You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

Swell AI Transcript: 97 Group Chat.mp4
Jake Wiskerchen: We don't know how to coach our kids through their distresses and how to tolerate them because we ourselves were bailed out of it. Now we've got multiple generations that don't know how to tolerate distress, so of course you're going to dive into some avatar. Of course you're going to avoid pubescence. It's just easier to reach into the video games or some shiny thing that says you can be this thing. And then the real problem with it is that they land on it and declare it as though it's permanent at a very early age. And it may not be. How many of us landed when we were 15 on what we wanted to be the rest of our lives? Very few of us, usually. Most of us change our minds. And now we're doing it with self-identity. Really scary stuff.
Stephanie Winn: You must be some kind of therapist. Welcome back to another episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist, where I am doing something new for the first but not the last time. I am welcoming back previous guests. So I'm not sitting here with one person like I usually am. I'm not even sitting here with two people. I'm sitting here with three whole people who long-term listeners of this podcast might already be familiar with. So I'm here with Jennifer Lawl, Karen King, and Jake Wiskirchen. So part of what I'm doing this year in 2024 is deepening relationships over time with people I've had the pleasure of meeting through this podcast. I've noticed that doing these long-form interviews just once. It ends up feeling after a while like you're having a bunch of intellectual one-night stands, like you're going so deep and so intimate with one person and then you don't talk to them again for a while. So in 2024, I'm inviting people who I've met before on the podcast to come back in different combinations and just see what happens when we put our minds together. So I understand that for people who are just listening and not watching on YouTube that tracking multiple voices might be a little confusing. So I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves so you can sort of get a feel for what each person's voice is and we'll go around and share which previous episode they were on and what we talked about. And then we're going to talk about what people have been up to since those last conversations because everyone's involved in some pretty interesting projects. And then we'll talk about some latest news and a few other things like detransitioners and psychedelics and all that interesting stuff. So Jennifer, we'll go ahead and start with you. And by the way, welcome and great to have you all here.

Jennifer Lahl: Well, it's good to be with you again. I was with you last year, Stephanie, on episode number 52, where we talked about surrogacy, which I'm very passionate about. Is it liberation for women or exploitation of women? So spoiler alert, I make a strong case that it's exploitative to women and children.

Karen King: Thank you for having me again, Stephanie, and I'm really looking forward to this conversation, Jennifer and Jake. I was on episode 81, where we talked about the psychedelics and the state of the field in 2023, and also my work with ketamine and assisted psychotherapy. And what I'm up to right now is I'm doing ideology-free supervision and peer-to-peer consultation, not only for critical therapy antidote members, but also on my own. I'm really trying to create a network of ideology-free supervisors. This past year, I've been experiencing a lot of new therapists coming in, very indoctrinated. And so I've been involved in trying to disindoctrinate them kindly, gently, and effectively. So my new website is ideologicaloasis.com where I'm doing that work.

Stephanie Winn: Awesome. And Jake?

Jake Wiskerchen: That's super cool to hear. And I want to follow up with you afterward, Karen, on some of that stuff. So thanks for having me. I was way back on episode two, and we discussed Guns and Mental Health. And I think that was actually the title, which is coincidentally the title of the podcast that I host called Guns and Mental Health. On behalf of an organization I'm a part of called Walk the Talk America. So I'm a marriage and family therapist by trade. I live in Reno, well, Sparks, Nevada, but I own and operate a company here called Zephyr Wellness. We do outpatient counseling and psychotherapy and a team of practitioners working for me and I love them very much and I'm very blessed to have my salary generated by them so I can do things like this which is super fun because I am trying to get information out into the public so people can fix their own problems and stop coming through my door. That's my goal. Humble though it may be.

Stephanie Winn: Great. And so Karen, you shared a little bit about Ideological Oasis and Jennifer also just released a big project. So Jennifer is a filmmaker. For those who don't know, I've, I've seen a couple of your films that you've done together with Callie Fell, who's also previous guests of this podcast. And so Jennifer just released a new film called the Lost Boys. Or is it the Lost Boys? Yeah. The Lost Boys, the search for manhood, which is available free on YouTube and it's about male detransitioners. So can you share a little bit about your film?

Jennifer Lahl: Yeah, well, first, a year ago, we released the Detransition Diaries, Saving Our Sisters, which is only focused on female detransitioners. And my book, The Detransition Diaries, just came out last week, where we actually include two of the male detransition stories in this book that are featured in The Lost Boys Searching for Manhood. So that film was released three weeks ago today. And it's just been really warmly well received. It's already been translated into Spanish and Polish. But we interview in that film five young men who thought that their mental health issues, their gender dysphoria, whatever was going on in their personal lives would all be solved and corrected. transitioned and became women. And that, you know, as many people who listen and follow your work, Stephanie will know that that often, you know, lands flat when they wake up one day and go, what the hell have I done? We interviewed Dr. Oz Hakim, who was a psychiatrist in that film, Dr. Joe Burgo. Maybe you've had Joe on your show, I don't know.

Stephanie Winn: Was going to.

Jennifer Lahl: We had to reschedule.

Stephanie Winn: Yeah.

Jennifer Lahl: Yeah. Graham Lightening is in that film, you know, the British comic that got cancelled. And also One Dad. So it's an all-male cast made by female filmmakers. And we decided we would let men tell their stories because men to speak for men.

Stephanie Winn: Jennifer, I love what you did with this film. I watched it recently, thought it was really well done. And this way of just centering men and their stories and really acknowledging that when it comes to this whole idea of gender transition, men's issues and women's issues are different. And the boys and men that you featured in your film, it was this struggle and this search for manhood, whether it had to do with grappling with being gay, grappling with feeling ashamed of being a man, narratives of what it meant to be a man that made them feel like that was something that they needed to run from. And I love the way that you also brought in male experts to talk about men's issues.

Jennifer Lahl: Yeah, and honestly, a year ago, we were in the Sydney Transition Diaries. We had no intention of making another film so quickly, and we had no idea we were going to make this film. But what happened was we had parents that just literally came out of the woodwork and said, nobody's talking about our boys. Nobody's talking about our sons. Please tell the story of the boys so they don't get lost. So part of the lost boys was, are the boys lost in this decession? So we were happy to do that. And, you know, we, whenever people come to us with a plea, a cry for help, whatever, you know, many of you on the phone, you know, you're dealing with this on this interview, you deal with people that come to you for help. And you can't say, oftentimes, no to them. So we felt this burden to let the boys, let the men tell their story.

Karen King: I also noticed my response as I was watching it was just the egregiousness of the therapy treatment they received, as we're all used to, I think, unfortunately, seeing with more whistleblowers. But it just really struck me how they could have been helped so much earlier along the way. And I think even one of them said, actually, this is what should have happened. I can't remember which one, but he said, how about being sober? and then I can have more of a perspective. So that was just really painful and poignant to watch. That was Brian.

Stephanie Winn: And I was a pediatrician. Brian was on my podcast in the past as well. Oh, sorry. This is, yeah, talking over each other is going to happen when we have four people. Sorry. We're just going to have to like klutz our way through this as we figure it out. There's also like a little bit of a lag. So I'll just I'll say my piece and then you can share yours, Jennifer. So Brian was on a previous episode of my show as well, Surviving Gender Malpractice, and really went into depth about the egregiousness of the the therapy that he received. Jennifer, you were about to say?

Jennifer Lahl: Yeah, I was just going to add that, you know, for the listener, I did work in pediatric critical care nursing for many, many years. So I witnessed firsthand this sort of the shift and erosion of medical ethics. Because we would never, when I was practicing nursing at Children's Hospital Oakland or University of California, San Francisco, this would not be the, you know, the affirmation only approach was not even on the radar. So it's really sad to see that this is the care, in quotes, that children, minors, young adults are being awkward when everybody on this panel with me today is well aware that we need to deal with the mental health issues.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think SAD is a great way to put that too because it's an erosion of the foundations of the field that we were all brought up to execute. And when we tread into postmodern deconstructionism, what we end up with is a deconstructing of everything and a building up of nothing in its place. And we ended up all becoming like a funhouse reflection of other things that are also not anchored. And for whatever reason, I think our field is at the epicenter of this. And it's become in vogue to attack things rather than take a stand for things. And I believe the reason that's happening is it's scary to stand on something, right? And I think that's why things like Critical Therapy Antidote and Open Therapy Institute are so critical because we have to return to the fundamental foundations of Why are you in front of me? What is wrong? Establish a goal to solve that problem and then move toward problem resolution. This medicalization of symptom treatment is all kinds of wrong. And as we're seeing, the detransition community is very vocal about it. But they're being suppressed, and for whatever reason, it hasn't yet rattled our profession like every other thing has rattled us, which is through lawsuits. We get threatened with litigation at every turn, even though it doesn't happen, because if we were getting sued all over the place, our professional liability insurance wouldn't be as low as it is. But yet, nobody's brought up the idea that like, if we sign off on these letters for medical transition as therapists after one session or four sessions or whatever, we can actually come back and be sued for failing to do the proper thing, which Stephanie, you're doing very well at, you know, helping to reroute therapists into a mindful approach to those who are struggling with, you know, their gender identity. But for some reason, that's not that's not waking us up. Like, the last thing I want to do is be sued four years from now, because I didn't do my due diligence. And I don't know why we're not talking about that. But I love that you said sad, because it's tragic that we've just abandoned 120 years of research and theory to grasp this latest and greatest or whatever.

Stephanie Winn: It's bizarre that there isn't more fear, like you were saying, Jake, amongst mental health professionals of some sort of board complaints or lawsuits. Because I remember in grad school, in my law and ethics class, our professor put the fear of God in us about all the things that could go wrong. And we had to review board complaints and things like that. And just to see the hastiness and pridefulness with which people who are on board with the gender stuff are are pushing it without any regard for the fact that they're messing with people's lives. I also wanted to circle to the question maybe later, just because there's so much on the table here, of your thoughts, Jake, on whether therapy is male-friendly. But Karen, what were you about to say?

Karen King: I was just going to say, I think that the reason that we can be so, as therapists, easily complicit is that it's in our code of ethics. Our ethics, APA, ACA, AMA, they've all been hijacked years ago. And we're just following our ethics codes, unfortunately. So it feels conspiratorial, but because there's such a top-down approach to that, I think that's why. And the trainings that we're given you know, we are, those of us in the field, I think we're highly agreeable usually, and we really want to help. And when we hear that someone is being harmed, and there's this whole new theory that might help them, there's a sparkliness to that, and we feel like we can become advocates for the underdog. And then our ACA code of ethics are telling us that, and then everything's being reorganized to accommodate that. It's a little like being in Wizard of Oz, and you, you know, you just have to have a wake up moment. and realize, oh, there is objective reality and people are being harmed. I have so many stories about people I've interviewed. I run a clinic that come in and have these really deep expressions of the ideology that they're standing for. And that's really what has inspired me to do Ideological Oasis. It's indoctrination and I feel for them. I don't think they mean to be. I don't think it's malicious. The ideology has preyed on our ability to help people and on that temperament we have. So I think that's why.

Jake Wiskerchen: Well, when you regurgitate an ideology, you don't have to be you. You don't have to risk you. You could just revert to the talking points. But when questioned, about the talking points, the individual generally has no idea what they're talking about or why, because the intentionality is gone when you're programmed. If you've wrestled with something and deeply discovered what its purpose and root is, it's easy to pick the fruit and present it to somebody. But if all you have is a basket of fruit, you can't explain the tree from which it arose. And that's exactly what's happening when we start questioning these things and things fall apart. The ideologues get very defensive and you get a very limbic response out of that. And so then you get an argument instead of a discussion. And I agree with your assessment of how it's infiltrating the professional associations. You know, AMFT so far has not embedded it into its ethics, but they're due for a review, I'm sure, because the last one was 2015. And so far, they have 26 pages of guidelines, they call them, when the ethical code itself is only 11 pages. So it's only a matter of time before those get hybridized into the ethical code. And then by extension, the licensing boards will adopt, by reference into law, the ethics of that professional organization like they do in my state, Nevada. And then we're beholden to it. And if you cross that ethical path, well, then, you know, we'll be it to you. The problem is the guidelines are inherently in conflict with the ethics and print as as they stand. And I could go on and on about this, but I don't want to now because it's in the weeds and the listening audience probably is already glazing over.

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Jennifer Lahl: Now I was gonna say, your ethics is only as good as the foundation of what the ethics is. Today, since everybody has a different ethical theory, some people think affirmation only, you have to do this. And so if you build from that, then you're gonna get crap ethics. If you build from an ethical base of biological reality and evidence-based science, you know, you're going to get a whole different approach, which is, I think, you know, we were talking before we went live and this, this particular show will air in a couple of weeks, but, you know, we're on the heels of a big New York Times, you know, expose at a brand new whistleblower this morning. And so, you know, there's, there's cracks because, you know, this ethical theory, this ethical framework that they've given professional societies, you know, through WPath or whatever, It's still doing the house on sinking sand and the jig is up. And so you're going to see more and more whistleblowers. You're going to see more and more mainstream media talking about this and giving Stephanie Wynne the light of day in the New York Times.

Jake Wiskerchen: That's literally what I said when I forwarded that somebody said that the facade is starting to crack and I think that's Important because that's exactly what it is. It's been a patina that's been painted over an entire perfect multiple professions representing as though this is not only the best way, but the only way to go about healing somebody's distress. And they've checked out all other options. And so now with the whistleblowing, the exposés, the partnerships that we're seeing, we're all finding more and more voice to push back against this illiberal reality that's being presented on a May force down our throats. I think all in the service of just monetization of medical III truly believe that's it and there's just a bunch of Flying monkeys who are willing to carry water for these organizations that really don't care about them at all. They're they're too busy making money So I think the more we can push back and the more confidence we can give to the lay run-of-the-mill frontline clinician to say no I'm not actually gonna sign off on that letter that form letter, by the way, that was presented to me from the hospital, because I am not ethically within my scope of practice to say that a medical intervention is necessary. I think the more we can do that, the better off the patients will be. And to walk that out just a little bit further, I can't think of any other medical intervention where therapists should be signing off on the medical intervention. We certainly don't do that for psychotropic medication. Like, psychiatrists do that because it's in their scope of work. It's in their scope of practice by law. I wouldn't, I mean, consultation maybe to make sure that we're seeing the same thing would be appropriate, but I'm not going to pick Zoloft over, you know, whatever else the psychiatrist is schooled to do. I don't I don't know what the brain chemistry does. I didn't take those classes. So why would why would the medical profession pass the buck to the mental health profession, other than as a shield for when they get sued, and they could point the finger at me like, well, he signed off on it. I just think I find the whole thing distasteful.

Karen King: Well, it's so odd to me, like as a stark contrast, we are advised to not write emotional support animal letters, because there's too much liability, because we're not familiar with the animal. And to me, it's so amazing that we are supported, and I think it's a two-day training to be able to write these letters, and you can do it within the first couple of sessions. And yet, you know, we can't write emotional support animal letters. There's more thought going into that.

Stephanie Winn: There are lists of hundreds of therapists around the country who have signed up saying, I am willing to write a letter for surgery in the first visit. And they feel like it's an important mission. It's almost, I mean, many of them, I presume, are atheists, but it's almost like they feel like they're on a mission from God to save people. There's this kind of righteous savior complex that's Yeah, rife within that that community. And but Jennifer, you brought up the New York Times article. And so for any listeners who didn't, aren't aware of this, there was a few days ago, right now we're recording this February 5. So I can't remember exactly what day it came out. But we're looking at early February to 2024. There was a New York Times opinion piece by Pamela Paul, in which I was interviewed as well as several other mental health professionals and D transitioners. about detrans issues. And people have been pushing the New York Times to cover this issue for years. And those of us in the gender critical community have often been pretty discouraged by the angle that the New York Times has taken on this particular issue. So I think for many people, this felt like a turning point. Of course, you know, while I've gotten backlash, everyone featured in the article has gotten backlash, the authors gotten backlash, the comments have been overwhelmingly positive. And that's coming from the New York Times reader base. And it's interesting to see what this is bringing up for people, because I think there, there are those of us who are just, you know, better late than never. And then there are people who I think are showing like maybe some bitterness about this, which I understand, because we're talking about people's lives being at stake here, you know, like Abigail Shrier published Irreversible Damage in 2020. And if the New York Times had covered her book, then maybe there would have been people who whose bodies would be intact today that aren't. But people often ask me, where do I feel like things are at in society? Are they getting better? Are they getting worse? Are more people peaking? And I think of it as sort of like a blind man and the elephant issue. Like I can only feel what I can feel from my limited perspective. And if I look at the evidence before me, I would say things are both getting better and worse at the same time, because there are some things getting better, some things getting worse. There are things being written into law that are terrifying, and those laws are going to take years to reverse. And at the same time, more people are waking up. But I think now that I have the three of you here, it's probably a good time to talk about this for listeners who are curious, who are desperate for a finger on the pulse of where is society at with this? in the law, in medicine, and in the sort of Overton window, do you guys feel like things are getting better, worse, both, neither?

Jennifer Lahl: I think, you know, I don't know if you guys have heard this before, but I've heard it said several times, like when gay marriage was legalized in the United States, that was when the HRC should have shut, you know, shuttered close-up shots that our work is done and go on. But no, they had to find a new gimmick, a new cause. And so that's when the rainbow flag got 17 new colors added to it, because they weren't happy that their initial mission was to legalize same-sex marriage. once that was accomplished, they should have just gone out of business. So I think this is winnable. I often tell people that in my day, in my time, we will win this issue because as any medical scandal, and we talk about this in our book, The Detransition Diaries, we look back at what happened in Nuremberg in Nazi Germany with the experimentations. We looked at the Tuskegee studies. We looked at the lobotomies. We looked at the mass involuntary sterilization programs we have in the United States where people weren't given, you know, didn't consent and were sterilized. So we've seen medical scandals come, and then there's the whistleblowers, and then there's the outrage, there's a public awareness, and then it goes away. So I think this, we will win this, but there will be some ugly other issue that rears its head. And so we'll have to be constantly vigilant.

Stephanie Winn: I was actually going to segue to something that I think you might want to comment on, Jake, which is that when Jennifer talked about how the Human Rights – sorry, is it Coalition? Is that what they're – HRC? Human Rights Coalition? Campaign. Campaign. Human Rights Campaign. That they should have celebrated a job well done, mission accomplished, and shuttered. But instead, they looked for the next project. And what it reminded me of is something that you talk about, Jake, with regard to mental health, that, you know, people aren't meant to be in therapy forever. They're meant to be in therapy long enough to get back to functioning so that they can use their other supports, like, you know, natural supports and hobbies and things like that, rather than just kind of relying on their therapist emotionally forever. And I was wondering if you noticed that connection, that parallel.

Jake Wiskerchen: Oh, yeah, like big time. So a couple of different directions I want to go here. One is something I repeatedly say, which you alluded to, which is mental health can and sorry, mental illness can and should be overcome. And I tell my students, my interns, all my employees here, that diagnoses can and should change also as symptom presentations, fluctuate, certain things alleviate, other things arise, but eventually over time, we stop treating symptoms and we treat problems and problems go away and we decouple ourselves from the patient because the patient ostensibly at that point has enough information, coping skills or whatever you want to call it to go live life in a healthy manner. Now, not to swing the pendulum too far and say that they can never come back because the medical model under which we operate and we do under, we operate under a medical model. It's in our ethics. It's usually in law. And it's certainly driven by insurance companies where somebody comes in and says, and this is for the uninitiated, so pardon me if I just walk this out a little bit, but somebody walks into my office, your office, whatever, says, hi, I'm Jake. Hi, Stephanie, nice to meet you. What brings you in today? And Stephanie says, whatever she says is ostensibly the problem, right? And then I go, what do you want to do about that? that becomes the goal and usually the goal is to solve the problem and then we formulate some objectives and then we do interventions and the intervention should be targeted to alleviate the suffering and achieve the goal at which point you're done, you're discharged. Now that doesn't mean that problems can overlap and interfere and so forth, you know, so sometimes we're uncovering things but I think what therapists have tended to do is go digging for problems because either out of our own insecurities financially or ego or otherwise, we love having a full calendar and we love having our patients come back week over week or every two weeks in perpetuity. And I have a whole presentation on why that's unethical. We need to move away from that. However, we still should have some parameters in place that say, if you're ill and you're seeking solutions and you're not finding them in your normal life, come see us. And I analogize this to auto mechanics because it's a good analogy. I don't know everything about my car. I can probably change my own oil. I can change my own tires. I can do lots of things if I'm savvy and I have the tools, although those are getting more expensive, the more computerized cars get. But at some point, I can't run a flush on my fuel system. I need a professional with professional equipment to do that, so I'll go to the mechanic. It would be nice if insurance specifically would pay for preventative care for our mental well-being. and they don't. And to my knowledge, we're still the only profession under the medical umbrella that doesn't have preventative care paid for. We get it in primary care, we get it in pediatrics, we get it in dentistry, we get it in optometry, we get it everywhere except mental health. But if you had a four times a year, pop the hood, check the belts and hoses, I think that keep people running pretty clean for a really long time. So if we can hybridize these two, you know, I think we would, we would do really well as maintenance professionals, just as well as we can do with helping people when things get really dark, or they want to uncover whatever their childhood trauma was, we want to do depth counseling, that would be really awesome. But right now, we're hemmed in by a whole bunch of things, not to mention our own supervisors and professors who tell us that make sure they're really, really well before you discharge them. It's like, like, can I just meet them where they are? And like, just heal what they came in with? Why do I have to keep digging for issues? So that all being said, when you talk about organizations like the human rights campaign, constantly looking for new things to muster, I think it's I think it's an ego issue, where they don't know who they are without this, this rah rah, to accomplish. And I see some parallels in the suicide prevention community, quite honestly. If suicide prevention people were really serious about their jobs, they'd stop talking about suicide prevention and get upstream from that and start introducing things to keep people well, not just react when people are suicidal. But again, that threatens their existence, it threatens their jobs. And for me, I don't, I don't, I'm not attached to therapist as identity. If I work myself out of a job because the community is super well, and I don't have to deal with my kids being bullied on the playground or watching couples fight in the grocery store, and I still have like seven years left on my lease, I'll turn this place into a coffee shop and a brew pub. I don't care. I'll walk away from therapy because everybody else is healed. I don't think we'll ever achieve that. And I'd still like to do maintenance work. But then we could do, I don't know, therapy and brews or something. So yeah, I do see some parallels. And I think we as professionals have to get out of our own way and realize that if a job is done, great. Move on to something else. Go be a barista.

Karen King: I really think this is sort of a greater philosophical societal issue, though, not necessarily just embedded in the medical paradigm. Because I'm thinking about in our town, there's a big fentanyl crisis. There are people doing drugs on the streets, lots of people dying. And I just saw an article in our paper where they're so concerned about it that they're going to build more space for the homeless to be. And I just think about the definition of compassion there is that we will then enable the problem, but we'll be kind to the people while we're having the problem. And we won't actually intervene on the the prevention of the problem itself. So no money, I shouldn't say none, but less money is going into treatment and detox. And yet we have all these programs to help people live successfully on the street, which is a backwards upside down world. And it's kind of like I'm making the parallel to the reliance on therapy. Therapy is so interesting. I feel like people really don't get that We have so much unexamined accidental power right now in culture. Maybe your film, Jennifer, really named this, but we really, not only do we deliver cultural indoctrination to our clients, but we are also receiving it directly, like from the ACA, the AMA, and counseling programs in particular. So there's this, this like over reliance on what in the Buddhist world is called idiot compassion, that is not discerning about actually moving through and solving the problem but just getting better at taking care of the brokenness. And that is what I'm really working with my supervisees. They should not be needed eventually. Our clients should graduate. And that's the goal.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think I know where that comes from. And I think it's again, I'll go back to the postmodern deconstructionism. where you're not allowed to take a stand on anything because it's deemed oppressive or patriarchal or whatever. And I think that's it. I think it's just become easier and in vogue to support people in their misery rather than to assert that there's a higher calling, a wellness, an achievement point, because there's an inherent top-down approach, right, where somebody walks into the counseling office or goes into the homeless shelter or the substance abuse recovery clinic or whatever it is. They're wounded and ailing and they walked in for that reason. And for whatever reason, we have abdicated our responsibility as professionals in assisting them because we don't want to be seen as imperialistic or whatever. And it's like, no, no, they came in and they hired you. you're a professional. Can you imagine if the auto mechanic did that? It was like, you know what, man, I don't want to like, mansplaining this to you. So I'm just gonna let you drive your broken car until the wheels fall. It's like, no, you like assert yourself with your credibility, the the experience that you have the authority given to you by law, if you have a license, and give some feedback, like tell them, yeah, there's probably a pathway forward from your misery. You don't have to just live in misery, more nicely. Like, it's, it's bizarre to me. But I think that's where it comes from.

Stephanie Winn: I have so many thoughts on this. I think the one way to sort of introduce my thoughts on this is that when I meet a young person, I'm talking – I mean, I don't do therapy for minors anymore, but when I did, you know, like a 16-year-old or nowadays if I were to be working with like a 20-year-old, who is pretty sure they want to be a therapist, I'm immediately worried about them. I'm like, what has happened in their young life that has made them already kind of gravitate towards this role? And oftentimes, there are family of origin codependency issues, there are parentified child issues. And maybe that person's path in life is truly to become a therapist, and maybe that would bring them joy and bring healing to other people's lives. But maybe they need to find healing for themselves first and find what really makes them happy. And like, maybe the actual path for them is to be a botanist or an artist or, you know, something that's more focused on thriving. than on fixing what's wrong. And there's an element that I'm not saying I see in these young people, but that I think is also sort of a shadow element of this dynamic we're talking about, and it's sadism. It's a certain sadism that I think is unconscious in some people in our culture, and that is truly at heart, even if people aren't conscious of it, a desire not to see others well, but a desire to see others suffering either because it confirms someone's existing worldview to see others suffering, to see that life is full of misery, because it shores up their identity as a rescuer or a savior. But, you know, Karen, you mentioned the fentanyl crisis, and we have that where I live too. And I had an interview that was really excellent on homelessness in Portland, but unfortunately I wasn't able to air it because of some legal issues that came up for the guest. But this person had a lot of expertise on the homelessness crisis. And what I learned through talking to him was really eye-opening because our city, Portland, is like designed to keep people just barely alive, right? And it's this sort of like faux compassion as if this is really what people truly want or need is just to be like just on the brink of death at all times. But I don't think it's working for anyone for these people to be just on the brink of death. But the harm reduction, so-called harm reduction services that are provided, I mean, these people are provided with clean needles, you know, so that they can continue injecting themselves with drugs that take them to the brink of death but without getting HIV from them. And the list just goes on and on of ways that these supposedly progressive, supposedly compassionate policies, including things in the mental health field, are really set up to keep people not thriving, just barely surviving. And I do think that there's a shadow, like unexamined element of sadism in some people. And you see that within like some of the anarchists in Portland, which I just hosted a dinner party last night and we heard about anarchists that like actually stop people from trying to get homeless people truly off the streets because they're defending like, this is a valid way of living. And it's sort of like with the trans stuff, the people who are coming in and defending, this is a valid way of living. It's like, okay, so you're fighting for people's rights to be lifelong medical patients. because you really want people to know that that's a valid way to live and you don't, you wouldn't aspire for there to be something better for them. You know, you have to question the sort of shadow motives of someone who takes up that mantle and wants people to be at that low level of health rather than wanting people to, you know, as you said Jake, to work yourself out of a job, to see a world in which People are thriving. Businesses are thriving, right? That's going to conflict with people's anti-capitalist views. A world in which people of various demographics are thriving, that's going to conflict with what people have now termed anti-racism, and so on and so on.

Jake Wiskerchen: Government programs sure are thriving, and the program managers do benefit from retaining and augmenting their services, right? I go back to suicide prevention. It's the same thing. You want to work yourself out of a job by stopping suicide. Keep people well. Don't just reflexively respond when they're suicidal. Don't just reflexively respond when somebody's homeless. Don't just reflexively respond when somebody has an overdose and you jab them with a Narcan pen, right? Like that's the wrong approach, but it sure does keep people employed.

Karen King: I just keep thinking I see these things so clearly and I guess maybe this is my solution focus background but then I think okay so how do we unwind this and for me it's really been examining liberalism versus conservativism philosophically, and I was just listening to john Anderson's interview with Mary Harrington this morning. And she was talking about her new book, and it's Progress Theology. Her theory is that there's this underlying thought that everything is moving towards, when actually that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, and that somehow, oh, I've lost my train of thought. but it is it's related to this and it is that oh that everyone's individual freedoms are the things that we should be fighting for and you know the impulses are to be worshipped and so everyone has their own right to live on the street or to do drugs or to be minor attracted people or whatever it is that freedom individual freedom becomes the theology and there's no sort of moral authority or Ability to live with civility and I think it like philosophically if we can figure out how to how to shift that That's why I guess I keep coming back to this. This is why I feel so strongly about Disindoctrinating young new counselors kindly and and really approaching it from a philosophical viewpoint. I think it's gonna be the way to Unwind it at least this is my approach. Hopefully I

Stephanie Winn: I recently told you about a group called Do No Harm, who's working to do just that. Eliminate the harm that so-called gender-affirming care for minors and political ideologies in medicine are causing. Do No Harm is made up of thousands of members across the country, from doctors to nurses to policymakers to concerned parents who see what's happening at practitioners around the country and are waving a red flag. Membership is free, and you get unlimited access to information from experts, on-the-ground updates from people working in medicine or state houses to take a stand, and collaboration with other thinkers. Learn more and sign up at do-no-harm-medicine.org slash sometherapist to learn more. That's do-no-harm-medicine.org slash sometherapist. For me, the work of Jonathan Haidt has been really impactful with moral foundations theory and understanding that we, you know, this framework that there's a moral palette. And so a value like freedom, for example, exists in sort of a constant balance with other values. So it's sort of, you know, according to Mary Harrington's work, and I've read her book too, and it's excellent. It's like, or maybe you would think of like Thomas Sowell's idea of the unconstrained vision, right? That we can have endless freedom, endless progress, and that it won't cost us anything. Whereas I think those of us with just maybe more life experience understand that there are trade-offs with anything, and that if you prioritize freedom as the ultimate value, there might be some other things that you also value, maybe things that you didn't even realize you value, that you take for granted. that you are coincidentally undermining through the process of pursuing freedom at all costs.

Jake Wiskerchen: I go back to needing an anchoring. Height's work is exceptional and I love everything that he's produced. I think it walks very nicely with traditional religious values. If you have an anchoring in something that's bigger than you, if it's morality, if it's a printed code, if it's scriptural doctrinal, then that's the thing to which you point when you get crossways with life. When you're not anchored, you just make things up as you go and you become God of your own world. And that's a really dangerous proposition because then you have a bunch of gods all running around bumping into each other, fighting each other over who's more right. And there's no common bond to tie them together. So I'm with you, Karen, like we need to deconstruct the indoctrination, but then we have to construct it onto something else. And I think that is already in place. It's our long lost ethical codes where we could say, what are the five ethical precepts of the counseling profession? autonomy, justice, fidelity, non-maleficence, beneficence, right? And those have reason, and they're grounded, and they're studied. From there springs all the codes. And if the codes run afoul of that, then the code goes away, right? We have to reconsider that at some point. But I think we lose the anchoring when we just start throwing codes and talking points at people. So by returning people to their anchor, we have a lens or a matrix through which we can filter our decisions that then matters and is in harmony with life and with nature. Because ultimate freedom is not a thing. It's like saying independence. It's just not true. You can't ever be independent. You're always interdependent, right? You can certainly be dependent. That seems unhealthy. But you can't have ultimate freedom. At some point, you sacrifice your freedom for somebody else And there may be an enlightened civic virtue in there where you also benefit. But think about marriage, for example. Ultimate freedom is not at all expressed in the marriage vows. It's something very, very different where you're choosing out of your own liberty to engage in this person for the rest of your life, but in so doing, you're trading off different freedoms, right, in order to augment and enhance both of your experiences walking the earth. So there's a million different applications to that, but we can't just go full anarchist libertarian. That doesn't make any sense because we all have to rely on each other at some point, and that requires sacrifice, whether it's my bread for your bullets or whatever it is. Jennifer looked like you were going to say something. Sorry. I'm ranting today. I'm stabby this morning.

Jennifer Lahl: Yeah. No, no, no. And now because I have like 50 things I want to say, one, you know, we have this notion that because it's progress, it's good, right? Progress, you know, all progress is thought good. So these progressive ideas that we think, oh, they're enlightened, they're not good. You know, in medicine, we have the principles of biomedical ethics, which is non-maleficence, beneficence, do no harm, do good, justice, and autonomy. We don't have any shared meaning for those words. What is to do justice? Some people say doing justice of letting the homeless live on the street, and we just support and give them their cell phones and their drugs and whatever they need. Some say doing harm is not allowing children to medicalize. That's harming them. They're going to commit suicide. They're going to be part of this conversion therapy. So, we don't have any shared language. We don't have shared values. We live in this multicultural, pluralistic world, which doesn't appreciate what it is to do justice, what it is to let somebody be autonomous in their decisions. And then, you know, the notion of the Chesterton's fence, you know, we build things or we tear things down with no imagination of what the consequences will be. You know, when you think of, like, civil engineers and they build roads and they divert water or something, they have to think, what is this? If I put this road here, what is that going to mean to the watering snowpack in Lake Tahoe? We have this great thing in Marin County where, close to where I live, And it's a life-size model of the Bay Area, which you can see like the, you know, the water movement and it's so, you know, melting and how that affects all the lakes. And, you know, we don't have any appreciation for, if we just start cutting genitalia off of children, that will help them. with no, no, you know, no notion that this is a person that's ever going to be able to be sexually intimate, never have an orgasm, never be able to have children, you know, but we're helping them. So I think this, this, for me, it's this burden of how do we get people to at least, at least agree on what is the good and how do we know it? You know, what is right and what is wrong without being Puritans or judgmental or, you know, you know, we, we can't even talk about, good and lovely things because we all disagree on what that looks like.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think it's their consent. I really do. I did a couple of different podcasts and I have a YouTube video on the balancing of the ethical precepts. They're all supposed to be equal, right? But when you choose one, you're inherently stepping on another. So if you lean toward autonomy, you can't possibly be doing justice. If you lean toward justice, you're sacrificing somebody's autonomy because you're speaking on their behalf. So, I think it comes down to consent and you have to seek permission to act on a person's behalf. Is anybody actually asking the homeless if they consented to, you know, whatever interventions we're giving them? Or are we just giving it to them? Which seems pretty imperialistic to me. I guess that's my instinctual response is that we have to seek a collaborative agreement first, and then we can move forward. But if we're just shouting at each other, like, no, that's my definition of this. No, that's my definition. It doesn't go anywhere. Because we're essentially talking in our little spheres about people who aren't present. Like, what's the best thing to do for this demographic? Well, they're not here. Maybe we should invite them in first and actually ask them if they want us to help.

Karen King: so many assumptions. I've done like 14 interviews the past two weeks. We're looking for associates and partners in our clinic. And I've had some shocking experiences with interviewees. And I keep thinking about this. I want to share this. So I had a couples therapist and associate level, so just graduated from school. And she popped on my screen and I said, hey welcome thanks for interviewing and what are you interested in i always like hearing people's niche and she said and i wrote it down because it was so amazing she said my focus is against the oppressive moralistic christian values against anti-kink in polyamorous polyamorous relationships. I was like, whoa. Okay. Against, against, against, against. That's very, it's very, first of all, it's very specific, which, you know, she's just out of school. And then she went on to tell me that she's part of a thruple and wants to really work with thruples and the anti-kink polyamory community. And then she said this one really clincher statement for me, which was, I have a trans 15 year old who is medically transitioning, my son is medically transitioning at 15, and I want to teach a parent group on how to talk to their trans children in order to not harm them. And I just thought, Wow, the definition of reality that we have here is if you don't think that medically transitioning your child at 15 is harmful, but you're worried about how you're speaking with them. It made me really want to find this common language that you're talking about. Like, really find the common values. And I just have to take it back to, she really wants to help people in pain. Now, I don't know if I have the energy to work with that person. That's a lot of indoctrination. But to come back to that, shared place, like we do have more in common than we do difference, I believe. So I'm always doing that with my supervisees, when they'll say something like that, and they'll say, Oh, it's interesting, you framework that whole thing in a power structure. Now, how would you look at it from a relational perspective, and really trying to help them just drop that framework that's so unhelpful, I think.

Stephanie Winn: I think that's really generous of you, Karen. And I mean, of course, people do grow and change over time. And this is someone just out of grad school. But of course, I'm hearing a lot of red flags. And the way I would frame that is in terms of countertransference issues, that this is someone I was looking for clients who she sees as being just like herself, and that their life choices are right because her life choices are right. Actually, just in the episode of my podcast that came out today, the day that we're recording this, it's part one of my conversation with Leighton, a detransitioner. She had dissociative identity disorder and went to a therapist who not only specialized in dissociative identity disorder, but also had untreated dissociative identity disorder and made Leighton's DID worse. And there was this countertransference issue that I was really picking up on where the therapist sort of saw Leighton and saw herself in her and projected onto her like, ooh, you're just like me. And so automatically there's this boundary issue. Right? And, and part of what what this brings up hearing about this, you know, person who applied that really couldn't be more mismatched for the type of clinic that you're running, is, is this someone who has the potential to be objective enough that if there was someone who, let's say, was trying to live a polyamorous or kinky lifestyle, and actually discovered that that lifestyle was not right for her, let's say, Like, would your, would this person be open to hearing that? Or would they, you know, be too attached to their worldview that they would be, you know, sort of like gaslighting the patient?

Karen King: well, that's why they need great supervision. I mean, that's what really motivates me is I don't wanna abandon her. I feel the sense that these, maybe it's a hopeless project because some people are too indoctrinated and will do all the counter-transference, but I feel like there's something to be preserved and that maybe some people can be brought back from the edge. The clinicians that I work with that say, I won't work with a Trump supporter. And we have to talk about that. And let's move beyond that. I live in a very, very liberal environment. So that's why these kinds of things are coming up here.

Stephanie Winn: Jake, you also provide clinical supervision. Have you had similar issues?

Jake Wiskerchen: Oh, how long do you have?

Karen King: Oh, it'd be so fun to write a book. Oh my gosh, the stories.

Jake Wiskerchen: You know, I don't want to come off as too blackpilled, but I'm not filled with much hope. Like Stephanie said, you were very generous. I don't see a person leading with ideological identity in a clinical interview as somebody who can have her mind changed.

Karen King: Oh yeah, I don't think this person could, no.

Jake Wiskerchen: When I ask these students, new grads or current grads, because we host graduate students doing their practicum hours as well, and we interview them, they often will not be able to answer clinical questions like, what is your formulating their, you know, foundational theory, or, you know, how do you how do you formulate a case, or they just look at you, like with deer eyes, and they sputter something about, you know, Rogers and, and unconditional positive regard and person centered, or maybe they reach for existentialism to sound cool. And then you ask them one probing question about existential psychotherapy, and they just they fizzle, but they can tell you all the talking points about DEI, right? Like that's really worrisome for me because what we're creating are activists, not therapists. Therapists should be agnostic on almost every issue. Now, it's okay to have opinions on certain things and champion causes. That's what free speech is about. Obviously, everybody knows I'm a firearms owner and I work with the 2A community to help get them into care because our people have pushed them away for so long, but that doesn't come up in session. If somebody asks about it, sure, we'll talk about it. But I'm not relevant in the clinical setting. What I do is not relevant. What's relevant is the person sitting in front of me. And for whatever reason, and I think we know some of those reasons, we've kicked them around. That's changed. It's not about the patient anymore. It's about the therapist. And it really terrifies me. Yes, I do encounter that long answer to your short question. And it's not as it was nine years ago when we opened Zephyr. It's much more prevalent, much more frequent. And the willingness of people to receive feedback and get out of their own blind spots and egos is vanishingly rare.

Karen King: Well, they don't know how. They haven't been taught that other people's views of them are important, because only their self view is important. Yeah, I don't know if I'm naive. I'm probably a little bit naive. But I also think that this is this is the way through is and you know, I guess maybe this is from a psychedelic perspective to maybe segue into that is that a lot of the people that come to us are coming because we are eMERGE clinic. We're positioning ourselves to be one of the first clinics, hopefully, in the Pacific Northwest to have MDMA site approval. And so people know that and they want to get the training from me on MAPS trained. And it's almost like I have a little, if they're listening, they might be bemused to this, like a little captured audience because they really want the psychedelic information. And along the way, I'm like, well, Tell me about your feelings about Jung. You just said he was an old white guy and so we shouldn't really talk about him. Let's talk about why you think that. And so they don't know that I'm doing this disindoctrination before we even get there. But the psychedelic perspective maybe is what is providing me a lot of hope and resilience is that things are malleable and maybe they have to fall apart and maybe they have to fall apart terribly. But then we always rework and we always come back together.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think that the psychedelic stuff is really critical for society. I'm really glad you're doing that. Stephanie, go ahead. Sorry.

Stephanie Winn: Well, I'm glad that you segued into that, Karen, because before we started recording, we all found ourselves talking about things we've observed or heard about D transitioners, and psychedelics playing a role in their healing process or in their process of disillusionment with the false self that they'd created. And this was a conversation that I was having just last night at a dinner party. Now, you know, in the wake of the New York Times article that we were talking about earlier, Anytime I'm featured in the news, two things happen. One is I get a whole lot of people reaching out to me to either, you know, praise or compliment me, or to ask to work with me, and then I also get a new wave of attacks from trans rights activists on the internet, and I've given them plenty to work with because I'm a very experimental open minded person who throws things out there like that, you know, I may not have reached a total conclusion on something or done all my research on something. But I'm like, here's a thought experiment, here's something that might help, here's something that might be connected. Because I think that's how we advance forward as a society, we explore in the unknown, we posit what ifs. And so some of the what ifs that I've posited have included things like can acupuncture be helpful for people with gender dysphoria, which gets framed as when the trans arts activists come after me on the internet, Stephanie Nguyen, needle lady, wants to torture trans people with needles, right? You know? And I'm like, well, what's, you know, what's a little acupuncture needle compared to like a hypodermic needle that you're signing up to inject yourself with for the rest of your life? So, you know, of course, one of the things I've been accused of is using psychedelics to conduct conversion therapy, right? Because I've, because I've pointed out that isn't it interesting that there are stories of detransitioners who feel like psychedelics played an important role, and we know about psychedelics' impact on depression, trauma, neuroplasticity, loosening rigid thought patterns. We definitely see a lot of OCD-type traits and behaviors in the children of the parents that I work with in my counseling and consulting practice. And it all has to do with, I think, you know, maybe a faulty rigid default mode network, which we know that psychedelics can interfere with. So I'd love to hear people's musings and observations and speculations on what's up with detransitioners and psychedelics.

Jennifer Lahl: Well, I'll go first because I'm not the psychotherapist in this discussion at all. So I, as a filmmaker, was totally like, you know, did a whiplash when two guys started talking about their, you know, their psychedelic trips and how that helped them wake up and realize that they were not women. And I thought, no, I did. I could never. So, of course, I took to the Google, which is what we all do, right, to learn more about this. But I was just really shocked and surprised. And out of five guys, two of them, what are the odds that two of them would have this same kind of experience with psychedelics in their detransition period? So, when we wrote about these two young men in the book, for various reasons, that part in their two stories didn't make it into the film. because we thought that was gonna just be harder to sort of unpack that in a tight film talking about five men and their stories and not make a film that's like three hours long where you know people have the attention span of about 20, 25 men. But we did write about it in the book. But I would love to hear more from you learned experts here on what and why that is because there's something interesting there.

Jake Wiskerchen: I love this stuff and I would like to take my swing at it and then Karen can put a bow on it with her experience.

Jennifer Lahl: Are you saying you love psychedelics, this stuff?

Jake Wiskerchen: I love the topic. I am not as well versed as some people that I know. But what I will say is that of the people I do know who have undergone psychedelic experiences, and I say trip meaning journey, not like you're tripping, as the kids would say. but they've undergone journeys either intentionally in an intentional setting with professionals around or unintentionally in a non-professional setting. The results have been pretty much the same, which is they look deeper within themselves, realize that they had some facades or in a Jungian, that'd be Carl Jung I'm referring to, in a Jungian way, a persona, that needed to dissolve, an ego that needed to dissolve so that their true self, capital T, capital S, could emerge. And of these anecdotal experiences, 100% of them, I can comfortably say, and these are very, very close friends of some of them, 100% of them have said, I am so much better. I am so much calmer. I'm so much more aware. I've alleviated a large chunk of my childhood trauma, my PTSD from combat, my PTSD from work, if they're in first response, all sorts of stuff. And here's what I think. I think that in my studying of Jung's work and Joseph Campbell's writings and David Hawkins, in conjunction with reading Michael Pollan and listening to him be interviewed. I think that what we're doing here with psychedelics is we're accessing the stuff that these legends of the field wrote about long, long ago. in a medical way, in a chemical way. And I think we're getting real, real close to understanding more about conscious and unconscious function. So if I could paint the picture real quick, deep inside of us is the true self that I mentioned earlier, the way God made us to be, to walk the earth as we were to see fit, right? That's our authentic self. And I think authenticity is very important when we're doing our kind of work. If we can know who we are really well, we can help guide other people. Inauthenticity doesn't necessarily mean lying. It could just mean unaware of your potential, and that could be potential for great and terrible. And I think what's terrifying about taking psychedelics is the same thing that's terrifying about doing deep work within oneself through talk therapy, which is that you have to acknowledge your full potential as a human being. Now there's a saying that goes, if a human being has done a thing, the thing is therefore human nature, all humans sharing human nature, therefore have the potential to do all things that any other human has ever done. That means you could be a child molester, or you could be a king, you could be a philanthropist, you could be a degenerate. You have that potential. We all have that potential. And whether or not we acknowledge it is, I think, a level of awareness that we often deny and sometimes purposely avoid. And in denial of self, when we start to carve out parts of our potential, we end up with psychiatric distresses because we're not living authentically. So I think what psychedelics do is they unlock, like Stephanie alluded to, the default mode network, and we're allowing consciousness to touch unconscious. And we just lack the language to interpret what we're seeing. But what we cannot deny is that deep within us is something that's supposed to be there and be represented truly authentically to the outer world. And it unlocks a whole bunch of stuff for people who have been pretending, shall we say, for a long period of time, whether they're in a wrong career, poor relationships, low sense of self, simply reacting out of what their voices of authority have told them all the years. all that just drops away when you touch divinity within you. And you can't deny it. Truth binds, truth penetrates, truth resonates. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. So I think that's what's happening. I think it's very, very magical, and very cool, and very special, and also very important. The cautionary tale, I think, that I would want to explore more, and I don't know enough about this, is that because, if the theory is correct, we are divine creatures, you can never actually achieve an arrival point. You can't ever say, I'm fully differentiated, or I'm fully individuated, I'm fully arrived, because then you would be tantamount to God. I think all we can ever do is approach and continue exploring and growing. So I worry about the journey itself, not the drug, but the journey itself becoming addictive insofar as people just want to know more about themselves. And I think that's a great thing. I worry about a little bit of dependence coming through this. But as far as people who are ailing, needing it to alleviate their distresses, I think it's wonderful. The emerging research is very clear that it works. Very clear that there's very low risk of any maladaptive fallout, unintended consequences that are that are negative, very, very low risk of that. And I'm all for it. So that's my take. I think it works hand in glove with what we do in talk therapy. I think it just accelerates the process, as Michael Pollan has said. But I'm really encouraged. I think there's really good things that can come from this. But it does threaten some of those establishments we talked about earlier. people could go out of business and if Big Pharma catches wind of it and its effectiveness, will they suppress it or will they just co-opt it and brand it and make it not effective so they can hook people? I have no idea. Rant over, Karen.

Karen King: I was taking notes. Yeah, there's so much in it. I'm sort of left with the last thing you said, which was you're afraid of the addictiveness to the experience and the spiritual experiencer. kind of craving that knowledge of themselves. And I think that would be one argument for the medical model, actually. And I'm coming from the standpoint of within the field of psychedelics, there's a big rift. And I've seen it grow over the past couple of years. And that is the dismissal of the Western enlightenment values and medical model from within the community, and sort of the romanticization, if that's a word, of indigenous science. And so it's interesting because it is a group of people that want to dismantle that are the practitioners, this is what it looks like. And then there's the researcher, and the researcher is really excited about the science and the effectiveness and the healthcare. And so there's, I see this, someone should do a documentary on this actually, Jennifer. Elbow in the ribs. It's so interesting. Just to go off on a tangent just for a second, but it's really representative of this and then to answer more of the question. When I was at the psychedelic conference last year in Denver, there were 12,000 people. It was the MAPS psychedelic conference. And it was shamans and ravers and researchers and practitioners, and it was just a wide array of people. And the second, I think, keynote speaker was Rick Perry, the ex-governor of Texas. And a huge contingent of practitioners, activists tried to have him canceled from speaking at the psychedelic event, presumably because of his politics. And to me, it was so representative. Fortunately, it didn't happen. He wasn't canceled, but thousands of people stood up in protest and walked out of the auditorium. And it was really quite a moment. Because it was it was the activists versus the I think the visionaries and the people that's and maybe I feel like we're more practical Is that we have to have these conversations with people that are advocating for veterans? Because that was his platform as he became very involved with a veteran of PTSD tried everything for years finally found MDMA trials entered him and And he's been healed of PTSD after a round of it and being involved in the treatment. So he's a strong advocate for that side politically and getting that money and getting that interest. And the activists wanted to cancel that. And I'm thinking, how are we going to successfully bring this into our culture? We exist within a medical model. It's in a medical model that it's being approved. This is how it will be delivered. So it's so short-sighted. So that's my rant about that. But that the effectiveness is so interesting. I mean, it's the really the marriage of the study of consciousness, and also psychology. So, you know, the default mode network, this is the prevailing theory goes offline. and other connections are made. And so my thought about detransitioners in particular, and actually I was contacted by a detransitioner recently who wants to collaborate with me to come up with protocols using ketamine-assisted therapy because of this neuroplastic default mode network relationship. But my theory, like when you first mentioned this, Stephanie, was that if the default mode network goes offline, then the sense of I, the sense of self goes away. And what's left is our essential nature. And I would suspect there's some information in there about what our essential nature is that we're not even, it might be related to masculine or feminine, I'm not sure, or sex. but there's some information that is clearer when our sense of I and how we define ourselves is gone. And so it seems natural to me that they would return to something that's essential. And like you said, Jake, it's the exploration of the unconscious. I think it's also that the power of it and the persistence, not only because of like the neurobiological effect, neuroplasticity, but it's our direct connection to the unknown. We have to be humble. And we don't have many opportunities unless we're maybe religious creatures. What is it like 47% of Americans now identify as atheist or 37% is really high number. And that perhaps it's our touching the mystery and having to be humble that actually allows us to change. That was long-winded.

Stephanie Winn: Well, to sort of tie what you're all saying together with the trans identity, there is a false self that gets created. And I think of it sometimes as a shield or a scaffold for those with a weak sense of self. Jake, you're holding up next to the screen for those who are just listening, a book that says what now?

Jake Wiskerchen: Dissolving the ego and realizing the self. It's just a compilation of David Hawkins teachings, but that's what you're talking about.

Stephanie Winn: Go on. When you're becoming a person, becoming a person is a process. Actually, I'm going to go off on a tangent related to this that just popped up. I recently had a very delightful encounter with a cockatoo, which for those who don't know is basically like a type of white parrot And I was so delighted and charmed by this cockatoo. And then I had the pleasure of speaking with Heather Hying recently and I had to ask her, she's a biologist, I was like, why are cockatoos so delightful? And she explained that basically, they have long lives, long childhoods, and that They are one of the types of creatures, of which we also are, where it takes a long time to become a human. It takes a long time to become an adult. Well, it takes a long time to become a cockatoo. And so I was like, oh, so they have personality is what you're saying. And it's like, yes, personality is a way of thinking of it. And this is not something to take for granted. Yes, we're born with maybe certain traits, certain dispositions, but the process of actually developing a full-formed personality can be a long and fraught and uncertain one. And a lot of these young people with these trans ideation, they don't have a full personality yet based on life experience. They don't have a concrete identity yet. So there's this sort of false self that gets created. And for some, it's like full-blown narcissistic personality disorder, false self. But for many, it's just an ego fragility. It's a narcissism or a hollowness. And I think along with it, there's a deep self-consciousness. They like the comfort of this idea that you can create who you are in sort of like a customizable avatar like you can on the internet, that you can just tell people that you are whatever you've created in your mind and that they'll play along with it because that's a lot easier and in some ways more comforting than the task of bringing to the foreground what it is that's within you. In other words, taking those seeds of potential of character or this essential self and making it manifest through your personality, appearance, demeanor, your ways of expressing yourself, interacting with other people, that's a really long and fraught process. And I was talking about this recently with an ROGD family because I think that this is an issue for a lot of these ROGD youth. So for example, some of the parents I talked to had this experience where they have observations of their son or daughter that anybody would observe. Let's say, because a lot of these youth have OCD traits, so let's say like finger picking, hair pulling, some sort of like behavioral tick that's readily apparent. And when the parents, let's say, express concern about that or say, I want to get you help for this or something, the youth becomes very defensive and hostile and shut down. And so in trying to help parents with this, I was sort of talking about what we were just talking about, right? I don't think these kids want to be seen for how their behavior is giving away their inner mental state, because their inner mental state is not a reflection of who they want to become. And so their behavior certainly does not show that integrated self that they're ultimately becoming. So there's a hiding out in this disconnection from reality and this sort of taking shelter in the trans identity, the false sense of self that's been constructed as a way of sort of comforting or pacifying the anxiety, the sort of existential anxiety, if you will, of the task of becoming a full human and presenting that full human to the world and somehow making it all work. So that's what I think about that. And I also wanted to mention, Jennifer, since Torin Donowski is one of the people featured in your film, and he's also a previous guest on my podcast, who shared on my podcast about his experiences with psychedelics. So for anyone who's interested in that episode, I have the name right here. It's episode 62, To Suffer Well, Detransition, Psychedelics, and Faith with Torin Donowski.

Jake Wiskerchen: It's terrifying to look at the potential of oneself, right? Because you have to let go of what you think you know about yourself. And if you're not clinging to something, you're open-handed, which means you're probably at risk because you're vulnerable. Risk of what? Usually more pain because somebody could give you something you don't like. And who wants more pain, right? So it's just easier to cling to something and identify as that. than it is to let go and be open to what's possible. So I get why people do this. I get why, you know, people stay in jobs longer than they'd like to, or relationships longer than they want to, or continue doing habits that aren't beneficial. It's just, it's just easier to default to what you know. And I think as therapists, our job is to Make it more comfortable in our safe space, in our environment, in our offices, where we're not judging, where we're very warm and welcoming. Make it comfortable to explore the uncomfortable, if that makes sense. Make it easy to challenge people directly. And like you were saying, Stephanie, a lot of these kids in particular who are coming in with with, I'll just say identity issues broadly, writ large, that not necessarily gender, some of it is, but they have identity issues. And I just go, you don't know who you are. They're like, Oh, it's like they've been pierced. Because it's a true statement. Like I said earlier, truth peasant penetrates, it resonates with people, and you can't run from it. So you don't know who you are. It's okay, you're 14. Not supposed to know who you are.

Karen King: I guess I feel that way about like young therapists. Yeah. It's similar like oh, you don't know what therapist you are. You don't know what you're doing. Let's come on. It's safe Let's talk about it. Ask me all your questions.

Jake Wiskerchen: You couldn't yeah, they're play acting their supervisors, right? That's what we all do like I'm gonna channel my inner doctor. So-and-so from college But that's not you.

Jennifer Lahl: Mm-hmm Yeah, yeah, and Joe Burgo speaks to that in the film of the lost voice He said, you know in this trails mania my words you know, that young people have given up the tasks, the duties of adolescence, which, you know, in adolescence, you are to figure out, what do I want to do? What do I want to be? What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of life do I want to have? And we, you know, they, you know, stalk all that to live in this fantasy, disillusioned world. And I don't know if that's a protective thing or if that's, you know, or what's driving that. But I thought it was really interesting how, you know, there's a job to be done in adolescence. And you're not doing it if you're over here presenting yourself as a woman and thinking that you're this other sex.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think generationally that we've accelerated that somewhat. And there's an overlap. And this is why I think they make such great partners. Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt, with the help of Zach Roush, their Venn diagram is very closely overlapped. Twenge's work analyzes humans across generations. Haidt's is looking at nowadays at social media influence on children. And I got to believe that The instant gratification acceleration of our culture, which, you know, probably started with video recordings in the seventies or so, maybe it was the TV. I have no idea. And then it moved into microwave TV dinners, and then it was like DVRs. And now we've got the internet and, and, and streaming services and everything's on demand and Amazon delivering to your door. Like everything is instant now customizable for me, right? It's, it's, it's definitely pushed our culture into the. Cluster B slash narcissistic slash histrionic rage that we've all become. And I think that adolescence used to be that time for exploration and the parents of those children who had gone through it themselves were able to coach them through it. Now, we've got multiple generations of parents who, myself included, even though I pretty evenly straddle the pre-internet, post-internet, I guess, timeframe. I don't know that I was also Gen X was also the original participation trophy people. So like, you know, you get something just for showing up, which is fine, but don't don't make it an award, make it a gift bag or something. I don't know. But we don't know how to coach our kids through their distresses and how to tolerate them because we ourselves were bailed out of it. So now we've got multiple generations that don't know how to tolerate distress. So of course, you're going to dive into some avatar. Of course, you're going to avoid pubescence like of course it's just easier to reach into the video games or some shiny thing that says you can be this thing and and then and then the real the real problem with it is that they land on it and declare it as though it's permanent at a very early age. And it may not be right, like how many of us landed when we were 15 on what we wanted to be the rest of our life, very few of us usually, you know, it's like, I want to be a doctor. Okay, go be a doctor. And then you're a doctor the rest of your life. But how many of those are there? One in 10,000? I don't even know most of us change our minds. And now we're doing it with self identity. Really scary stuff. And we don't parents don't know how to work with them.

Karen King: Yeah. I think it's belonging. I think we were desperate for some sort of belonging. And we've got to find a replacement for the feeling of belonging that the ideology brings.

Stephanie Winn: If you're looking for a simple way to take better care of yourself, check out Organifi. I start every day with a glass of their original green juice powder mixed with water. It contains moringa, ashwagandha, chlorella, spirulina, matcha, wheatgrass, beets, turmeric, mint, lemon, and coconut water. 100% organic with no added sugar. It's the best tasting superfood supplement I've ever tried. It's super easy to make and it makes me feel good. Organifi also makes several other delicious and nutritious superfood blends such as red juice, immune support, protein powders, a golden milk mix, and even superfood hot cocoa. Check out the collection at Organifi.com slash Sumtherapist. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I dot com slash Sumtherapist. And use code SUMTHERAPIST to take 20% off your order. So we've covered a lot of ground and I appreciate you guys for being my first guinea pigs of this experiment of bringing together past guests. I feel like it's it's kind of everything I thought it could be like it's it's chaotic and unwieldy and we're talking over each other and figuring out how to do this and and like so many ideas being sparked and also like diving deep intensively into several things. I really enjoyed it. So I'm thinking like maybe a few minutes to allow everyone to get out those last burning thoughts from all of the topics that have been sparked. And then we'll do a little wrap up and where we can find you process.

Jake Wiskerchen: I want to talk about the documentary that Jennifer is going to do on psychedelics starring Karen. Just kidding. Just volunteering you to do stuff.

Jennifer Lahl: You know, here's what my analogy because I've had four children. I say you never asked a woman who's actively in labor when she's going to have her next child. You never asked a woman who's just released a documentary film when she's going to make her next movie. That's awesome. Good point. I mean, I guess my farting words and it's just what drives me and gets me really passionate is, you know, calling to task the medical profession and getting them back to, you know, to the task that they, you know, supposedly have agreed to if they believe in Hippocrates. Hippocrates is probably spinning in his gray. when he looks at what medicine is doing. I'm a big fan of evidence-based medicine. You guys talked about it earlier. I do what we call history and physical people. How do you make documentary films? How do you interview people? I said, it's just like I'm doing a history and physical. I walk into the room and I say, so what brings you here today? Tell me about what's going on in your life. I mean, it's just the basics. So what can I do to call to account the medical profession? And when I say medical profession, I include with that in the nursing profession, because they're just as bad as medical doctors, except that they have the cover of the doctor who's ordered this one doing that. And so I hope that, you know, again, I will see this dark era of history in transgenic medicine die a very good death.

Karen King: Yes, I think I, you know, the thing that gets me up in the morning, and I am so I just feel obsessed with is is helping therapists that are gender critical, critical of CRT, critical of CSJ, come out, create networks, talk about alternative credentialing bodies, fight against the ACA code of ethics, And to do all that, I think we need a strong network of US-based therapists that are willing to be an army of supervisors that help disindoctrinate. It's kind of our, it's our role. We're the elders and we need to pass the lineage back. And those of the, those of them that went into the field for the right reasons really need our help. And, you know, this, We're going to have a whole lot of people coming through a very difficult process. A whole lot of our youth are going to be really challenged in about five to 10 years, and we're going to need therapists ready to face this and treat them well.

Jake Wiskerchen: I think that's really well stated and I'll circle it back to the documentary, which I haven't watched yet, but I will because I wanted to before this, but snow and school closures and whatnot. Men need to return to their sense of masculinity without being told that it's wrong. And I think that starts in the home and it starts with dads. So I applaud you, Jennifer, for creating such a film that centers on men, right? That's, I think it's woefully lacking in our society. So, that's one thing that I would encourage people to do. The other thing I would encourage people to do is, if you feel defensive, we all know what that feels like when we get the little, right? That's usually an indicator to look at a blind spot. Don't act out of that defensiveness. Just pause and wonder what's going on with you, not the other person. And then examine it. Don't judge it. Just observe it and describe it and try to figure out what's causing that, right? If we can get out of our defenses, I think we open ourselves up to a lot of good feedback. And we can learn to embrace mystery more and we can sit in peace and tolerate distress more. So, I just appreciate the conversation about all these things. We're advancing, certainly. If we can't fight the long-standing entities, then maybe we create parallel economies and maybe, you know, CTA becomes that organization or maybe OTI becomes that organization, who knows. But you're right, we do need to, we need to speak up and speak out because we can't neglect the entire profession. We need to pull them into our bosom, so to speak, and say, I got you. You're wandering and drifting and without direction. And if you're wandering and drifting without direction as a professional, then the people you're treating will not get helped. And we will decay as a society. I think it's really important that we anchor ourselves. That's my two cents. I'm really glad we're doing this, Stephanie. I cannot thank you enough. If I have not expressed yet how much you mean to me professionally, I will do that now publicly, public declaration of my affection. But your work, has inspired so, so many people that I don't know if you understand the ripple effect. I mean, I have an agency of 20 people here and countless more who've come through and then left and started their own practices who cite you as influencing and inspiring them to achieve more and greater. So please, please, please, I know that we all go through these bouts of blah. just know that there's a whole world of people out here, who not only you're influencing and bringing along, but have got your back when need be. So I cannot say enough how much I appreciate your work, and for bringing me along with it, too.

Karen King: I'm so glad you said that, Jake. I was just gonna say the same thing, Stephanie, just so inspired by your bravery. Thank you so much.

Stephanie Winn: Well, it seems like a lot of people just needed that little nudge, you know, like there's always like the early adopters or the first dissenters in any like time that there's a need for cultural change. And I've just encountered so many people that just needed that little bit of nudge and people who like were afraid to come out of the closet and then they admired my work and then they found out I was like also a human being with my own limitations and chronic illness. And for some people finding out that I was dealing with illness was enough for them to be like, okay, like, where's my what's my role? Like, how do I come out of the closet? And, and so I do get little glimpses of that ripple effect. But thanks for letting me know. Alright, so wrapping up Please quickly let our audience know where they can find you and any projects that you want them to know about.

Jennifer Lahl: I pretty much hang out on Twitter at Jennifer Law, such as my name, and all of my films I've made are free on the YouTube channel. So if you just go to YouTube and search one of the titles, The Lost Boys Searching for Manhood, our whole channel will pop up.

Jake Wiskerchen: You have a new follower.

Karen King: Oh, yeah, Karen here and on Instagram, the psychedelic counselor and also my supervision and consultancy work is ideological oasis.com

Jake Wiskerchen: Cool. Well, I'm on the X at Jake Wisk, J-A-K-E-W-I-S-K. The resources I'd like to leave people with, walkthetalkamerica, W-T-T-A dot O-R-G is the Guns and Mental Health that I mentioned earlier. We have some really cool stuff out there, including two free, three hour each courses that are usually good for continuing education credit. for practitioners that will educate you about firearms culture. So if you want to work competently with roughly 50% of Americans who either own a gun or live with one, I highly recommend you take at least part one. It'll spit you out a little certificate at the end so you can wave that in the face of whoever you need to wave it in the face of. And we also have a very rapidly growing nationwide provider directory of Second Amendment friendly providers. If you'd like to join that, it's also free. And Zephyr Wellness has a YouTube channel. It's got one guy and it's me, but if you want to hear me talk about stuff, Zephyr Wellness has a YouTube channel.

Stephanie Winn: I hope you enjoyed this episode of You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist podcast. To check out my book recommendations, articles, wellness products, guest episodes on other podcasts, consulting services, and lots more, visit sometherapist.com. or follow me on Twitter or Instagram at sometherapist. If you'd like to go deeper, join my community at somekindoftherapist.locals.com. Members can dialogue with other listeners, post questions for upcoming podcast guests to respond to, or ask questions for me to respond to in exclusive members-only Q&A live streams. To learn more about the gender crisis, watch our film, No Way Back, The Reality of Gender-Affirming Pair, at nowaybackfilm.com. Special thanks to my producers, Eric and Amber Beals at Different Mix, and to Joey Pecoraro for our theme song, Half Awake. If you appreciate this podcast and want more people to find it, kindly take a moment to rate, review, like, comment, and share on your platforms of choice. Of course, just because I am some therapist doesn't mean I'm your therapist. This podcast is not a substitute for medical advice. If you need help, ask your doctor or browse your local therapists online. And whatever you do next, please take care of yourself. Eat well, sleep well, move your body, get outside, and tell someone you love them. You're worth it.