By Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S — Taproot Therapy Collective
The Folding Table
There was a folding table in the student center. There is always a folding table.
I was in college, and the people at the table were not strange. That’s the first thing to understand. They were the best-organized, most articulate, most obviously competent people in the building. They had matching shirts before anyone else had matching shirts. They had a mission statement you could repeat back after hearing it once, which felt, at the time, like a sign of clarity.
And they were honest about the simplification. That’s the part I still think about twenty years later. They didn’t hide it. If you pushed on the mission — if you asked whether the world was really that clean — they would tell you, with something like humility, yes, of course it’s more complicated than that. But complexity doesn’t scale. We need reach. We need money. And once we have the money, once we have the reach, then we can do the actual work, and the actual work will be as complicated as it needs to be.
That was the pitch. Simplify now, pay it back later. A loan against nuance, with a promise of repayment when the organization got big enough to afford honesty.
The organization got big. The loan was never repaid.
What happened instead is that the money went to the megaphone. Not because anybody was corrupt. Because the megaphone worked, and the thing that works gets funded. Every dollar that came in from the simple story got spent making the simple story louder, which made people feel more angry, feel more guilty for not donating, which brought in more dollars, which bought a bigger megaphone. Nobody decided this. It was a gradient, and water runs downhill.
And then something happened that I have never stopped finding instructive. Some of the people who started it — actual believers, people who had meant the original thing — tried to put the complexity back. They tried to say: it’s more complicated than we’ve been telling you, and now we’re big enough to say so.
The organization turned on them.
Not the enemies of the organization. The organization itself. The membership. The people who had joined because of the simple story defended the simple story against the people who had written it. Because by then the story wasn’t a communication strategy anymore. It was the load-bearing wall of a lot of people’s identities. The founders were proposing a renovation. To everyone living inside, it read as demolition.
That is the mechanism. Not evil. Not stupidity. A story that got emotionally load-bearing before anybody noticed, and then defended itself against its own authors.
What follows is an account of why that happens inside a single human nervous system, because the group version is the individual version with a budget.
The Press Secretary in Your Left Hemisphere
Michael Gazzaniga spent decades working with people whose brain hemispheres had been surgically separated, and he found something in the left hemisphere that he called the Interpreter. I’ve been calling it the Storyteller.
The Storyteller’s job is not accuracy. Its job is coherence. When your body does something, the Storyteller produces an explanation for why “you” did it, and it produces this explanation whether or not it has any access to the actual cause. It is an internal press secretary. Press secretaries do not attend the meetings where the decisions get made. They are handed an outcome and told to make it sound deliberate.
The uncomfortable finding is not that the Storyteller lies. It’s that the Storyteller doesn’t know it’s improvising. The explanation arrives with full confidence and no watermark. You reach for the coffee, and the sentence I decided to have coffee shows up so smoothly that it never occurs to you the arm moved first.
Underneath that, running the actual operation, is what I’ve been calling the Navigator — Karl Friston’s brain, the one whose deepest purpose is to predict the world well enough to keep you alive in it. The Navigator handles gravity, balance, threat, the face across the table, the eleven small wrongnesses in a room. It doesn’t narrate. It doesn’t have the bandwidth for your self-image. It’s doing error minimization at a timescale your conscious mind cannot enter.
You know this system from the drive home you don’t remember. Thirty minutes of traffic, lane changes, braking, signaling, and no one was home upstairs. The Navigator drove. The Storyteller wrote the travel blog afterward and believed every word.
Here’s why this matters for cults.
A political cult, a cult of personality, a wellness cult, a therapy-modality cult, a parenting cult — these are not primarily belief systems. They are outsourced Storytellers. They take over the confabulation function. They hand you, in advance, the explanation for anything that happens: why the economy feels like that, why your marriage is hard, why the news made you sick to your stomach, why you’re tired all the time, why the other people are the way they are. One story, pre-written, infinitely applicable.
And the relief is enormous. This is the part that people who have never been near a cult refuse to understand, and it makes them much easier to recruit. The relief is not stupidity. It’s metabolic. Confabulating your own life is expensive. Somebody offering to do it for you is offering you something real.
The trade is this: you get coherence, and you give up your prediction error.
Why the Simplest Story Is Always Wrong
I want to be careful here, because “the simplest story is always wrong” can be misheard as an argument for mush. It isn’t. There are true things. Some claims are better supported than others. Complexity is not a synonym for wisdom, and there is a kind of professional fog-machine operator who uses “it’s complicated” to avoid ever being pinned to anything. That person is running a different racket, and we’ll get to them.
What I mean is narrower and, I think, harder to dodge.
Simplicity is a property of the story, not of the world. The world’s complexity is fixed. When a story gets simpler, the complexity didn’t go anywhere — it got moved off the page. So the real question about any story you’re being handed is not “is this true,” it’s “where did the complexity go, and who is holding it now.”
In a functional account, the complexity goes into caveats, mechanisms, tradeoffs, error bars, and the honest admission that a particular part isn’t known yet. In a cult account, the complexity goes into a person or a group. All the friction of a difficult world gets compressed and located in an enemy. That’s not an ideological move; it’s a load-bearing structural move, and it’s why the enemy can never be defeated, only replaced. Defeating them would return the complexity to the page.
So the tell isn’t the content. This is the thing that took me the longest to learn, and it’s the reason smart people get caught. The tell is the shape. You can hold a factually defensible position in a cultic shape, and you can hold an eccentric position in a perfectly sane shape. When you’re evaluating a group, the diagnostic questions are structural: how much complexity has been moved off the page, where did it go, and what happens to a member who tries to move some of it back?
Ask that last one at every folding table you ever encounter. What happened to the last person here who introduced a complication?
The Reaction Formation: Two Simple Stories in a Knife Fight
Here’s the claim I most want to land, because I think it’s the least understood dynamic in our political, religious, health, and psychology worlds.
Most bad stories are not original. They are reactions to other bad stories.
The majority of the cultic thinking I encounter clinically and culturally didn’t start with a positive vision. It started with a legitimate injury. Someone noticed, correctly, that an institution was lying to them. A church covered something up. A medical system dismissed their pain and was wrong. A political party told them a story about the economy that did not match their bank account. A psychiatric establishment handed them a diagnosis that explained nothing and a prescription that helped nothing.
The perception was accurate. The Navigator was doing its job. Prediction error, correctly registered.
And then the Storyteller got the file, and did what the Storyteller does — it produced coherence. And the fastest available coherence is inversion. If that story is false, the opposite story must be true.
That single move is the engine of most of the cults you know. Not credulity. Inversion. A person who has correctly detected that they were lied to, reaching for the negation as if negation were the same thing as truth.
It is not. The negation of a bad map is not a good map. It’s the same bad map with the labels swapped, which means you’re still navigating by the terrain features your abuser drew.
And it explains something you have all noticed: how bonded opposed cults are. How they need each other. How each one’s recruitment pitch is a citation to the other one’s worst behavior. They aren’t two systems. They’re one system with two poles, and each pole’s simplification licenses the other’s.
Which gives us the actual test, and it’s brutal in its symmetry: if the story you’re being offered and the story it’s rescuing you from are both simple, you haven’t escaped anything. You have changed cults. Possibly to a cult with better manners. But the shape is the shape.
The distrust can be right and the destination still be wrong. Being correct about the lie you were told confers no protection whatsoever against the next one. In fact it raises your risk, because now you have a grievance narrative, and grievance narratives are the highest-yield recruiting material in existence.
So: if you distrust your own organization — your practice, your church, your party, your professional body — you should absolutely critique the story it’s telling. That’s not disloyalty; that’s the only form loyalty can take that isn’t decorative. But critique means examining the story’s structure, not swapping it for the inverse. The correct output of “our story is too simple” is a more complicated story, not the opposite story.
Most people cannot tell those two operations apart. Learning to is most of the work.
How Doubt Gets Switched Off: The Believer and the Skeptic
There’s biology under this, and it’s specific enough to be useful.
Deep in the brain, the basal ganglia run two competing pathways. Researchers like Michael Frank have described them, and I find the characterization clinically indispensable: the direct pathway is the Believer, and the indirect pathway is the Skeptic.
The Believer is the Go signal. Do it. It’ll work. Reward is coming. It disinhibits action. It’s aligned with the Storyteller — it loves linear plans and confident forward motion, and it assumes the plan is sound.
The Skeptic is the No-Go signal. Wait. Something’s off. I recognize this pattern and I don’t like it. It’s aligned with the Navigator, and it works from data your conscious mind never received: micro-expressions, small inconsistencies in what someone said last month versus this month, the eleven wrongnesses in the room.
You know the Skeptic from the moment your hand stops over a signature line for no reason you can articulate. The indirect pathway ungated, briefly, and spoke. What you experience is not an argument. It’s a knot in the stomach, and a Storyteller scrambling to explain it — I guess I’m just nervous about big decisions — or, more often, overriding it: stop being paranoid, the numbers are fine.
Now here’s the part that maps onto groups.
Dopamine, acting on the direct pathway, amplifies the Believer. And it simultaneously suppresses the Skeptic. That’s why hypomania feels so good and so productive and ends the way it ends. The Believer is winning every internal argument because the opposition has been chemically silenced. The Storyteller can spin anything it wants, because the nagging is gone.
A high-arousal group is a dopaminergic environment. That is not a metaphor I’m being cute with. The rally, the conference, the twelve-hour livestream, the group chat that never sleeps, the retreat where you don’t get enough sleep and there’s always another session — these are engineered arousal states. They amplify Go. They gate off No-Go.
And notice what the group does to the Skeptic’s output when it does break through. Inside a healthy system, your hesitation is information to be examined. Inside a cultic system, your hesitation has a pre-assigned meaning: it’s your ego, your programming, your unhealed trauma, your privilege, your fear, your lack of faith, your capture by the enemy’s narrative. Every high-control group I’ve ever studied has a term of art for doubt that converts doubt into evidence of the group’s correctness. That’s the single most reliable structural marker I know. Not the beliefs. The doubt-conversion mechanism.
What that mechanism does, neurologically speaking, is install a permanent gate on your indirect pathway. It teaches you to treat your own most sophisticated pattern-recognition apparatus as a symptom.
Which brings me to something I’ve written about at length elsewhere and want to state plainly here, because it is the hinge of this entire argument:
Trauma and genuine intuition are phenomenologically indistinguishable. They arrive identically. Both come as somatic certainty — a felt, pre-verbal, whole-body this is true, I know this. But they are opposite epistemic states. One is your Navigator reading the current room with more information than your conscious mind has. The other is your Navigator reading a room from 1997 and mistaking it for this one.
They feel the same. That’s not a flaw in you; it’s how the machinery works. Which means certainty is not evidence. The felt sense of being right tells you the indirect pathway fired. It tells you nothing about whether it fired at present-tense reality or at an old map.
This is where cults live. Right in that gap. They locate people whose old maps produce constant somatic certainty and they supply a story that flatters the certainty and names a target for it. The person feels, for the first time in years, that their body’s alarm makes sense. That feeling is the most persuasive thing a human being can experience, and it has no truth value at all.
Politics as Harry Potter
At some point, and I don’t think anyone chose it, we started processing politics through the grammar of children’s franchise entertainment.
I’m not being dismissive about the source material. The grammar is the issue. In that grammar there is a chosen protagonist, an irredeemable antagonist, a plucky in-group with better values, and a plot that resolves. Moral standing is a property of characters rather than of conduct. And critically: the audience’s job is to identify, then feel, then cheer. The audience has no job that produces anything.
Once that grammar is installed, several things follow automatically.
Coalition becomes betrayal, because you don’t ally with the antagonist’s people, you defeat them. Policy becomes characterization, because what matters is what a proposal says about who you are. Compromise becomes corruption, since in the franchise grammar the hero who bargains with the enemy is being seduced. And most importantly, the story has to resolve, so every election is the final battle, which means every loss is apocalyptic and every win is supposed to be the end — and then it isn’t, because governing is a maintenance activity and franchises don’t do maintenance.
But the real damage is what this grammar does to anger.
What Anger Is Actually For
I’m on record about this and I’ll say it again, including to colleagues who don’t like it: anger is a competence. The capacity to feel anger, stay in contact with it, and convert it into accurate problem-detection and assertive energy directed at your actual life is one of the most valuable things psychotherapy can teach a person. I’d put it in the top three.
A lot of therapy is quietly hostile to this. Not officially. But the field has an aesthetic preference for calm, and it tends to treat anger as a regulation failure — something to be metabolized, titrated, breathed through, and reduced. Anger management, as it’s usually taught, is a set of techniques for turning the volume down.
Turning the volume down is genuinely necessary sometimes. If you’re throwing things, we start there. But if that’s where treatment stops, we’ve done something strange: we’ve treated the alarm as the pathology. Anger is often the Navigator’s cleanest and most accurate output. It says something here is wrong, and I have standing to object. For a lot of the people I see — particularly people with complex trauma, particularly people who learned early that objecting was dangerous — recovering access to anger is not a risk of treatment. It’s the goal. What they present with is not too much anger. It’s anger that got routed into shame and came out as depression, or into the body and came out as pain, or into vigilance and came out as anxiety.
So: anger is data plus fuel. And here’s what simple stories do to it.
They don’t suppress your anger. They spend it.
A simple story takes the enormous, accurate, expensive energy that your nervous system generated in response to a real problem, and it spends that energy on a target that cannot absorb it. It converts a signal into a loyalty display. The anger goes out and nothing comes back, and because nothing came back, you need more anger next week. That’s the flywheel. Rage that produces no change requires escalation to keep feeling like agency.
You can watch this in electoral politics without taking a side, because both American parties have done it, repeatedly, in full view. Democrats and Republicans have both backed candidates who were manifestly ineffective — bad at legislating, bad at coalition, bad at delivering the material thing they promised — and been backed anyway, because the electorate on that side was too angry at the other side to audit its own. When the entire evaluative frame is the enemy must not win, then the only question about your own candidate is whether they fight. Not whether they build. Fighting is legible; building is slow and boring and looks like compromise.
And so nothing changes. Not because the anger was misplaced — the underlying grievances in this country are, in most cases, real and well-founded. Nothing changes because the anger got spent on the one variable nobody controls, and withheld from the one variable they do.
Which is the whole point, clinically and politically: you have leverage over your own side and almost none over theirs. Your practice. Your church. Your party. Your professional board. Your family system. The demand for competence is only enforceable where you have standing, and the story that keeps you enraged at the far side is, functionally, a device for redirecting your anger away from the only door you can actually open.
That’s not centrism, by the way. I want to be clear, because this argument gets misread as a plea for everyone to calm down and meet in the middle. I’m arguing for more anger, aimed better. At structures rather than characters, and preferentially at the structures you can reach.
The Ten-Minute Rule
We have a rule at my office, and it exists because I got tired of watching competent professionals damage each other over things that would have evaporated with a question.
When one professional gets angry at another professional, you owe ten minutes of curiosity before you’re allowed to be angry.
Ten minutes of actually wondering what the world looks like from where they’re standing. Not ten minutes of rehearsal. Not ten minutes of building the case. Ten minutes of the honest question: what would have to be true, from inside their situation, for that decision to have made sense to them? What are they responsible for that I’m not? What information did they have that I don’t? What are they scared of? What did the last person in their position get punished for?
You are allowed to conclude, after ten minutes, that they were wrong. Frequently they were. The rule doesn’t adjudicate the substance. The rule is about which of your systems is holding the pen when you respond.
Because here’s what those ten minutes actually do, mechanically. Your Storyteller has already written the press release. It wrote it in the first two hundred milliseconds, and the press release says they disrespected me, or they’re incompetent, or this is what they always do. That document is confidently written and it is not based on evidence about them; it’s based on your priors, which are made of your history. The ten minutes are a forced delay between confabulation and action. Long enough for the indirect pathway to get a word in. Long enough to notice whether your certainty is reading this room or an older one.
And if you can’t do it — if the ten minutes are physically unavailable, if you cannot hold their perspective in your mind for that long without your own case surging back in — then you are not equipped to solve this problem yet. You’re equipped to have it. A person who cannot be curious for ten minutes is not solving a problem, they’re creating one, and usually creating one that outlasts and outweighs whatever the original grievance was.
That holds even when the other person genuinely did something wrong. This is the part people resist hardest, and I understand why, because it feels like the rule is asking you to absorb an injustice. It isn’t. The rule is about efficacy. When you enter a real conflict carrying an unexamined narrative, you fight the narrative instead of the problem, and the person across from you — who is also running a Storyteller, also convinced, also mostly wrong about your motives — fights their narrative. Two confabulations in a room. Nobody’s talking about the actual thing. The problem survives, and now there’s an injury on top of it that will still be there in three years.
Being wronged does not exempt you from the requirement to be effective. It just makes the requirement harder and more important.
The Ethics Professor
When I was in graduate school at the University of Alabama, ethics was taught to me by a veteran social worker who had been in practice a long time, and she said something I have quoted more often than anything else I learned in that building.
If you feel certain you’re right in the middle of an ethical dilemma, that’s exactly where you’re wrong.
Her argument was that a genuine ethical dilemma is, by construction, a conflict between two real goods. Client autonomy against client safety. Confidentiality against a duty to protect. Honesty against the therapeutic relationship. Your obligation to this client against your obligation to the next twenty. If your analysis has produced a clean answer with no residue, you haven’t solved it. You’ve amputated one of the goods and lost track of the fact that it was a good. Ethics lives in the gray, always resolves as a compromise, and always costs something. If it isn’t costing anything, you haven’t finished understanding what you’re looking at.
I’ve come to think that’s not just professional ethics. It’s the best cult-detector I know, and it’s more portable than any checklist, because it operates on your own internal state rather than on the group’s characteristics.
The feeling of clean moral certainty in a complicated situation is a symptom. It means something got moved off the page. Find it. It’s usually the good you sacrificed, and you sacrificed it fast enough that you never had to feel it.
This is also why a certain kind of very online moral confidence is such a reliable red flag. Not because the positions are wrong — sometimes they’re right — but because a person who never displays cost is telling you they are not doing ethics. They’re doing identity maintenance in ethical vocabulary. Real ethical reasoning leaves a mark on the reasoner. You can hear it. There’s grief in it, or at least reluctance.
The Tension You Can Hold Is the Size of Your Mind
Here is my actual definition of psychological adulthood, and it has almost nothing to do with age.
An adult can hold two opposing positions in mind, with their tension intact, without collapsing to one, and without needing the tension resolved before they can act. An adult can articulate the strongest version of the other side’s case, in the other side’s language, without ridicule and without their voice changing. And an adult can be in an argument without identifying with their own position — can experience “I might be wrong about this” as information rather than as a threat to the self.
That last one is the load-bearing one. Most bad conflict isn’t a disagreement about facts. It’s two people defending their sense of self using facts as material. The tell is that people fight hardest on the points where they’re least sure, because uncertainty is where the identity is thinnest and needs the most reinforcement.
The capacity to tolerate uncertainty is what makes a person less myopic, and I mean that in an almost optical sense. Certainty narrows the aperture. When you know the answer, you stop sampling the environment, which means you stop getting prediction error, which means the model never updates, which means the world you’re navigating is increasingly the one in your head. That’s the same failure as the driver on autopilot, except it’s running on your politics and your marriage.
And this gives you a practical, if uncomfortable, heuristic about people.
If a person cannot do this — cannot hold tension, cannot state your position fairly, cannot be uncertain out loud — you should probably keep some distance, regardless of whether you currently agree with them. Not because they’re bad. Because the architecture is unstable. Someone who requires a simple story will end up in one. Which one is close to arbitrary; it depends on who reaches them, and when, and what they were angry about that week. Today they agree with you. That’s a coincidence of timing, not a shared method, and methods are what determine where somebody is in ten years.
I’ve watched this play out with people I loved. The specific content of what they believed changed completely — in a couple of cases, all the way to the opposite pole. The shape never changed once. The shape is the person. The content is weather.
Which is the hopeful version of the same claim, and I don’t want to skip it: the shape is trainable. Slowly, in a relationship, usually with something like grief involved, but trainable. That’s a large part of what the work in my office actually is. Not installing better beliefs. Enlarging the container so a person can hold more than one thing.
Jung was mapping this territory a century before we could image it. The Hero — Beebe’s dominant function, the part that says “I” — is the Storyteller, and its instinct is to claim credit and defend the narrative. The Shadow does the objective navigating. And the Trickster moments, the double binds where the Hero’s machinery visibly fails and you do something you cannot explain and think that wasn’t me — those are the moments when the User Illusion becomes briefly visible.
A cult is a structure that makes Trickster moments impossible to notice, by having an explanation ready before the experience finishes arriving. It sells you a Hero so airtight that the Shadow can never get a message through. And then the Shadow, having no channel, does what it always does when it’s denied a channel. It stops sending letters and starts driving the car.
Ten Questions to Find Out Whether You’re Still Thinking
These are diagnostic, not rhetorical. Answer them out loud, with someone else in the room if you can find someone who won’t just agree with you. The scoring is simple: an answer that comes fast and clean is worse than one that comes slow and qualified.
1. What is the purpose of this organization, stated in one sentence, with no reference to an enemy? If the mission can’t be said without naming what it’s against, the mission is the enmity. Everything else is program notes.
2. What is the plan? Not the goal. The plan. Sequence, resources, timeline, who does what by when, what has to happen first. “Raise awareness,” “build the movement,” and “fight” are not plans. A plan can be wrong. That’s a feature — wrong plans can be corrected. Vibes can’t.
3. If we fully succeed, what exists in the world afterward that doesn’t exist now? Name the material thing. A building, a bill, a clinic, a service, a trained cohort, a number that moved. If success is entirely a change in how people feel or who holds status, you’re in a symbolic economy, and symbolic economies have no exit condition.
4. Is the specific thing I am advocating for right now going to materially produce that, or is it serving my emotional need to feel aligned and righteous? This is the sharpest one and it’s the one I’d keep if I could only keep one. Most internal fights inside good organizations are ritual, not strategy. Ask it about your own last three positions. Be prepared for the answer.
5. Follow the last dollar. Does the money become capacity, or does it become megaphone? Capacity is staff, equipment, service delivery, training, research, anything that increases the ability to do the mission. Megaphone is anything that increases the ability to say the mission. Some megaphone is necessary. When the ratio inverts and stays inverted, the organization has quietly changed its business to attention, and it will start making decisions that serve attention.
6. Can I state the strongest version of the opposing case, in their vocabulary, without my voice changing? Their real best argument — the one their smartest, most decent adherent would make — not the stupidest thing you saw a stranger post. If you can’t produce it, you don’t understand your own position either. You’ve only been shown one side of it.
7. What specific evidence would change my mind? Name it concretely, in advance, before it exists. “Nothing” is an honest answer, and it means what you’re holding is not a position, it’s an identity. Identities are allowed. They just can’t be argued with, and you should stop pretending yours can.
8. Who is permitted to disagree here, and what happened to the last person who did? Every group says it welcomes dissent. The answer isn’t in the policy; it’s in the personnel history. Find the last complication-introducer and ask where they are now.
9. When our side fails, what happens? Is there a mechanism to demand better — a real one, with consequences — or does failure get reframed as sabotage by the enemy? A group that cannot metabolize its own failure has no way to improve, which means the only remaining growth strategy is escalation.
10. What is this costing me? Not what it’s costing the enemy. Me. Relationships I’ve written off. Curiosity I’ve stopped extending. Books I now know not to read. The ability to say “I was wrong” out loud in front of people. Sleep. If the ledger only has entries in the credit column, you’re not looking at a ledger. You’re looking at a brochure.
An eleventh, for the people in my profession: what would I have to stop believing about myself if this turned out to be wrong? That’s usually the actual size of the resistance, and it’s usually much larger than the intellectual stakes.
What Actually Protects You
The people at that folding table were not lying. I want to say that once more, because the moral of this story is not watch out for liars. Liars are the easy case.
They believed the simplification was temporary. They believed complexity was a debt you could carry and repay later, once you had the resources to afford it. And they were sincere, and they were competent, and they were disciplined, and the mechanism did not care about any of that. The megaphone got louder. The story got sturdier. And when the founders came back with the nuance they’d been promising all along, the story they’d built said no.
That’s the part I’d want anyone to take from this. The story doesn’t need a villain to run. It only needs enough people to have built something load-bearing on top of it. After that it defends itself, and it will defend itself against you, its author, with your own words.
The protection is not intelligence. I’ve watched brilliant people get taken, and the brilliance mostly served as a better confabulation engine. The protection is a set of small, unglamorous, practiced capacities. Ten minutes of curiosity before the anger. Noticing that clean certainty is a symptom and not a credential. Knowing that the negation of a lie is not the truth. Being able to say the other side’s best argument without your face doing something. Keeping the aperture open when it would be so much cheaper to close it.
And feeling your anger all the way, and then asking it — before you spend it — whether it’s about to build something, or whether it’s just going to make the megaphone a little bit louder.
If you find that your certainty runs ahead of your evidence, that conflict at work turns into something bigger than the problem that started it, or that you’ve lost track of which of your convictions are yours and which were handed to you, that’s workable material. Complex trauma, in particular, has a way of producing somatic certainty that feels exactly like insight. Learning to tell the difference is clinical work, not a matter of willpower.
Taproot Therapy Collective works with complex trauma, depth psychology, and somatic and brain-based approaches — Brainspotting, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, qEEG brain mapping, and Jungian-informed parts work. Reach out at GetTherapyBirmingham.com.
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