Dissident Dialogues: Meredith Miller

Guest Post by Margaret Ann Alice

Below are the next three questions in my mind-expanding conversation with Meredith Miller. We discuss emancipation from mental slavery; building immunity to coercion; why our efforts to wake people up fail; collectivism; shame; radical acceptance; and transitioning from victimhood to empowerment. You will find the first four questions here:

Q&A #5

MAA:

How do people break the spell when they fervently want to remain cocooned in that state—and what can we do to help them overcome their resistance to counternarrative voices and truths? In other words, how do we help them cultivate the five character traits of dissidents you described earlier?

MM:

People break out of that spell when they’re ready to. This involves a spontaneous moment of disruptive truth that suddenly pierces their denial and viscerally shatters their entire reality. A person arrives at that moment independently once they’ve reached their breaking point. The abuse continues to escalate until then.

For some, that moment might be a vax injury or watching a loved one suffer or die as a result of the shots. I saw two friends come out of denial after they got injured by boosters. The pain and horrific struggles they went through forced them to see the truth, much like in an abusive relationship where the victim finally wakes up when something devastating happens.

Others have not yet gotten to the point where the disruptive truth has forced them to see what’s happening. We’ve also seen videos online of people who became disabled from the shots, yet they still subscribe to the narrative.

It’s both frustrating and sad to see people, especially loved ones, in an abusive situation and not be able to wake them up. This is one of the biggest struggles I see people having nowadays, especially parents who want to wake up their adult kids.

One of my clients tried to use me as a pawn to wake up her daughter by forcing information about the global abuse on her. Her daughter had already asked her to stop bombarding her with that information, and when she didn’t respect that boundary, the daughter blocked her email. I told the client multiple times that it would be unethical for me to try to force her daughter to see the truth. She told me if I didn’t force that information on her daughter, then I’m not a real truth warrior, and if I don’t do what she wants, then she will report me to one of the well-known people in the medical freedom movement to let them know that I’m controlled opposition. That’s an example of what NOT to do.

People will wake up on their own timing … or they won’t wake up at all.

We can model those five character traits that I mentioned earlier by doing our inner work and shining that example for other people to see. It’s up to others if they want to wake up and do the work of recovery. It can be difficult to accept when others don’t want to wake up or do the work to self-heal—however, that’s their choice. We can’t force that on someone else because it’s a violation of consent. The more we push a person or try to force information on them once they’ve said they don’t want it, the more they will usually run toward the abuser due to what Dr. Patrick Carnes calls the irrational loyalty of the trauma bond.

If we try to fix someone else, rescue them, or help them wake up and heal when they don’t want to do it for themselves, that becomes codependency. This is one way of avoiding dealing with our own stuff.

It’s more effective to lead the way by example, doing our inner work, and providing information to those who want it. Of course, we can pray for others or send them love while respecting their right to consent to waking up, growing up, and healing.

We can have compassion for those living in denial while also setting healthy boundaries to not get caught up in their issues or pulled back into the trance. People often learn this the hard way, trying to get alcoholics or addicts help when they don’t want it. That leads to exhaustion, powerlessness, toxicity, and emotional turmoil. A person in an abusive relationship also has an addiction, but in this case, it’s to the fantasy and the pleasant feelings they get from maintaining the illusion.

I realize this is not what people want to hear. People often want a way to wake other people up, and that’s understandable but not productive or helpful. When I tell people this, they often insist anyway and end up making things worse for themselves and their relationship with the other person.

Our energy is best focused on connecting with allies to stay sane and remember we aren’t alone as well as working on creating a new life separate from the abusive system. We can talk and process together to make sense of what’s happening and prevent as much of the post-trauma as possible as well as to prepare for whatever else may come. We can work on healing our unresolved personal past traumas, but the big recovery work for what’s going on now won’t really start until after this is over because we are still in the ongoing trauma.

For those who are awakening to the abuse, the first step is to work on dissolving the cognitive dissonance. This entails relentlessly facing the truth. Initially, the mind will go back and forth between self-doubt and the sobriety of reality/truth. This is especially prominent after contact with mainstream media, social media, and people who are still in the abuse cycle or even following thoughts that the tide is turning, the truth is all coming out, the abusers are going to admit they were wrong, or a rescuer is coming and it’s all going to be over soon so we can get back to normal. I’m sorry to say that’s not going to happen because that’s not how abuse dynamics work. We need to be prepared for the long haul, and we are going to have to rescue ourselves.

During this initial stage of awakening, I recommend people write a Sobriety List, which is a bullet-point summary of the abusive things that have happened. If you catch yourself slipping back into self-doubt, toxic hope, or wanting to believe the globalists really have our best interests at heart or that they’re going to end the abuse, read the list until your mind becomes sober in reality again.

One of the foundational steps in self-healing after abuse is to rebuild self-worth. This gets devastated in abusive relationships because abusers degrade the target’s sense of dignity to the point that the target doubts their worthiness of the most basic human rights. Many of us were segregated from society and public places. Others were forced or coerced into participating in a mass medical experiment. The violations of human dignity during the recent years are countless.

Self-worth is the greatest immunity to abuse. It’s important to rebuild this foundation so we don’t fall into any upcoming traps that will be set for us.

I teach a simple formula to rebuild self-worth, and the results speak for themselves. First, do an inventory of your values—in other words, identify what really matters to you and write those things down. Then create a standard for each value, meaning what that looks like in real life. Finally, create boundaries to protect what matters (each of your values).

Each time you enforce a new boundary to protect your values, your self-worth rises. We learn boundaries in real time as we are tested by people and life. It’s best to set these up mentally in advance. For anyone who wants more guidance in that process, I walk people through this in a short course called Raising Self-Worth.

Your boundaries are first and foremost an agreement you have with yourself. When others don’t respect your boundaries, it’s best to walk away unless you want to degrade your self-worth.

It’s also important to rebuild a strong sense of self after abuse. In abusive relationships and situations, as we are experiencing in the New Normal, we are taught it’s selfish to prioritize self-care. This can create self-doubt and even self-abandonment when we are guilted into believing something is wrong with that. Sacrificing our authenticity or well-being for a relationship, job, friendship, or society is devastating to the sense of self.

Here are some questions that can help during the restoration of self—and keep in mind honesty is key in doing this self-analysis.

• What makes you happy?
• What makes you unhappy?
• What are you good at?
• What are you not good at?
• In what ways do you pretend to be someone you’re not?
• What new skills/knowledge do you want to learn?
• What habits and traits do you want to modify or improve?
• What have you achieved that you’re proud of?
• What major challenges have you overcome in your life so far?
• What are your biggest fears?
• What are your dreams for your life?
• What are the five most interesting things about you?
• How have you felt about who you are in the last few weeks, few months, few years?
• Is there a part of you that you’ve sacrificed and want to recover?

After you reflect on those answers, look for some key words and themes. Then you can create a vision board called I AM. Write all the adjectives that describe who you are and who you are becoming. You can get creative with it and use drawings, images, or photos instead of words.

If you want to take this exploration of self to the advanced level, then you can reflect on these questions next:

• Which people in your life will likely support who you are if you’re being your authentic self?
• Who probably won’t?
• Does your current environment support your authentic self? If not, what needs to change?
• What kinds of self-talk and beliefs do you need to have in order to live in your authenticity?
• What kind of mentors do you need to help you reach your next level of authenticity and keep growing?

We need to teach the importance of individuality and authenticity to kids. They are born into the digital, internet, smartphone, and social media life where the technology has covertly replaced their sense of self with a fantasy avatar. They have no idea what human life was like before the digital world came about. This is all they know. Those of us from older generations ought to remind them how to discover their authentic self, unplugged from the devices, before that wisdom gets lost in history when we are gone from this world. Of course, we need to start with ourselves so we can show them by example.

There’s also a lot of indoctrination in the culture trying to confuse people into replacing their individual identity with a group identity. The COVID campaign was based on collectivism, convincing us that we’re selfish and not doing our part in society if we want to protect our bodily autonomy and individual sovereignty.

Most people don’t have any idea how much their sense of self is wrapped up in their online avatar until they walk away from it. The big question is, Do you know who you are if you’re not the version of you who lives on those platforms?

The WEF Davos 2023 did a segment on The Clear and Present Danger of Disinformation in which they said social media platforms are the battleground where they expect to control the narrative in an ongoing manner—not just for COVID and future plandemics but also for climate control, the economy, war, and the rest of their agendas. They’re still pushing plenty of lies despite the truths that have come out, and that trend will continue.

I highly recommend people get off the mainstream social media platforms. There’s plenty of valuable information on alternative sites, and it’s also important to set time boundaries on those platforms so we can spend more time in real life. I know this isn’t easy, but I also know it’s worth it.

Along those lines, I recommend people get off “dating” apps—AKA Swipe Life. Those apps aren’t for dating, anyway. People do a lot of things with those apps, but dating isn’t really one of them. This may seem like a tangential topic, but it’s all related in the Big Picture.

Those apps are complicit with newnormalism. In 2020, they were recommending video calls as a safe way to connect, and in 2021, they introduced a new biometric category for users to identify as vaccinated or not yet vaccinated, which implies the inevitability of getting vaxxed. Unvaxxed wasn’t an option on the list. Beyond that, Swipe Life is destroying actual dating and replacing it with “hanging out and hooking up” as well as erasing the ability to form meaningful and committed relationships, which is very important for personal well-being and the wellness of society. That’s also why the apps exist as part of the divide-and-conquer tactics, creating more isolation, trauma, and resentment among people.

It’s a lot easier to stay sober and out of the spell when we are less exposed to the perpetrators’ messaging through online media, especially the subtle, subversive stuff that evades our conscious perception. As professor Marshall McLuhan said back in the 1960s–1970s, “The medium is the message.” He clarified that in addition to the particular messages transmitted, each medium creates an environment that has an even bigger impact on how we see ourselves and reality.

We have not fully understood yet how the digital environment has made the New Normal agenda possible. I think we have a small window of time to reckon with this before the global digital slavery system is fully installed.

Q&A #6

MAA:

Once again, I feel like you’ve peeled away the layers of obfuscation and illustrated with piercing clarity the neuropsychological forces holding people captive in a collective delusion.

Something I struggle with personally is the deep sense of disappointment I feel with people I expected to see through the lies. They are people who tend to exhibit the five traits you identified and who previously would have been inclined to practice critical thinking, skepticism, and distrust toward corporations and governments and may even still do so in other areas of their lives. Their compartmentalized thinking enables them to circumvent the application of these skills to COVID specifically, though, like their brain shuts off the instant this topic arises.

I’m sad when I learn they succumbed to the propaganda, coercion, psychological manipulation, and social pressures, but I understand why they did and don’t judge them for getting swept along with the current.

What hurts, though, is when I share my Substack or ask them to spend just a few minutes watching a video like A Letter to Dr. Andrew Hill, and they can’t even be bothered to do that. Anything that contradicts their programming is automatically viewed through the propagandists’ truth-deflecting slurs like “conspiracy theorist” and “anti-vaxxer.”

If they do take the time to read or watch something I’ve shared but still disagree, I respect them for overcoming their hesitancy and am grateful for their willingness to engage. All I ask is that they open their eyes, ears, and mind.

For those who refuse, however, I can’t help feeling ashamed of them for exhibiting intellectual laziness, groupthink, social conformity, obedience to authority, compliance with tyranny, and—perhaps worst of all—cowardice.

I’m holding open the door and encouraging them to emancipate themselves from mental slavery, and they run away, lash out, or cut off communication.

Thanks to you, I now better understand why they react that way and why using scientific evidence, logic, reason, and even real human experiences of vaxx injuries and deaths fails to crack their hermetically sealed minds.

If I see them as victims of abuse, which they obviously are, I can feel compassion toward them. But, as you said, it is incredibly difficult to watch someone you care for choose enslavement over freedom, irrationality over logic, and abuse over love.

But the instant, the absolute instant, they express the curiosity, humility, and courage required to break out of their imprisonment, I would flip from feeling ashamed of them to feeling intensely proud of them and I would celebrate this momentous step toward liberation.

I started this Substack to unmask totalitarianism and awaken the sleeping before tyranny triumphs, so it is hard for me to let go of the mission to awaken the sleeping, but I recognize the wisdom of your words and realize I felt lighter when I decided to stop arguing with Covidians and instead focus on nurturing this brave, brilliant, buoyant, and beautiful community.

Something I have wondered about, though, is if it would be possible to apply cult deprogramming techniques to help shake them awake.

I imagine one of the challenges is that Covidianism is now a worldwide religion saturating every aspect of our culture, media, governments, and society, so you can’t easily pull people out of that immersive environment short of a monthlong camping trip in majestic natural surroundings—but even that won’t work if they bring their mental cage with them.

And then there are also practices like interventions used for people suffering from addiction, but again, this requires a physical act, and I’m trying to figure out how to reach people remotely.

I know you’ve already said it’s likely a futile effort unless people are ready to break the spell themselves and they experience a spontaneous epiphany, but I feel I would be remiss not to ask if we can adapt methods from cult deprogramming and addiction counseling or find other creative avenues to spark those disruptive moments.

If you don’t feel we can draw valuable tools from the realms of cult deprogramming and addiction treatment, why is that? What makes this challenge different from those?

MM:

I think it’s really important to honor the right of all people to choose whether or not to consent to treatment and techniques that could help them.

This is tricky territory. It’s important that we don’t do what the adversary did, forcing or coercing people into something—even if that something is promised to be life-saving. The injections harmed people. However, it’s still unethical to force or coerce people into any treatment, even if it’s for their good. People still have the power of choice and the right to say no.

There’s something spiritual about the spontaneous moment in which the piercing of the denial finally happens and a person can see the insanity of their own behavior. From my perspective, it’s a Divine intervention, a moment negotiated between an individual’s soul and God. This is why human intervention in other people’s addictions and dysfunctional behaviors usually fails or leads to relapse in the long-term.

It’s important to allow people to experience the consequences of their choices and habits. Until people hit rock bottom and decide to get help, trying to save them becomes enabling. That’s where we can fall into the rescuer role in Karpman’s drama triangle. The act of rescuing people from their dysfunctional behaviors only prolongs their victimhood and dependency. The rescuer ends up stuck in that triangle, too.

I agree that the treatments and techniques like those you mentioned could be beneficial for people who want help. There will be a great need for this kind of work in the coming years as more people want to get out of the psychoneurospiritual state of captivity, which can endure long after waking up and leaving an abusive situation.

It’s true that it’s a big challenge now that Covidianism has saturated every aspect of human life, and it appears this is only one layer of the globalists’ plans in the digital slavery system. It’s nearly impossible to escape that immersive environment, especially since we are all so plugged into our digital devices, which is the primary medium through which the programming is disseminated. You’re correct that a trip to a remote, natural area could help to detox from that environment, but the psychological warfare was installed in the minds of humans, so this will follow us anywhere unless we actively unsubscribe from it all.

I also agree that when people wake up and express the desire to break out of the traumatic entrapment, it’s to be celebrated and welcomed. That means they are finally receptive to help and perhaps ready to take action and transform their life. That’s when the door to new possibility and opportunity opens.

Your Substack as well as others’ contributions are super-helpful for people who are waking up. Once the light pierces the denial, that’s the point when people become ravenous for this kind of information, trying to make sense of everything. At that point, people need the words to be able to articulate and label what happened to them. They also need to be able to talk with others about reality.

I can understand how you felt lighter when you stopped arguing with Covidians and instead turned your focus to nurturing this community. You’re creating a beacon of truth and understanding for people to find here. That is no small thing.

Q&A #7

MAA:

Thank you, Meredith. That is profoundly meaningful coming from you, who has done so much to illuminate the path toward healing.

I agree with what you stated although would argue that in the case of these novel injectable products, people cannot give proper consent because they have not been informed regarding the grave potential side effects and nonexistent benefits. I feel those of us who are aware of those consequences have a responsibility to share them, but I agree we cannot and should not force anyone to subscribe to a particular viewpoint or decision.

In contemplating practices that may be helpful for people emerging from the trance, I thought of Albert Ellis. A lot of people have never heard of Ellis, and yet he was voted the second-most influential psychotherapist in history in a 1982 survey of North American psychologists—with Carl Rogers coming in first and Freud coming in third. A Psychology Today interview with Ellis stated in the introduction:

“[I]t’s safe to say that no individual—not even Freud himself—has had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.”

Ellis used to practice and recommend what he called shame-attacking exercises to help people overcome their primal fears of humiliation, embarrassment, and shame.

These fears have been weaponized by the engineers of emotional manipulation during COVID. People are so terrified of being labeled a “conspiracy theorist,” “anti-vaxxer,” “right-wing extremist,” and “science-denier” that they would rather risk their health and lives on an experimental injection than suffer the pain of name-calling, social condemnation, and nonconformity.

I think this is one reason it is so empowering to embrace these labels, as those who have been vilified by name-calling throughout history have discovered. Once you are no longer afraid of being called these baseless names, the propagandists lose their power to control you through the threat of ostracization.

I wonder if doing something like holding a sign saying, “I’m a proud anti-vaxxer. Ask me why.” in a public space or even posting it on social media would help people overcome their fears of being shamed by labels.

It seems like this concept ties into Tara Brach’s concept of radical acceptance, which she describes as “the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as it is.”

By brazenly confronting naked reality and diving headlong into our fears, we are liberated from the pain of resistance to that suffering, flowing with the water instead of rigidly fighting and being battered by it.

I feel like so much of what Brach describes in Radical Acceptance echoes your own wisdom and could help those awakening from the spell.

Here are a few quotes from Brach:

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns.… We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”

“Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance. If we are holding back from any part of our experience, if our heart shuts out any part of who we are and what we feel, we are fueling the fears and feelings of separation that sustain the trance of unworthiness. Radical Acceptance directly dismantles the very foundations of this trance.”

“The emotion of fear often works overtime. Even when there is no immediate threat, our body may remain tight and on guard, our mind narrowed to focus on what might go wrong. When this happens, fear is no longer functioning to secure our survival. We are caught in the trance of fear and our moment-to-moment experience becomes bound in reactivity. We spend our time and energy defending our life rather than living it fully.”

“Each time you meet an old emotional pattern with presence, your awakening to truth can deepen. There’s less identification with the self in the story and more ability to rest in the awareness that is witnessing what’s happening. You become more able to abide in compassion, to remember and trust your true home. Rather than cycling repetitively through old conditioning, you are actually spiraling toward freedom.”

Do you think practices like shame-attacking exercises and radical acceptance can help with recovery from the narcissistic abuse cycle and liberate people from their enslavement to fear, shame, and guilt? And how do such tactics complement or overlap with your own recommendations for healing?

MM:

I agree that it wasn’t proper consent. However, there is also an implication of personal responsibility in terms of what we consent to and not. I want to unpack this topic more and emphasize the importance of these concepts in moving forward as individuals and society after what happened.

The Powers That Be are invested in keeping people stuck in the victimhood consciousness because that’s how they maintain their power. This is why there are cultural and political ideologies promoting a focus on the victimization without providing the tools for people to get themselves out of that state. This issue is visible at the individual level and also in the collective consciousness, which we can see in the way history is told.

During all things COVID, in most parts of the world, people weren’t constrained or physically forced to be tested or receive the injections. The covert type of abuse relies more on subtle treachery. The consent was coerced by the perpetrators. They used emotional manipulation and psychological warfare to get people to choose to line up for testing and injections.

There are two levels of truth here. These may seem like contradictions, however they form part of the dialectical understanding of what happened, which is key to preventing it from happening again.

Many people went along with it because they didn’t see another escape from that state of psychoneurospiritual captivity. In some cases, people made desperate decisions, and, in other cases, people enthusiastically consented because they believed it was for their good.

It was certainly a violation of consent per the definition established in the Nuremberg Code, whose very first tenet is, “The voluntary consent of the human being is absolutely essential.” In that first section, the document further defines consent as:

“to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion.”

The Nuremberg Trial took place a couple years after World War II ended. Unfortunately, most of the perpetrators escaped justice. Only a couple dozen people were actually tried. Even though there wasn’t ideal justice, I think they left us some very important clues for the future.

After the war, those who defined consent in this document were looking back at the decade that led up to the more overt violence with the abuse of human rights, medical experiments, and genocide. The end is not where things started. Perhaps the authors of this famous historical document hoped writing those tenets would prevent such a thing from happening again by helping people recognize the early and more covert abuse before it escalates. Unfortunately, human nature hasn’t changed since then. We are now repeating history, and most of society appears to not realize this.

Once again, we see the institutions of psychology, psychiatry, and medicine being used for harm, violating consent in a similar way. That’s not to say that everyone who works in those fields is harming people or that everything that comes out of those institutions is wrong. Some are very humane and helpful to their patients, utilizing the best of the resources available to them, even when those treatments are vilified by the establishment. Some brave psychologists and medical doctors are standing up for what’s right, even taking great personal risks to help others, despite the corruption in those institutions and the complicity of the majority of their colleagues in the New Normal.

The institution of psychology has normalized, delegitimized, avoided, or erased the most relevant topics to the real cause of the pandemic—namely psychopathy, covert narcissism, and the Stockholm syndrome.

The institution of allopathic medicine is rotten to the core, poisoned with Big Pharma’s agenda from the medical school textbooks all the way to the prescribed bedside manner with patients. It was the ideal environment for COVID tyranny to spread.

Most of the doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists went into the New Normal cult. These are the very people in society who ought to have been leading the way against the violations of informed consent by state and corporate actors. Instead, they enabled the abuse. One would think this would be part of their “do no harm” training, but it’s clearly not.

In addition to all of the above, there’s another layer of truth about the victimization.

People have been victimized, and that needs to be validated first. Their consent was coerced by deception, fraud, duress, and other forms of over-reaching. It wasn’t their fault. The responsibility of the spiritual, psychological, medical, and financial abuse that took place lands squarely on those who perpetrated such acts.

AND at the same time, we are each responsible for our choices and participation in life. That includes complying with the abuse, even when we don’t realize it’s abuse.

Unless a person accepts this layered truth after having been victimized, they will stay stuck in the powerlessness of the victimhood, externally focused on the perpetrators and primed to be victimized again in the future because they don’t see their own role and participation in the dynamic or how they could make a different decision next time.

One of the first truths a victim of abuse can work on accepting, is, “It wasn’t your fault.” The abuse, whether overt or covert, is never the fault of the target. This is also a partial truth, one layer of truth.

In the victimhood state, the person is not yet ready for the next level of awareness. During the first stage, the awakening victim’s focus is external—on the abuser and the abuse, articulating what happened, and labeling those experiences with words.

The next level of truth is the one that a person is ready to accept upon crossing the first threshold of self-responsibility. That’s when a survivor starts by asking the question, “Now what?”

This is where the empowerment starts to grow. Whatever happened happened, and that can’t be changed. Yet each of us is responsible for our choices and participation in life, so this is where we start to reflect on what we can do about it now.

Spiritual maturity starts developing in the second stage as the focus turns inward and we are able to face the more difficult truths. At this point, we develop the courage and strength to look back in retrospect and see where we gave away our power and agency.

An important part of growing up is to be able to move beyond the limitations of black-and-white thinking and into the realm of dialectical reasoning. Dialectical thinking is about balancing seemingly opposite or conflicting perceptions. It’s useful for integrating layered truths about self, relationships, and life situations.

There are octaves of the truth that are relevant at each level of consciousness, yet all are part of a whole understanding.

In the victimhood stage, it’s important for the victim to understand the abuse (or tyranny) was not their fault. That’s the first level of truth, the external layer, a victim needs to realize to release the self-blame and confusion.

However, if a person stays stuck there, they’ll spend the rest of their life feeling powerless and victimized by the world over and over again and not understand why it keeps happening. As I mentioned in our first question, that’s where I was stuck for almost thirty-eight years of my life.

Once a person crosses the threshold into the empowerment of the next stage of healing and growth by committing to self-responsibility, that’s where a person realizes another level of truth: The abuse wasn’t your fault, AND you are the only one who can do something about it now.

In this next level of consciousness, a person is ready to integrate an additional layer of truth: that we are each responsible for our choices and how we participate in our life, including in abuse dynamics. This is an internal layer of truth, and it’s the pill that’s a lot harder to swallow.

A person still in the victimhood consciousness will hear the second level of truth and immediately feel blamed because they can’t yet synthesize these two layers of truth, which seem like contradictions. They’re not ready to commit to self-responsibility, which is why they can’t integrate the next level of consciousness yet. They’re still focused on the external truth and not yet ready to look inside to see how they participated in the dynamic.

It’s helpful to look back with self-compassion and identify the moment/s when we wish we would’ve made a different decision to say no, set a boundary, or leave an abusive situation. This exercise isn’t for the purpose of self-blame but rather to grab the reins back and empower ourselves to make different choices in the future. The internal reckoning process is necessary if we don’t want to be victimized again.

This is one of the most misunderstood concepts I’ve taught over the years in narcissistic abuse recovery on the interpersonal level. I understand why as I was once trapped in that level of thinking, too. A lot of people stay stuck in the victimhood consciousness long after the abusive relationship is over because they aren’t able to synergize the next level of truth.

The same struggle exists in society. In the way we view history, we can observe how the collective consciousness is still stuck in the first level of truth about victimization.

For example, Hitler was clearly evil and did horrible things. But what about the evil the people also participated in? Both of these are true. The people were victims, AND they participated in the victimization of themselves and others, whether actively or passively. They enabled the tyranny, which would not have gone on as it did had they stood up in good conscience. It’s much easier to point at people like Hitler and tuck that story neatly away so we don’t have to look at ourselves and the more difficult truth—that we are all implicated.

The part we didn’t learn in history class—and the one that’s most avoided in adult conversations about those events nowadays—is the people were cheering Hitler on and participating, whether actively or passively, in the tyranny.

People sent their kids, either by enthusiastic choice or coercion, into the indoctrination and sexualization of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls. Many people turned in their neighbors, friends, and even family members.

By the end, some people still refused to believe the photos of the mass graves and concentration camps were real. The people went insane due to the propaganda, terror, and crazy-making, which is what happens in abusive relationships.

We are seeing the same happen in society now as mental illness is skyrocketing. The good news is people can transform if they want to. That will require not only waking up to the truth about the abuse but also crossing the threshold into the next layer of truth. The antidote to the repetition of the victimization in the future is owning our part as individuals participating in the dynamic.

I’m glad you brought up the shame because this is another important topic. It’s painful to be smeared and labeled all kinds of names for taking the unpopular stance against tyranny.

This goes back to our early human origins, where being ostracized from the tribe meant imminent death. We are a social species, and, even in modern times, we have a much greater chance of survival when we are connected with others. That’s why people often sacrifice the truth and what’s right for social acceptance and belonging.

The sense of shame and fear of not being good enough is weaponized by social engineering and advertising in general, which was escalated in the intense emotional manipulation we saw during COVID.

It’s incredible that compliance is now a part of scientific studies, but this is a term they’ve been introducing into medicine for some time. One of my nurse friends mentioned something about a patient being “noncompliant.” Apparently, that’s a common term used in nursing. This is a form of shame-based labeling of those who don’t do what the authority (doctors and nurses in this case) tell them to do for their health.

Of course, that doesn’t mean everything medical authorities tell patients is wrong. Sometimes, it’s sound advice. However, it’s the label of “noncompliant” that made me realize this shaming language was already woven into the medical industry pre-COVID, so it was a perfect segue into shaming those who are noncompliant with the medical tyranny.

A sense of not being good enough is a normal human struggle. Most people feel that way to some degree. We all seek social validation and approval, especially from those closest to us. The remnants of childhood shame get triggered in adulthood when we are told there’s something wrong with us—in this case, for not complying with the mandates of abuse and tyranny.

Several of my teachers have emphasized the difference between guilt (based on what you do) and shame (based on who you are). This is an important distinction and one that often gets messed up in childhood when parents aren’t conscious of the way they treat their kids. Shaming kids leads to toxic shame. In adolescence, the sense of shame gets reinforced by peers. That keeps repeating in adulthood.

There’s also a difference between healthy shame vs. toxic shame. A sense of healthy shame is an important foundation of guilt, which guides a healthy conscience and contributes to social coherence because it causes us to examine our own behavior. When we do something wrong, something that harms someone else—or even when we fail to give enough effort to something important—the sense of shame ought to motivate us to make it right and do better next time. We can learn and grow from healthy shame.

Toxic shame, on the other hand, is deeply harmful to one’s sense of self and identity. This is about feeling worthless, like there’s something fundamentally wrong with oneself. This is what’s implied in terms like “anti-vaxxer.”

John Bradshaw was one of the most prominent experts on this topic, teaching really helpful techniques he called reparenting work with the wounded inner child to heal the toxic shame that gets woven into our identity at various stages of development, then triggered again in adulthood when we are shamed by others.

As a relevant side note, Bradshaw died a few years before all things COVID began, but he had already written about the “culture of obedience” in which we live, “the kind of social morality that produced the Nazi Holocaust.” He already saw where that was going.

As a contrast, Bradshaw referenced how Aristotle and Aquinas identified the virtue we need when sure knowing is lacking but our conscience or circumstances demand we act. Aristotle called that virtue phronesis, which means moral wisdom in Greek. Aquinas translated it as prudentia, or prudence. Bradshaw wrote in Reclaiming Virtue, “Prudence is conscience in action … it’s our situational conscience.”

I find that impeccably pertinent to the challenges we’ve faced since 2020—not knowing exactly what’s going on yet still needing to recognize the moral actions to take in such uncertain circumstances, even though that wasn’t the popular stance. This understanding is helpful for confronting the toxic shame about being name-called as anti-vaxxers and all the other pejoratives.

It’s interesting you mentioned Albert Ellis. I hadn’t heard of him until I read your question. Then, in synchronicity, that same week I heard Dr. Ron Siegel refer to Ellis in an NICABM course. Dr. Siegel said Ellis was a cowboy in the psychotherapeutic space, and he mentioned some examples of those shame-busting exercises that were part of Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.

During that segment of the course, Dr. Siegel and Dr. Kelly McGonigal got into an important discussion about those kinds of exercises. They agreed those only work in an environment that’s essentially safe for the person. Dr. McGonigal elaborated that going out beyond the comfort zone in those ways might not be for everyone because there could be valid reasons why people feel the need to manage their presentation in certain environments. Those are sensible words of caution.

I think the shame-attacking exercises suggested by Albert Ellis could be helpful to some people to overcome some of their emotional reaction to other people’s judgments and get more comfortable with other people’s disapproval. It’s not too different from posting or commenting similar things online nowadays and facing the backlash in the digital public square, though there is the added risk of being physically attacked.

Ellis’s exercises sound a lot like exposure therapy for facing fears, which could be helpful for some people but detrimental for others, exacerbating their fears and toxic shame or even putting them in dangerous situations.

I also don’t think those shame-attacking exercises can heal the root cause of the toxic shame because they’re externally focused. Healing the shame that binds you, as John Bradshaw referred to it, involves more internal work over time. I would recommend his books and reparenting techniques as a worthwhile investment of time and energy because we all internalized some toxic shame in childhood. This work builds inner resilience to current shaming tactics being used against us.

There’s also a cautionary distinction between not caring what other people think in order to stand by one’s principles of health and liberty in an environment of intense social pressure and shaming tactics used to coerce people versus the shamelessness of narcissism and psychopathy, where a person does awful things or advocates for such things to be done simply because they don’t care about anyone else or what they think.

I was horrified to see some psychologists, researchers, and pseudoscientific studies shaming people who didn’t comply with the New Normal mandates as narcissistic and psychopathic because we didn’t follow the mandates and social rules. I think those psychologists and researchers are stuck at the level of black-and-white thinking and haven’t been able to grow beyond the contradictions and nuances into the more dialectical thinking required to balance the complexities of the tyranny taking place.

I’m not familiar with Tara Brach’s work, though I’ve heard people refer to her in the realms of psychology and Buddhism. I did a quick search and noticed one of her recent videos is called Radical Acceptance: Our Gateway to Love & Freedom.

I wonder how that concept was applied during the plandemic in the Buddhism and psychology communities. Spiritual bypassing could cause some people to think radical acceptance would mean accepting what the media, corporations, and public health experts tell us—that COVID is terrifying and we all need to stay home and then take injections to be safe, keep other people safe, and get our freedoms back.

It’s shocking how many of the Buddhist and psychology communities and leaders fell into the New Normal narrative despite their teachings, just like what happened in many spiritual communities, churches, and synagogues as well as other places of healing and worship.

One of my recent clients who for decades had attended events in various Buddhist, shamanic, and other healing communities described the incredible shock of suddenly being othered, segregated, and excluded from attending those events and gatherings due to not taking the injections. Those were communities centered on healing modalities, often preaching unity, compassion, kindness, and spiritual awakening.

It’s hard to process that sense of betrayal and the shock of being shamed and ostracized in communities where we used to find acceptance. When we are confronted with such experiences, we might not want to accept reality. We might wish that things would go back to how they were, when all were welcomed into those healing and worship communities. However, that wishful thinking isn’t based on reality, so it will lead to suffering.

The betrayal and sense of shaming that result from these kinds of experiences provides a great opportunity to practice radical acceptance. We might want to try to change the perspectives and policies of other people or groups, yet that approach will likely lead to more suffering. We might feel hurt when called names, yet trying to prove ourselves to those who see us differently usually only leads to exhaustion and more suffering.

Instead, we can work on accepting that it is what it is, and there’s nothing wrong with us for not wanting to take injections, get tested, or wear a mask. At the same time, we can choose to be open to the gratitude that there was a time when we found something valuable in those teachings and communities, even though we are not accepted there anymore.

When we feel rejected or name-called by someone for any reason, the sure path of suffering is to beg for acceptance. I think the best way to deal with rejection is to accept that it happened, then turn toward self-care and connecting instead with people who do accept us.

Radical acceptance is one of the principles of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which is used to help people look more objectively at past or current events rather than just reacting emotionally. When we react emotionally to life, that leads to a downward spiral.

The radical acceptance of DBT is about acknowledging the moment as it is. That means facing reality and allowing the pain to be felt, not ignoring it but also not getting stuck in the suffering. This practice can help people cope with difficult feelings and situations, whether those that are currently happening and are out of our control or those that happened in the past and cannot be changed.

Sometimes we hear the word “acceptance” and think that implies tolerance of unacceptable things. I think there’s an important nuance here. If we tolerate unacceptable behavior, we are normalizing that in our nervous systems and society. We can accept that the globalist psychopaths and their enablers are doing things that are out of our control while also not tolerating their abuse of human rights through compliance.

The word “acceptance” might sound like a mental decision we just make in a moment, but it’s not that simple. It’s actually a process, an ongoing commitment we can make to ourselves, intertwined with self-responsibility.

That state of radical acceptance is also the result of the grieving process over time. The acceptance part doesn’t come immediately. First, we go through all the other layers such as denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, yet this isn’t a linear process. Those phases of grief overlap in fractals over time, leading toward greater and greater acceptance after a painful loss or difficult conflict.

When I consider radical acceptance, I think about relentlessly facing the truth and reality—even when it’s not what we want to see. That includes the internal and external. Eventually, that process leads to an increasing sense of acceptance.

It also reminds me of the Serenity Prayer:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I think you’re right that radical acceptance is an important practice for overcoming shame and facing the entire New Normal situation. It’s relevant for life in general and even more so post-2020.

I also want to highlight the value of healthy connection for overcoming the shame. As I mentioned in one of our earlier questions, there is both the self-regulation piece as well as the co-regulation, and both are important.

John Bradshaw’s work is an excellent guide for the self-regulation part of healing toxic shame. Connection is the co-regulation, where our nervous systems are able to communicate automatically and regulate each other just by being in close proximity.

I do want to emphasize that not all connection is healthy. Unhealthy connections with people, places, habits, substances, and negative entities can be very harmful. It’s important to be selective about the connections we make in life and not desperately connect with just anyone or anything out of a sense of loneliness or shame. Those experiences will often reinforce much of the same.

Healthy connection is deeply healing to the toxic shame. When we feel a safe connection with another person through that co-regulation, our nervous systems start to rewire the old programs of toxic shame and isolation, replacing those with acceptance and love.

This is why cuddle therapy has such positive benefits. The practice involves nonsexual physical intimacy, essentially just holding one another close. This is most powerful when done between people who know and trust one another. Dogs innately know this, and perhaps you’ve seen puppy snuggle piles.

Sometimes, in some periods of life, some of us are without others with whom to share such a healthy connection and healing experience. It can be devastatingly lonely. Loneliness is the environment where the shame festers. That’s why I mentioned in an earlier question how important it is to have allies when awakening from the abuse. Sometimes there may be other people around, yet a person can feel more lonely with others than when actually alone because there isn’t a healthy connection or trust. In those circumstances, going into a peaceful, safe place in nature to feel that connection can be really helpful.

In the absence of a trusted person or safe place in the physical environment, a person can do this practice through a guided meditation journey in their mind. Imagine lying in a soft field of grass or other favorite kind of nature spot, feeling connected to All That Is. There, we can bring our attention to the sense of support, feeling the nurturing Earth holding us gently, noticing how everything is dancing and breathing together and we are part of it all. It may be helpful to play Solfeggio Frequencies in the background during this kind of practice to help the mind calm down and the body relax into the meditation benefits.

For some people, connection with nature is the easiest way they can feel a connection to God. This is part of the Judaic practice of Hitbodedut, which I highly recommend for those who have or want to have a relationship with God. In the unconditionally loving and accepting presence of God, we can pour out our hearts as if speaking to a close friend. That can bring a deep sense of acceptance, peace, and protection.

In a state of transcendent connection, which can happen with another person, with nature, and with God, we can open to a deep sense of peace and stillness that brings calm to our worries, anxieties, and insecurities.

During those experiences, we can anchor that state with a word or image of choice. Then any time we are being name-called or feeling a sense of shame, if we want to shift into a sense of peace, we can use that anchor word or image to evoke the body memory of the peaceful state, integrating it into the stressful moment.

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