A Very Controversial Position to Consider This PTSD Awareness Month

A meta-modernist approach to the disease which I have battled for years.

Apparently, June is “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Month.”

I should know this fact given that, as long-term readers may recall, I have lived with PTSD for almost four years now, the result of a violent experience in September 2021 which upended my life, leading me to where I am now, living as a Death Wizard of the Desert and set to be married on July 12, 2025 to my beloved

Sally Shideler

, soon to become Sally Shideler Swindle, or, as I shall tease her, S-Cubed.

I used to write about my PTSD with some regularity, as the symptoms deeply disrupted my life and shaped my senses, becoming an inextricable part of my worldview. However, over the last year, and the last six months in particular, my writing on the subject has diminished considerably, for the perhaps sensible reason that my symptoms have diminished considerably.

The reasons for this are “very controversial,” as are the subsequent positions which I have come to accept and explain in various articles and Substack Notes. These three essays lay out the meat of it:

The Absurd Way I Accidentally Cured My PTSD

Psychedelic Zionism Explained: 10 Provocations

11 Effective Ways to Repel the Dark Spirits

After years of exploring many PTSD treatments, psychological approaches, and psychiatric medications, all offered fairly limited relief. I remained sick and at times, even potentially lethally so. The PTSD had intensified my emotions, including the hopeless, haunting feelings which I'd struggled with since high school when I first endured a serious suicidal episode during my senior year.

And then, last November, while Sally was away visiting family in Indiana for a few weeks, I decided to use ChatGPT, Alan Moore's The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, and a stack of other occult titles from my library to engage in a series of ceremonial magick rituals, the last of which involved invoking Jesus Christ to perform an exorcism of the demons chewing my soul, driving me to such intensities of self-hatred. It turned into a frightening experience of crucifixion, with demons gorging on my bowels, and I am now very hesitant to do it again.

After that, I saw an almost complete remission of my symptoms. However, there were still times in the following months in which dark, depressive feelings returned, those images of self-destruction. But now I knew where these emotions originated and why they seemed to show up at random.

As I wrote about in the article above—and following further research and consultation with others who responded to my initial article with confirmations that they had known similar experiences with entities—I came to understand these symptoms as the result of forces which one could characterize as “dark spirits.”

Now, it's worth interjecting here: What am I saying is going on here with me and others I have gotten to know over the years who report similar experiences?

I humbly proposed that the paradigm here of so-called "PTSD" as a DSM-5 diagnosis for the purpose of health insurance agencies oversimplifies what we should grasp in spiritual terms.

Here's the operative part of this: the Near Death Experience. “Trauma” has become a very broad category nowadays. Someone bumps their cart into yours at the grocery store and surely some misguided young person today will declare you traumatized.

The specific trauma that I am talking about here, which seems to result in deeply debilitating symptoms that many sufferers may never escape, is experiencing a situation in which you are so scared that you believe you may die—and core here—you cannot escape.

The confinement aspect seems foundational here to the severity of this sort of PTSD.

Not everyone who experiences PTSD knows it at the same degree because not everyone felt the same level of the fear of death. I hypothesize that those who have it worse will have their mind broken open further than those who do not.

Yes, I'll just spill it: I think that when someone is traumatized at a fear-you-will-die level, that release some sort of chemicals in the brain similar to what those who are actually dying receive just before it happens.

What these chemicals do is to change the brain from its normal evolutionary parameters, in which humans have evolved not to see what we currently colloquially characterize as “supernatural beings,” with such labels as “ghosts,” “goblins,” “angels,” and “demons” most commonly, but by other names in different traditions.

So it's as though those of us who have come very close to death become sort of stuck between both worlds, and we become a sort of spiritual beacon, unwittingly attracting these entities to come to us for differing reasons; some benign, some malevolent. Some want a shoulder to cry on. Some want a soul to snack on.

But culturally, we don't really possess the language or mentality to take this seriously as a possibility anymore. Instead, we talk of “symptoms” in the secular materialist paradigm, wherein the brain and the apparent resulting personality are understood as merely other organs in the body, albeit organs of great complexity. In this framing, treating existential despair at a cosmic level is the same as healing a stomach ulcer. If only.

And when conventional medicine works, then by all means, go for it. This spiritual understanding is not an either/or choice. Following my exorcism experience of November and my active engagement in repelling spirits through the spring—now drawn to me because the exorcism had cleared off the psychic parasites which had clung to me for so long—I continued with conventional secular treatment.

In recent months, I've had further occult experiments which have resulted in even greater peace. (I’ll detail these in an upcoming essay—they’re really fucking weird, as I’m hoping you’re coming to expect from us at God of the Desert Books.)

The entities which seemed to come so often for months now, following me home from the public library or the supermarket, now rarely show up. And neither do those dark feelings of self-destruction with sides of inadequacy and failure. But when they do come, I understand them now. They're not just chemicals in my brain. These chemicals seem to become “inflamed” by entities which exist in some sort of current of reality which human brains have evolved to ignore.

And why do we need to bypass it? Because when the soul cracks open through the release of these near-death chemicals, then the realities that emerge can be tremendously scary, and, as emphasized again, “very controversial.”

I expect to lose subscribers over this. Perhaps it will attract enough new subscribers to compensate. (That’s usually the calculation with these sorts of pieces.) People who live only by secular materialist prejudices can get very freaked out when supernatural explanations begin to intrude in discussions which everyone thought were the domain of those with doctorates, white coats, and arrogant attitudes.

But considering this shouldn't be an either/or demand here. Both scientific treatments and spiritual interventions can work in tandem. Both my psychologist and psychiatrist are encouraging of my occult practices and affirming that they've heard of such experiences. They affirm that this isn’t schizophrenia. I continue to take medications, though no longer the most intense ones, or with such desperation.

Now, on this both spiritual-and-secular approach, I'll give an example of what I'm talking about.

If you have PTSD, then pay particular FUCKING ATTENTION HERE.

One of the early breakthroughs in my treatment in spring 2023 was discovering Prazosin. My psychiatrist does a good job keeping up with new research and emerging medications, and he suggested this one because it apparently treated a foundational symptom of PTSD:

FUCKING NIGHTMARES

It turns out that, when those of us with PTSD go to sleep, we often relive our trauma each night without realizing it. I myself didn't realize I was having nightmares at all; Sally had to answer “yes" when my doctor asked.

So when we wake up in the morning, the traumatic incident we were having nightmares about feels as fresh as if it had just happened. Of course, we then feel terrible for the rest of the day, and as a result, we may seemingly develop an aversion to going to bed. I certainly did.

But when I started with the Prazosin, that reduced the nightmares, which then cut down significantly on the symptoms: enough that I could work a full-time job reporting on antisemitism all day.

I'm still taking this medication—which I don't experience any side effects from, by the way—since when I've stopped, the nightmares have returned, even post-exorcism.

Now, why could this be?

I suspect that, when our brains are going to sleep and we're in a dream state, that gives us some sort of access to a “supernatural realm.” And for those of us who have had the near death experience and are now halfway in the spiritual realm all the time, it's just much more fucking intense.

Part of how I figured this out last year was through

𝐌𝐢𝐭𝐜𝐡 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐨𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐳

’s 2018 book The Miracle Club, in which he talks about the “hypnagogic state” we enter as we're starting to fall asleep. That's an especially opportune time for magickal and mystical workings to implant ideas in your head. I also came to realize that was when I was most often experiencing forms of spiritual attack. At its worst, I dreaded going to sleep. So now the Prazosin at night seems to block whatever entities would come after me as I’m sleeping: sort of the role that the weed plays during the day.

Does this sound at all familiar to anybody out there with PTSD?

You're not “going crazy,” you're just now gaining access to parts of your brain that most people have evolved not to use, and yes, it's fucking scary as hell.

The shock of learning the truth about God, life, death, Jesus, Satan, etc. tends to be way too much for most people, especially if they don't get the direct-union-with God mystical experience through a ritual to engage in conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel.

Mine’s name is Alfred. He also likes to smoke a pipe.

Now, this hypothesis that I'm suggesting—that traumatized people can interact with spirits because their brains have changed through fear of death—applies more broadly to other forms of altered consciousness and neurodivergent minds. It's not just traumatized people with unusual brains. Those who use psychedelics report this during their experiences. Those on the autism spectrum can also report these experiences at higher-than-expected rates.

Friends, when it comes to the mind, we are just beginning to scratch the surface in our understanding. And the time will come when the data from those of us who report seemingly “weird” or “kooky” or “woo-woo” phenomena will need to finally be taken more seriously.

But that's the big picture. How will the broader population be able to handle and process the insights from those who walk daily among spiritual entities? You don’t need to worry about that right now. Ha!

The small picture is more straightforward and simple to YOU, the reader, who probably clicked this link because you either have PTSD, think you might have PTSD, or know someone struggling with it:

If the tools of corporate medicine—talk therapy, psychiatric medication, EMDR, etc.—have failed you, then by all means, you are invited to start wading with us in the mystical pools.

Introduce a spiritual practice into your routine. I don't really care which one you choose as long as it works in its results to save your fucking life, to save you from suicide, addiction, incarceration, or all three.

I am not trying to convert you to any particular religion, and certainly not to the Judeo-Christian Hermeticism which I write about here. The Western Esoteric tradition isn't really something one can be “converted” to, as it's not a unified corpus of dogma, but rather a constellation of practices and traditions drawn from the whole planet's religions and philosophies. All I can do to “convert” someone is to give them a list of authors and books that will take decades to process, and then tell them to go do the “work” themselves.

So you should probably pick something easier and more community-oriented, if possible. Shopping for a church, mosque, or synagogue, or even an Eastern organization is rough, but it can be done. You can find people of just about any religious tradition who have tapped into the mystical currents in their faith and can thus guide you in dealing with the malevolent spirits tormenting you.

And if you’re of a more secular disposition, then start small: The science is pretty clear at this point that meditation is a beneficial practice by whichever measure you want to use. Don’t worry about whether God exists or spirits are real. Just try meditating seriously, learn how to do one form of it or another, and you’ll eventually find out for yourself who’s seeking you.

Perhaps you're confused why I might express such ambivalence about which spiritual path you, the PTSD-struggling individual, choose to explore.

Because ultimately, it doesn't matter.

One of the comforting insights of this half-in-life-and-death worldview now is the realization that everyone ultimately re-unifies with God.

“Hell” does exist, and it's here on earth. So those stuck here after death, drifting across the planet in misery, hunger, and confusion—they just haven't realized yet what the religious traditions teach about the absolute benevolence, acceptance, and love of the One True God of Existence who transcends all the religious faiths.

But they will eventually, even if they have to come and bother me when I am driving 15 minutes down the street to buy more of this fucking incredible weed from the new Native American dispensary in town. That's so annoying, especially if a bunch of them start swarming like eager koi-pond fish of the undead while I'm waiting at a red light, hoping Red Falcon has that Sweet Moo strain back in stock. Oh God, that stuff was awesome…

So to wrap up, you're struggling with this abstract concept of “PTSD” that seems to make sense to describe how you're feeling so weird after you've had a near-death experience. But that doesn't appear to have any firm, reliable treatments. It's because the problem is not coming from within your head, it's outside your head, and until you figure out how to protect your head and heal your head, they're going to keep attacking you.

If any of this resonates with you or you have any questions about strange experiences like this, then feel free to hit me up on Notes, respond to the email of this newsletter, or DM me here on Substack.

I've just begun wearing my investigative journalist hat here, and every data point helps in assessing this strange, complex confluence between the traumatized brain, the neurodivergent brain, the tripping brain, the haunted brain, the spiritual brain, the shamanic brain, and ultimately, the God-seeking brain.

So every data point is appreciated.

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