What if Modern Mental Health Is Wrong?
Why Dr. Roger McFillin Turned Against Modern "Mental Health"
I first encountered Roger McFillin while reading his Substack, Radically Genuine. It was a brazen opinion piece he published, damning the medicalizing and labeling of young women with strong emotions as “borderlines.” Was this guy for real?
I had to know more. So I travelled across the country a conference where he was presenting last December. He interviewed me on his podcast, and I interviewed him on mine. He became one of those friends who shocks and challenges you with raw truths you kind of know, but you don’t dare speak them, because if you did, it would break things. And there’d be no going back.
Today I’m finally publishing the interview he gave me six months, which I withheld until now on the advice of my lawyer at the time, who said to avoid producing any content that would be perceived as inflammatory by the California Board of Psychology, who spent the last few years trying to shut down my work. Alas, censoring myself made no difference, and now I’m suing them in federal court for violating my right to free speech (you can read about it here).
So now I speak freely, and speak with others when I feel like it. Enjoy.
You can learn about my work here:
My Book, Re-Regulated
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about trauma is that if you understand it, you should be able to move past it.
When I say trauma, I don’t mean one difficult event. I mean childhood grooming, childhood sexual abuse, parental abuse that is very hard to discuss, years of severe bullying and physical assaults after school, and rejection of peers because I was from another country. So much so, that as soon as I turned 18 I made plans to leave. And I did. It wasn’t one experience. It was years of my nervous system learning that the world wasn’t safe. My body was stuck there and I could not unstick myself!
Cognitively, I knew what had happened. I didn’t deny it. I understood it. I took psychology classes. I read the books. I learned everything I could about trauma. I tried therapy multiple times over the years. I tried nearly every SSRI and other psychiatric medications my doctors recommended.
But none of those things answered the question I was really asking:
How do I stop feeling like I’m still in danger when I’m not?
I didn’t want to be a victim. I didn’t want to keep talking about the past forever. The truth is, I often couldn’t. Every time I tried to go back there, my body would become so activated that I would either shut down or become overwhelmed. I didn’t have the skills to regulate my nervous system well enough to process those memories safely.
What I’ve come to understand is that insight and healing are not the same thing.
Trauma doesn’t only live in our memories. It changes how our nervous system responds to the world. My brain knew I was safe, but my body hadn’t gotten the message.
That has been the biggest shift for me. Instead of trying to force myself to revisit every painful memory, I’m finally learning how to help my nervous system feel safe in the present. I finally have a therapy that understands that I don’t need to talk about every single incident. Learning regulation first has made healing feel possible in a way that years of simply understanding trauma never did.
The part about fragility resonated with me. I've noticed this phenomenon in which people think it's malevolent to ask a question. I'm not talking about questions that truly are inappropriate or abusive. I'm talking about sincere questions that help one person to understand where the other person is coming from. This trend worries me.