What Antisemites and I Have in Common

It starts with a "T" ...

Over the last month, I’ve only written five posts here. Ideally, I’d be hitting at least twice or preferably three times that many.

When this happen it generally means a combination of two things: I’m focusing my time primarily on the production of our books so we can finalize them and submit them to our distributor, but more importantly, it means my PTSD symptoms have again risen from the grave to torment and assault me.

This used to be one of the primary topics of this Substack, as the symptoms generated from the violent trauma and fearing-for-my-life terror of fall 2021 were often debilitating. These symptoms prevented me from working, from reading the books I love so much, and even from wanting to go on living. It has taken a long time to figure out a wide variety of medicines - and now, a whole toolkit of techniques to become functional enough to hold down a full-time journalism job while also launching this Zionist activist publishing company.

But these don’t always work properly, and it often becomes time to try and cobble together a more effective combination of strategies to keep me going. Thank God I have

Sally Shideler

to help me each time with figuring this out—I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying: she is entirely responsible for keeping me alive since 2021, and so it remains.

And what exactly is so bad during theses “PTSD episodes” which I used to be able to largely keep under wraps, relegated to the late evening and early mornings? So horrible that I regularly just want to die? The primary symptoms of PTSD for me have been what’s known as “hyper-arousal” and its sub-symptom “hyper-vigilance.”

WebMD does a good job of describing it:

Hyperarousal can be characterized by: 

• Pervasive jittery feelings

• Always being on the lookout for peril

• General irritability 

• Becoming angry instantaneously

• Getting startled by loud noises 

• Paranoia

• Difficulty sleeping

• Inability to concentrate or focus on one thing

And here’s hyper-vigilance, per PTSD-UK:

One of the many hyper-arousal symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is hypervigilance and this refers to the experience of being in a state of high alert, constantly tense and ‘on guard’ and always on the lookout for hidden dangers, both real and presumed – it’s stressful and exhausting to maintain.

This state of increased awareness, anxiety, and sensitivity to the environmental around you often manifests as a need to always scan your surroundings for potential threats. With the brains resources on constant alert, the results can be inappropriate or even aggressive reactions in everyday situations.

So, essentially, my emotions go even more intense than they usually are. My physical senses go absurdly intense. Things taste different, music sounds different, and as I look around the room I can’t ignore all the tiny details.

And so, too, does my sense of empathy go through the roof along with these feelings—other people’s pain becomes acutely more intense too.

Understand, though, feeling this level of intensity about other people’s physical pain, emotional fears, and upsetting life occurrences isn’t anything new for me, and the 2021 experience of intense violence and emotional trauma was not the first in my life that deeply affected who I became and how I see the world at an angle different from so-called “normal” people. Violent trauma experienced as a child and later as a teenager also transformed me, as did the emotional and verbal abuse I experienced during adolescence, and further, what I experienced regularly over the last 15 years professionally.

And so now—and throughout my life since childhood’s conclusion—the most effective way of treating my trauma hasn’t been therapists or psychiatric drugs. It hasn’t even been my beloved assortment of practices from psychedelic hippie culture and decades of engaging with mysticism and occultism. It’s been focusing on other people’s traumas rather than my own.

That’s what drove my decision to begin the “Antisemitism and Culture” series in November 2022, which ultimately—within only a few months—led to my full-time position now reporting almost exclusively on antisemitism all around the world for Jewish News Syndicate. It's the best job that I’ve ever had, and I’m working with the best editors that I’ve ever had.

Every day now, all day, I’m effectively just distracting myself from all of the crippling memories of my own traumas—the furthest back I can trace to my alcoholic grandfather’s physical abuse—by trying to focus on traumas which seem to me far worse than what I’ve experienced myself.

So that has turned into immersing myself into the worlds of irrational, criminal, violent hate and its consequences. By focusing on the fact that others’ trauma has been much worse than mine, it somehow gives me a reason to try and fight back against my own feelings of worthlessness, brought on by the hate which others have inflicted on me.

And it also gives life a sense of meaning. Perhaps, at some small level, writing about antisemitic hate groups and the far-left, far-right, or Islamist ideologies that fuel them gives me a reason to keep living. If I stay alive, then at least I have a life to give some value to. And I can contribute in the fight to stop others from developing PTSD and feeling the overwhelming pain that I deal with on a daily basis.

But please understand, my Jewish friends and fellow non-Jewish Zionist allies, this sense of intense empathy has also extended to our enemies - those seeking to inflict the trauma - too.

Having studied antisemitism in its multiple ideological disguises for so long, and continuing to immerse myself in it every day, when I report on hate crimes, I don’t just feel sorry for the victims. I feel sorry for the perpetrators, too.

I’ve come to the conclusion that virtually all intense antisemites have trauma on the order of my own. And I believe they’re coping with that trauma in a way similar to what I’m doing—they are distracting themselves by focusing their emotional intensity onto problems (real or imaginary) they have persuaded themselves are bigger than their own. Often, this is to the point of total irrationality when it rises to the level of committing hate crimes, engaging in terrorism, or even the lesser degree of defending both.

And I don’t just say that from reading about antisemites and reporting on them so much, because when the opportunities present themselves, I will attempt to actually dialogue with antisemites at length in order to better understand them.

It doesn’t happen very often, but when I can, I’ll even try and befriend these lost souls: not just to try to somehow get them to abandon their self-destructive ideology, but because I genuinely feel deeply sorry for whatever pain they have experienced that has brought them to this point where they have to distract themselves by endlessly calling me the K-word on Substack Notes.

These are human beings, too, and they’re in pain. They’re lonely, they’re confused, they don’t know what to do with the intense emotions inside them, and they just need someone to listen to them, to see their humanity.

And sometimes this can become very difficult to hear. It stops me in my tracks when an antisemite admits to me that he felt a personal loss when Israel recently rescued hostages following their long captivity by Hamas. Or that they do not care if Jews get stabbed in the street, or if I were to again be mistaken for a Jew, as I regularly am, and attacked myself.

I honestly don’t recommend others engage in this—especially Jewish people—just as I don’t recommend immersing oneself in worrying about antisemitic terror groups and the genocidal regimes that support them.

Something else I don’t recommend for most people is one of the primary concepts that I advocate regularly at this Substack: the psychedelic experience. Just as engaging with hatred all day with other people’s trauma is often unpleasant, so too with taking a large quantity of a mind-altering drug to produce a controlled traumatic experience that is generally much more unpleasant than not. Yes, they’re scary—that’s the whole point.

And for the record: as effective as illegal psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD can be in trauma treatment, their current criminal status and the difficulties in properly dosing makes them more hassle than they’re worth. Be very careful. I only recommend Amanita Muscaria gummies, which are legal and can provide a consistent dosage, both for micro- and macro-dosing. And regarding the latter, I suppose part of my feeling terrible right now is simply that I’m due for another heavy dose here, something which I tend to dislike doing and usually regret in the moment. It’s effectively a controlled poisoning of oneself, with the milder trauma of the experience providing relief from the symptoms generated by the real trauma that runs so much deeper.

amanita musaria

And so this is ultimately what I’ve come to with countering where antisemitism—and really all varieties of serious hate—emerge.

PTSD makes those of us afflicted by it irrational in how we see the world and ourselves. In extreme cases, this manifests as seeing paranoid conspiracies having to do with the Jewish people, the perennial scapegoat for ignoring one’s own pain. But in less extreme cases, such as mine, it becomes simply regarding myself as a physically unattractive person, an ineffective activist accomplishing nothing, and a mediocre writer whose career is more based on luck and closeted men wanting to have sex with me (yes, I have been sexually harassed too), rather than the result of any inherent skill or talent.

Trying to get over these intense feelings of self-hatred is hard work. So many people afflicted with these feelings through trauma have not yet figured out how to engage with it, as even many psychiatrists and psychologists haven’t figured it out. And that leads to people like me desperately re-traumatizing themselves by poisoning themselves with mushrooms out in the desert.

I’m trying real hard to get better through whatever means I can, and as I engage with more traumatized Jewish people, more traumatized antisemites, and more traumatized people who have experienced all manner of violence, I’m goin to return again and again to my Judeo-Christian call to love others, to pray for those who persecute you, and the hippie ethos to find the others, to turn on to the wisdom of the ages originating in the ancient shamans, tune in to the mystic truth that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, and drop out of the poisonous cycle of hate.