This is not just frustrating. It is breaking politics, relationships, and the mind itself.

What follows is an attempt to explain what is happening. Why communication feels impossible now. Why facts do not matter. And I do not mean the alternative facts that other people have. I mean our facts, the ones we think are factual, do not affect us anymore in the way we believe they should. We feel simultaneously hyperconnected and utterly alone.

I want to suggest that what we are experiencing is not confusion. It is a transition. A painful, disorienting passage between two different ways of being human. This is not an us-against-them analysis. It is an us-against-us analysis. We are all doing both modes at the same time, and understanding that is the only way we are going to survive what is coming.

The Fused Brain

At Taproot Therapy Collective, we work with quantitative electroencephalography, or qEEG brain mapping. This technology measures electrical activity in the brain, identifying which areas are overactive or underactive and mapping the patterns that contribute to symptoms. The treatment works on a principle of frequency mimicry: when the cap delivers a frequency strongly, nearby neurons will drop their current frequency and synchronize with the new signal. The brain learns to pattern itself differently.

I once asked our neuroscience team a hypothetical question. If you could keep brains alive and physically connect them, would they start to sync up? Would they drop redundant structures and build new networks?

The answer was yes. Hypothetically, if you connected multiple brains while keeping them and their persons alive, they would influence each other at the neurological level. Where they connected, they would begin to function similarly. The individual minds would not disappear, but they would gravitate toward specialized roles within a unified whole. They would prioritize information differently so that the collective organism was not being redundant. Each brain would become a node in something larger than itself.

This is science fiction. We cannot actually wire brains together.

But we have done it anyway. We just used a different kind of wire.

Listen to the Article as a Podcast

The accelerating speed of digital communication is entwining us into a vastly complex interdependent neural network. Every time you scroll, every time you post, every time you react to something online, your patterns are being recognized and your frequencies are being incorporated. You are being woven into something larger. You are offloading a certain amount of critical thinking and picking up assumptions from something else that become part of your wiring.

Just as a single brain can develop neurosis, this massive collective brain is experiencing profound cognitive dissonance. The culture, hyperwired together, has to be diagnosed en masse as a giant brain. The anxiety, the polarization, the sense that reality itself has become unstable, these are the symptoms of a collective organism going through developmental crisis.

Walter Ong and the Archaeology of Language

To understand what is happening to our communication, we need to examine how human language has worked historically.

The media theorist Walter Ong spent his career studying the difference between oral cultures and literate cultures. This may sound like an academic distinction, but it is profound.

In oral cultures, think of Homer’s Odyssey sung at campfires, or elders passing down tribal knowledge through stories, language worked in a particular way. It was participatory, performative, mythic. There was no permanent record. The stories existed only in the telling. The Odyssey probably changed substantially over time before it was written down. The Bible changed until it was canonized. Information was expected to grow and change with the culture because that was what information was.

Meaning in oral cultures was not fixed. It was flexible, forged in the communal space between storyteller and audience. The story changed depending on who was listening and what the occasion demanded and what felt true in that moment. True to the audience, not true to some external standard. Oral cultures thought differently because of this. Memory worked differently. Knowledge worked differently. Truth itself worked differently. It was not about correspondence with some external record. It was about resonance with lived experience.

Then came writing and eventually printing. Everything changed.

Print culture prioritized permanence. You could write something down, walk away, and it would say the same thing a hundred years later. This shifted us toward literalism, toward the idea that we could accumulate scientific fact, an objective mapping of the world that would gradually fill in. We used to not know what the map looked like. Here is an island. Now it connects to Europe. Now there is another continent. The blank edges of the map filled in. We thought the same thing would happen with knowledge until we basically knew everything.

The printing press did not just give us books. It gave us modern science, modern law, modern bureaucracy. It gave us the idea that there is one correct interpretation of a text and that disputes can be resolved by pointing to what the document actually says. This is the world where most of us were trained to navigate. The world of citations and fact checks and “but actually the dictionary defines it as.” The world where language is supposed to be precise, where words have specific meanings, where communication is about transmitting information accurately from one mind to another.

Ong predicted that electronic media would thrust us into an era of secondary orality. We would retain the tools of literacy, the permanent archives and searchable databases and the ability to cite and quote and fact check, but we would use them in the rhythms of an oral culture. It would be participatory, performative, improvisational. It would return to mythology, not in literal belief in myths, but in the function of personal expression and meaning-making that religion once provided.

That is what is happening now.

The internet is a library but it is also a campfire. Every conversation is simultaneously archived forever and created in the moment. We are operating in both modes at the same time. This is unprecedented in human history. We have had people speak different languages with different words before. We have never spoken different languages with the same words.

The Dual Register of Memes

The internet meme is the ultimate artifact of this fusion.

Look at any successful meme. It operates on two frequencies at once, sometimes many more. The image is usually mythic or archetypal. The distracted boyfriend looking at another woman. The woman yelling at the confused cat at the table. The dog sitting in a burning room saying “this is fine.” These are not just pictures that communicate simple emotions. They carry emotional resonance that transcends any particular context. They describe complex relationships with several points of meaning that map onto the reason you are sharing the meme.

The text, meanwhile, is hyperliteral. It is a specific complaint about today’s inflation rate. A precise critique of legislation. A reference to something that happened yesterday and will be forgotten tomorrow.

The meme works by fusing these two registers. It takes your immediate, specific anxiety and links it to a timeless human pattern. It makes your particular suffering feel like part of something eternal. It does what myths have always done: provides a framework for making sense of experience. But it does it with material drawn from the 24-hour news cycle.

This is why memes spread and why they feel so satisfying to share. They are not just jokes. They are tiny acts of mythmaking, mapping your context onto a larger story. They are the campfire stories of the digital age, and simultaneously literal polemic arguments.

Here is the problem.

When everyone is speaking two languages at once, it becomes easy for bad faith actors to colonize weak nodes of the network. This is a troll’s paradise. If you attack someone’s literal argument, they can retreat into the symbolic register and say they were just joking while signaling to their audience that they were not. If you attack their toxic symbolism, they can demand that you prove it with data and accuse you of seeing patterns that are not there. There is always an escape hatch built into everything.

Whitney Phillips and other media scholars talk about Poe’s Law, the internet adage that it is impossible to distinguish between extreme views and parodies of those views. If someone follows all of your beliefs to their ultimate conclusion, are they doing it because they agree with you or because they are mocking you? If you genuinely cannot tell whether someone is being serious or ironic, literal or symbolic, sincere or trolling, perhaps they cannot tell either.

This ambiguity is not a bug. For some people it is a feature. They get to pretend they believe everything, and depending on what happens, they get to pick the interpretation that is most advantageous. They get to pretend that was what they always thought.

Mythic Politics and the Failure of Fact-Checking

Think about the political paradox of the last decade.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 election, the political right recognized a societal void of meaningful narrative and projected their need for a modernist heroic myth onto him. There was something similar happening with Clinton, but the myth was not as popular. There was not much substance to either candidate other than what people projected onto them. The people most upset were the ones who were not doing much projecting at all.

The political left attempted to counter that mythic projection by using the tools of postmodern literalism. They deployed fact checkers. They had companies that told you whether the information in the meme was accurate. They pointed out that Trump’s wealth was exaggerated, that his claims were false, that his policies would not accomplish what he promised.

It did not work. Those companies folded. The literal critiques failed to land.

You cannot defeat myth with fact-checking. That is not the role myth plays. The American electorate has repeatedly rejected the sterile procedural language of modern liberalism because it lacks any compelling mythic vision of the future. The Democrats brought spreadsheets to a mythological battle. “If you check page 14 of the website, you will actually see that she thinks…” That does not work.

They spoke on the literal register while their opponents spoke on both. The more memetic campaign won. This is not about one party being smarter than the other. Both parties continue to make mistakes that are not wrong in the sense of disagreeable but wrong in the sense of clueless. They do not understand what is effective now.

You cannot defeat the myths of the modern with the literalism of the postmodern. You have to synthesize both and make something new. You have to be able to speak mythically and literally at the same time with full awareness of what you are doing in each register.

If you work with younger people in therapy, this is something older therapists need to learn. It is a language that younger clients speak. It may not be a language you speak at home, but it is a language you need to speak in therapy with some people.

David Bohm: Thought as a System

David Bohm was a physicist and philosopher who worked with Einstein until Einstein’s classical orientation diverged from Bohm’s quantum interests. Bohm spent his later years trying to understand why human beings seemed incapable of solving problems that are clearly solvable. Climate change. Nuclear weapons. Inequality. Protecting children from abuse. Creating a world that is relatively fair financially. These should be self-evident goals that everyone pursues together. Yet somehow no one is actually pursuing them.

Bohm’s answer was that thought itself is the problem. Not wrong thoughts that need to be replaced with right thoughts. The structure of thought.

We assume our thoughts are our own, that they arise from our individual mind and reflect our individual perception and express our individual will. Bohm argued that the vast majority of what we think is not individual at all. It is collective. It is inherited. It is the residue of everything our culture has thought before us, running automatically through our nervous system.

Thought, he said, has become systematic. It operates like an immune system, automatically defending itself against anything that threatens its coherence. When you encounter information that contradicts your worldview, thought does not calmly evaluate the evidence. It reacts. It defends. It attacks. It does this faster than you can consciously intervene, because conscious intervention is itself just more thought operating within the same system.

This means that collective thought, the shared assumptions and narratives and frameworks of a culture, increasingly controls individual thought without anyone noticing. You think you are thinking your own thoughts. You are actually running inherited programs. The system is thinking itself through you.

Bohm said this in 1994, before social media, before smartphones, before algorithms, before the amplification of everything.

Imagine what Bohm would say about a world where collective thought forms propagate at the speed of light. Where the most viral ideas are the ones that trigger the strongest automatic reactions. Where algorithmic infrastructure is specifically designed to hijack the immune response of thought, making ideas spread not because they are true but because they are triggering.

The collective thinking Bohm warned about has been given technological steroids. The loss of individual authenticity he described has accelerated to the point where many people do not even have a concept of what individual thought would feel like. They have never experienced it. The collective has colonized them completely, but they are still ready to fight hard to defend this thing that feels like them.

Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle

In 1967, Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle, a book that reads like prophecy now but was considered obscure theory at the time.

Debord argued that modern capitalism had transformed social life into an accumulation of spectacles: representations that replaced direct experience with mediated images. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Life under the spectacle is not lived. It is watched. It is consumed. It is experienced at a remove through screens and images and narratives that stand between you and reality.

The spectacle is not just entertainment or distraction, though it includes those things. It is a social relationship between people mediated by images. It is what happens when representation becomes more real than the thing represented. When the map does not just obscure the territory but replaces it entirely.

Debord was writing about television and advertising, about the emerging media environment of the 1960s. His analysis applies with even greater precision to the internet now.

Here is where Debord connects with Bohm: the spectacle thinks through us.

Debord understood that the spectacle is not just something we watch. It is something that structures thought. The images and narratives of the spectacle become the categories we use to understand experience. We do not just see the spectacle. We see through it. It becomes the lens, not the object.

This is why you can know that social media is manipulating you and still be manipulated. The knowing happens within the spectacle. The critique happens within the spectacle. Even your resistance is captured and displayed as another image in the endless flow.

Debord called this the colonization of everyday life. The spectacle does not stay on the screen. It colonizes your relationships, your desires, your sense of who you are. You start to experience your own life as content. You start to perform your existence for an imagined audience. You become a character in your own personal spectacle, watching yourself from the outside.

Psychologists began seeing a new kind of presentation in the early 2000s. Patients felt like they were being watched and recorded all the time. They were exhausted from having to stay in character and set a good example for “all these people watching them”. But these patients were completely alone. This phenomenon had created a new kind of suffering that had not been seen before.

The younger you are, the more online you are, the more you feel this. It is why younger people tend to resonate with these ideas while older people say “what are you talking about?” The more natural it seems to narrate your experience as you are having it, to frame moments for their sharability, to evaluate your emotions by how they would work an audience. These patterns started at age four or six or two, not at forty-five.

The Viral Failure of Symbolic Victory

Here is something we need to confront honestly. The viral political moments often fail. Not just fall short of their goals. They fail completely at the material level while appearing to succeed everywhere else.

Think about Occupy Wall Street. On a symbolic and mythic level, it was an extraordinary success. It changed the vocabulary of American politics. The 99% entered the language. Income inequality became a mainstream talking point. The images spread everywhere. The memes propagated wildly. Occupy dominated the symbolic landscape.

But on a literal and procedural level, the level where actual laws get written and institutional power gets wielded, it was a complete material failure. No lasting policy change. No sustained organizational structures. No actual power and specifically money changed hands. The banks that crashed the economy in 2008 are bigger now than they ever were. One of them took the bailout money, announced they were closing, paid it to themselves as bonuses, and that was perfectly legal.

Occupy Wall Street failed.

There is a similar trajectory with other major cultural movements. Cancel culture. Black Lives Matter. They attained enormous amounts of cultural control but did not affect real material change. Police budgets were not cut after BLM. They increased. Qualified immunity was not ended. The structural reforms that might actually have accomplished the goals of the movement did not happen.

These movements illustrate the trap that Adam Curtis describes. The symbolic register of cultural control, the oral culture, the mythic victory, does not translate automatically into literal, material victory. They are two different things. But because they share overlapping symbols, people mistake them for the same thing.

When you win symbolically, it feels like you won. The brain lights up with recognition. You see your language used everywhere. You feel like you are part of something powerful. But the sense of momentum is real while the material conditions have not changed.

Companies pander to movements all the time. BLM. MAGA. Pride. MAHA. They get symbolic alignment to drive material gain, but it does not change their material practices or advance the aims of the movement. This confusion between symbolic and material victory is not always an innocent mistake. Powerful interests actively cultivate it.

But people are noticing. And as they notice, they are becoming more resistant to falling for it again. The collective brain is changing. How could it really know how to deal with these new forms of control until it tried the old solutions over and over and watched them fail? That is how people in individual therapy realize they need a new approach. Culture works the same way.

The Digital Dreamtime

I call this the digital dreamtime.

The concept comes from Aboriginal Australian cosmology. The Aboriginal dreamtime was not a rejection of the material world as illusion in the manner of Gnosticism, nor was it a complete embrace of material reality as the only truth. It was a liminal space where both converged. The place where the symbolic and the material overlapped most heavily.

The goal was not to overcome the material and ascend to the spiritual world, nor to reject the spiritual and live purely in the material. It was to bridge them together. The literalism of the material and the meaning of the mythic, held in tension.

The dreamtime is an eternal symbolic realm that interpenetrates ordinary reality at every moment. The ancestral beings who created the world are still present. We participate with them in mythic patterns that continue to shape existence. Time is not a line moving from past to future. It is a depth dimension. Timelessness rather than timeline.

In the dreamtime, individual beings are not separate isolated entities. We are nodes on a vast web of kinship that extends to animals and plants and to the land itself. Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart arrived at similar insights. So did Hindu traditions with concepts like Indra’s Net. So did Mahayana Buddhism with its understanding of interdependence.

The phone is how we connect to the dreamtime now. The internet is our new collective unconscious, the space where individual minds interpenetrate and ancestral patterns (we call them memes) propagate and shape consciousness.

If the internet is creating a collective organism, a massive interconnected neural network, we are all part of it. What it is experiencing now is growing pains. It is in a developmental crisis. It is becoming a teenager. The brain is forming but it has not found coherence. And like we tell our teenagers, it should probably drive carefully and it probably should not drink.

This is what neurosis looks like from the inside. Conflicting impulses. Fragmented identity. The sense that different parts of yourself are at war with each other. Anxiety without a clear cause. Depression without a clear reason. The feeling that something is deeply wrong but you cannot articulate what.

The collective brain is experiencing all of this, and we feel it individually because we are part of the collective. Our individual anxiety is in part the anxiety of a larger organism working through contradictions.

Digital Colonization and the Exploitation of Trauma

Once you feel connected to the network, once you sense the power of viral propagation, a temptation emerges. You start to look for soft spots. You start to see how far your influence can extend, what new regions of this network you can colonize, how much power you have.

Multiple networks push against each other. Multiple spectacles compete for attention. All of them run through the same nervous system, the same thought processes, the same humans who have less and less sense of where the collective ends and they begin.

It is exhilarating. Sometimes thrilling. But it is exhausting and ultimately hollow if it does not connect to actual material change, to something that happens in reality rather than in the endless circulation of images.

We are so fused together now that collective psychology is functioning like individual psychology. Not metaphorically. The same processes that happen in an individual mind: pathology, defense mechanisms, personality disorders, grandiosity, delusion, psychosis. They are happening at the collective level.

This is not entirely new. Jung talked about the collective unconscious. Systems theorists discuss emergent group behavior. There is a whole literature on how crowds think differently than individuals and how nations develop something like personality. But here is what is different now: it is happening in real time.

The speed of connection has collapsed the time scales. What used to take generations now takes months. What used to take years now takes weeks. The feedback loops are so fast, so tight, so interconnected that you can watch collective pathology develop the way you would watch a time-lapse of a disease spreading through a body.

Collective groups of humanity can now be analyzed almost the same way you would analyze a patient in therapy. You can identify the defenses. You can trace the trauma. You can see the splitting, the projection, the denial. You can watch the collective do exactly what an individual does when confronted with something they cannot face.

What you see on the internet now is collectivized brains fighting against other networks of brains, trying to expand, sussing out weaker regions, finding nodes that are not well defended, going in, taking them over.

What are they looking for?

Wounds. Hurts. Grievances. Trauma. The fuel that runs the world, more valuable than gold and more valuable than oil. Populations that feel abandoned, humiliated, forgotten. Populations that keep that pain unconscious and want to project it onto something else.

The colonizers of the new networks are not creating pain. They are finding existing pain and exploiting it.

This sounds like imperialism. It is what colonialism and exploitation and neoliberalism have always done. Scholars have documented how powerful interests find vulnerable populations and exploit them for centuries. But there is a new layer now. Something that operates on top of the old colonial dynamics but moves faster and works differently.

In traditional imperialism, you needed ships and armies and supply lines and years and decades and printing presses. In digital colonization of the collective brain, it happens at the speed of thought. A wound gets identified. A narrative gets crafted. A meme gets deployed. Before anyone can organize a response, the colonization is complete. The population has already internalized the new story. The new neural pathway has already been laid down.

And pain, trauma, is the unhealed psychological substrate for that road.

Two things are terrifying about this. First, how do you incentivize a world to heal trauma when it profits from trauma? Second, what happens when you make this process even faster with AI that does not know what it is doing, operating inside a black box, given control of the data that identifies this information?

Parallel Objectivities and the Grinding Gears

We now live in parallel objectivities.

Different populations inhabit different realities. Sometimes in the same country. The same state. The same household. Not just different opinions about the same facts. Genuinely different facts. Different evidentiary standards. Different criteria for what counts as true.

For some people, literal truth is literal truth. For other people, their mythic world is literal truth and they do not know what scientific fact is. Some people make their phenomenological, internal, subjective, and religious experiences their literal facts. They operate entirely on intuition, leaving them blind to where their intuition is colored at the source by trauma.

These parallel objectivities are not just tribal disagreements. They are something stranger. They are systems of representation that have become self-contained. Internally coherent. Reproducible. Reliable in the sense that they generate consistent outputs from consistent inputs. They have all the features we associate with objectivity. But they are not valid. They do not point back to anything real.

Here is a concrete example. I watch patients drop out of treatment not because therapy is not working, not because they are not getting better, but because they cannot afford a fifteen or thirty dollar copay. They are choosing between their mental health and groceries. They have to choose groceries.

But the official metrics say the economy is fine. GDP is up. Unemployment is down. The stock market is healthy. By every measure that institutions track, we are in good shape.

But my patients often struggle to afford a thirty dollar copay.

Those economic metrics are coherent. They are reproducible. If you run the calculations again, they tell you everything is healthy. But they are not valid. They are not capturing the reality of people’s lives, what is important, what they use money for.

We see the same dynamics in education, in psychology, in all of the soft sciences. And here is the thing: you feel this whether or not you notice that you feel it. The same way the orchestral swell of a film soundtrack influences your emotion whether or not you are consciously aware of it.

We have been convinced that the solution is inside the thing that no longer works. If we just tweak the model, adjust the variables, get better data, the gap will close. The problem is technical, not fundamental. The mirror can be polished until it reflects the territory accurately.

That is the trap.

Freud’s concept of the uncanny, the unheimlich, is the experience of something familiar that has become strange. Something that should feel like home but does not anymore. Something that should feel normal or safe or good that we are telling ourselves does feel that way, but we know it does not. It feels wrong.

We are living in a world that looks functional. Institutions are operating. Metrics are being produced. Procedures are being followed. But the procedures do not result in the things they are supposed to produce.

That is an uncanny valley.

When people try to articulate the wrongness, when they say “the metrics do not match my life, the economy is not actually good, I do not feel safe, the institutions are not actually helping,” they get dismissed. They are being emotional. They are not looking at the data. They are letting their feelings override their facts.

But their feelings are data. Felt experience is information. The sense of wrongness is the territory trying to communicate through the noise of the map.

We are all dissociating. We are going through a dissociative split at the collective level.

The Collision

For a long time, the parallel objectivities could stay separate. Your reality is over there. Their reality is over there. Different populations inhabiting different worlds, each internally coherent, each reflecting its own assumptions back to itself. These bubbles floated alongside each other without touching. The mirrors faced their own mirrors and reflected endlessly.

You could go your whole life without seriously confronting the fact that other people lived in a completely different factual universe.

But those bubbles cannot stay separate forever.

The crises we face now are too large to be contained in a single bubble. Climate change does not respect which reality you inhabit. Pandemics do not check your epistemological commitments. Economic collapse does not care about your evidentiary standards.

The parallel realities that could coexist through mutual avoidance are being forced together now. They are grinding against each other like gears that do not mesh. Teeth that do not fit. Mechanisms that clash. The whole apparatus is shuddering until it figures out a new way to run.

I call this the kaleidoscope.

In a kaleidoscope, mirrors create beautiful patterns by reflecting fragments into symmetry. But what happens when the mirrors themselves start moving? When they are no longer fixed in place but sliding and crashing and breaking? The patterns shatter. The fragments collide. The reflections become collisions.

That is where we are.

The separate realities cannot stay separate. The material world will not let them. The crises are too big, too fast, too indifferent to respond to our constructions.

You can feel this in every conversation that goes wrong. In every place where you feel disconnected from family or community or therapy or medical care or art or the spaces that just are not there or do not feel right anymore.

This grinding is painful. It is disorienting. It feels like the end of something.

But here is what grinding does: it wears down the parts that do not fit. It removes what does not make the thing run. Grinding makes things fit together again.

The parallel realities have to come back together somehow. We have to find things that we all think are self-evident, things we all agree on, again. Even if we cannot agree on how things work, we need to start by agreeing on what the goals are.

This is a brittle hope. A brutal hope. Living in this collision is painful.

The bubbles were never sustainable. The parallel objectivities were always a temporary condition. The separate perspectives have been reflecting each other for decades, building power before they collided. Potential energy in a mirror facing a mirror. Each confirming its own assumptions by seeing them reflected back.

But reflection without contact is just narcissism. Each bubble admiring its own constructed reflection.

The collision breaks the narcissism. It forces contact with what is outside.

We may have lost the ability to be as avoidant as we wish we could be.

What Comes After

The metamodern condition is sometimes described as an oscillation, a swinging back and forth between the sincerity of modernism and the irony of postmodernism. The literality of communication and its symbolic function. We oscillate. We reach for grand narratives and we see through them. We fall into ironic detachment and then we yearn for something real.

But back and forth, neither position is stable. The oscillation is not an end state. It is a phase. The pendulum swings until it finds a new equilibrium.

The fused brain does not have to be a monster. The collective organism does not have to be pathological. The dreamtime does not have to be a nightmare.

Whether it becomes something beautiful or something terrible or something more human, some oscillating cycle of both, depends on how we navigate the transition. We have to endure tension. We have to find some way to address collective trauma. We have to learn to sit with uncertainty, to step into the unknown with more than scientific and more than spiritual faith in ourselves, in a future that is bigger or better than this.

The biggest step I see is the recognition that trauma treatment is self-evidently necessary. But before that: the recognition that we are traumatized. That we are being traumatized by this.

It is not a luxury. It is a foundation. It is a right.

Because trauma fuels the blind spots. It makes these problems worse. It makes us less likely to ever solve them. Trauma is why we built the bubbles. Trauma is why we defend representations that do not connect to anything real.

The collective organism is sick. It is traumatized. The parallel realities, the grinding gears, these are trauma responses groaning at collective scale.

We have to learn how to actually live together. Not to manage each other. Not to avoid each other. Actually live together. Western history is largely the story of how we managed avoiding parts of self even when we had to live in proximity.

Connection without internal avoidance. That is the task.

You cannot connect with others unless you understand the parts of yourself. You cannot face parts of yourself that you cannot tolerate. Internal avoidance becomes external avoidance. We need to see ourselves as multiplicities, not unified selves. The unified self was always a fiction. We need to stop splitting through emotion. We can hold our own multiplicity.

The parallel realities are not just political. They are psychological. The external fragmentation mirrors the internal fragmentation. You cannot fix one without addressing the other. The internal system is the external system. That is what the collective brain metaphor, the digital dreamtime, gives us.

What we build from these fragments depends on whether we can finally stop avoiding ourselves. Avoiding reality itself. Because the parts of ourselves or the parts of other people that we do not like are just there. They are just there like it is raining outside. They are just there like there is a mountain in your way. It does not matter what you think about it. It does not matter what you feel about it. Those things are real.

We did not choose this, but the collision is happening whether we want it or not. The only question is whether we participate consciously. Whether we bring the witness consciousness, the dual language fluency, the shamanic navigation to the collision. Or whether we just get ground up in the gears because we refuse to see reality inside of us and inside of other people.

That is where it always was.

Build a bridge.

Joel Blackstock, LICSW-S, is the Clinical Director of Taproot Therapy Collective in Birmingham, Alabama. He specializes in complex trauma treatment using qEEG brain mapping, Brainspotting, and somatic approaches.