Dissident Dialogues: Meredith Miller (Q&As #1–4)

Nearly a year and a half in the making, this spellbinding and spell-breaking Dissident Dialogue with Meredith Miller is a master class in narcissistic abuse, psychological manipulation, mass control, propaganda, spiritual explorations, healing, and resilience. It contains life-saving and sanity-restoring information that can help you navigate both personal and societal challenges.

Not only is Meredith one of my favorite long-form writers on Substack and a beloved friend, but her crisp psychological insights have helped me understand the nuanced layers of emotional manipulation, coercion, and abuse that occurred during the Reign of COVID Terror. She has also illuminated the greatest mystery plumbed in my work—namely, how do kindhearted, well-intentioned individuals become ardent advocates for and eager enforcers of totalitarianism?

I hope you will find her wisdom, pragmatic guidance, and Apocaloptimistic outlook as educational, empowering, and inspiring as I do. Due to its length, I have broken our conversation into parts. Below you will find the first four questions out of twelve.

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Meredith Miller

Meredith Miller is a holistic coach, author, and speaker. She helps people transmute the past into gold so they can step into their Divine purpose and make a difference in the world around them. Meredith is passionate about helping people liberate themselves and evolve so they can live as free, empowered, responsible, awakened, purposeful, and actualized human beings who contribute to the liberation and evolution of others in their own unique ways.

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Q&A #1

MAA:

You are a holistic coach with a focus on trauma, narcissistic abuse, and toxic relationships. At your Inner Integration website, you confide you were born into a multi-generational legacy of abuse. And yet you radiate joy and exemplify your mission of bridging the gap between trauma and purpose. Can you take us through your journey from trauma to purpose? How did you bridge that gap in your personal life before you began to help others do the same?

MM:

For decades, I lived as a captive. The word captivity might evoke an image of physical confinement. However, captivity can also be a state of consciousness, and one that can endure long after a person has left a relationship or situation involving abuse.

Psychologically, neurologically, and spiritually, I was trapped in that perception of reality. That’s why I call it a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity. It felt like there was no way out. Even after I would leave abusers, I couldn’t shake off that state. Now, looking back and observing from a very different level of consciousness, I realize I must’ve thought that was just normal life because it was all I had known.

A person who married into my family and eventually found out about the pedophilia of my grandfather and one of his brothers said, “All families are dysfunctional, but some families are really fucked up.” My family was the latter. Though on the surface, you might see something that more resembled a Norman Rockwell painting.

The worst part about the abuse is when people pretend it didn’t happen. When I learned the term gaslighting, that’s when my whole life started making a lot more sense.

I came from a family where the legacy of abuse was passed down, generation after generation. It was mostly unspoken, as if the silence about the abuse somehow meant that it didn’t happen or it wasn’t real. It was impossible for me to communicate this to anyone or even articulate it to myself because it was disguised as normality.

Often when people hear the word “abuse,” they think of a battered woman. But that’s just one face of abuse. In the case of physical abuse, the victim can show bruises and scars as proof that something happened. Some forms of abuse are more overt and obvious. Other forms of abuse are more like death by a thousand cuts. Invisible abuse is much more subtle, hidden, and covert. It’s often disguised as love and kindness. This is why it’s called “crazy-making.”

If you try to talk to other people in the abusive family system about what’s going on, you’ll usually end up feeling like you’re the only one with a problem. When people are dependent on abusers and the abusive system, they will defend the abusers and the system, minimizing or normalizing the abuse. That’s called enabling.

It’s a lot like being in a cult. It’s very isolating because other people don’t understand it, including most therapists and psychologists. It’s not usually part of their training.

When you’re a kid and you sense that something is off, there’s no way out. You have to find a way to survive within your environment, so you develop dysfunctional behaviors to cope with the stress, and that develops into long-term relational patterns in adulthood. For me, that was people-pleasing and codependency. I learned that it was easier to comply, but I had no idea how much that would cost me in the long run.

When I was nineteen, I managed to escape the environment. However, I had emerged into adulthood naïve, unprepared for life, and incapable of recognizing abuse because it felt familiar. So, naturally, even though I thought I was free at last, I fell into abusive relationships over and over again in all areas of my life. The pattern was present in my intimate relationships, friendships, at work, and with neighbors. It got worse over the years and decades with every repetition of the trauma. Unresolved trauma compounds over time in the human spirit, mind, and body. Trauma doesn’t add up like addition. It’s more like using the exponential function.

In my twenties and thirties, I began to study and work in holistic healing while doing lots of inner work on myself. However, I was still stuck in the victim reality loop. I felt like I was running on a gerbil wheel, exerting a lot of effort yet seemingly getting nowhere.

I worked through some layers of the childhood sexual abuse with practitioners of hypnosis and energetic bodywork as well as during my acupressure emotional balancing training.

However, the more covert psychological abuse was still a huge blindspot in my growth process until my late thirties. This was the stuff no one taught or talked about. As an external reflection of my flattened self-worth, I was barely making enough income to hold my head above the poverty line. There were moments when I was doing okay, but inevitably the bottom would fall out again.

Each time that happened, I’d have dread attacks, curl into the fetal position in bed, and feel like I didn’t have the right to exist. That kept me in survival mode and even drove me to accept horrible living situations by misreading perceived acts of kindness in moments of desperation.

Since I grew up in a family where abuse was disguised as love and home, that became the programming in my nervous system. In adulthood, the only way to rewrite those faulty programs is to face the truth and label what happened, weave all that together into a deeper understanding of the Big Picture, process the emotional residue surfacing from the body, and then integrate the learning. This happens layer by layer over time.

It’s a long process, and it’s brutal. Along the way, there’s still the occasional neurological betrayal that takes place. I was astounded by how powerful the old programming was, even once I had learned the red flags of covert abuse. I still leaned into it a few more times because it felt like love and home.

The conscious mind, the part that memorizes knowledge and facts, goes offline when the neurological programming of trauma gets triggered. It’s like reliving the past superimposed upon the present moment. The trigger reaction is automatic. That’s why people get into repetitive abusive relationships without realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. This is why I spent decades of adulthood repeating the same kinds of trauma and not understanding why it kept happening to me. Every time I was devastated by another abusive relationship, I turned to the original abuser, which only made it worse.

The cycle tends to repeat until an abuse victim reaches rock bottom. In 2015, I hit rock bottom after some devastating experiences with abusers in a work-living environment. I went back to my parents’ house because I was homeless and had nowhere else to go. Now, looking back, I understand that my return was divinely orchestrated because I needed to face the childhood patterns head on.

A few weeks later, just as I was starting to lift myself off the floor of my rock bottom, I told my mother I was getting a new website going for my holistic coaching work. I expected her to be happy when she saw me starting to resuscitate my life force energy and renew my drive to strive and move forward.

Instead, she rubbed her forehead in exasperation, exclaiming, “That coaching thing has never worked before, so why would it work now? Why don’t you just go to the mall and get a job!”

I was shocked, yet at the same time something inside me shattered. Standing there in that moment, like an instant download, I finally saw the truth clearly and recognized the insanity of my own participation in the dynamic. I had kept doing the same thing while hoping for different results. I was looking for loving support from a person who didn’t believe in me or want the best for me.

At some level, I already knew that, yet it had been hidden behind the veil of denial and all the plausible deniability. As my reality shattered, I realized with sharp clarity that it was my responsibility to stop my participation in the dynamic so I could get out of the repetitive loop of victimhood.

That was the breakthrough that pushed me over the threshold from powerless victim to empowered survivor. It was a visceral understanding that I was the only one who had the power to change my life. I knew I had to get out ASAP because there is no healing in a toxic environment. I made a commitment to myself to own 100-percent responsibility of my thoughts, feelings, behavior, and choices.

That was the beginning of the rest of my life. Of course, there were many difficulties, challenges, trials, and tribulations to come, even some minor failures, but from that moment forward, I believed in my ability to figure it out. I started clearing more toxic people from my life. My efforts began yielding more favorable results, and the brain fog started clearing up. I was finally building, though very slowly at first, a solid foundation in my life. 

Once I cracked the code and started rebuilding my life on solid ground, I became highly motivated to speak about narcissistic abuse. I wanted to help other people understand what happened to them so they would know they’re not alone, they’re not crazy, and there is a way out. I started a YouTube channel and read a lot of comments from people who resonated with my message. That work also contributed to my own healing.

From that point forward, I created the content I wished I’d had access to when I was struggling in the dark, alone, and afraid. At first, I was mostly raising awareness about narcissistic abuse, specifically the more covert forms. Since I already had a lot of holistic healing training, I started tailoring that knowledge toward this topic. The more my inner healing progressed, the more I could speak about the self-healing process. Eventually, I created digital courses and wrote a book called The Journey: A Roadmap for Self-Healing After Narcissistic Abuse.

Through that process, the pain started transmuting into new purpose. I discovered that my painful life experiences were my immersion training for helping others, so it was all worth it.

In 2020, when all things COVID began, I realized I would need to shift my focus toward speaking more about the connection between the micro (interpersonal) and macro (societal) patterns of abuse.

I don’t have a background in psychology. I majored in Spanish language and literature in college, then later studied holistic healing and coaching. Over the years, people have said I offered them a light in the darkness and a balm for their soul, something they hadn’t been able to receive from psychologists who didn’t believe them or understand their experiences with covert narcissistic abuse.

Now that this theme has become center stage in the world, very few psychologists are speaking up. That’s why I’m trying to create awareness about the abuse dynamic and how it induces a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity. 

I think the people who most radiate joy are usually those who have known deep pain. However, not everyone who experiences pain will find their way to joy. Pain can be paralyzing, and the victimization tempts people to integrate that state of consciousness into their identity, becoming victims for life.

The victim consciousness is really sticky. That’s why most victims don’t cross the first threshold into empowerment as a survivor. Victimhood is a stage, a state of consciousness, not a life sentence. What most matters is what we do with it, and this is the same choice we are all facing in the world now.

Trauma opens two paths: one of light, love, truth, awareness, awakening, breakthroughs, growth, and healing and the other of darkness, denial, ignorance, lies, illusion, resentment, destruction, and repetition. This choice is entirely up to the individual. Our choices become our legacy.

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Q&A #2

MAA:

When you turned your penetrating lens to COVID in 2020, what were the indicators that covert narcissistic abuse was occurring?

MM:

The first red flag of narcissistic abuse in 2020 was the control of information, which is reality control. Gaslighting is the favorite tool of abusers. This is the distortion of the perception of reality to the point where the target feels like they’re going crazy or their memory doesn’t work. Abusers and tyrants try to make you believe you can’t trust your own eyes and ears. It’s covert when it’s hidden and disguised as good.

Since 2020, politicians, public officials, and other globalist personalities began shaping our reality around COVID to engineer a new reality, which they called the “New Normal.” The media and people in positions of power and influence have always spun their narrative of reality, but what started happening in 2020 was a whole other level of information control.

The craziest part about what’s happening now is humans aren’t the only source of the information control and gaslighting. We are also being gaslit by AI. Of course, the AI is programmed by humans. Actual people write the algorithms, and then the technology carries out the work—both disseminating information to us and harvesting information from us, which it later uses against us to influence our behavior. The AI is creating a perception of reality, yet it’s so hidden in the background most people don’t realize it’s happening.

Around March of 2020, social media sites immediately created new policies based on their novel truth doctrines in which they programmed the algorithm to delete, demonetize, shadow-ban, or flag with disclaimers anything that contradicted the narrative.

The platforms started pushing propaganda campaigns in the feed.

They have so much “confidence” in this project that the comments are turned off. Propaganda doesn’t like questions and comments.

Search engines became even more curated, pushing to the top the articles and sites that fit the globalist narrative, including smear campaigns against medications, treatments, and information they didn’t want people to have access to. It had been getting progressively more difficult to find certain information online before 2020, but after all things COVID began, it became nearly impossible without a direct link to a webpage. 

Part of the information control that started in 2020 was the quick adoption—in nearly every country on the planet—of specific catch phrases and words such as “social distancing,” “asymptomatic transmission,” “quarantine,” “essential workers,” “essential shopping,” and “trusted sources”—all of which were translated into local languages.

Each of these terms was like a zip folder download of information that could trigger a certain state intended to induce a specific behavioral response. These are called “anchors” in hypnosis. Those phrases anchored the new perception into the human collective consciousness so we could be used as pawns to create that reality in the world. There was clearly a coordination by governments, corporations, and media around the world to deliver a homogenous narrative.

Shortly after the lockdowns began, a popular graphic design website called Canva began offering social media graphics with the approved messaging to be promoted by businesses and individuals online.

Nearly every email marketing or newsletter I opened in 2020—whether from corporate stores or other businesses—contained the same COVID messaging. It’s still being played on the loudspeakers of grocery stores, continually bombarding the subconscious of shoppers.

In the spring of 2020, some brave doctors started speaking up. They were instantly smeared. That trend has continued and worsened—to the point now where California (as well as some countries) recently passed legislation to persecute doctors who do not spread the approved public health messaging. When doctors are being censored during a pandemic, Houston, we have a problem!

The same thing started happening to the rest of us who tried to share information online or even question the information that didn’t make sense. We were told we should just leave the thinking to the experts. Since we aren’t doctors, we aren’t qualified to have an opinion, they said.

Of course, they didn’t mean we should listen to all doctors. They meant we should only listen to their approved list of trusted sources. This is similar to when an abusive partner tells the target they shouldn’t trust anyone else—like their friends or family or even their own discernment. The abuser might plant the idea in the target’s mind that other people aren’t trustworthy, therefore the target begins to turn to the abuser as the only source of trust and reality. This keeps a target of abuse from speaking to others about what’s happening or trying to confirm reality with a third party.

The information control is an integral part of the first parameter of the Stockholm syndrome, which is a survival mechanism also known as a trauma bond, traumatic entrapment, appeasement, or what I call a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity. That first parameter is isolation, which can be both physical and psychological.

Physical isolation came in the form of social distancing; keeping six feet apart; staying home; wearing masks and face shields; the installation of plexiglass barriers; school closures; spreading fear of others as vectors of the virus; and the abuse of elders living in care homes as well as hospital patients, who were denied visitors and advocates. This physical isolation stops people from sharing information face-to-face in addition to causing many other harms well-known in neuroscience research before 2020.

The psychological isolation, however, is where the bulk of information control happens. For the con to work, the abuser must isolate the target from outside perspectives of reality.

The abuser spins a certain story and makes sure the target cannot be exposed to other perspectives. The target must be completely subscribed to the abuser’s narrative.

In one of the globalists’ dress rehearsals—Event 201 in October 2019—they had planned to “flood the zone” with approved information to control the narrative, which, of course, they claimed was for our good. We were suddenly bombarded nonstop with the repetitive messaging of their narrative beginning in early 2020.

At that time, most people were physically isolated at home. The information delivery came primarily through our personal technology devices (smartphones, tablets, computers, TVs) and the media, including social media, where people disseminated the narrative by proxy and the algorithms worked to suppress outside information. While the technology often gives the perception of making all of us more connected, it’s also being used to psychologically isolate people in a particular perception of reality. The information control produces the psychological isolation.

There has been an unprecedented amount of censorship, propaganda, and smearing of any alternative information. Derogatory terms (e.g., “conspiracy theorist,” “right-wing extremist,” “selfish”) were used to shame and intimidate people into self-censorship, silence, and compliance.

Ad hominem attacks were used to discredit brave people speaking out against the narrative. If the individual is discredited, the information the individual shared can be dismissed or discarded without actually having to address it. Algorithms were programmed to target and hide certain topics, individuals, and organizations so that information didn’t spread. This is how the globalists—and their AI—formed and maintained a specific narrative or perception of reality.

After a short period of time, most people became completely subscribed to the narrative, and even now, a lot of them still aren’t looking for outside perspectives. While it’s not as easy as opening a news app or a mainstream social media site, there are still ways of seeking outside perspectives and information.

However, it’s also clear the globalists are continuing to augment their information control tactics to make it increasingly difficult to find information outside their approved sources. They are desperate to control people’s perception of reality to keep the con going because our participation is required.

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Q&A #3

MAA:

I felt chills while reading your response because you articulated with such clarity so many of the troubling signs that made me realize from the outset we were dealing with an endeavor to manipulate perception at an unprecedented scale—from the internationally coordinated propaganda campaign to intentionally disconnecting us to the disinformation campaigns discrediting effective treatments to the smearing, censorship, and legislative silencing of dissident doctors, scientists, and protesters to the use of name-calling to dehumanize us to the deletion of contrary opinions to the process by which menticide is achieved to the unfurling of the Milgram–Stanford Prison–Asch Conformity mashup and Biderman’s Chart of Coercion. I covered the “flood the zone” strategy in Step 5 (Organization) of the Ten Stages of Genocide in this piece.

Letter to a Holocaust Denier

CJ Hopkins and I also discussed “reality control” in our Dissident Dialogue, and both you and he have been delving deeply into the epic gaslighting we have been subjected to, so I feel like our conversation is a perfect sequel to my discussion with CJ.

Dissident Dialogues: CJ Hopkins

One of the topics we explored was why some obey and others resist. Why do you think some people happily complied while others felt viscerally violated by the coercion tactics? What differentiates those who recognize this form of abuse from those who cannot and instead defend their abusers, Stockholm-style?

MM:

The question of why some people complied yet others viscerally rejected the coercion tactics is one of the most common things people have been wondering. The answer seems to be similar to why some people fall into abusive relationships and others don’t. Spoiler alert—it’s not because they’re stupid.

Over the years of working with victims of narcissistic abuse, I had quite a few therapists and psychologists as clients—some with PhDs. Similarly, most psychologists don’t currently see the psychological abuse that’s happening in the world, including the trauma experts.

It’s not about intelligence or education level. There are much more complex dynamics involved. From my perspective, there are several factors that can make a person more vulnerable to covert abuse. A person may have one major blind spot or several.

The top five character traits and skills that differentiate those of us who rejected the coercion tactics are:

1. Clarity of values and the boundaries to protect what matters

This is the recipe for self-worth. A person with healthy self-worth has a high degree of immunity to abuse. Self-worth comes from a) knowing what one’s personal values are, b) having a clear idea of what those look like in real life (these are called standards), and c) protecting those with boundaries.

If your personal values aren’t explicitly clear, that will make it challenging to set boundaries, which then leaves you open to harm or loss of what most matters. It’s helpful to take a personal inventory of what matters most to you and update your list of values periodically as you grow.

We are also living in a society where anti-values have been promoted through cultural ideology for decades before we ever heard the word “COVID.” Many people’s values were already degraded, distorted, or even completely absent. For example, in the ideology of entitlement, people might believe everyone else owes them or other people should be forced to sacrifice for their comfort.

Since 2020, the people who weren’t clear on their values or didn’t have healthy boundaries to protect their values could have easily fallen into the narrative and complied with the unhealthy public “health” mandates.

That happened to a lot of people who later regretted it because they got injured. Others lost their lives. Values and boundaries are extra-important in the recovery from trauma such as war or abuse. This topic will continue to be relevant for years to come in the ongoing war and its aftermath.

Dr. Gordon Eadie wrote in a journal called Mental Hygiene published in January 1945 (relative to World War II):

“We are trying to show him not only what we are fighting against, but what we are fighting for. So many of these boys have only a very hazy idea of the real issues of the war. About all they see is ‘going back to the good old days.’ This is a dangerous state. If they don’t stand for something, they will fall for anything. They need to realize that we are fighting two wars—the war of arms and the war of ideas—that other war of which the war of arms is one phase.”

2. Healthy sense of self

One’s sense of self is one’s personal identity. This is the part of each of us that can differentiate between what is self and what is other. The sense of self is the natural result of the individuation process Carl Jung described as occurring during adolescent and early adult development. Some people have always had a healthy sense of self due to their upbringing, and others of us have gone through rites of passage to discover who we really are. With a healthy sense of self, we don’t allow others to tell us who we are.

Unfortunately, the individuation process of many individuals has been stunted due to the decades-long infantilization promoted by social engineering, mainly through entertainment and the educational system. Our society has mostly forgotten the importance of rites of passage to mark the transition from one life stage to another.

Many people feel so lost in life that they want someone else to tell them what to do. Because they don’t know who they are as individuals, they desperately want to belong so they can gain a sense of identity through the group. This was part of the demoralization process that started long before COVID.

Some politicians and influencers have called for unity, which sounds great in theory, but this can be a covert code for depriving the individual of a healthy sense of self. That’s usually a red flag of cult dynamics in which a person’s individual identity is sacrificed (usually through trauma) and replaced with the group identity, which is promoted as something beneficial for all.

This is the goal of identity politics in general. The COVID narrative was loaded with this tactic. Those who didn’t do what everyone else did and had a healthy sense of self to stand for individual sovereignty were vilified with the “for the common good” covert abuse tactics used to coerce compliance and self-sacrifice.

Without a healthy sense of self, a person could easily get pulled into these cult dynamics, merging with the group identity for the false sense of security and comfort. This is very dangerous when dealing with abusers and tyrants because they create a role for the target to play in their cult dynamic.

An abusive family is also like a cult. The abusive parent will use the child as an extension of themselves, even when the child is an adult. The child can become so enmeshed with the parent that the child doesn’t develop a healthy sense of self. Any signs of individuation are squashed by an abusive parent. We have seen something similar in the COVID messaging.

In society—where many people had already been infantilized, confused, and left unsure about who they are or what to do—a role and the perception of belonging were created for them. People who lacked a healthy sense of self were more likely to play the role that was written for them as the good citizen who obeys and complies, doing their part for the good of everyone else.

3. Discernment

This is the ability to recognize what is not evident to everyone. It’s a sharpness of judgment or understanding that is less of a mental concept and more of a spiritual skill. Discernment goes hand-in-hand with having one’s approval barometer facing inward instead of seeking approval externally. It’s about having a sense of clarity in being able to distinguish what is true and good rather than relying on someone else’s judgments.

This is one of the most important skills to develop in the post-2020 world. There are a lot of wolves in sheep’s clothing, not only in elite positions of power and influence but also among us. Discernment is a gift that is earned, often painfully, through encounters with evil and the refinement of one’s spirit. A person with disordered desires will not be able to use their discernment because they will be primarily led by the flesh and materialism. That’s how evil can creep in the door undetected.

Emotional codependency is one of the epidemics in our modern world due to marketing, advertising, social engineering, abuse, and neglect. When people are entrapped in the state of spiritual bankruptcy, they have a void—an empty, painful sense of loneliness or inadequacy—that causes them to think they need to fill it with something external. That becomes an insatiable desire. When people are driven by these desires, they become addicted to the anticipation of reward, praise, and pleasure.

This corresponds to the second parameter of the Stockholm syndrome: acts of perceived kindness. Abusers and tyrants instinctually know they need to use love-bombing to seduce a target into their web. They use these perceived acts of kindness in intermittent reinforcement, alternating with acts of cruelty or devaluation. The intermittency of the reward causes the target to work harder, invest more, and develop a near-obsession with compliance. They become willing to minimize or normalize the bad to get the “good” feelings of pleasure.

The COVID acts of perceived kindness were many: government stimulus checks; unemployment benefits; forbearance of mortgages, rent, and student loans; the loosening of some restrictions; the free “vaccine”; incentives to get vaxxed; promises of “for your safety,” “for your protection,” and “because we care”; the social praise of being a “good” citizen; or even the little dosing of truth here and there.

Some of us were able to discern that those were not real acts of kindness and the public “health” measures weren’t actually about health at all. Others still haven’t figured that out.

Some of us were able to discern good from evil that pretends to be good. Others still don’t see the evil, even though it’s now dancing in the daylight.

Some of us were able to discern between a real danger and what was positioned as a perceived life threat, which is the third parameter of the Stockholm syndrome. We didn’t fall for the fear campaign about the virus or get paralyzed by the terror of tyranny.

We will all need to keep refining this skill of discernment as the globalist agenda continues to escalate across other aspects of human life.

4. Commitment to self-responsibility

This is the key to empowerment. Self-responsibility is about taking ownership of one’s own actions, choices, thoughts, and words. It’s the threshold that leads out of the victimhood stage. That’s not just a decision. It requires a commitment to oneself—in every moment.

When I started speaking up about the same patterns of covert narcissistic abuse in society as in interpersonal relationships and the family, I figured my YouTube audience would be the first to see what’s happening since they had been through it personally. I was shocked to discover that was not the case with a lot of people. Looking back, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise because I already knew, based on the comments over the years, that only a small percentage of people are actually doing the work of recovery, which requires a commitment to self-responsibility.

When people are in the victimhood stage, their focus is external and they’re not ready to look inside or commit to self-responsibility. Our culture does not value self-responsibility. In fact, the term “personal responsibility” has been mostly relegated to the dregs of “far-right extremist” political views, whereas it used to be a more universal value. This is a result of social engineering and the infantilization of the population over decades of demoralization and indoctrination.

People have been conditioned to perceive doctors as the authority over their health. By 2020, most people weren’t taking responsibility for their own health. Instead, they were outsourcing that responsibility to their doctors, so naturally they looked to public health figures as if they were responsible for society’s health. Many people felt powerless to take responsibility for their own health decisions. They did what they were told, hoping that would keep them safe and healthy. What will they do as the medical system continues to collapse?

When a person is psychologically, neurologically, and spiritually trapped in the victim stage, they don’t see a way out. The fourth—and final—parameter of the Stockholm syndrome is a perceived inability to escape. That’s why I call it a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity.

When people don’t know how to rescue themselves, they have rescue fantasies. If a person doesn’t see a way out, an escape route from their painful life circumstances, they usually turn to escapism behaviors like indulging in fantasy, alcohol, substances, or other addictions.

We saw all of these skyrocket since 2020. Of course, the “safe and effective vaccine” was positioned as the only way out so people could get their lives back. Most people complied, thinking compliance would end the abuse.

Other people—even those who didn’t comply—might still be trapped in the rescue fantasies that a certain politician, an anonymous group of “white hats,” tribunals, extraterrestrials, or a religious figure will save them. We actually have to rescue ourselves.

It’s important to note that a person can be awake to the abuse and still avoid taking self-responsibility. Even a person leaving the abusive situation doesn’t necessarily imply fully committing to self-responsibility, rescuing oneself from the state of captivity, and doing the inner work of self-healing.

This is a growing edge for all of us, even those of us who didn’t fall for the narrative. If we don’t want the new reality the globalists are designing for us, then we need to create something else. That work starts inside each individual.

5. Integrated trauma

All of the above are actually related to the trauma healing and the integration process. Trauma causes a loss of self-worth and sense of self. It makes it difficult to discern what is good and true. It can trap a person in victimhood, where they don’t realize self-responsibility is the only way out. Unresolved trauma—and its aftermath—is the biggest reason people fell into the narrative and will continue to fall into future narratives.

The tricky thing is unresolved trauma can also be holding back those who are aware the narrative is a con because awareness is not the same as healing. The awareness is a spark of light that illuminates a process and a new path forward. The silver lining is integrated trauma creates the opportunity for greater resilience, growth, and self-actualization.

Unresolved trauma causes reactivity. A person will toggle between states of numbness and hyper-reactivity to triggers that remind the person’s nervous system of the past trauma. The trigger will unleash a flood of feelings, which elicit a behavioral reaction.

Until a person does the inner work to heal and integrate the trauma, they will feel constantly derailed and set back by their reactions to life without realizing what’s happening. This is why the globalists’ Problem >> Reaction >> Solution equation works so well to control the behavior of the population.

As long as people are emotionally reactive, they won’t choose their response consciously, so they’ll likely have the behavioral reaction that leads to the predetermined solution. Responding instead of reacting is an essential life skill to avoid falling into these traps.

All of us have traumatic experiences in life. Each of us is also carrying the unresolved ancestral and collective trauma of those who came before us. Most people have some unresolved personal trauma they may not even be aware of. One of the leading trauma experts, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, says post-trauma develops if no one was there for you when it happened. This is another reason why isolation is so harmful, especially during times like these.

We’ve all been victimized in recent years, and we’ve all lost something, some more than others. We cannot bypass the healing process, and we also can’t heal until we first acknowledge the pain and trauma. Until then, it’s frozen in the nervous system.

Some people stay stuck in denial. Others become more aware but get stuck in the victim identity. Then there are those who are more aware but don’t want to confront the victimization, so they can get stuck in the avoidance of the trauma by acting tough and avoiding the ugly feelings.

This is where freedom fighters can also fall into false empowerment, thinking they’ve overcome it already because they don’t feel it, but they’re actually still reacting. To graduate from fighter to warrior, we have to face the pain and consciously move through it.

Our painful stories need to be witnessed by a compassionate listener so we can feel the reciprocal presence of another and experience the co-regulation of our nervous systems, which is an important aspect of homeostasis for us as mammals.

We also need to do the self-regulation work—to feel and process, layer by layer, all the heavy emotions that got frozen in the nervous system in the moments of trauma when it was too overwhelming at the time. We can do this work at the levels of personal, ancestral, and collective trauma.

Thomas Hübl, a trauma healing expert, teaches that there is an individual, ancestral, and collective nervous system that lives in all of us. He says what’s really hurt is silent and frozen, and this is where most energy is held in our culture:

“The thing that’s hardest to find has the highest healing impact. What is not obvious, is the gold of the transformational work of our world.”

The more present we are, the more able we are to notice the numbness, and there we have the opportunity to extract valuable learning from those experiences, which can be integrated into our life as wisdom. As individuals and communities, we become stronger and more resilient through that process.

While we cannot heal from the trauma that is still happening, we can use this opportunity now to work on healing past, unresolved traumas that are coming up to the surface with the new trauma. We can connect, especially in person, with allies who are also witnessing the current global trauma, so we can co-regulate and prevent a lot of post-trauma.

Trauma integration is an ongoing construction zone for all of us as we move through these challenging times into the future. It’s not easy, and that’s why most people avoid doing the work, but it is worth it. Those who survive and thrive through the coming years will be those who are building resilience and fortitude through trauma healing and integration. 

We become warriors by facing the pain and working through it, not by avoiding it. Part of that work is internal, and another part happens through the connection of our nervous systems. I think many of us can agree it’s high time we grow up as individuals and a society. Perhaps these global events were the spiritual calling we needed to wake up, step up, and evolve.

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Q&A #4

MAA:

Wow, Meredith. That may be the most lucid, compelling, and compassionate explanation of why some people believed the narrative and why others saw through the lies I’ve ever encountered. I finally feel like I’ve been able to scratch an itch that has been tormenting me for years. “Thank you” doesn’t feel strong enough to capture the gratitude I feel toward you.

It also helped me understand why I was resistant to the propaganda—every single character trait you outlined has been present in me as far back as I can remember.

Indeed, I had such a strong sense of self and my values that this became a source of friction in my relationship with my father as early as age six. 

His authoritarian parenting style was the opposite of my mother’s nurturant approach. He expected me to respect him simply because he was my father, whereas I felt respect was something you earn over time through your behavior and words. My mom treated me like an equal, but he treated me like a subject.

I refused to comply with his demands when I felt they were illogical, and this led to occasional spankings. (It wasn’t the spankings themselves that were the issue—my mom once spanked me when I walked to 7-Eleven with my friends without telling her beforehand as she had been frantic with worry. This was completely understandable; knowing I had hurt her was far more painful than the spanking itself and was enough to keep me from repeating that mistake in the future.)

I felt such a strong antipathy toward my father, I once fantasized about packaging up a box of mosquitoes and presenting it to him as a birthday gift.

By the time I was nine, I could no longer bear living with him and decided to move in with my best friend. I didn’t announce my decision. I just planned a sleepover at my friend’s house … and never came home. My mom later joined me. But that’s another story.

In retrospect, I realize I was overly hard on him, and we just had different ways of living and being. I was a reader; he was a surfer. I was a writer; he was a fisherman. I lived in my mind; he lived in the world.

Our relationship improved as I grew older—although now he thinks I’m an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist and half-jokingly calls me “the enemy” for questioning the government/media/pharmaceutical corporations and spreading dangerous misinformation 😆

Even though we have profound disagreements, I respect that he is capable of sustaining himself through gardening and fishing, which gives him an advantage over me when it comes to engineered food shortages—provided he survives the long-term effects of the injection.

I want to go back to something you touched on earlier—hypnosis. CJ has critiqued Mattias Desmet for his use of the term. I myself have used it on occasion, including in my first essay, where I cited one of my favorite Orwell quotes:

“As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.”

I still think this quote captures precisely what occurred with the COVID propagandizing, although I now wonder if “hypnosis” is technically correct. Yes, we’re witnessing Gustave Le Bon’s psychology of crowds; Joost Meerloo’s mind-raping; and Bernaysian mass control through propaganda and the crystallization of public opinion.

There is also a colossal level of denial going on that causes people to intentionally blind and deafen themselves to avoid being exposed to information that threatens their world view, which means they are more in control of their mental state than hypnosis would imply.

No doubt this is a mechanism of self-preservation as most people are too terrified to confront what they have done to their bodies (or worse, their children’s), too proud to admit they’ve been conned, too naïve to acknowledge the degree of psychopathy required to orchestrate the reset of the world, and too entrenched in normality to consider the possibility that a depopulation agenda not only exists but is being enacted.

Given your clinical understanding of the term “hypnosis,” would you say it is accurate to describe people as having fallen under mass hypnosis, and if so, what characteristics make it so? How does denial factor into that equation? Are there other mechanisms contributing to this willful blindness?

MM:

Technically, yes, the hypnotic trance is related to what we are observing. However, that state is fairly common, and there are also more complex psychological abuse dynamics taking place. That’s where the denial comes in as well as other survival mechanisms that result from the Stockholm syndrome, which I refer to as a psychoneurospiritual state of captivity as mentioned above.

Clarifying the abuse dynamics is a very important distinction because the abuse implies intent on behalf of the perpetrators to manipulate and coerce people.

In hypnosis training, we learn that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. This means the person is not under someone else’s control.

Hypnosis and trance states can be used for good or for harm. Some people find benefits of hypnotherapy for quitting smoking, losing weight, overcoming fears, or getting into an abundance mindset among other things.

A trance state is a survival mechanism. We all enter trance states to some degree daily—for example, when daydreaming. Some people can enter that state more easily than others. A common example of slipping into a trance state is when you’re driving home and you realize you don’t remember part of your ride. Your mind was in a trance and your automatic memory took over, guiding you home.

Orwell was correct that newspapers and radio can induce emotional reactivity and a state of hypnotic trance. Of course, now we can add television, social media, the smartphone, and other media to that list.

When we watch TV, the brain produces more alpha waves, which induces a light hypnotic state. This state causes us to become more receptive, passive, relaxed, and unfocused.

After watching TV, people usually feel more anxious. If you’ve ever observed people on their smartphones in public, you can see how they walk around looking at those screens like zombies in a hypnotic trance. The TV and other devices were already part of the programming of society long before COVID, making people less able to concentrate and instead more passive, anxious, and reactive.

Perhaps you can relate to watching an action movie when you suddenly notice your thighs or shoulders are tense. You feel the anxiety and tension in your body as if you were one of the characters. When you’re watching TV, your brain can’t tell the difference between what you’re imagining (seeing on the screen) and what is really happening (in real life). This is why the fight-or-flight state can get activated even if there’s no actual danger in the environment.

The ability to enter a trance state has something to do with dissociation, which is like zoning out. People who fantasize a lot are often in dissociative states. A habit of dissociation is usually the result of pain and trauma.

Not everyone responds the same to hypnosis. Some people are more suggestible than others. If you walk into a room where everyone is masked and you suddenly feel like you need to put on a mask, too, then you might be more sensitive to social cues and more suggestible to following the cultural norms.

For those who are more resistant to suggestion, there’s a technique called hypnotic induction by confusion. This method is used to help relax the grip of a strong critical mind. One of my hypnotherapy teachers said that during hypnosis, the critical mind takes a seat. It’s not entirely shut off, but it’s allowing a bypass to the subconscious mind.

To induce hypnosis by confusion, the hypnotist uses a bombardment of nonsensical and contradicting information, mixed messages, and things the person’s mind knows can’t be true. This overwhelm of strange information exhausts the critical mind so it can release its grip of control and allow access to the subconscious.

In 2020, I realized the COVID messaging was very similar to a hypnotic induction by confusion. There was a bombardment of contradicting information. First they told us masks don’t work based on the science studies. Then they said masks do work and we should all wear them. Shortly after that, they mandated masks in most places and called people who didn’t mask “anti-science” and “granny killers.”

You had to wear a mask to walk into a restaurant or when you got up to use the restroom, but you didn’t have to wear a mask at the table. It didn’t make sense that a virus could travel dangerously between five to six feet above the ground but doesn’t spread at the height of the table where you’re sitting. It was also confusing to hear public officials tell everyone to wear a mask or they would be putting other people’s lives at risk, and then photos would come out of those same officials unmasked in public. These are just a few examples of the bombardment of nonsensical and contradicting information.

In 2020, I warned people that hypnotic induction by confusion was taking place and everything that had happened until that point was merely the induction into whatever was coming next. When I launched my Substack in 2022, I incorporated that in a post called The Hypnotic Trance of the 2020s.

The Hypnotic Trance of the 2020s

In abusive family systems, there’s a collective trance that is contagious—and even more so for those who are highly suggestible. This is something we can also see in the world. However, I don’t think this is a complete explanation of what happened since 2020 and why people complied with tyranny.

This is why I mainly focus on the psychoneurospiritual state of captivity. I think this concept has been intentionally muddied or outright ignored by the psychology and psychiatry institutions. While they often acknowledge how it fits into sex trafficking or domestic (they mean physical) abuse, they don’t train clinicians to recognize how this happens in psychologically abusive relationships and families.

I think they delegitimize the Stockholm syndrome because they can’t seem to bridge the gap between what happens in a hostage situation—in other words, physical confinement—and a situation or relationship in which a person feels like there’s no escape. Victims of psychological abuse usually leave their house multiple times a day to go to work, drop off the kids, and go to the grocery store, yet they keep going home to the abuser because psychologically, neurologically, and spiritually, they feel like there’s no way out.

I have a hard time believing the boards of the institutions of psychiatry and psychology are so incompetent that they can’t see how this happens, though it is usually best to assume incompetence before malice. They also don’t include the more covert types of abusers in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatry Association. This is another topic that’s incredibly relevant to these times since we are mostly dealing with covert abuse. It seems to me these phenomena are conveniently omitted from “the science” to erase them from reality.

Denial is the most primitive human psychological defense mechanism, often resulting from cognitive dissonance, which is when the mind is overwhelmed by the stress of trying to hold two contradictory facts, beliefs, or perceptions of reality at the same time.

In abusive situations, cognitive dissonance is a defense mechanism caused by the intermittent reward/pleasure and degradation of human dignity. In the abuse cycle, we call these two phases love-bombing and devaluation. The intermittent reinforcement creates the cognitive dissonance, which causes the brain to short-circuit into states of denial and defensiveness. In such a state, if you present evidence to someone that contradicts their strongly held beliefs, they won’t be open to it and they might even attack you.

Sometimes people are more conscious of their cognitive dissonance. You might have presented some information to someone who turned away saying, “I can’t look at that because if what you’re saying is true, I can’t live in a world like that.”

The cognitive dissonance fits into the second parameter of the Stockholm syndrome, an act of perceived kindness. In abusive situations and relationships, it’s not just one act. There are many acts of perceived kindness alternated with acts of cruelty and depravation. The intermittent nature of reward causes people to work harder, invest more, and become obsessed with compliance so they can get back to the “good” times and feel the pleasure. This conditions people to develop an emotional addiction that can cause them to become willfully ignorant of the damage being caused by the abuse because they’re so highly motivated to do whatever it takes to get out of the pain and back to the pleasure feeling.

The other aspect of this psychoneurospiritual state of captivity that makes it difficult for people to receive new information is the third parameter of the Stockholm syndrome—the perceived life threat.

When people are bombarded with fear, their nervous system shuts down into a state of collapse due to the cues of threat. If you present them with information to try to dispel their fears and the life threat, their brain can’t process it and they probably won’t even remember what you said later.

A mouse caught in the mouth of a cat feigns death as a last-ditch effort to survive. We can’t stay long-term in that kind of state because a physiological shutdown is happening to functions like breathing and heart rate. So when the fear and sense of life threat are ongoing, humans adapt by dissociating so they don’t have to feel the pain.

Eventually, the perceived inability to escape such a situation leads to a state of learned helplessness, where the person feels hopeless, powerless, and unable to control or change their life circumstances. They become debilitated, exhausted, and have a sense of overpowering dread, which leads to apathy.

That’s when people start giving up. When it seems like there’s no way out, people turn to escapism behaviors such as fantasy, alcohol, drugs, food, porn, sex, social media, gambling, video games, TV, or workaholism. In severe cases, that can involve self-harm and suicide.

The vax was positioned in the marketing campaign as the only escape back to normal life. You may have even heard some people say they went and got the shots because they “just wanted to get it over with.” This is similar to a woman who becomes used to marital rape. She learns her resistance only prolongs the pain so she stops fighting him and instead just lets him get it over with.

You’re correct that self-preservation has to do with what’s happening. These are survival mechanisms getting triggered to deal with an ongoing, seemingly inescapable situation of overwhelming stress. The Stockholm syndrome or trauma bond is also known as appeasement, which is another term for fawning. This is a common response to an abusive relationship. The person feels like there’s no escape from the situation so they try to comply and appease the abuser to survive.

I can’t imagine how difficult it must be at this point for people to break through the self-preservation drive and admit what they did to their bodies, or worse yet, to their children. I don’t know how a parent would be able to live with the guilt of realizing they have harmed their own child.

I also don’t know how doctors, nurses, and those working at pharmacies or other sites who personally administered the shots will be able to process the amount of guilt of having potentially injured or even killed people. That reality is a stark contrast to the air of saving lives, which is what one of my friends said everyone was feeling at the vax sites where she got jabbed.

They were all victims of the abuse, too. As adults, however, we are each responsible for our actions, and unfortunately, those who administered the shots became active enablers of the abuse. When people are recruited to participate in atrocities, they often think they’re doing the right thing for the greater good. The Nuremberg trials concluded that following orders is not an excuse for wrongdoing. Eventually, this truth will come back around in the collective consciousness, and history will probably not look kindly at them.

I don’t know if many people in those situations will ever wake up because it would mean having to face the immense burden of responsibility. A person can choose to face it and go through the breakdown to breakthrough process, but that’s the difficult path, which most people don’t choose. The easy path is to continue in denial and defensiveness, where there are only two other ways out: insanity or death.

Maybe the Metaverse will be positioned as a fantasy escape to herd those who are still gripping on tightly and refusing to see the ugly reality as it unfolds. We might also see a big uptick in dementia cases, which is something I’ve noticed affecting both abusers and enablers in a lot of abusive families, perhaps because they lived their whole life in denial and fantasy. Probably more countries will offer medically-assisted suicide as an option for those who want an easy way out.

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Continue reading:

Dissident Dialogues: Meredith Miller (Q&As #5–7)

Dissident Dialogues: Meredith Miller (Q&As #8 & 9)

Dissident Dialogues: Meredith Miller (Q&As #10–12)

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