Why I did not take the Jab - Psychological Musings

With Disease X on the horizon, and WHO poised for a medical power grab, I found myself reflecting on the Pandemic and the decision I made about the Vaccine. Hoping that sharing this process may be helpful and validating to others.

I remember being a psychology undergrad in the late 80s and learning about the famous Milgram study.  This is the study where a significant proportion of the subjects, under the supervision of an expert, would administer allegedly painful levels of electric shock to people they believed were volunteers. While other students were focused on how people could be influenced by authority to harm others,, I was more interested in understanding the people who did not comply.  What was it about those individuals that made them hold their ground and defy the experts? For me that was the most interesting part of those experiments

Flash forward to 2024, I completed my doctoral training in 1997, and have been a psychologist in private practice for decades.  I provided care to traumatized teens and young adults throughout the lockdowns and the changes in the world that followed.  How is it that I recognized there was some kind of game afoot and had a healthy resistance to complying with vaccine recommendations and mandates?  I ended up being one of the lucky holdouts, who never did get the jab.

As I contemplate this, I realize that, through my clinical work with people suffering from anxiety disorders, I have developed a strong understanding of how anxiety interacts with our nervous systems. For example, I understand that when anxiety has hijacked your brain and your sympathetic nervous system has taken control, your thinking becomes very polarized.   The only options you can even dare to consider are very extreme. Any perceived or potential threats become exaggerated.  Your access to your frontal lobe, where you do your best complex problem solving, is severely limited. 

I have had countless conversations over the years with my patients about how anxiety can manipulate us into believing preposterous things, like it's not safe to leave your house, for example.  I have worked with people to develop a healthy skepticism, even distrust, about their most anxiety driven thoughts.  I have convinced clients to hold off on performing compulsive behaviors that reduce anxiety and bring a brief period of relief, but ultimately strengthen the hold that anxiety has on them.  

I have taught people how to hack their nervous system to elicit a relaxation response from their parasympathetic nervous system; helping people learn how to turn off their anxiety response and get to a calm brain. Only then can they access their frontal lobes and do complex problem solving and engage in nuanced thinking.  

I am very familiar with the human brain in the grip of anxiety.  I started to see the parallels between how our government was freaking us out, feeding our fears, and then offering us extreme behaviors that were there to protect us from the purported (exaggerated?) danger of COVID 19.   The government, through lockdowns, was specifically directing us away from our emotional support systems and isolating us from others.  These toxic bureaucrats would not allow us to access those things  that would calm and soothe us, like sunshine,  exercise,  contact with our community, spiritual or otherwise.  Our government was censoring reasonable balanced debate and feeding our sympathetic nervous system a mental diet of exaggerated fears, inflated COVID positive test results (of otherwise healthy people).  Like clinical Anxiety does to its victims, our government wanted to keep us off balance and too fearful and confused and emotionally reactive to step back and realize that we were being propagandized.  

When I work with young children, we give their anxiety a name.  We talk about it as a friend who may mean well but is either terribly misinformed, or actually a bully.  How this “friend”  will scare them and try to fool them into thinking all sorts of scary things and stop them from taking any risks.   They will convince the child that the only way to be safe is to listen to their anxiety and do its bidding.  If I were asked to name my anxiety over the past few years, I would call him Tony.  

I was able to see that our government's response to COVID was straight out of Anxiety’s playbook.  Stoking fear by othering those that would raise questions or try to bring reason to bear, or simply have a fair and balanced discussion. When you first stop indulging your anxiety disorder, it doubles down and throws everything it can at you to pull you back in.  Anxiety craves control and it won’t let go of you so easily.  Just as the powers that be continue their efforts to trigger our anxieties with monkeypox, bird flu and of course, Disease X.  Anxiety’s cravings for control can never be satisfied in the same way that our toxic bureaucrats will never stop trying to push us around. Disordered anxiety cannot be appeased, it must be confronted.  So it is with our government.  We have to stop cooperating with the government's campaign of fear and push back on the othering and shaming.

I should thank all of my patients past and present for the courage they have shown me and  for allowing me to be a part of their battles with anxiety.   They have taught me  so much about perseverance in the face of powerful forces.  They have helped me in the most important ways possible. Through their example, I was given  the courage to face the challenges of the lockdowns and the fear mongering from our government that continues to this day.

My work with anxiety gave me the skills I needed to stand in my truth and not cave into the fear and uncertainty provoked by the forces that I have heard Bret Weinstein refer to as Goliath.  Thank you to all of the reasoned and thoughtful dissident voices that insisted on being heard and bringing balanced reason to bear on our current situation. Jay Bhattacharya, Del Bigtree, Aaron Siri, Peter McCullough, Steve Kirsch, Edward Dowd, Aseem Molhatra, Heather Heying, Chris Martenson, Shannon Joy, and too many others to name.