#7: The Valley of Shadows
On Primal Rage, Two Years of Tapering, and Sacred Secrets
Sometimes I find myself in the jungle recesses of the mind.
Vengeful, frightfully full of rage.
I observe it take shape within me and without.
I close my eyes.
I see a jaguar, sleek and haunched, lurching at breakneck speed toward an opponent. She attacks, bites, and scratches over and over until her opponent submits, and then like fog rising up, everything has dissipated.
I feel calm.
~
Rage is frowned upon.
Rage is suppressed.
I close my eyes and unleash my jaguar. She comes back with blood dripping from her fangs. A victor.
Nothing out of the ordinary has happened in the recesses of the dark jungle. All is as it should be in the ecosystem pulsating with the hum of vibrating blood. Alive.
Does my rage make you uncomfortable?
Good.
It lives in you — it lives in me.
We forget our deep primal nature. Of course, we (hope to) live in a civilized world with niceties and professionalism. Our evolved brains have made it so.
Yet unchecked rage ironically morphs into barbaric behavior, psychological fracturing, somatic trauma, violence, genocide, and collective unrest.
As my brother has said, “There’s a thin veneer over society separating us from civil to barbaric.”
So when do you let your jaguar out?
To hunt, to fight, to defend, to kill?
She’s rattling the cage. She wants to be seen. And you need not do a thing except sit in a quiet space, close your eyes, and observe her.
In University I had a writing professor say it’s your job as a writer to explain the unexplainable.
I’ve been tapering Lexapro, an SSRI, for two years now. What I was told would take 4—6 weeks to come off of has taken two years… and I still have a third of the way to go.
Explain the unexplainable.
I’ve talked plenty about initiations in this newsletter, bringing up topics like birth, business, and the underworld.
Tapering from antidepressants has been my biggest initiation in life thus far. Tapering has been nothing less than a death.
It’s been a kaleidoscope, a prism. And as one of my teachers says, an entry point to the deepest reality: right here.
While this axiom has become a cliché it’s still true: the deepest pains we walk through become our guiding Northstar if we simply allow them. If we let the dark mother take us into the depths and allow what needs to happen to happen… and trust we will emerge as something new.
And in that, the world becomes so quiet.
There’s nothing to say anymore.
And while tapering an SSRI has been anything but a secret in the service to potentially help others, some things can never fully be expressed with words.
This is because, as mystic poet John O'Donohue said, the secret and the sacred are sisters.
~
I climbed out of the hole, untangled the weeds and spiderwebs gripping my ankles and wrists, and rubbed the dirt from my eyes. I walked into the creek bare-naked, washing myself against the rushing water. I stepped out and into the sun.
What is there to say?
I’m alive.
We were driving through the mountains, the October sky brushed lightly with a wash of lilac and coral, quickly fading into indigo.
The Google Maps on our dashboard showed us a snake-shaped route, curving S after S up the base of Appalachia. The air outside was crisp. I didn’t mind. Window down, my hand fanned out until my fingers went numb from the cold.
I felt so zen. Blissed out in a way that seemed eerie. I’ll find out I was looming over a great dark abyss, about to fall in head first.
For the full five days we were driving in Tennessee, I had a headache. Dull. Pulsing. Sharp. Throbbing. Altitude sickness? No, we weren’t that elevated, it’s not Colorado. Allergies? My allergies had improved quite a bit since that summer, I even stopped the antihistamines. I took two Advil until it wore off, then two more. Repeat. It just didn’t cease. Still, I floated on, observing the changing leaves and the road ahead.
It took me until January to realize it had only been five days since I cut my Lexapro dosage in half before our trip to Tennessee.
My brain was now, all of a sudden, only getting half the dosage of chemicals it was used to having for the past five years. In essence, I was throwing my brain off a cliff by doing this.
What I was feeling — the zen-d out freeze, the headaches, the eerie calm — was the very beginnings of SSRI withdrawal; a serious defrosting underway of five years worth of severe repression and serotonin overdosing and likely 15 years more of frozen emotions underneath that.
I had been driving deep into the valley of shadows.
And it would get much worse before it would get better.
And I was catching my breath
Staring out an open window catching my death
and I couldn’t be sure
I had a feeling so peculiar
that this pain would be for
evermore. | TS, evermore
There still isn’t much public info about tapering and SSRI withdrawal online especially in spaces with large followings.
When I started to write this essay in September I wasn’t sure where I wanted it to go. A research piece on the dangers of SSRIs? A personal essay on the horrors of tapering? The insanity/delusion of social media’s undying love for promoting psychotropic drugs in the name of self-care?
I’d already done and combined all of that into a 3-part podcast in the spring of 2022 (before I’d even reached the worst of it). While much (most) of my experience and opinions have changed since I released those episodes, I’ve left it up for those of you in the future who I know are looming just beyond.
I feel there are many who will want some assurance that they are, indeed, not going crazy and that there’s an experience out there paralleling theirs.
And I can tell you that I feel you and I see you.
As decades tick on, I think the opioid epidemic will be overshadowed by the Benzo and SSRI withdrawal epidemic. I can feel it waiting in the wings, a grim reaper sitting idly, sharpening his scythe, waiting to collect.
We can’t run from our pain.
For the past twenty-five years, the psychiatric establishment has told us a false story. It told us that schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, and bipolar illness are known to be brain diseases, even though it can’t direct us to any scientific studies that document this claim. It told us that psychiatric medications fix chemical imbalances in the brain, even though decades of research failed to find this to be so.
It told us that Prozac and the other second-generation psychotropics were much better and safer than the first-generation drugs, even though the clinical studies had shown no such thing. Most importantly, the psychiatric establishment failed to tell us that the drugs worsen long-term outcomes.”
― Robert Whitaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, 2010
Validation is a facet of how we view the world around us and our aim to “get better.” Avoidance and Identity are other facets. Therapy, pills, meditation, and much more often get roped into this as avoidant strategies, ego boosts, and community validation. These things are not inherently bad and are certainly helpful… for a while. There will be a time when you need to leave them behind in order to grow.
When we get prescribed medication and find others who are also on that medication with the same diagnosed illness from the DSM-V, we feel so seen. Validated.
This is an illusion — unsubscribe.
When I decided to taper the SSRI, a whole new pandora’s box flung open releasing every scary monster possible — no medical professional ever told me this would be a possibility. For weeks I felt absolute, horrific dread. The only way to survive it was minute by minute.
Much of this journey has been an intuitive echo of whispers: “yes,” “no,” and, “keep going.” Unsubscribing from shoulds, blame, comparison, and answers within and without freed me up to be shown the how in how do I get through this. It will look completely unique to each person.
So talking and not talking about my experience is important — both in equal measure, perhaps.
The secret and the sacred are sisters.
The psychotropic drug industry is a billion-dollar behemoth with staunch supporters of the “mental health/wellness” clans in full evangelist mode of what is right and good and true. My response is… silence. I’m glad pills work for some. I’m not here to take them away.
While this may not apply to everyone who tapers, I wanted to list the symptoms of my taper for those of you who pass by here in the future.
I had only one of these symptoms before starting Prozac at 20 years old and Lexapro at 24 (Pure OCD/intrusive thoughts); the rest were brand new and began during my taper.
I also want to note that I view these symptoms with an enormous amount of compassion and love. Toward myself, toward others who experience this, and toward my body who lived it.
As Kenneth Jover said, if it’s coming up, it wants to be cleared. It wants to be completed.
-Firstly: a 60lb weight gain over five years
-Needing to sleep 10–12 hours per day, hard to open eyes without
-Muscles twitching, fork-in-an-electric-socket kind of zapping
-Brain zapping
-Tremoring and shaking when crying
-Unable to listen to audio at full speed (people talking way too fast)
-Wiped out exhaustion from doing “not much”
-Heat radiating from solar plexus/chest (burning hot, need ice to cool) down arms
-Phantom sharp pains that radiate (jaw, elbows, knees, shoulders, hands)
-Five-day long headache stretches
-Weepy crying, howling (for about 3 months — howling was primal, animal)
-Weeks-long diarrhea (serotonin lives in the gut, after all)
-Extensive eyelid twitching (alternates between left & right)
-Dizzy spells
-Difficulty speaking, throat tightens
-Difficulty holding eye contact for too long, feels too intense
-Fluorescent light sensitivity — elevates heart rate
-Extreme nausea, need nausea bands days on end
-Disturbing intrusive thought loops (bizarre, freakish)
-Severe nausea after sex (for about four months)
-Vibration sensitivity and panic (from bass, motorcycles, cars, or soundbars)
-Car traffic illicit panicky sensations
-Extremely overheated, can’t cool down or sweat; feels like I’m going to combust
-Very painful Charlie horses in calves when stretching/ waking up (dehydration/minerals depleted)
-Elevated heart rate with any exercise, even slow walking
-Elevated heart rate in heat/humidity above 80 Fahrenheit, even sitting
-Needing to apply ice to body in summer on chest, bottoms of feet, and brainstem
-Skin feels like it’s burning from the inside out (face)
-Survival stress after eating — throat tightening, feeling the need to run away
-Frightened in stores, malls, or enclosed spaces where I cannot visually see the outside world
-Head/ear pressure and lightheadedness when standing up too fast and after sitting for a while/ laying too quickly (especially in heat)
-Tightness in solar plexus/chest — Constricting, tensing tightness, hard to expand for a full breath
-Gasping for breath, over-breathing, hyperventilation, unable to take a satisfying, full breath
-Breath is shallow, shaky, trepid (biggest help: don’t do breathwork at this stage and do not “change” your breath — let it BE as it is)
-Blurry eyes — the world feels overwhelmingly blurry and too bright simultaneously; difficult to focus visually
-Body odor when cutting a dosage (deodorant brand didn’t change)
-Waking up in pools of sweat
-Waking up gasping for air and/or screaming for help (no emotions attached)
Even though
I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death
I fear nothing
for you are with me. | Psalm 23:4
Today things feel much different.
I am rooted to the ground beneath me. My nervous systems aren’t stuck in parasympathetic or sympathetic, they ebb and flow, up and down, as healthy, recovering systems should.
My whole life has changed — work, relationships, my perceptions, my will, my body, my energy, my brain.
Make me an instrument.
Like an onion, there are many layers… It seems I began to flourish well in the dark and underground.
Merge my will with Divine will.
I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I knew who I was. Now I see it’s ever-changing. How funny and sweet it all feels in hindsight.
Do you trust what you can’t see?
I will never have any of this truly figured out. I still have a ways to go to get off the medication for good. What a delicious joy that is. Trusting the mystery has brought me the right people, the right opportunities, and the right teachers — all at the right time.
Why am I here, God?
These days, I don’t want to force or push or take or fake or “manifest” desires that aren’t even mine.
Surprise me, Life.
I want to be an embodiment of what the path has given me, what God wants for me, and what is mine to hold and transform.
Make me an instrument.
Honour
It’s easy as we heal and expand to take on our learnings and begin to teach before we are ready (a.k.a. embodied). Especially with an Open G center in Human Design like me, I can easily take opinions and teachings and identify with them so deeply, that I’ll start to pass them off as my own.
I want to be very clear that the last year has been one of me being very selective/intentional with trainings, teachers, and information intake. The teachers that appeared in my path were I believe, divinely orchestrated.
My prayer, over and over again, during the darkest days of this journey was, “Please show me the way. Please tell me what to do.” As one of my eventual teachers came to say, a pure cry to God will always be met with pure guidance.
Irene Lyon’s work has been deeply instrumental. She is the only nervous system expert I trust at this time. Nervous system work is “hot” right now — be very careful in who you choose and really get quiet and listen to your inner knowing before intaking the information. Irene’s work on titration, pendulation, capacity, resourcing, and breath in regard to healing trauma in the nervous system has been paramount.
Pilar Lesko’s work is the kind I cannot put into words. Pilar is the one who introduced devotion, the mystery, and the desire to become an instrument to me as not only a concept but as a pure embodiment. She is devotion to the mystery. She is frequency first, and she is energy mastery. I am ever grateful for her and Eden.
Keshava has been my teacher for eight years and is the only yoga practitioner I have ever found to resonate. Yoga has been deeply hijacked and disrespected as a practice (as have many mystic and spiritual practices that have existed for thousands of years in what we now call the “new age”) and I’ve been grateful to have a traditional and respected lineage of this practice in my life. Keshava is an embodiment of being in the world but not of the world.
The folks who work on a volunteer basis over at SurvivingAntidepressants.Org. Just… wow. They have supported half a million people from around the world during their taper journeys. This forum was so helpful to me in the very beginning when I couldn’t understand what was happening to me. It’s necessary to log off after a certain amount of time though, as there is an incredible amount of energy being flung around in there (understandably).
Robert Whitaker’s book Anatomy of An Epidemic was devasting, but so well researched. It’s 13 years old so I would love to see an updated version. The thesis of the book is, “Whitaker asks why the number of Americans who receive government disability for mental illness approximately doubled since 1987 [in 2010].” Robert’s book brought me to my knees, peeled the layers from my eyes, and led me to an important and valuable place in my journey: rage.
I’ve spoken about how Nature and her beings have been a deep resource, a guide, a mother, a friend. Through the seen and unseen, she keeps revealing herself to me. Endlessly — thank you,thank you,thank you.
And I was catching my breath
Floors of a cabin creaking under my step
and I couldn’t be sure
I had a feeling so peculiar
this pain wouldn't be for
evermore. | Taylor Swift, evermore
Thank you for reading.
Tracy
Tracy, thank you for sharing this piece with us. My crown tingled throughout. An exquisite read that I felt deeply in my heart.
This was a powerful read 🤍
Honored to bear witness to your journey, thank you for sharing so fully with all of us.