My brother and his wife are child abusers of the kind that leave the scars on the inside, so calling CPS was always a dubious prospect since that can make the abuse worse. My dad used to work in corrections, and he's seen enough horror stories first-hand to know CPS is the last resort, as awful as that is. I was instructed to never escalate with my brother's family, ever, because we knew they'd use their daughter as a bargaining chip to make us comply. The point wasn't our own freedom, but instead to make sure we'd be able to watch over her and provide a safe place for her when we could. This meant my brother was glued to my side constantly and I could never defend myself against him, and it crushed my spirit. So much of the joy of my life got sapped, and nothing ever came to replace it. That would have been fine, but I didn't get much support from my parents after they became accustomed to handling the situation, and so I was left to languish while everyone else judged me harshly for the personal price I paid putting up with that monster for 16 years. When I couldn't stand the pressure and neglect anymore, my family imploded and it's been in tatters ever since.

It wasn't until my mom died that I finally had the space to explain any of this to my dad, and he's horrified at what happened to me right under his nose, and he never knew. I don't mean to badmouth my mom, but she had a way of letting practicality push everything to the brink because of how hard she and my dad had to work when they were young, and that made talking about the things that make life worth living, and why I couldn't do them, very difficult. There just wasn't enough of her left before the end for her to be able to help me with anything, and she needed just as much help holding everything together as I did.

One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn is that the shape of your body affects your mindset. If you feel embarassed about dancing and refuse to do it, there's a good chance it's because the composition of your body means you can't do it. There's very little sympathy for the kind of postural bindings that prolonged trauma can put on you, that make you so stiff you either can't do anything at all, or you do everything too hard, and without grace. 0 or 100, there is no middle ground when you're chased so far up the tree by a predator you can't fight. You can't afford to move without breaking your perch, so you need a damned good reason to move at all. When everything you do is premeditated, that looks so different than acting natural it turns you into a pariah. People become suspicious of you, even when you've done nothing wrong, and so when you do make a mistake your punishments are so much worse. It is a curse.

I'm getting better. Because of how much I've practiced premeditating my actions and considering everything around me as much as I can, just so I wouldn't hurt anyone or make anything worse, I've started to spot the subtle things in my environment that have an outsized effect on me, and I've been able to slough some of them off. I've taken charge of my body's composition, not through force, but by asking, and I've fixed a lot of my stubborn health issues. I was born with chronic migraines, for example, and I've had one or two every week my entire life except for this summer, where I had maybe one per month. I'm strong now, really strong, and I've been taking singing lessons. I feel like I'm approaching a place where I feel 16 again, as though it was all a bad dream and the price I paid wasn't damnation.

Psychedelics have played a very small part of my journey, and aren't a normal part of my life. Instead my interest is in cooking and proper nutrition, but you can't look into that too deeply without realizing that not that long ago the food we ate was psychedelic, comparable to microdosing, but that has gone away now that food seems to only exist to be efficient or to be sold. Finding ingredients good enough to make food truly sublime is difficult if you don't grow it yourself. For example, raw milk has IPA in it, which is an auxin that protects against alzheimers. Before the soil was so contaminated people got fulvic acids from the dirt on their vegetables. I could go on, but you get my point. My interest in psychedelia is actually nutritional, and recreative in the sense that you can use good nutrition to recompose, recreate, your body to heal it.

Because of my experiences with people who have no respect for boundaries I can misread friendliness for an attack, so I might not be the best fit here. I'm still learning how to be comfortable in my own skin again. I don't mind being told to leave. I respect boundaries.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to you.

No one will ask you to leave, and no one here will be allowed to attack you.

Your comments and perspectives about nutrition are intriguing, I hope you share more with us.

Thanks.

One of the most surprising results I found is that turmeric when fermented or paired with freshly ground black pepper, so it can be absorbed better, is just as profound on the mind as things like weed or shrooms. The difference is that turmeric does not force you to look at its light. You have to put yourself in a position to see what it is trying to teach you, which requires a lot of movement and flexibility training. I was practicing with a quarterstaff at the time to help me build the upper body muscles used in singing and practicing toe-first walking to strengthen my legs and core when I noticed this. I assume yoga would work as well. There is something about how it interacts with the nerves in your tendons that makes it much easier to sense how you can move, and this rapidly opens up a world of new possibilities for what your mind can do.

The way I explain this is that if you step on a slippery surface, then your mind will become frigid as it puts more focus onto balance, and anything that would threaten your balance will be less likely to occur to you. Similarly smiling will make you feel an inkling of happiness that can snowball into a lot of happiness. Your posture, by which I mean how your muscles are grabbing your skeleton, and your mindset are very closely linked, so learning how to adopt a wide range of postures lets you more easily adapt to a given situation because you can choose to fall into the ones you believe will be useful. I've actually used this concept to replicate some of the effects shrooms can have on your eyes by carefully examining what the muscles in my face were doing during the experience. Using a mirror can help with this. It's not the full experience on its own, just like smiling isn't a lot of happiness on its own. It's just an inkling, but enough to notice.

A relevant tangent is I once read an account by a lady who was commenting on how she found her husband more appealing when they went to a bar. It was not the alcohol, but instead the way his gait changed when they walked through the door, before any inebriation. Once I started realizing some of this stuff that story lit up in my mind.

One of the things that interests me is the possibility of fermentation teks. For example, what's possible if you infuse kombucha with various plants, perhaps some that aren't even well known for their psychedelic uses? I'm inexperienced with fermentation, but I do know a guy who brews his own kombucha regularly and whenever he has time for me I want to learn from him.

Welcome Hooligan!
That your path in finding your true Self may be filled with joy and happiness.

I have always felt that the items we consume creates the foundations of our collective perceptions.
That would imply that we can change our collective perceptions by changing our consumption-patterns.
Which could also explain the radically different cultures across the world. And now the emerging uni-culture, that is currently evolving, since we are all starting to eat the same items from across the world.

You can easily ferment vegetables by keeping them in a jar filled with salty water (2.5-5%).

Stay awake and flux with joy!

The fact that you stood for something larger than your own agendas and personal gain in identifying and doing something about the abuse is a huge thing. I was abused growing up severely. My family are pretty much sociopathic narcissists and of the variety that have never had limits. Many abusive people have limits maybe even your brother (not in any way to defend him in the slightest). Mine didn't to the degree that even having my own thoughts and being my own person was an excuse to eliminate resistance to their abuse. They would punish me for existing. I've met some sick people but only they went that far and when I say sick I've been homeless and lived in the lowest possible places you can live scraping the bottom with people in and out of prison for horrible things, most of them that die well before their time or spend most of it behind bars. In contrast I could exist around those people even if it was a sh*tty existence. Puts it into perspective. Oh and I'm adopted so from an identity perspective there's the abuse which is horrific and life changing and then there is the who am I, who is the family, is this even real to go along with it. The cluster fuck of being a child and not even being allowed to be a child and everything being wrong with me, and then being adopted and not knowing who the f*ck you are.

I'm early thirties now. Psychedelics changed my life. Along with lots of baby steps towards a better life they made a worthy ally. Those baby steps add up. And people like yourself who want to put a stop to the abusive cycle make a huge difference to the journey someone who is being abused is on. I know because despite that never coming as a child I found it as I got older in some amazing people. There are good people out there and the fact you care about what that child is going through and the fact it affected you like it did means you're one of them! Don't forget that.

The mind-body connection is real. As someone who deals with reoccurring depersonalization and dissociation, I have struggled with wanting to be in my body. You learn in trauma to hide away and you can become adversarial towards your body treating it like it's not enough. It's a form of escape. And no matter where we go, there we are. You don't really escape but that behaviour serves a purpose from an evolutionary perspective in repressing your experience because if you didn't it would make you vulnerable. Vulnerability is the hardest thing to deal with when traumatized but its ultimately the way home. It IS home.

Welcome Hooligan!

Its always a plus to look outside of these substances for peace of mind. People tend to neglect how what we eat changes how we feel.