Links and notes in order of mention:
Casey “not-like-the-other-psychiatrists” Paleos and the NYC psychedelic therapy scene around Fluence are big GPM (II-IV).
“Key competencies for psychedelic treatment in real-world mental health care settings” Wolff et al., 2025
Some other points on The Tell:
-I think Amy Griffin is involved with an extremely dubious scene of psychedelic therapists/sitters, all revolving around the orbit of MAPS, T Cody Swift, NYU, (I have no evidence to back this, but I would be entirely unsurprised to see connections with NYC-based Fluence et al.).
-It was reckless for Olivia, the “practitioner” that Amy and John Griffin worked with, to go into the session with Amy, intending to look for repressed memories of sexual abuse.
-There are numerous other glaringly large red flags in Olivia’s practice e.g. this whole quote:
““AS TIME WENT ON, I found myself asking more people if I could share my story with them. I understood that it was a lot to hear, and the person listening needed to be ready to hear it. But I also understood that to tell—the thing I promised I would never do—was a gift to myself. Each time I gave myself permission to tell, I felt freer.Sometimes, when I told people, they praised me for doing “the work,” because, they said, it made me a better example to my children, a better wife to my husband, or a better friend to those closest to me. Women are always doing things so we can be better for other people. My relationships had changed for the better, but I didn’t do it for anyone else. I did it for me.There is also, I’ve learned, a way that people sometimes respond when I tell them about my experience. They grow tight, zipped up, locked away. “I don’t think I could do anything like that,” they say. “I’m too much of a control freak. And besides, I don’t think I want to know. What if I don’t have the space for “ it? What if I find out something that I can’t deal with? I don’t have the time to process what comes up on the other end. Why would I want to wallow in the pain?” Or the line I hear the most: “If I don’t remember something, isn’t there a good reason for that?” In these comments, I hear the sound of their tell—the thing that nags at them with gnawed edges, the way it did at me for so long.Olivia laughed when I told her this. “You and I both know those are probably the people who need it the most,” she said. “Just like you did.”She was visiting me and John on a summer night not unlike the one when she’d first entered my life. MDMA had recently been legalized for therapeutic use in Australia, which indicated that the rest of the Western world would likely follow in the years to come. I was wearing the bracelet Olivia had given me for my birthday a year earlier, which had become one of my most cherished possessions—a tangible link to the leap of faith I’d taken. Just like the one I’d held on her wrist “during my first session, the bracelet was made of coins that I now knew dated to 1912, the year MDMA was invented.”
-There are big question marks for me about how and why this book got published. It seems a literary agent sought out Amy, although Amy’s writing was originally intended entirely for herself. It feels incredibly fast, almost like running into publishing a memoir. Ironically, Amy claims that her entire therapy process has been about teaching her to slow down? This feels like the fastest sprint into blowing up a massive and still very fresh story involving repressed memories. Though I have a lot of reservations about saying this, I feel that Amy is being exploited in some ways by the publishing behemoth that put this book into the public consciousness.
-Olivia of all people should have been strongly warning about this book being published — my guess is though is that she’s probably all on board, rationalising as being guided by Amy’s inner healing intelligence.
-Amy isn’t without agency in this — I’m not saying she has been ‘brainwashed’ or is in a cult. But she’s definitely repeating the Grof party line, without ever mentioning him. I think she might be the greatest example of Grof Promulgation Matrices four (GPM IV). Amy is somone who has every resource available to look at participate in good research. She has every financial resource available to fund women’s research and companies, and she does. Her first big investment was in…Goop. Gwenyth Paltrow. That is who Amy Griffin is — we should believe her, because she has told us exactly who she is. Amy lives in a world without intersectionality. which leads me to the next point
-There are many extremely valid reasons why you shouldn’t tell people your story. It is not safe for many people to tell their story. They don’t deserve to hear it. They can’t hear. Or, just simply, you don’t feel the need to tell them. Stories hold different weights for everyone — some big some non-existent. This insistance to “tell” is such a huge, glaring point that she never puts any conditions around. It reminds me of myself at 23-ish, 2011-ish. I had a friend from an extremely strict family. There were many layers of culture, religion, and probably just plain abuse. She was dating a white guy and her parents could not find out. She was clear about this. I told her she should just tell! It will be so freeing! You have a right to — you need to live your truth. I was an idiot — I did not understand. Many years later, I look and see how she tried to teach me and explain to me why that wasn’t possible. I understand a lot better now after a lot of experience working in family court and family violence response services.
This whole thing is just…deeply unsettling to me
Then of course there’s the whole thing of John Griffin donating $1 million to fund the MAPS phase III trials. This was a few months after the Phase II abuse became public throug Olivia Goldhill’s reporting
Of course this is all tied to PSFC.
OAnd his $77million townhouse.
Don’t worry though, John is figuring out why poverty persists.
If Grof had been a 20-something dude in 2025 telling you about doing a huge hit of Salvia in highschool instead of a 25-year old psychiatrist in 1956 Czechlosovakia who writes books about doing LSD for the first time:
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