• I've included them so that you can more easily see how I've constructed this timeline from the source material that I reference throughout this post (e.g. news articles, posts on social media, etc.)
• Each in-text citation is linked to a different part of this post where I've provided the corresponding reference.
• They look like this (for example):
  • [AA19c]
  • [EW23a]
• And their meanings are like this:
  • [AA19c] -- "Annie Altman, 2019, c"
  • [EW23a] -- "Elizabeth Weil, 2023, a"
• Specifically:
  • The first two upper-case letters stand for the first and last name of the author of the reference.
    • Example: "AA" for "Annie Altman".
  • The two numbers that follow represent the year in which the reference was published.
    • Example: "19" for "2019".
  • The final lower-case letter doesn't have a specific meaning. It's just for distinguishing between different references published in the same year that would otherwise look the same.
    • Example: "[AA19c]" vs "[AA19b]".
• Note: some of the links on these in-text citations are currently outdated and/or don't work. For now, just use Command-F/Control-F, or scroll down manually, to see the corresponding refernece for each in-text citation.

• The month and day of Annie's birthday is currently provided on her account on X (formerly Twitter):

  • 

• The birth years of Max, Jack, and Annie can be deduced from (e.g.) [EW23a], this article, this tweet, etc.
• $⟹$Sam is ~9 years older than Annie, Max is ~7 years older than Annie, Jack is ~5 years older than Annie.

Note: I initially added these to this post because they provided evidence that Annie was, indeed, Sam Altman's actual sister. As of January 2025, I doubt that anyone would question this, e.g. given that Annie filed a lawsuit against Sam on January 6, 2025, and that Connie, Sam, Max, Jack, provided a public statement in response on January 7, 2025. 

However, before January 2025, there were some people who were skeptical that Annie Altman (and her associated accounts and writings on the Internet) were actually real/authentic and/or that Annie Altman was Sam Altman's actual sister, e.g. to the point that Annie posted this on November 22, 2023:
 

Source: https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1727224272522023287

For now, I've decided to keep these photos in this post, because they also provide evidence supporting Annie's claim that she used to interact with with her family up until June 2020, when she initiated no contact with them (which, as I understand it, has continued to the present, except for the phone calls Annie had with Sam in late 2021.)
 

• On November 13, 2021, Annie wrote: "I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman." [AA21a]
• September 10, 2022, Annie wrote: "Sam and Jack, I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers. “Forgive them father for they know not what they’ve done” Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten." [AA22a]
• Note on how I determined "between January 8, 1994 and January 8, 1997":
  • It seems that definitions vary regarding the age range in which a human is considered a "baby".
    • Some say "0-12 months." (Example.)
    • Others say "0-3 years." (Example.)
  • So, I just went with the conservative definition of "0-3 years."
  • Thus, because Annie was born on January 8, 1994, the abuse, which perhaps started with "dwarf tossing" of Annie when she was a baby (0-3 years old), and then escalated over time, must have began between January 8, 1994 and January 8, 1997.

• "Things Grandma was right about..."dwarf tossing” with my baby body was wrong" [AA24n]
• Annie has also written that her grandmother (who I think was Marjori Mae “Peggy” Francis Gibstine) reprimanded Connie for neglecting Annie -- see [AA24p].

Image source: https://x.com/sama/status/467486655872385025

• In one of the Altman family pictures above, from when Jack was younger, Jack does indeed look a bit heavier:

• The question here being, "why?"
• A possible answer

• "20. As a direct and proximate result of the aforementioned acts, Defendant, Sam Altman, created in Plaintiff’s mind, a well-founded fear of imminent peril, caused by Defendant Sam Altman’s ability to commit an unwanted and forceful sexual assault and battery, and Defendant, Sam Altman, by committing the aforementioned acts, thereby committed a sexual assault upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman." [MLW25a]
• "22. Defendant Sam Altman’s actions amounted to willful and wanton misconduct and/or a reckless disregard for the health and safety of Plaintiff, Ann Altman." [MLW25a]
• "23. As a direct and proximate result of the foregoing acts of sexual assault upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman, by Defendant, Sam Altman, Plaintiff has suffered great bodily injury, including but not limited to, physical injuries associated with the harms committed; she has also experienced PTSD, severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression, which is expected to continue into the future; she has experienced embarrassment and humiliation; Plaintiff has incurred numerous medical bills and other health-related bills as a result of medical and mental health treatment for her injuries, and is expected to incur the same in the future; she has lost wages and benefits she would have otherwise received, but for the sexual assault by Defendant; and may suffer such loss of wages and benefits in the future; she has suffered a loss of enjoyment of a normal life as a consequence of her emotional injuries and she has lost her ability to engage in the same kinds of normal activities, all to her damage." [MLW25a]
• "WHEREFORE, Plaintiff, Ann Altman, requests that judgment be entered on her behalf against Defendant, Samuel Altman, for actual damages in a sum in excess of Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars ($75,000.00), for punitive damages, and for costs of suit." [MLW25a]
• Annie has stated that:
  • Sam was something like her "first {sex work} client" [AA23j]
  • Sam used her to "help him figure out his sexuality" [AA23a]
  • Her brothers Sam and Jack "touched her." [AA22a]
    • (implied: in an inappropriate / nonconsensual way that would be classified as sexual abuse.)
  • ""I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you."" [AA23a]
  • ""Was he “really aware of his sexuality really young” or was he abusing his little sister to figure it out hmmmmmm"" [AA22d]

Note 1: this book is not a light read. It contains graphic descriptions of horrible events, e.g. childhood sexual abuse, and the effects of traumatizing events.

Note 2: Bessel van der Kolk cites hundreds of scientific studies throughout his book. He also uses footnotes extensively throughout his book to indicate the sources from which he draws various statistics, empirical results, observations, etc. Reproducing all the footnotes and cited studies from Kolk's book here would make this already-long section even longer, so for now I am not going to do so. However, you can of course go check them yourself (and doing so is of course good epistemic practice.) You can get the book here on Amazon.
 

• Prologue - Facing Trauma
  • "Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit."
  • "Traumatic experiences do leave traces, whether on a large scale (on our histories and cultures) or close to home, on our families, with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems."
  • "Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims, combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds, trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability. While we all want to move beyond trauma, the part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival (deep below our rational brain) is not very good at denial. Long after a traumatic experience is over, it may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed brain circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones. This precipitates unpleasant emotions intense physical sensations, and impulsive and aggressive actions. These posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption."
  • "Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failing."
• Chapter 1 - Lessons From Vietnam Veterans
  • "Kardiner reported the same phenomena I was seeing: After the war his patients {World War I veterans} were overtaken by a sense of futility; they became withdrawn and detached, even if they had functioned well before. What Kardiner called “traumatic neuroses,” today we call posttraumatic stress disorder—PTSD. Kardiner noted that sufferers from traumatic neuroses develop a chronic vigilance for and sensitivity to threat. His summation especially caught my eye: “The nucleus of the neurosis is a physioneurosis. ” In other words, posttraumatic stress isn’t “all in one’s head,” as some people supposed, but has a physiological basis. Kardiner understood even then that the symptoms have their origin in the entire body’s response to the original trauma."
  • "Working at the VA {Boston Veterans Administration Clinic} I soon discovered how excruciating it can be to face reality. This was true both for my patients and for myself. We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?"
  • "Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated?"
  • "It’s hard enough to face the suffering that has been inflicted by others, but deep down many traumatized people are even more haunted by the shame they feel about what they themselves did or did not do under the circumstances. They despise themselves for how terrified, dependent, excited, or enraged they felt. In later years I encountered a similar phenomenon in victims of child abuse: Most of them suffer from agonizing shame about the actions they took to survive and maintain a connection with the person who abused them. This was particularly true if the abuser was someone close to the child, someone the child depended on, as is so often the case. The result can be confusion about whether one was a victim or a willing participant, which in turn leads to bewilderment about the difference between love and terror; pain and pleasure."
  • "Experiencing Bill’s flashback firsthand in my office helped me realize the agony that regularly visited the veterans I was trying to treat and helped me appreciate again how critical it was to find a solution. The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop...When we gave the Rorschach test to twenty-one additional veterans, the response was consistent: Sixteen of them, on seeing the second card, reacted as if they were experiencing a wartime trauma. The second Rorschach card is the first card that contains color and often elicits so-called color shock in response. The veterans interpreted this card with descriptions like “These are the bowels of my friend Jim after a mortar shell ripped him open” and “This is the neck of my friend Danny after his head was blown off by a shell while we were eating lunch. ” None of them mentioned dancing monks, fluttering butterflies, men on motorcycles, or any of the other ordinary, sometimes whimsical images that most people see. While the majority of the veterans were greatly upset by what they saw, the reactions of the remaining five were even more alarming: They simply went blank. “This is nothing, ” one observed, “just a bunch of ink. ” They were right, of course, but the normal human response to ambiguous stimuli is to use our imagination to read something into them. We learned from these Rorschach tests that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between. We also learned that trauma affects the imagination. The five men who saw nothing in the blots had lost the capacity to let their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots they were not displaying the mental flexibility that is the hallmark of imagination. They simply kept replaying an old reel...The Rorschach tests also taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people. For most of us a man coming down the street is just someone taking a walk. A rape victim, however, may see a person who is about to molest her and go into a panic. A stern schoolteacher may be an intimidating presence to an average kid, but for a child whose stepfather beats him up, she may represent a torturer and precipitate a rage attack or a terrified cowering in the corner."
  • "In those early days at the VA, we labeled our veterans with all sorts of diagnoses—alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, mood disorder, even schizophrenia—and we tried every treatment in our textbooks. But for all our efforts it became clear that we were actually accomplishing very little. The powerful drugs we prescribed often left the men in such a fog that they could barely function. When we encouraged them to talk about the precise details of a traumatic event, we often inadvertently triggered a full-blown flashback, rather than helping them resolve the issue. Many of them dropped out of treatment because we were not only failing to help but also sometimes making things worse...A turning point arrived in 1980, when a group of Vietnam veterans, aided by the New York psychoanalysts Chaim Shatan and Robert J. Lifton, successfully lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis: posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which described a cluster of symptoms that was common, to a greater or lesser extent, to all of our veterans. Systematically identifying the symptoms and grouping them together into a disorder finally gave a name to the suffering of people who were overwhelmed by horror and helplessness. With the conceptual framework of PTSD in place, the stage was set for a radical change in our understanding of our patients. This eventually led to an explosion of research and attempts at finding effective treatments. Inspired by the possibilities presented by this new diagnosis, I proposed a study on the biology of traumatic memories to the VA. Did the memories of those suffering from PTSD differ from those of others? For most people the memory of an unpleasant event eventually fades or is transformed into something more benign. But most of our patients were unable to make their past into a story that happened long ago."
  • "In my new job {psychopharmacology at the Massachussetts Mental Health Center, beginning 1982} I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital. Furthermore, the textbook said, “There is little agreement about the role of father-daughter incest as a source of serious subsequent psychopathology. ” My patients with incest histories were hardly free of “subsequent psychopathology” —they were profoundly depressed, confused, and often engaged in bizarrely self-harmful behaviors, such as cutting themselves with razor blades. The textbook went on to practically endorse incest, explaining that “such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world. ” In fact, as it turned out, incest had devastating effects on women’s well-being. In many ways these patients were not so different from the veterans I had just left behind at the VA. They also had nightmares and flashbacks. They also alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships. As we now know, war is not the only calamity that leaves human lives in ruins. While about a quarter of the soldiers who serve in war zones are expected to develop serious posttraumatic problems, the majority of Americans experience a violent crime at some time during their lives, and more accurate reporting has revealed that twelve million women in the United States have been victims of rape. More than half of all rapes occur in girls below age fifteen. For many people the war begins at home: Each year about three million children in the United States are reported as victims of child abuse and neglect. One million of these cases are serious and credible enough to force local child protective services or the courts to take action. In other words, for every soldier who serves in a war zone abroad, there are ten children who are endangered in their own homes. This is particularly tragic, since it is very difficult for growing children to recover when the source of terror and pain is not enemy combatants but their own caretakers."
  • "In the three decades since I met Tom, we have learned an enormous amount not only about the impact and manifestations of trauma but also about ways to help traumatized people find their way back. Since the early 1990s brain-imaging tools have started to show us what actually happens inside the brains of traumatized people. This has proven essential to understanding the damage inflicted by trauma and has guided us to formulate entirely new avenues of repair. We have also begun to understand how overwhelming experiences affect our innermost sensations and our relationship to our physical reality—the core of who we are. We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present. Our search to understand trauma has led us to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also about the processes by which it heals."
• Chapter 2 - Revolutions in Understanding Mind and Brain
  • "We now know that more than half the people who seek psychiatric care have been assaulted, abandoned, neglected, or even raped as children, or have witnessed violence in their families. But such experiences seemed to be off the table during rounds. I was often surprised by the dispassionate way patients’ symptoms were discussed and by how much time was spent on trying to manage their suicidal thoughts and self-destructive behaviors, rather than on understanding the possible causes of their despair and helplessness."
  • "This made me wonder: Our patients had hallucinations—the doctors routinely asked about them and noted them as signs of how disturbed the patients were. But if the stories I’d heard in the wee hours were true, could it be that these “hallucinations” were in fact the fragmented memories of real experiences? Were hallucinations just the concoctions of sick brains? Could people make up physical sensations they had never experienced? Was there a clear line between creativity and pathological imagination? Between memory and imagination? These questions remain unanswered to this day, but research has shown that people who’ve been abused as children often feel sensations (such as abdominal pain) that have no obvious physical cause; they hear voices warning of danger or accusing them of heinous crimes."
  • "In my role as recreation leader I noticed other things: As a group the patients were strikingly clumsy and physically uncoordinated. When we went camping, most of them stood helplessly by as I pitched the tents. We almost capsized once in a squall on the Charles River because they huddled rigidly in the lee, unable to grasp that they needed to shift position to balance the boat. In volleyball games the staff members invariably were much better coordinated than the patients. Another characteristic they shared was that even their most relaxed conversations seemed stilted, lacking the natural flow of gestures and facial expressions that are typical among friends. The relevance of these observations became clear only after I’d met the body-based therapists Peter Levine and Pat Ogden; in the later chapters I’ll have a lot to say about how trauma is held in people’s bodies."
  • "INESCAPABLE SHOCK -- Preoccupied with so many lingering questions about traumatic stress, I became intrigued with the idea that the nascent field of neuroscience could provide some answers and started to attend the meetings of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). In 1984 the ACNP offered many fascinating lectures about drug development, but it was not until a few hours before my scheduled flight back to Boston that I heard a presentation by Steven Maier of the University of Colorado, who had collaborated with Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania. His topic was learned helplessness in animals. Maier and Seligman had repeatedly administered painful electric shocks to dogs who were trapped in locked cages. They called this condition “inescapable shock.” Being a dog lover, I realized that I could never have done such research myself, but I was curious about how this cruelty would affect the animals. After administering several courses of electric shock, the researchers opened the doors of the cages and then shocked the dogs again. A group of control dogs who had never been shocked before immediately ran away, but the dogs who had earlier been subjected to inescapable shock made no attempt to flee, even when the door was wide open—they just lay there, whimpering and defecating. The mere opportunity to escape does not necessarily make traumatized animals, or people, take the road to freedom. Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know. I was riveted by Maier’s account. What they had done to these poor dogs was exactly what had happened to my traumatized human patients. They, too, had been exposed to somebody (or something) who had inflicted terrible harm on them—harm they had no way of escaping. I made a rapid mental review of the patients I had treated. Almost all had in some way been trapped or immobilized, unable to take action to stave off the inevitable. Their fight/flight response had been thwarted, and the result was either extreme agitation or collapse. Maier and Seligman also found that traumatized dogs secreted much larger amounts of stress hormones than was normal. This supported what we were beginning to learn about the biological underpinnings of traumatic stress. A group of young researchers, among them Steve Southwick and John Krystal at Yale, Arieh Shalev at Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem, Frank Putnam at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and Roger Pitman, later at Harvard, were all finding that traumatized people keep secreting large amounts of stress hormones long after the actual danger has passed, and Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai in New York confronted us with her seemingly paradoxical findings that the levels of the stress hormone cortisol are low in PTSD. Her discoveries only started to make sense when her research clarified that cortisol puts an end to the stress response by sending an all-safe signal, and that, in PTSD, the body’s stress hormones do, in fact, not return to baseline after the threat has passed. Ideally our stress hormone system should provide a lightning-fast response to threat, but then quickly return us to equilibrium. In PTSD patients, however, the stress hormone system fails at this balancing act. Fight/flight/freeze signals continue after the danger is over, and, as in the case of the dogs, do not return to normal. Instead, the continued secretion of stress hormones is expressed as agitation and panic and, in the long term, wreaks havoc with their health."
  • "The drug revolution that started out with so much promise may in the end have done as much harm as good. The theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs has become broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession. In many places drugs have displaced therapy and enabled patients to suppress their problems without addressing the underlying issues. Antidepressants can make all the difference in the world in helping with day-to-day functioning, and if it comes to a choice between taking a sleeping pill and drinking yourself into a stupor every night to get a few hours of sleep, there is no question which is preferable. For people who are exhausted from trying to make it on their own through yoga classes, workout routines, or simply toughing it out, medications often can bring life-saving relief. The SSRIs can be very helpful in making traumatized people less enslaved by their emotions, but they should only be considered adjuncts in their overall treatment. After conducting numerous studies of medications for PTSD, I have come to realize that psychiatric medications have a serious downside, as they may deflect attention from dealing with the underlying issues. The brain-disease model takes control over people’s fate out of their own hands and puts doctors and insurance companies in charge of fixing their problems. Over the past three decades psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences. Consider the case of antidepressants. If they were indeed as effective as we have been led to believe, depression should by now have become a minor issue in our society. Instead, even as antidepressant use continues to increase, it has not made a dent in hospital admissions for depression. The number of people treated for depression has tripled over the past two decades, and one in ten Americans now take antidepressants...Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems. Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered."
• Chapter 3 - Looking Into the Brain: The Neuroscience Revolution
  • "In the early 1990s novel brain-imaging techniques opened up undreamed-of capacities to gain a sophisticated understanding about the way the brain processes information. Gigantic multimillion-dollar machines based on advanced physics and computer technology rapidly made neuroscience into one of the most popular areas for research. Positron emission tomography (PET) and, later, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) enabled scientists to visualize how different parts of the brain are activated when people are engaged in certain tasks or when they remember events from the past. For the first time we could watch the brain as it processed memories, sensations, and emotions and begin to map the circuits of mind and consciousness. The earlier technology of measuring brain chemicals like serotonin or norepinephrine had enabled scientists to look at what fueled neural activity, which is a bit like trying to understand a car’s engine by studying gasoline. Neuroimaging made it possible to see inside the engine. By doing so it has also transformed our understanding of trauma...I had just finished a study on how trauma is remembered (to be discussed in chapter 12), in which participants repeatedly told me how upsetting it was to be suddenly hijacked by images, feelings, and sounds from the past. When several said they wished they knew what trick their brains were playing on them during these flashbacks, I asked eight of them if they would be willing to return to the clinic and lie still inside a scanner (an entirely new experience that I described in detail) while we re-created a scene from the painful events that haunted them. To my surprise, all eight agreed, many of them expressing their hope that what we learned from their suffering could help other people. My research assistant, Rita Fisler, who was working with us prior to entering Harvard Medical School, sat down with every participant and carefully constructed a script that re-created their trauma moment to moment. We deliberately tried to collect just isolated fragments of their experience—particular images, sounds, and feelings—rather than the entire story, because that is how trauma is experienced...I was standing outside the scanner as Marsha underwent the procedure and could follow her physiological reactions on a monitor. The moment we turned on the tape recorder, her heart started to race, and her blood pressure jumped. Simply hearing the script activated the same physiological responses that had occurred during the accident thirteen years earlier. After the recorded script concluded and Marsha’s heart rate and blood pressure returned to normal, we played her second script: getting out of bed and brushing her teeth. This time her heart rate and blood pressure did not change...There were some puzzling dots and colors on the scan, but the biggest area of brain activation—a large red spot in the right lower center of the brain, which is the limbic area, or emotional brain—came as no surprise. It was already well known that intense emotions activate the limbic system, in particular an area within it called the amygdala. We depend on the amygdala to warn us of impending danger and to activate the body’s stress response. Our study clearly showed that when traumatized people are presented with images, sounds, or thoughts related to their particular experience, the amygdala reacts with alarm—even, as in Marsha’s case, thirteen years after the event. Activation of this fear center triggers the cascade of stress hormones and nerve impulses that drive up blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen intake— preparing the body for fight or flight. The monitors attached to Marsha’s arms recorded this physiological state of frantic arousal, even though she never totally lost track of the fact that she was resting quietly in the scanner. Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered. In other words, we had visual proof that the effects of trauma are not necessarily different from—and can overlap with—the effects of physical lesions like strokes. All trauma is preverbal. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murdered king’s body is discovered: “Oh horror! horror! horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!” Under extreme conditions people may scream obscenities, call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down. Victims of assaults and accidents sit mute and frozen in emergency rooms; traumatized children “lose their tongues” and refuse to speak. Photographs of combat soldiers show hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void. Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past. This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like the veterans in chapter, come up with what many of them call their “cover story” that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s traumatic experiences into a coherent account—a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even a seasoned reporter like the famed CBS correspondent Ed Murrow struggled to convey the atrocities he saw when the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald was liberated in 1945: “I pray you believe what I have said. I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words.” When words fail, haunting images capture the experience and return as nightmares and flashbacks. In contrast to the deactivation of Broca’s area, another region, Brodmann’s area 19, lit up in our participants. This is a region in the visual cortex that registers images when they first enter the brain. We were surprised to see brain activation in this area so long after the original experience of the trauma. Under ordinary conditions raw images registered in area 19 are rapidly diffused to other brain areas that interpret the meaning of what has been seen. Once again, we were witnessing a brain region rekindled as if the trauma were actually occurring. As we will see in chapter 12, which discusses memory, other unprocessed sense fragments of trauma, like sounds and smells and physical sensations, are also registered separately from the story itself. Similar sensations often trigger a flashback that brings them back into consciousness, apparently unmodified by the passage of time...The scans also revealed that during flashbacks, our subjects’ brains lit up only on the right side...our scans clearly showed that images of past trauma activate the right hemisphere of the brain and deactivate the left. We now know that the two halves of the brain do speak different languages. The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial, and tactual, and the left is linguistic, sequential, and analytical. While the left half of the brain does all the talking, the right half of the brain carries the music of experience. It communicates through facial expressions and body language and by making the sounds of love and sorrow: by singing, swearing, crying, dancing, or mimicking. The right brain is the first to develop in the womb, and it carries the nonverbal communication between mothers and infants. We know the left hemisphere has come online when children start to understand language and learn how to speak. This enables them to name things, compare them, understand their interrelations, and begin to communicate their own unique, subjective experiences to others. The left and right sides of the brain also process the imprints of the past in dramatically different ways. The left brain remembers facts, statistics, and the vocabulary of events. We call on it to explain our experiences and put them in order. The right brain stores memories of sound, touch, smell, and the emotions they evoke. It reacts automatically to voices, facial features, and gestures and places experienced in the past. What it recalls feels like intuitive truth—the way things are. Even as we enumerate a loved one’s virtues to a friend, our feelings may be more deeply stirred by how her face recalls the aunt we loved at age four. Under ordinary circumstances the two sides of the brain work together more or less smoothly, even in people who might be said to favor one side over the other. However, having one side or the other shut down, even temporarily, or having one side cut off entirely (as sometimes happened in early brain surgery) is disabling. Deactivation of the left hemisphere has a direct impact on the capacity to organize experience into logical sequences and to translate our shifting feelings and perceptions into words. (Broca’s area, which blacks out during flashbacks, is on the left side.) Without sequencing we can’t identify cause and effect, grasp the long-term effects of our actions, or create coherent plans for the future. People who are very upset sometimes say they are “losing their minds.” In technical terms they are experiencing the loss of executive functioning. When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. But because their left brain is not working very well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame for it. They behaved the way they did because you were ten minutes late, or because you burned the potatoes, or because you “never listen to me.” Of course, most of us have done this from time to time, but when we cool down, we hopefully can admit our mistake. Trauma interferes with this kind of awareness, and, over time, our research demonstrated why. What had happened to Marsha in the scanner gradually started to make sense. Thirteen years after her tragedy we had activated the sensations—the sounds and images from the accident— that were still stored in her memory. When these sensations came to the surface, they activated her alarm system, which caused her to react as if she were back in the hospital being told that her daughter had died. The passage of thirteen years was erased. Her sharply increased heart rate and blood pressure readings reflected her physiological state of frantic alarm. Under normal conditions people react to a threat with a temporary increase in their stress hormones. As soon as the threat is over, the hormones dissipate and the body returns to normal. The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli. The insidious effects of constantly elevated stress hormones include memory and attention problems, irritability, and sleep disorders. They also contribute to many long-term health issues, depending on which body system is most vulnerable in a particular individual. We now know that there is another possible response to threat, which our scans aren’t yet capable of measuring. Some people simply go into denial: Their bodies register the threat, but their conscious minds go on as if nothing has happened. However, even though the mind may learn to ignore the messages from the emotional brain, the alarm signals don’t stop. The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs, and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep the score...For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them—to tell a story of victimization and revenge—than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience. Our scans had revealed how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be “there” and did not know how to be “here” —fully alive in the present."
• Chapter 4 -- Running For Your Life: The Anatomy of Survival
  • "But Noam’s experience allows us to see in outline two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival. At the time the disaster occurred, he was able to take an active role by running away from it, thus becoming an agent in his own rescue. And once he had reached the safety of home, the alarm bells in his brain and body quieted. This freed his mind to make some sense of what had happened and even to imagine a creative alternative to what he had seen—a lifesaving trampoline. In contrast to Noam, traumatized people become stuck, stopped in their growth because they can’t integrate new experiences into their lives. I was very moved when the veterans of Patton’s army gave me a World War II army-issue watch for Christmas, but it was a sad memento of the year their lives had effectively stopped: 1944. Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. -- Trauma affects the entire human organism—body, mind, and brain. In PTSD the body continues to defend against a threat that belongs to the past. Healing from PTSD means being able to terminate this continued stress mobilization and restore the entire organism to safety. -- After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their life. These attempts to maintain control over unbearable physiological reactions can result in a whole range of physical symptoms, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, and other autoimmune diseases. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind, and brain...When the brain’s alarm system is turned on, it automatically triggers preprogrammed physical escape plans in the oldest parts of the brain. As in other animals, the nerves and chemicals that make up our basic brain structure have a direct connection with our body. When the old brain takes over, it partially shuts down the higher brain, our conscious mind, and propels the body to run, hide, fight, or, on occasion, freeze. By the time we are fully aware of our situation, our body may already be on the move. If the fight/flight/freeze response is successful and we escape the danger, we recover our internal equilibrium and gradually “regain our senses." If for some reason the normal response is blocked—for example, when people are held down, trapped, or otherwise prevented from taking effective action, be it in a war zone, a car accident, domestic violence, or a rape—the brain keeps secreting stress chemicals, and the brain’s electrical circuits continue to fire in vain. Long after the actual event has passed, the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists. Since at least 1889, when the French psychologist Pierre Janet published the first scientific account of traumatic stress, it has been recognized that trauma survivors are prone to “continue the action, or rather the (futile) attempt at action, which began when the thing happened.” Being able to move and do something to protect oneself is a critical factor in determining whether or not a horrible experience will leave long-lasting scars."
  • "Our rational, cognitive brain is actually the youngest part of the brain and occupies only about 30 percent of the area inside our skull. The rational brain is primarily concerned with the world outside us: understanding how things and people work and figuring out how to accomplish our goals, manage our time, and sequence our actions. Beneath the rational brain lie two evolutionarily older, and to some degree separate, brains, {1. the "ancient animal brain" (aka reptilian brain), 2. the limbic system (aka mammalian brain)} which are in charge of everything else: the moment-by-moment registration and management of our body’s physiology and the identification of comfort, safety, threat, hunger, fatigue, desire, longing, excitement, pleasure, and pain. The brain is built from the bottom up. It develops level by level within every child in the womb, just as it did in the course of evolution. The most primitive part, the part that is already online when we are born, is the ancient animal brain, often called the reptilian brain. It is located in the brain stem, just above the place where our spinal cord enters the skull. The reptilian brain is responsible for all the things that newborn babies can do: eat, sleep, wake, cry, breathe; feel temperature, hunger, wetness, and pain; and rid the body of toxins by urinating and defecating. The brain stem and the hypothalamus (which sits directly above it) together control the energy levels of the body. They coordinate the functioning of the heart and lungs and also the endocrine and immune systems, ensuring that these basic life-sustaining systems are maintained within the relatively stable internal balance known as homeostasis. Breathing, eating, sleeping, pooping, and peeing are so fundamental that their significance is easily neglected when we’re considering the complexities of mind and behavior. However, if your sleep is disturbed or your bowels don’t work, or if you always feel hungry, or if being touched makes you want to scream (as is often the case with traumatized children and adults), the entire organism is thrown into disequilibrium. It is amazing how many psychological problems involve difficulties with sleep, appetite, touch, digestion, and arousal."
  • "Danger is a normal part of life, and the brain is in charge of detecting it and organizing our response. Sensory information about the outside world arrives through our eyes, nose, ears, and skin. These sensations converge in the thalamus, an area inside the limbic system that acts as the “cook” within the brain. The thalamus stirs all the input from our perceptions into a fully blended autobiographical soup, an integrated, coherent experience of “this is what is happening to me.” The sensations are then passed on in two directions—down to the amygdala, two small almond- shaped structures that lie deeper in the limbic, unconscious brain, and up to the frontal lobes, where they reach our conscious awareness. The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the pathway to the amygdala “the low road,” which is extremely fast, and that to the frontal cortex the “high road,” which takes several milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience. However, processing by the thalamus can break down. Sights, sounds, smells, and touch are encoded as isolated, dissociated fragments, and normal memory processing disintegrates. Time freezes, so that the present danger feels like it will last forever."
  • "STAN AND UTE’S BRAINS ON TRAUMA -- On a fine September morning in 1999, Stan and Ute Lawrence, a professional couple in their forties, set out from their home in London, Ontario, to attend a business meeting in Detroit. Halfway through the journey they ran into a wall of dense fog that reduced visibility to zero in a split second. Stan immediately slammed on the brakes, coming to a standstill sideways on the highway, just missing a huge truck. An eighteen-wheeler went flying over the trunk of their car; vans and cars slammed into them and into each other. People who got out of their cars were hit as they ran for their lives. The ear-splitting crashes went on and on—with each jolt from behind they felt this would be the one that killed them. Stan and Ute were trapped in car number thirteen of an eighty-seven-car pileup, the worst road disaster in Canadian history. Then came the eerie silence. Stan struggled to open the doors and windows, but the eighteen-wheeler that had crushed their trunk was wedged against the car. Suddenly, someone was pounding on their roof. A girl was screaming, “Get me out of here—I’m on fire!” Helplessly, they saw her die as the car she’d been in was consumed by flames. The next thing they knew, a truck driver was standing on the hood of their car with a fire extinguisher. He smashed the windshield to free them, and Stan climbed through the opening. Turning around to help his wife, he saw Ute sitting frozen in her seat. Stan and the truck driver lifted her out and an ambulance took them to an emergency room. Aside from a few cuts, they were found to be physically unscathed. At home that night, neither Stan nor Ute wanted to go to sleep. They felt that if they let go, they would die. They were irritable, jumpy, and on edge. That night, and for many to come, they drank copious quantities of wine to numb their fear. They could not stop the images that were haunting them or the questions that went on and on: What if they’d left earlier? What if they hadn’t stopped for gas? After three months of this, they sought help from Dr. Ruth Lanius, a psychiatrist at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Lanius, who had been my student at the Trauma Center a few years earlier, told Stan and Ute she wanted to visualize their brains with an fMRI scan before beginning treatment. The fMRI measures neural activity by tracking changes in blood flow in the brain, and unlike the PET scan, it does not require exposure to radiation. Dr. Lanius used the same kind of script- driven imagery we had used at Harvard, capturing the images, sounds, smells, and other sensations Stan and Ute had experienced while they were trapped in the car. Stan went first and immediately went into a flashback, just as Marsha had in our Harvard study. He came out of the scanner sweating, with his heart racing and his blood pressure sky high. “This was just the way I felt during the accident, ” he reported. “I was sure I was going to die, and there was nothing I could do to save myself. ” Instead of remembering the accident as something that had happened three months earlier, Stan was reliving it."
  • "DISSOCIATION AND RELIVING -- Dissociation is the essence of trauma. The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own. The sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present, where they are literally relived. As long as the trauma is not resolved, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating, and the defensive movements and emotional responses keep getting replayed. Unlike Stan, however, many people may not be aware of the connection between their “crazy” feelings and reactions and the traumatic events that are being replayed. They have no idea why they respond to some minor irritation as if they were about to be annihilated. Flashbacks and reliving are in some ways worse that the trauma itself. A traumatic event has a beginning and an end—at some point it is over. But for people with PTSD a flashback can occur at any time, whether they are awake or asleep. There is no way of knowing when it’s going to occur again or how long it will last. People who suffer from flashbacks often organize their lives around trying to protect against them. They may compulsively go to the gym to pump iron (but finding that they are never strong enough), numb themselves with drugs, or try to cultivate an illusory sense of control in highly dangerous situations (like motorcycle racing, bungee jumping, or working as an ambulance driver). Constantly fighting unseen dangers is exhausting and leaves them fatigued, depressed, and weary. If elements of the trauma are replayed again and again, the accompanying stress hormones engrave those memories ever more deeply in the mind. Ordinary, day-to-day events become less and less compelling. Not being able to deeply take in what is going on around them makes it impossible to feel fully alive. It becomes harder to feel the joys and aggravations of ordinary life, harder to concentrate on the tasks at hand. Not being fully alive in the present keeps them more firmly imprisoned in the past. Triggered responses manifest in various ways. Veterans may react to the slightest cue—like hitting a bump in the road or seeing a kid playing in the street—as if they were in a war zone. They startle easily and become enraged or numb. Victims of childhood sexual abuse may anesthetize their sexuality and then feel intensely ashamed if they become excited by sensations or images that recall their molestation, even when those sensations are the natural pleasures associated with particular body parts. If trauma survivors are forced to discuss their experiences, one person’s blood pressure may increase while another responds with the beginnings of a migraine headache. Still others may shut down emotionally and not feel any obvious changes. However, in the lab we have no problem detecting their racing hearts and the stress hormones churning through their bodies. These reactions are irrational and largely outside people’s control. Intense and barely controllable urges and emotions make people feel crazy—and makes them feel they don’t belong to the human race. Feeling numb during birthday parties for your kids or in response to the death of loved ones makes people feel like monsters. As a result, shame becomes the dominant emotion and hiding the truth the central preoccupation. They are rarely in touch with the origins of their alienation. That is where therapy comes in —is the beginning of bringing the emotions that were generated by trauma being able to feel, the capacity to observe oneself online. However, the bottom line is that the threat-perception system of the brain has changed, and people’s physical reactions are dictated by the imprint of the past. The trauma that started “out there” is now played out on the battlefield of their own bodies, usually without a conscious connection between what happened back then and what is going on right now inside. The challenge is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened but learning how to gain mastery over one’s internal sensations and emotions. Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recovery."
  • "THE TIMEKEEPER COLLAPSES -- Both Stan and Ute had become hypersensitive and irritable after the accident, suggesting that their prefrontal cortex was struggling to maintain control in the face of stress. Stan’s flashback precipitated a more extreme reaction. The two white areas in the front of the brain (on top in the picture) are the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. When those areas are deactivated, people lose their sense of time and become trapped in the moment, without a sense of past, present, or future."
  • "THE THALAMUS SHUTS DOWN -- Look again at the scan of Stan’s flashback and you can see two more white holes in the lower half of the brain. These are his right and left thalamus—blanked out during the flashback as they were during the original trauma. As I’ve said, the thalamus functions as a “cook” —a relay station that collects sensations from the ears, eyes, and skin and integrates them into the soup that is our autobiographical memory. Breakdown of the thalamus explains why trauma is primarily remembered not as a story, a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, but as isolated sensory imprints: images, sounds, and physical sensations that are accompanied by intense emotions, usually terror and helplessness. In normal circumstances the thalamus also acts as a filter or gatekeeper. This makes it a central component of attention, concentration, and new learning—all of which are compromised by trauma. As you sit here reading, you may hear music in the background or traffic rumbling by or feel a faint gnawing in your stomach telling you it’s time for a snack. If you are able to stay focused on this page, your thalamus is helping you distinguish between sensory information that is relevant and information that you can safely ignore...People with PTSD have their floodgates wide open. Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well."
• Chapter 5 - Body-Brain Connections
  • "If we look beyond the list of specific symptoms that entail formal psychiatric diagnoses, we find that almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal (as in the case of habitually becoming enraged, shut down, overexcited, or disorganized). Usually it’s a combination of both...Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives...the critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety...Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them...After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety....For many people panic and rage are preferable to the opposite: shutting down and becoming dead to the world. Activating flight/flight at least makes them feel energized. That is why so many abused and traumatized people feel fully alive in the face of actual danger, while they go numb in situations that are more complex but objectively safe, like birthday parties or family dinners. When fighting or running does not take care of the threat, we activate the last resort—the reptilian brain, the ultimate emergency system. This system is most likely to engage when we are physically immobilized, as when we are pinned down by an attacker or when a child has no escape from a terrifying caregiver. Collapse and disengagement are controlled by the DVC, an evolutionarily ancient part of the parasympathetic nervous system that is associated with digestive symptoms like diarrhea and nausea...When you beg for your life, but the assailant ignores your pleas; when you are a terrified child lying in bed, hearing your mother scream as her boyfriend beats her up; when you see your buddy trapped under a piece of metal that you’re not strong enough to lift; when you want to push away the priest who is abusing you, but you’re afraid you’ll be punished. Immobilization is at the root of most traumas. When that occurs the DVC is likely to take over: Your heart slows down, your breathing becomes shallow, and, zombielike, you lose touch with yourself and your surroundings. You dissociate, faint and collapse...Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences—or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves. The landmark ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) study, which I’ll discuss in more detail in chapter 9, showed that women who had an early history of abuse and neglect were seven times more likely to be raped in adulthood. Women who, as children, had witnessed their mothers being assaulted by their partners had a vastly increased chance to fall victim to domestic violence. Many people feel safe as long as they can limit their social contact to superficial conversations, but actual physical contact can trigger intense reactions. However, as Porges points out, achieving any sort of deep intimacy—a close embrace, sleeping with a mate, and sex —requires allowing oneself to experience immobilization without fear. It is especially challenging for traumatized people to discern when they are actually safe and to be able to activate their defenses when they are in danger. This requires having experiences that can restore the sense of physical safety, a topic to which we’ll return many times in the chapters that follow."
  • "Porges’s work has had a profound effect on how my Trauma Center colleagues and I organize the treatment of abused children and traumatized adults. It’s true that we would probably have developed a therapeutic yoga program for women at some point, given that yoga had proved so successful in helping them calm down and get in touch with their dissociated bodies."
  • "The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/emuscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions."
• Chapter 6 -- Losing Your Body, Losing Your Self
  • "As far back as Sherry could remember, her mother had run a foster home, and their house was often packed with as many as fifteen strange, disruptive, frightened, and frightening kids who disappeared as suddenly as they arrived. Sherry had grown up taking care of these transient children, feeling that there was no room for her and her needs. “I know I wasn’t wanted, ” she told me. “I’m not sure when I first realized that, but I’ve thought about things that my mother said to me, and the signs were always there. She’d tell me, ‘You know, I don’t think you belong in this family. I think they gave us the wrong baby. ’ And she’d say it with a smile on her face. But, of course, people often pretend to joke when they say something serious. ” Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation. Sherry turned out to be a living example of these findings: Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating at any age, but it is particularly destructive for young children, who are still trying to find their place in the world. Sherry had graduated from college, but she now worked in a joyless clerical job, lived alone with her cats, and had no close friends. When I asked her about men, she told me that her only “relationship” had been with a man who’d kidnapped her while she was on a college vacation in Florida. He’d held her captive and raped her repeatedly for five consecutive days. She remembered having been curled up, terrified and frozen for most of that time, until she realized she could try to get away. She escaped by simply walking out while he was in the bathroom. When she called her mother collect for help, her mother refused to take the call...Sherry told me that she’d started to pick at her skin because it gave her some relief from feeling numb. The physical sensations made her feel more alive but also deeply ashamed—she knew she was addicted to these actions but could not stop them. She’d consulted many mental health professionals before me and had been questioned repeatedly about her “suicidal behavior"...However, in my experience, patients who cut themselves or pick at their skin like Sherry, are seldom suicidal but are trying to make themselves feel better in the only way they know. This is a difficult concept for many people to understand. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the most common response to distress is to seek out people we like and trust to help us and give us the courage to go on...But if no one has ever looked at you with loving eyes or broken out in a smile when she sees you; if no one has rushed to help you (but instead said, “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about”), then you need to discover other ways of taking care of yourself. You are likely to experiment with anything—drugs, alcohol, binge eating, or cutting—that offers some kind of relief...Struck by how frozen and uptight she was, I suggested that she see Liz, a massage therapist I had worked with previously. During their first meeting Liz positioned Sherry on the massage table, then moved to the end of the table and gently held Sherry’s feet. Lying there with her eyes closed, Sherry suddenly yelled in a panic: “Where are you?” Somehow Sherry had lost track of Liz, even though Liz was right there, with her hands on Sherry’s feet. Sherry was one of the first patients who taught me about the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience. I discovered that my professional training, with its focus on understanding and insight, had largely ignored the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves. Sherry knew that picking her skin was a destructive thing to do and that it was related to her mother’s neglect, but understanding the source of the impulse made no difference in helping her control it. -- LOSING YOUR BODY -- Once I was alerted to this, I was amazed to discover how many of my patients told me they could not feel whole areas of their bodies. Sometimes I’d ask them to close their eyes and tell me what I had put into their outstretched hands. Whether it was a car key, a quarter, or a can opener, they often could not even guess what they were holding—their sensory perceptions simply weren’t working. I talked this over with my friend Alexander McFarlane in Australia, who had observed the same phenomenon. In his laboratory in Adelaide he had studied the question: How do we know without looking at it that we’re holding a car key? Recognizing an object in the palm of your hand requires sensing its shape, weight, temperature, texture, and position. Each of those distinct sensory experiences is transmitted to a different part of the brain, which then needs to integrate them into a single perception. McFarlane found that people with PTSD often have trouble putting the picture together. When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive."
  • "HOW DO WE KNOW WE’RE ALIVE? Most early neuroimaging studies of traumatized people were like those we’ve seen in chapter 3; they focused on how subjects reacted to specific reminders of the trauma. Then, in 2004, my colleague Ruth Lanius, who scanned Stan and Ute Lawrence’s brains, posed a new question: What happens in the brains of trauma survivors when they are not thinking about the past? Her studies on the idling brain, the “default state network” (DSN), opened up a whole new chapter in understanding how trauma affects self-awareness, specifically sensory self-awareness. Dr. Lanius recruited a group of sixteen “normal” Canadians to lie in a brain scanner while thinking about nothing in particular...she asked them to focus their attention on their breathing and try to empty their minds as much as possible. She then repeated the same experiment with eighteen people who had histories of severe, chronic childhood abuse. What is your brain doing when you have nothing in particular on your mind? It turns out that you pay attention to yourself: The default state activates the brain areas that work together to create your sense of “self.” When Ruth looked at the scans of her normal subjects, she found activation of DSN regions that previous researchers had described. I like to call this the Mohawk of self-awareness, the midline structures of the brain, starting out right above our eyes, running through the center of the brain all the way to the back. All these midline structures are involved in our sense of self. The largest bright region at the back of the brain is the posterior cingulate, which gives us a physical sense of where we are—our internal GPS. It is strongly connected to the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the watchtower I discussed in chapter 4. (This connection doesn’t show up on the scan because the fMRI can’t measure it.) It is also connected with brain areas that register sensations coming from the rest of the body: the insula, which relays messages from the viscera to the emotional centers; the parietal lobes, which integrate sensory information; and the anterior cingulate, which coordinates emotions and thinking. All of these areas contribute to consciousness. The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain: The MPFC, the anterior cingulate, the parietal cortex, and the insula did not light up at all; the only area that showed a slight activation was the posterior cingulate, which is responsible for basic orientation in space. There could be only one explanation for such results: In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that accompany and define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive. The disappearance of medial prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatized people lose their sense of purpose and direction. I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it. Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired. How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn’t define what they wanted or, to be more precise, what the sensations in their bodies, the basis of all emotions, were trying to tell them? The lack of self-awareness in victims of chronic childhood trauma is sometimes so profound that they cannot recognize themselves in a mirror. Brain scans show that this is not the result of mere inattention: The structures in charge of self-recognition may be knocked out along with the structures related to self-experience."
  • "Our sensory world takes shape even before we are born. In the womb we feel amniotic fluid against our skin, we hear the faint sounds of rushing blood and a digestive tract at work, we pitch and roll with our mother’s movements. After birth, physical sensation defines our relationship to ourselves and to our surroundings. We start off being our wetness, hunger, satiation, and sleepiness. A cacophony of incomprehensible sounds and images presses in on our pristine nervous system. Even after we acquire consciousness and language, our bodily sensing system provides crucial feedback on our moment-to-moment condition. Its constant hum communicates changes in our viscera and in the muscles of our face, torso, and extremities that signal pain and comfort, as well as urges such as hunger and sexual arousal. What is taking place around us also affects our physical sensations. Seeing someone we recognize, hearing particular sounds—a piece of music, a siren—or sensing a shift in temperature all change our focus of attention and, without our being aware of it, prime our subsequent thoughts and actions. As we have seen, the job of the brain is to constantly monitor and evaluate what is going on within and around us. These evaluations are transmitted by chemical messages in the bloodstream and electrical messages in our nerves, causing subtle or dramatic changes throughout the body and brain. These shifts usually occur entirely without conscious input or awareness: The subcortical regions of the brain are astoundingly efficient in regulating our breathing, heartbeat, digestion, hormone secretion, and immune system. However, these systems can become overwhelmed if we are challenged by an ongoing threat, or even the perception of threat. This accounts for the wide array of physical problems researchers have documented in traumatized people...THE SELF UNDER THREAT -- In 2000 Damasio and his colleagues published an article in the world’s foremost scientific publication, Science, which reported that reliving a strong negative emotion causes significant changes in the brain areas that receive nerve signals from the muscles, gut, and skin—areas that are crucial for regulating basic bodily functions. The team’s brain scans showed that recalling an emotional event from the past causes us to actually reexperience the visceral sensations felt during the original event. Each type of emotion produced a characteristic pattern, distinct from the others. For example, a particular part of the brain stem was “active in sadness and anger, but not in happiness or fear.” All of these brain regions are below the limbic system, to which emotions are traditionally assigned, yet we acknowledge their involvement every time we use one of the common expressions that link strong emotions with the body: “You make me sick”; “It made my skin crawl”; “I was all choked up”; “My heart sank”; “He makes me bristle. ” The elementary self system in the brain stem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger. They startle in response to the slightest noises and are frustrated by small irritations. Their sleep is chronically disturbed, and food often loses its sensual pleasures. This in turn can trigger desperate attempts to shut those feelings down by freezing and dissociation."
  • "Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilize to manage them. But we can’t do this unless our watchtower, the MPFC, learns to observe what is going on inside us. This is why mindfulness practice, which strengthens the MPFC, is a cornerstone of recovery from trauma."
  • "Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves. The more people try to push away and ignore internal warning signs, the more likely they are to take over and leave them bewildered, confused, and ashamed. People who cannot comfortably notice what is going on inside become vulnerable to respond to any sensory shift either by shutting down or by going into a panic—they develop a fear of fear itself. We now know that panic symptoms are maintained largely because the individual develops a fear of the bodily sensations associated with panic attacks. The attack may be triggered by something he or she knows is irrational, but fear of the sensations keeps them escalating into a full-body emergency. “Scared stiff” and “frozen in fear” (collapsing and going numb) describe precisely what terror and trauma feel like. They are its visceral foundation. The experience of fear derives from primitive responses to threat where escape is thwarted in some way. People’s lives will be held hostage to fear until that visceral experience changes. The price for ignoring or distorting the body’s messages is being unable to detect what is truly dangerous or harmful for you and, just as bad, what is safe or nourishing. Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation—from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others. Many of my patients respond to stress not by noticing and naming it but by developing migraine headaches or asthma attacks. Sandy, a middle-aged visiting nurse, told me she’d felt terrified and lonely as a child, unseen by her alcoholic parents. She dealt with this by becoming deferential to everybody she depended on (including me, her therapist). Whenever her husband made an insensitive remark, she would come down with an asthma attack. By the time she noticed that she couldn’t breathe, it was too late for an inhaler to be effective, and she had to be taken to the emergency room. Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body. Even though Sandy had learned to ignore her relationship problems and block out her physical distress signals, they showed up in symptoms that demanded her attention. Her therapy focused on identifying the link between her physical sensations and her emotions, and I also encouraged her to enroll in a kickboxing program. She had no emergency room visits during the three years she was my patient. Somatic symptoms for which no clear physical basis can be found are ubiquitous in traumatized children and adults. They can include chronic back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, migraines, digestive problems, spastic colon/irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, and some forms of asthma. Traumatized children have fifty times the rate of asthma as their nontraumatized peers. Studies have shown that many children and adults with fatal asthma attacks were not aware of having breathing problems before the attacks."
  • "Psychiatrists call this phenomenon alexithymia—Greek for not having words for feelings. Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean. They may look furious but deny that they are angry; they may appear terrified but say that they are fine. Not being able to discern what is going on inside their bodies causes them to be out of touch with their needs, and they have trouble taking care of themselves, whether it involves eating the right amount at the right time or getting the sleep they need. Like my aunt, alexithymics substitute the language of action for that of emotion. When asked, “How would you feel if you saw a truck coming at you at eighty miles per hour?” most people would say, “I’d be terrified” or “I’d be frozen with fear. ” An alexithymic might reply, “How would I feel? I don’t know. . . . I’d get out of the way. ” They tend to register emotions as physical problems rather than as signals that something deserves their attention. Instead of feeling angry or sad, they experience muscle pain, bowel irregularities, or other symptoms for which no cause can be found. About three quarters of patients with anorexia nervosa, and more than half of all patients with bulimia, are bewildered by their emotional feelings and have great difficulty describing them. When researchers showed pictures of angry or distressed faces to people with alexithymia, they could not figure out what those people were feeling."
• Chapter 7 - Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement
  • "The former chairman of the Harvard psychology department, Henry Murray, one of the pioneers of personality theory...had, among other things, become famous for designing the widely used Thematic Apperception Test. The TAT is a so-called projective test, which uses a set of cards to discover how people’s inner reality shapes their view of the world. Unlike the Rorschach cards we used with the veterans, the TAT cards depict realistic but ambiguous and somewhat troubling scenes: a man and a woman gloomily staring away from each other, a boy looking at a broken violin. Subjects are asked to tell stories about what is going on in the photo, what has happened previously, and what happens next. In most cases their interpretations quickly reveal the themes that preoccupy them. Nina and I decided to create a set of test cards specifically for children, based on pictures we cut out of magazines in the clinic waiting room. Our first study compared twelve six- to eleven- year-olds at the children’s clinic with a group of children from a nearby school who matched them as closely as possible in age, race, intelligence, and family constellation. What differentiated our patients was the abuse they had suffered within their families. They included a boy who was severely bruised from repeated beatings by his mother; a girl whose father had molested her at the age of four; two boys who had been repeatedly tied to a chair and whipped; and a girl who, at the age of five, had seen her mother (a prostitute) raped, dismembered, burned, and put into the trunk of a car. The mother’s pimp was suspected of sexually abusing the girl. The children in our control group also lived in poverty in a depressed area of Boston where they regularly witnessed shocking violence. While the study was being conducted, one boy at their school threw gasoline at a classmate and set him on fire. Another boy was caught in crossfire while walking to school with his father and a friend. He was wounded in the groin, and his friend was killed. Given their exposure to such a high baseline level of violence, would their responses to the cards differ from those of the hospitalized children? One of our cards depicted a family scene: two smiling kids watching dad repair a car. Every child who looked at it commented on the danger to the man lying underneath the vehicle. While the control children told stories with benign endings—the car would get fixed, and maybe dad and the kids would drive to McDonald’s—the traumatized kids came up with gruesome tales. One girl said that the little girl in the picture was about to smash in her father’s skull with a hammer. A nine-year-old boy who had been severely physically abused told an elaborate story about how the boy in the picture kicked away the jack, so that the car mangled his father’s body and his blood spurted all over the garage. As they told us these stories, our patients got very excited and disorganized. We had to take considerable time out at the water cooler and going for walks before we could show them the next card. It was little wonder that almost all of them had been diagnosed with ADHD, and most were on Ritalin—though the drug certainly didn’t seem to dampen their arousal in this situation. The abused kids gave similar responses to a seemingly innocuous picture of a pregnant woman silhouetted against a window. When we showed it to the seven-year-old girl who’d been sexually abused at age four, she talked about penises and vaginas and repeatedly asked Nina questions like “How many people have you humped?” Like several of the other sexually abused girls in the study, she became so agitated that we had to stop. A seven-year-old girl from the control group picked up the wistful mood of the picture: Her story was about a widowed lady sadly looking out the window, missing her husband. But in the end, the lady found a loving man to be a good father to her baby. In card after card we saw that, despite their alertness to trouble, the children who had not been abused still trusted in an essentially benign universe; they could imagine ways out of bad situations. They seemed to feel protected and safe within their own families. They also felt loved by at least one of their parents, which seemed to make a substantial difference in their eagerness to engage in schoolwork and to learn. The responses of the clinic children were alarming. The most innocent images stirred up intense feelings of danger, aggression, sexual arousal, and terror. We had not selected these photos because they had some hidden meaning that sensitive people could uncover; they were ordinary images of everyday life. We could only conclude that for abused children, the whole world is filled with triggers. As long as they can imagine only disastrous outcomes to relatively benign situations, anybody walking into a room, any stranger, any image, on a screen or on a billboard might be perceived as a harbinger of catastrophe. In this light the bizarre behavior of the kids at the children’s clinic made perfect sense. To my amazement, staff discussions on the unit rarely mentioned the horrific real-life experiences of the children and the impact of those traumas on their feelings, thinking, and self-regulation. Instead, their medical records were filled with diagnostic labels: “conduct disorder” or “oppositional defiant disorder” for the angry and rebellious kids; or “bipolar disorder.” ADHD was a “comorbid” diagnosis for almost all. Was the underlying trauma being obscured by this blizzard of diagnoses?"
  • "If you have no internal sense of security, it is difficult to distinguish between safety and danger. If you feel chronically numbed out, potentially dangerous situations may make you feel alive. If you conclude that you must be a terrible person (because why else would your parents have you treated that way?), you start expecting other people to treat you horribly. You probably deserve it, and anyway, there is nothing you can do about it. When disorganized people carry self-perceptions like these, they are set up to be traumatized by subsequent experiences."
  • "Disorganized attachment showed up in two different ways: One group of mothers seemed to be too preoccupied with their own issues to attend to their infants. They were often intrusive and hostile; they alternated between rejecting their infants and acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs. Another group of mothers seemed helpless and fearful. They often came across as sweet or fragile, but they didn’t know how to be the adult in the relationship and seemed to want their children to comfort them. They failed to greet their children after having been away and did not pick them up when the children were distressed. The mothers didn’t seem to be doing these things deliberately—they simply didn’t know how to be attuned to their kids and respond to their cues and thus failed to comfort and reassure them. The hostile/intrusive mothers were more likely to have childhood histories of physical abuse and/or of witnessing domestic violence, while the withdrawn/dependent mothers were more likely to have histories of sexual abuse or parental loss (but not physical abuse). I have always wondered how parents come to abuse their kids. After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning. What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children? Karlen’s research provided me with one answer: Watching her videos, I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers. At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions. Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse. About eighteen years later, when these kids were around twenty years old, Lyons-Ruth did a follow-up study to see how they were coping. Infants with seriously disrupted emotional communication patterns with their mothers at eighteen months grew up to become young adults with an unstable sense of self, self-damaging impulsivity (including excessive spending, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating), inappropriate and intense anger, and recurrent suicidal behavior. Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/intrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most powerful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise. Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults."
  • "Lyons-Ruth was particularly interested in the phenomenon of dissociation, which is manifested in feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world and in seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down. She found a “striking and unexpected” relationship between maternal disengagement and misattunement during the first two years of life and dissociative symptoms in early adulthood. Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk to grow into adolescents who are unable to know and to see. Infants who live in secure relationships learn to communicate not only their frustrations and distress but also their emerging selves—their interests, preferences, and goals. Receiving a sympathetic response cushions infants (and adults) against extreme levels of frightened arousal. But if your caregivers ignore your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing. 37 Bowlby wrote: “What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self. ”38 If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation. 39 Maybe the most devastating long-term effect of this shutdown is not feeling real inside, a condition we saw in the kids in the Children’s Clinic and that we see in the children and adults who come to the Trauma Center. When you don’t feel real nothing matters, which makes it impossible to protect yourself from danger. Or you may resort to extremes in an effort to feel something—even cutting yourself with a razor blade or getting into fistfights with strangers."
• Chapter 8 - Trapped in Relationships: The Cost of Abuse and Neglect
  • "Marilyn was a tall, athletic-looking woman in her midthirties who worked as an operating- room nurse in a nearby town. She told me that a few months earlier she’d started to play tennis at her sports club with a Boston fireman named Michael. She usually steered clear of men, she said, but she had gradually become comfortable enough with Michael to accept his invitations to go out for pizza after their matches. They’d talk about tennis, movies, their nephews and nieces—nothing too personal. Michael clearly enjoyed her company, but she told herself he didn’t really know her. One Saturday evening in August, after tennis and pizza, she invited him to stay over at her apartment. She described feeling “uptight and unreal” as soon as they were alone together. She remembered asking him to go slow but had very little sense of what had happened after that. After a few glasses of wine and a rerun of Law & Order, they apparently fell asleep together on top of her bed. At around two in the morning, Michael turned over in his sleep. When Marilyn felt his body touch hers, she exploded—pounding him with her fists, scratching and biting, screaming, “You bastard, you bastard!” Michael, startled awake, grabbed his belongings and fled. After he left, Marilyn sat on her bed for hours, stunned by what had happened. She felt deeply humiliated and hated herself for what she had done, and now she’d come to me for help in dealing with her terror of men and her inexplicable rage attacks. My work with veterans had prepared me to listen to painful stories like Marilyn’s without trying to jump in immediately to fix the problem. Therapy often starts with some inexplicable behavior: attacking a boyfriend in the middle of the night, feeling terrified when somebody looks you in the eye, finding yourself covered with blood after cutting yourself with a piece of glass, or deliberately vomiting up every meal. It takes time and patience to allow the reality behind such symptoms to reveal itself."
  • "TERROR AND NUMBNESS -- As we talked, Marilyn told me that Michael was the first man she’d taken home in more than five years, but this was not the first time she’d lost control when a man spent the night with her. She repeated that she always felt uptight and spaced out when she was alone with a man, and there had been other times when she’d “come to” in her apartment, cowering in a corner, unable to remember clearly what had happened. Marilyn also said she felt as if she was just “going through the motions” of having a life. Except for when she was at the club playing tennis or at work in the operating room, she usually felt numb. A few years earlier she’d found that she could relieve her numbness by scratching herself with a razor blade, but she had become frightened when she found that she was cutting herself more and more deeply, and more and more often, to get relief. She had tried alcohol, too, but that reminded her of her dad and his out-of-control drinking, which made her feel disgusted with herself. So, instead, she played tennis fanatically, whenever she could. That made her feel alive. When I asked her about her past, Marilyn said she guessed that she “must have had” a happy childhood, but she could remember very little from before age twelve. She told me she’d been a timid adolescent, until she had a violent confrontation with her alcoholic father when she was sixteen and ran away from home. She worked her way through community college and went on to get a degree in nursing without any help from her parents. She felt ashamed that during this time she’d slept around, which she described as “looking for love in all the wrong places.""

  • 

  • "As I often did with new patients, I asked her to draw a family portrait, and when I saw her drawing (reproduced above), I decided to go slowly. Clearly Marilyn was harboring some terrible memories, but she could not allow herself to recognize what her own picture revealed. She had drawn a wild and terrified child, trapped in some kind of cage and threatened not only by three nightmarish figures—one with no eyes—but also by a huge erect penis protruding into her space. And yet this woman said she “must have had” a happy childhood."
  • "As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense. I call this Auden’s rule, and in keeping with it I deliberately did not push Marilyn to tell me what she remembered. In fact, I’ve learned that it’s not important for me to know every detail of a patient’s trauma. What is critical is that the patients themselves learn to tolerate feeling what they feel and knowing what they know. This may take weeks or even years."
  • "I decided to start Marilyn’s treatment by inviting her to join an established therapy group where she could find support and acceptance before facing the engine of her distrust, shame, and rage. As I expected, Marilyn arrived at the first group meeting looking terrified, much like the girl in her family portrait; she was withdrawn and did not reach out to anybody...Three months later Marilyn told the group that she had stumbled and fallen a few times on the sidewalk between the subway and my office. She worried that her eyesight was beginning to fail: She’d also been missing a lot of tennis balls recently. I thought again about her drawing and the wild child with the huge, terrified eyes. Was this some sort of “conversion reaction, ” in which patients express their conflicts by losing function in some part of their body? Many soldiers in both world wars had suffered paralysis that couldn’t be traced to physical injuries, and I had seen cases of “hysterical blindness” in Mexico and India. Still, as a physician, I wasn’t about to conclude without further assessment that this was “all in her head.” I referred her to colleagues at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and asked them to do a very thorough workup. Several weeks later the tests came back. Marilyn had lupus erythematosus of her retina, an autoimmune disease that was eroding her vision, and she would need immediate treatment. I was appalled: Marilyn was the third person that year whom I’d suspected of having an incest history and who was then diagnosed with an autoimmune disease —a disease in which the body starts attacking itself. After making sure that Marilyn was getting the proper medical care, I consulted with two of my colleagues at Massachusetts General, psychiatrist Scott Wilson and Richard Kradin, who ran the immunology laboratory there. I told them Marilyn’s story, showed them the picture she’d drawn, and asked them to collaborate on a study. They generously volunteered their time and the considerable expense of a full immunology workup. We recruited twelve women with incest histories who were not taking any medications, plus twelve women who had never been traumatized and who also did not take meds—a surprisingly difficult control group to find. (Marilyn was not in the study; we generally do not ask our clinical patients to be part of our research efforts.) When the study was completed and the data analyzed, Rich reported that the group of incest survivors had abnormalities in their CD45 RA-to-RO ratio, compared with their nontraumatized peers. CD45 cells are the “memory cells” of the immune system. Some of them, called RA cells, have been activated by past exposure to toxins; they quickly respond to environmental threats they have encountered before. The RO cells, in contrast, are kept in reserve for new challenges; they are turned on to deal with threats the body has not met previously. The RA-to-RO ratio is the balance between cells that recognize known toxins and cells that wait for new information to activate. In patients with histories of incest, the proportion of RA cells that are ready to pounce is larger than normal. This makes the immune system oversensitive to threat, so that it is prone to mount a defense when none is needed, even when this means attacking the body’s own cells. Our study showed that, on a deep level, the bodies of incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety. This means that the imprint of past trauma does not consist only of distorted perceptions of information coming from the outside; the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe. The past is impressed not only on their minds, and in misinterpretations of innocuous events (as when Marilyn attacked Michael because he accidentally touched her in her sleep), but also on the very core of their beings: in the safety of their bodies."
  • "Previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs. Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system, the subject of the treatment section of this book."
  • "LEARNING TO REMEMBER -- About a year into Marilyn’s group, another member, Mary, asked permission to talk about what had happened to her when she was thirteen years old. Mary worked as a prison guard, and she was involved in a sadomasochistic relationship with another woman. She wanted the group to know her background in the hope that they would become more tolerant of her extreme reactions, such as her tendency to shut down or blow up in response to the slightest provocation. Struggling to get the words out, Mary told us that one evening, when she was thirteen years old, she was raped by her older brother and a gang of his friends. The rape resulted in pregnancy, and her mother gave her an abortion at home, on the kitchen table. The group sensitively tuned in to what Mary was sharing and comforted her through her sobbing. I was profoundly moved by their empathy—they were consoling Mary in a way that they must have wished somebody had comforted them when they first confronted their traumas. When time ran out, Marilyn asked if she could take a few more minutes to talk about what she had experienced during the session. The group agreed, and she told us: “Hearing that story, I wonder if I may have been sexually abused myself.” My mouth must have dropped open. Based on her family drawing, I had always assumed that she was aware, at least on some level, that this was the case. She had reacted like an incest victim in her response to Michael, and she chronically behaved as if the world were a terrifying place. Yet even though she’d drawn a girl who was being sexually molested, she—or at least her cognitive, verbal self—had no idea what had actually happened to her. Her immune system, her muscles, and her fear system all had kept the score, but her conscious mind lacked a story that could communicate the experience. She reenacted her trauma in her life, but she had no narrative to refer to. As we will see in chapter 12, traumatic memory differs in complex ways from normal recall, and it involves many layers of mind and brain. Triggered by Mary’s story, and spurred on by the nightmares that followed, Marilyn began individual therapy with me in which she started to deal with her past. At first she experienced waves of intense, free-floating terror. She tried stopping for several weeks, but when she found she could no longer sleep and had to take time off from work, she continued our sessions. As she told me later: “My only criterion for whether a situation is harmful is feeling, 'This is going to kill me if I don’t get out.'" I began to teach Marilyn calming techniques, such as focusing on breathing deeply—in and out, in and out, at six breaths a minute—while following the sensations of the breath in her body. This was combined with tapping acupressure points, which helped her not to become overwhelmed. We also worked on mindfulness: Learning to keep her mind alive while allowing her body to feel the feelings that she had come to dread slowly enabled Marilyn to stand back and observe her experience, rather than being immediately hijacked by her feelings. She had tried to dampen or abolish those feelings with alcohol and exercise, but now she began to feel safe enough to begin to remember what had happened to her as a girl. As she gained ownership over her physical sensations, she also began to be able to tell the difference between past and present: Now if she felt someone’s leg brush against her in the night, she might be able to recognize it as Michael’s leg, the leg of the handsome tennis partner she’d invited to her apartment. That leg did not belong to anyone else, and its touch didn’t mean someone was trying to molest her. Being still enabled her to know—fully, physically know—that she was a thirty- four-year-old woman and not a little girl. When Marilyn finally began to access her memories, they emerged as flashbacks of the wallpaper in her childhood bedroom. She realized that this was what she had focused on when her father raped her when she was eight years old. His molestation had scared her beyond her capacity to endure, so she had needed to push it out of her memory bank. After all, she had to keep living with this man, her father, who had assaulted her. Marilyn remembered having turned to her mother for protection, but when she ran to her and tried to hide herself by burying her face in her mother’s skirt, she was met with only a limp embrace. At times her mother remained silent; at others she cried or angrily scolded Marilyn for “making Daddy so angry.” The terrified child found no one to protect her, to offer strength or shelter. As Roland Summit wrote in his classic study The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome: “Initiation, intimidation, stigmatization, isolation, helplessness and self-blame depend on a terrifying reality of child sexual abuse. Any attempts by the child to divulge the secret will be countered by an adult conspiracy of silence and disbelief. ‘Don’t worry about things like that; that could never happen in our family. ’ ‘How could you ever think of such a terrible thing?’ ‘Don’t let me ever hear you say anything like that again!’ The average child never asks and never tells. ”3 After forty years of doing this work I still regularly hear myself saying, “That’s unbelievable,” when patients tell me about their childhoods. They often are as incredulous as I am—how could parents inflict such torture and terror on their own child? Part of them continues to insist that they must have made the experience up or that they are exaggerating. All of them are ashamed about what happened to them, and they blame themselves—on some level they firmly believe that these terrible things were done to them because they are terrible people. Marilyn now began to explore how the powerless child had learned to shut down and comply with whatever was asked of her. She had done so by making herself disappear: The moment she heard her father’s footsteps in the corridor outside her bedroom, she would “put her head in the clouds. ” Another patient of mine who had a similar experience made a drawing that depicts how that process works. When her father started to touch her, she made herself disappear; she floated up to the ceiling, looking down on some other little girl in the bed. She was glad that it was not really her—it was some other girl who was being molested."

  • 

  • "Looking at these heads separated from their bodies by an impenetrable fog really opened my eyes to the experience of dissociation, which is so common among incest victims. Marilyn herself later realized that, as an adult, she had continued to float up to the ceiling when she found herself in a sexual situation. In the period when she’d been more sexually active, a partner would occasionally tell her how amazing she’d been in bed—that he’d barely recognized her, that she’d even talked differently. Usually she did not remember what had happened, but at other times she’d become angry and aggressive. She had no sense of who she really was sexually, so she gradually withdrew from dating altogether—until Michael."
  • "HATING YOUR HOME -- Children have no choice who their parents are, nor can they understand that parents may simply be too depressed, enraged, or spaced out to be there for them or that their parents’ behavior may have little to do with them. Children have no choice but to organize themselves to survive within the families they have. Unlike adults, they have no other authorities to turn to for help—their parents are the authorities. They cannot rent an apartment or move in with someone else: Their very survival hinges on their caregivers. Children sense—even if they are not explicitly threatened—that if they talked about their beatings or molestation to teachers they would be punished. Instead, they focus their energy on not thinking about what has happened and not feeling the residues of terror and panic in their bodies. Because they cannot tolerate knowing what they have experienced, they also cannot understand that their anger, terror, or collapse has anything to do with that experience. They don’t talk; they act and deal with their feelings by being enraged, shut down, compliant, or defiant. Children are also programmed to be fundamentally loyal to their caretakers, even if they are abused by them. Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror. I have never met a child below the age of ten who was tortured at home (and who had broken bones and burned skin to show for it) who, if given the option, would not have chosen to stay with his or her family rather than being placed in a foster home. Of course, clinging to one’s abuser is not exclusive to childhood. Hostages have put up bail for their captors, expressed a wish to marry them, or had sexual relations with them; victims of domestic violence often cover up for their abusers. Judges often tell me how humiliated they feel when they try to protect victims of domestic violence by issuing restraining orders, only to find out that many of them secretly allow their partners to return. It took Marilyn a long time before she was ready to talk about her abuse: She was not ready to violate her loyalty to her family—deep inside she felt that she still needed them to protect her against her fears. The price of this loyalty is unbearable feelings of loneliness, despair, and the inevitable rage of helplessness. Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions. One of my patients told me, “It is like hating your home, your kitchen and pots and pans, your bed, your chairs, your table, your rugs. ” Nothing feels safe—least of all your own body."
  • "REPLAYING THE TRAUMA -- One memory of Marilyn’s childhood trauma came to her in a dream in which she felt as if she were being choked and was unable to breathe. A white tea towel was wrapped around her hands, and then she was lifted up with the towel around her neck, so that she could not touch the ground with her feet. She woke in a panic, thinking that she was surely going to die. Her dream reminded me of the nightmares war veterans had reported to me: seeing the precise, unadulterated images of faces and body parts they had encountered in battle. These dreams were so terrifying that they tried to not fall asleep at night; only daytime napping, which was not associated with nocturnal ambushes, felt halfway safe. During this stage of therapy Marilyn was repeatedly flooded with images and sensations related to the choking dream. She remembered sitting in the kitchen as a four-year-old with swollen eyes, a sore neck, and a bloody nose, while her father and brother laughed at her and called her a stupid, stupid girl. One day Marilyn reported, “As I was brushing my teeth last evening, I was overcome with feelings of thrashing around. I was like a fish out of water, violently turning my body as I fought against the lack of air. I sobbed and choked as I brushed my teeth. Panic was rising up out of my chest with the feeling of thrashing. I had to use every bit of strength I had not to scream, ‘NONONONONONO,’ as I stood over the sink.” She went to bed and fell asleep but woke up like clockwork every two hours during the rest of the night. Trauma is not stored as a narrative with an orderly beginning, middle, and end. As I’ll discuss in detail in chapters 11 and 12, memories initially return as they did for Marilyn: as flashbacks that contain fragments of the experience, isolated images, sounds, and body sensations that initially have no context other than fear and panic. When Marilyn was a child, she had no way of giving voice to the unspeakable, and it would have made no difference anyway— nobody was listening."
• Chapter 9 - What's Love Got To Do With It?
  • "How do we organize our thinking with regard to individuals like Marilyn, Mary, and Kathy, and what can we do to help them? The way we define their problems, our diagnosis, will determine how we approach their care. Such patients typically receive five or six different unrelated diagnoses in the course of their psychiatric treatment. If their doctors focus on their mood swings, they will be identified as bipolar and prescribed lithium or valproate. If the professionals are most impressed with their despair, they will be told they are suffering from major depression and given antidepressants. If the doctors focus on their restlessness and lack of attention, they may be categorized as ADHD and treated with Ritalin or other stimulants. And if the clinic staff happens to take a trauma history, and the patient actually volunteers the relevant information, he or she might receive the diagnosis of PTSD. None of these diagnoses will be completely off the mark, and none of them will begin to meaningfully describe who these patients are and what they suffer from. Psychiatry, as a subspecialty of medicine, aspires to define mental illness as precisely as, let’s say, cancer of the pancreas, or streptococcal infection of the lungs. However, given the complexity of mind, brain, and human attachment systems, we have not come even close to achieving that sort of precision. Understanding what is “wrong” with people currently is more a question of the mind-set of the practitioner (and of what insurance companies will pay for) than of verifiable, objective facts."
  • "The first serious attempt to create a systematic manual of psychiatric diagnoses occurred in 1980, with the release of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official list of all mental diseases recognized by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The preamble to the DSM-III warned explicitly that its categories were insufficiently precise to be used in forensic settings or for insurance purposes. Nonetheless it gradually became an instrument of enormous power: Insurance companies require a DSM diagnosis for reimbursement, until recently all research funding was based on DSM diagnoses, and academic programs are organized around DSM categories...The manual has become a virtual industry that has earned the American Psychiatric Association well over $100 million...A psychiatric diagnosis has serious consequences: Diagnosis informs treatment, and getting the wrong treatment can have disastrous effects. Also, a diagnostic label is likely to attach to people for the rest of their lives and have a profound influence on how they define themselves. I have met countless patients who told me that they “are” bipolar or borderline or that they “have” PTSD, as if they had been sentenced to remain in an underground dungeon for the rest of their lives, like the Count of Monte Cristo...In this chapter, and the next, I will discuss the chasm between official diagnoses and what our patients actually suffer from and discuss how my colleagues and I have tried to change the way patients with chronic trauma histories are diagnosed...In 1985 I started to collaborate with psychiatrist Judith Herman, whose first book, Father-Daughter Incest, had recently been published. We were both working at Cambridge Hospital (one of Harvard’s teaching hospitals) and, sharing an interest in how trauma had affected the lives of our patients, we began to meet regularly and compare notes. We were struck by how many of our patients who were diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) told us horror stories about their childhoods. BPD is marked by clinging but highly unstable relationships, extreme mood swings, and self-destructive behavior, including self-mutilation and repeated suicide attempts. In order to uncover whether there was, in fact, a relationship between childhood trauma and BPD, we designed a formal scientific study and sent off a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health. It was rejected. Undeterred, Judy and I decided to finance the study ourselves, and we found an ally in Chris Perry, the director of research at Cambridge Hospital, who was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to study BPD and other near neighbor diagnoses, so-called personality disorders, in patients recruited from the Cambridge Hospital. He had collected volumes of valuable data on these subjects but had never inquired about childhood abuse and neglect. Even though he did not hide his skepticism about our proposal, he was very generous to us and arranged for us to interview fifty-five patients from the hospital’s outpatient department, and he agreed to compare our findings with records in the large database he had already collected...Keeping in mind that people universally feel ashamed about the traumas they have experienced, we designed an interview instrument, the Traumatic Antecedents Questionnaire (TAQ). The interview started with a series of simple questions...It progressed gradually to more revealing questions...The questions continued: “Who made the rules at home and enforced the discipline?” “How were kids kept in line—by talking, scolding, spanking, hitting, locking you up?” “How did your parents solve their disagreements?” By then the floodgates had usually opened, and many patients were volunteering detailed information about their childhoods. One woman had witnessed her little sister being raped; another told us she’d had her first sexual experience at age eight—with her grandfather. Men and women reported lying awake at night listening to furniture crashing and parents screaming; a young man had come down to the kitchen and found his mother lying in a pool of blood. Others talked about not being picked up at elementary school or coming home to find an empty house and spending the night alone. One woman who made her living as a cook had learned to prepare meals for her family after her mother was jailed on a drug conviction. Another had been nine when she grabbed and steadied the car’s steering wheel because her drunken mother was swerving down a four-lane highway during rush hour. Our patients did not have the option to run away or escape; they had nobody to turn to and no place to hide. Yet they somehow had to manage their terror and despair. They probably went to school the next morning and tried to pretend that everything was fine. Judy and I realized that the BPD group’s problems—dissociation, desperate clinging to whoever might be enlisted to help—had probably started off as ways of dealing with overwhelming emotions and inescapable brutality. As we later reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 81 percent of the patients diagnosed with BPD at Cambridge Hospital reported severe histories of child abuse and/or neglect; in the vast majority the abuse began before age seven. This finding was particularly important because it suggested that the impact of abuse depends, at least in part, on the age at which it begins. Later research by Martin Teicher at McLean Hospital showed that different forms of abuse have different impacts on various brain areas at different stages of development. Although numerous studies have since replicated our findings, I still regularly get scientific papers to review that say things like “It has been hypothesized that borderline patients may have histories of childhood trauma.” When does a hypothesis become a scientifically established fact?"
  • "THE POWER OF DIAGNOSIS -- Our study also confirmed that there was a traumatized population quite distinct from the combat soldiers and accident victims for whom the PTSD diagnosis had been created. People like Marilyn and Kathy, as well as the patients Judy and I had studied, and the kids in the outpatient clinic at MMHC that I described in chapter 7, do not necessarily remember their traumas (one of the criteria for the PTSD diagnosis) or at least are not preoccupied with specific memories of their abuse, but they continue to behave as if they were still in danger. They go from one extreme to the other; they have trouble staying on task, and they continually lash out against themselves and others. To some degree their problems do overlap with those of combat soldiers, but they are also very different in that their childhood trauma has prevented them from developing some of the mental capacities that adult soldiers possessed before their traumas occurred. After we realized this, a group of us went to see Robert Spitzer, who, after having guided the development of the DSM-III, was in the process of revising the manual. He listened carefully to what we told him. He told us it was likely that clinicians who spend their days treating a particular patient population are likely to develop considerable expertise in understanding what ails them. He suggested that we do a study, a so-called field trial, to compare the problems of different groups of traumatized individuals. Spitzer put me in charge of the project. First we developed a rating scale that incorporated all the different trauma symptoms that had been reported in the scientific literature, then we interviewed 525 adult patients at five sites around the country to see if particular populations suffered from different constellations of problems. Our populations fell into three groups: those with histories of childhood physical or sexual abuse by caregivers; recent victims of domestic violence; and people who had recently been through a natural disaster. There were clear differences among these groups, particularly those on the extreme ends of the spectrum: victims of child abuse and adults who had survived natural disasters. The adults who had been abused as children often had trouble concentrating, complained of always being on edge, and were filled with self-loathing. They had enormous trouble negotiating intimate relationships, often veering from indiscriminate, high-risk, and unsatisfying sexual involvements to total sexual shutdown. They also had large gaps in their memories, often engaged in self- destructive behaviors, and had a host of medical problems. These symptoms were relatively rare in the survivors of natural disasters. Each major diagnosis in the DSM had a workgroup responsible for suggesting revisions for the new edition. I presented the results of the field trial to our DSM-IV PTSD work group, and we voted nineteen to two to create a new trauma diagnosis for victims of interpersonal trauma: “Disorders of Extreme Stress, Not Otherwise Specified” (DESNOS), or “Complex PTSD” for short. We then eagerly anticipated the publication of the DSM-IV in May 1994. But much to our surprise the diagnosis that our work group had overwhelmingly approved did not appear in the final product. None of us had been consulted. This was a tragic exclusion. It meant that large numbers of patients could not be accurately diagnosed and that clinicians and researchers would be unable to scientifically develop appropriate treatments for them. You cannot develop a treatment for a condition that does not exist. Not having a diagnosis now confronts therapists with a serious dilemma: How do we treat people who are coping with the fall-out of abuse, betrayal and abandonment when we are forced to diagnose them with depression, panic disorder, bipolar illness, or borderline personality, which do not really address what they are coping with? The consequences of caretaker abuse and neglect are vastly more common and complex than the impact of hurricanes or motor vehicle accidents. Yet the decision makers who determined the shape of our diagnostic system decided not to recognize this evidence. To this day, after twenty years and four subsequent revisions, the DSM and the entire system based on it fail victims of child abuse and neglect—just as they ignored the plight of veterans before PTSD was introduced back in 1980."
  • "In 1985 Felitti was chief of Kaiser Permanente’s Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego...This was only the second case of incest Felitti had encountered in his twenty-three-year medical practice, and yet about ten days later he heard a similar story. As he and his team started to inquire more closely, they were shocked to discover that most of their morbidly obese patients had been sexually abused as children. They also uncovered a host of other family problems...In 1990 Felitti went to Atlanta to present data from the team’s first 286 patient interviews at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity. He was stunned by the harsh response of some experts: Why did he believe such patients? Didn’t he realize they would fabricate any explanation for their failed lives? However, an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encouraged Felitti to start a much larger study, drawing on a general population, and invited him to meet with a small group of researchers at the CDC. The result was the monumental investigation of Adverse Childhood Experiences (now know at the ACE study), a collaboration between the CDC and Kaiser Permanente, with Robert Anda, MD, and Vincent Felitti, MD, as co–principal investigators. More than fifty thousand Kaiser patients came through the Department of Preventive Medicine annually for a comprehensive evaluation, filling out an extensive medical questionnaire in the process. Felitti and Anda spent more than a year developing ten new questions covering carefully defined categories of adverse childhood experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and family dysfunction, such as having had parents who were divorced, mentally ill, addicted, or in prison. They then asked 25,000 consecutive patients if they would be willing to provide information about childhood events; 17,421 said yes. Their responses were then compared with the detailed medical records that Kaiser kept on all patients. The ACE study revealed that traumatic life experiences during childhood and adolescence are far more common than expected. The study respondents were mostly white, middle class, middle aged, well educated, and financially secure enough to have good medical insurance, and yet only one-third of the respondents reported no adverse childhood experiences. One out of ten individuals responded yes to the question “Did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you, insult you, or put you down?” More than a quarter responded yes to the questions “Did one of your parents often or very often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you?” and “Did one of your parents often or very often hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?” In other words, more than a quarter of the U.S. population is likely to have been repeatedly physically abused as a child. To the questions “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever have you touch their body in a sexual way?” and “Did an adult or person at least 5 years older ever attempt oral, anal, or vaginal intercourse with you?” 28 percent of women and 16 percent of men responded affirmatively. One in eight people responded positively to the questions: “As a child, did you witness your mother sometimes, often, or very often pushed, grabbed, slapped, or had something thrown at her?” “As a child, did you witness your mother sometimes, often, or very often kicked, bitten, hit with a fist, or hit with something hard? Each yes answer was scored as one point, leading to a possible ACE score ranging from zero to ten. For example, a person who experienced frequent verbal abuse, who had an alcoholic mother, and whose parents divorced would have an ACE score of three. Of the two-thirds of respondents who reported an adverse experience, 87 percent scored two or more. One in six of all respondents had an ACE score of four or higher. In short, Felitti and his team had found that adverse experiences are interrelated, even though they’re usually studied separately. People typically don’t grow up in a household where one brother is in prison but everything else is fine. They don’t live in families where their mother is regularly beaten but life is otherwise hunky-dory. Incidents of abuse are never stand-alone events. And for each additional adverse experience reported, the toll in later damage increases...When it came to personal suffering, the results were devastating. As the ACE score rises, chronic depression in adulthood also rises dramatically. For those with an ACE score of four or more, its prevalence is 66 percent in women and 35 percent in men, compared with an overall rate of 12 percent in those with an ACE score of zero. The likelihood of being on antidepressant medication or prescription painkillers also rose proportionally. As Felitti has pointed out, we may be treating today experiences that happened fifty years ago—at ever-increasing cost. Antidepressant drugs and painkillers constitute a significant portion of our rapidly rising national health-care expenditures. 16 (Ironically, research has shown that depressed patients without prior histories of abuse or neglect tend to respond much better to antidepressants than patients with those backgrounds. 17) Self-acknowledged suicide attempts rise exponentially with ACE scores. From a score of zero to a score of six there is about a 5,000 percent increased likelihood of suicide attempts...Women in the study were asked about rape during adulthood. At an ACE score of zero, the prevalence of rape was 5 percent; at a score of four or more it was 33 percent. Why are abused or neglected girls so much more likely to be raped later in life? The answers to this question have implications far beyond rape. For example, numerous studies have shown that girls who witness domestic violence while growing up are at much higher risk of ending up in violent relationships themselves, while for boys who witness domestic violence, the risk that they will abuse their own partners rises sevenfold. More than 12 percent of study participants had seen their mothers being battered. The list of high-risk behaviors predicted by the ACE score included smoking, obesity, unintended pregnancies, multiple sexual partners, and sexually transmitted diseases. Finally, the toll of major health problems was striking: Those with an ACE score of six or above had a 15 percent or greater chance than those with an ACE score of zero of currently suffering from any of the ten leading causes of death in the United States, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), ischemic heart disease, and liver disease. They were twice as likely to suffer from cancer and four times as likely to have emphysema. The ongoing stress on the body keeps taking its toll."
  • "CHILD ABUSE: OUR NATION’S LARGEST PUBLIC HEALTH PROBLEM -- The first time I heard Robert Anda present the results of the ACE study, he could not hold back his tears. In his career at the CDC he had previously worked in several major risk areas, including tobacco research and cardiovascular health. But when the ACE study data started to appear on his computer screen, he realized that they had stumbled upon the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters. 20 It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration. When the surgeon general’s report on smoking and health was published in 1964, it unleashed a decades-long legal and medical campaign that has changed daily life and long-term health prospects for millions. The number of American smokers fell from 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 19 percent in 2010, and it is estimated that nearly 800,000 deaths from lung cancer were prevented between 1975 and 2000. 21 The ACE study, however, has had no such effect. Follow-up studies and papers are still appearing around the world, but the day-to-day reality of children like Marilyn and the children in outpatient clinics and residential treatment centers around the country remains virtually the same. Only now they receive high doses of psychotropic agents, which makes them more tractable but which also impairs their ability to feel pleasure and curiosity, to grow and develop emotionally and intellectually, and to become contributing members of society."
• Chapter 10 - Developmental Trauma: The Hidden Epidemic
  • "There are hundreds of thousands of children like the ones I am about to describe, and they absorb enormous resources, often without appreciable benefit. They end up filling our jails, our welfare rolls, and our medical clinics. Most of the public knows them only as statistics. Tens of thousands of schoolteachers, probation officers, welfare workers, judges, and mental health professionals spend their days trying to help them, and the taxpayer pays the bills."
  • "Recent research has swept away the simple idea that “having” a particular gene produces a particular result. It turns out that many genes work together to influence a single outcome. Even more important, genes are not fixed; life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off by attaching methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, to the outside of the gene (a process called methylation), making it more or less sensitive to messages from the body. While life events can change the behavior of the gene, they do not alter its fundamental structure. Methylation patterns, however, can be passed on to offspring—a phenomenon known as epigenetics. Once again, the body keeps the score, at the deepest levels of the organism. One of the most cited experiments in epigenetics was conducted by McGill University researcher Michael Meaney, who studies newborn rat pups and their mothers. He discovered that how much a mother rat licks and grooms her pups during the first twelve hours after their birth permanently affects the brain chemicals that respond to stress—and modifies the configuration of over a thousand genes. The rat pups that are intensively licked by their mothers are braver and produce lower levels of stress hormones under stress than rats whose mothers are less attentive. They also recover more quickly—an equanimity that lasts throughout their lives. They develop thicker connections in the hippocampus, a key center for learning and memory, and they perform better in an important rodent skill—finding their way through mazes. We are just beginning to learn that stressful experiences affect gene expression in humans, as well. Children whose pregnant mothers had been trapped in unheated houses in a prolonged ice storm in Quebec had major epigenetic changes compared with the children of mothers whose heat had been restored within a day. 6 McGill researcher Moshe Szyf compared the epigenetic profiles of hundreds of children born into the extreme ends of social privilege in the United Kingdom and measured the effects of child abuse on both groups. Differences in social class were associated with distinctly different epigenetic profiles, but abused children in both groups had in common specific modifications in seventy-three genes. In Szyf’s words, “Major changes to our bodies can be made not just by chemicals and toxins, but also in the way the social world talks to the hard-wired world."
  • "The DSM definition of PTSD is quite straightforward: A person is exposed to a horrendous event “that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others, ” causing “intense fear, helplessness, or horror, ” which results in a variety of manifestations: intrusive reexperiencing of the event (flashbacks, bad dreams, feeling as if the event were occurring), persistent and crippling avoidance (of people, places, thoughts, or feelings associated with the trauma, sometimes with amnesia for important parts of it), and increased arousal (insomnia, hypervigilance, or irritability). This description suggests a clear story line: A person is suddenly and unexpectedly devastated by an atrocious event and is never the same again. The trauma may be over, but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system. How relevant was this definition to the children we were seeing? After a single traumatic incident—a dog bite, an accident, or witnessing a school shooting—children can indeed develop basic PTSD symptoms similar to those of adults, even if they live in safe and supportive homes. As a result of having the PTSD diagnosis, we now can treat those problems quite effectively. In the case of the troubled children with histories of abuse and neglect who show up in clinics, schools, hospitals, and police stations, the traumatic roots of their behaviors are less obvious, particularly because they rarely talk about having been hit, abandoned, or molested, even when asked. Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage."
  • "As the NCTSN treated more and more kids, it became increasingly obvious that we needed a diagnosis that captured the reality of their experience. We began with a database of nearly twenty thousand kids who were being treated in various sites within the network and collected all the research articles we could find on abused and neglected kids. These were winnowed down to 130 particularly relevant studies that reported on more than one hundred thousand children and adolescents worldwide. A core work group of twelve clinician/researchers specializing in childhood trauma then convened twice a year for four years to draft a proposal for an appropriate diagnosis, which we decided to call Developmental Trauma Disorder. As we organized our findings, we discovered a consistent profile: (1) a pervasive pattern of dysregulation, (2) problems with attention and concentration, and (3) difficulties getting along with themselves and others. These children’s moods and feelings rapidly shifted from one extreme to another—from temper tantrums and panic to detachment, flatness, and dissociation. When they got upset (which was much of the time), they could neither calm themselves down nor describe what they were feeling. Having a biological system that keeps pumping out stress hormones to deal with real or imagined threats leads to physical problems: sleep disturbances, headaches, unexplained pain, oversensitivity to touch or sound. Being so agitated or shut down keeps them from being able to focus their attention and concentration. To relieve their tension, they engage in chronic masturbation, rocking, or self-harming activities (biting, cutting, burning, and hitting themselves, pulling their hair out, picking at their skin until it bled). It also leads to difficulties with language processing and fine-motor coordination. Spending all their energy on staying in control, they usually have trouble paying attention to things, like schoolwork, that are not directly relevant to survival, and their hyperarousal makes them easily distracted. Having been frequently ignored or abandoned leaves them clinging and needy, even with the people who have abused them. Having been chronically beaten, molested, and otherwise mistreated, they cannot help but define themselves as defective and worthless. They come by their self-loathing, sense of defectiveness, and worthlessness honestly. Was it any surprise that they didn’t trust anyone? Finally, the combination of feeling fundamentally despicable and overreacting to slight frustrations makes it difficult for them to make friends. We published the first articles about our findings, developed a validated rating scale, and collected data on about 350 kids and their parents or foster parents to establish that this one diagnosis, Developmental Trauma Disorder, captured the full range of what was wrong with these children. It would enable us to give them a single diagnosis, as opposed to multiple labels, and would firmly locate the origin of their problems in a combination of trauma and compromised attachment. In February 2009 we submitted our proposed new diagnosis of Developmental Trauma Disorder to the American Psychiatric Association, stating the following in a cover letter...I felt confident that this letter would ensure that the APA would take our proposal seriously, but several months after our submission, Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National Center for PTSD and chair of the relevant DSM subcommittee, informed us that DTD was unlikely to be included in the DSM-V. The consensus, he wrote, was that no new diagnosis was required to fill a “missing diagnostic niche. ” One million children who are abused and neglected every year in the United States a “diagnostic niche”? The letter went on: “The notion that early childhood adverse experiences lead to substantial developmental disruptions is more clinical intuition than a research-based fact. This statement is commonly made but cannot be backed up by prospective studies.” In fact, we had included several prospective studies in our proposal. Let’s look at just two of them here..."
  • "THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF INCEST -- In 1986 Frank Putnam and Penelope Trickett, his colleague at the National Institute of Mental Health, initiated the first longitudinal study of the impact of sexual abuse on female development. Until the results of this study came out, our knowledge about the effects of incest was based entirely on reports from children who had recently disclosed their abuse and on accounts from adults reconstructing years or even decades later how incest had affected them. No study had ever followed girls as they matured to examine how sexual abuse might influence their school performance, peer relationships, and self-concept, as well as their later dating life. Putnam and Trickett also looked at changes over time in their subjects’ stress hormones, reproductive hormones, immune function, and other physiological measures. In addition they explored potential protective factors, such as intelligence and support from family and peers. The researchers painstakingly recruited eighty-four girls referred by the District of Columbia Department of Social Services who had a confirmed history of sexual abuse by a family member. These were matched with a comparison group of eighty-two girls of the same age, race, socioeconomic status, and family constellation who had not been abused. The average starting age was eleven. Over the next twenty years these two groups were thoroughly assessed six times, once a year for the first three years and again at ages eighteen, nineteen, and twenty-five. Their mothers participated in the early assessments, and their own children took part in the last. A remarkable 96 percent of the girls, now grown women, have stayed in the study from its inception. The results were unambiguous: Compared with girls of the same age, race, and social circumstances, sexually abused girls suffer from a large range of profoundly negative effects, including cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, troubled sexual development, high rates of obesity, and self-mutilation. They dropped out of high school at a higher rate than the control group and had more major illnesses and health-care utilization. They also showed abnormalities in their stress hormone responses, had an earlier onset of puberty, and accumulated a host of different, seemingly unrelated, psychiatric diagnoses. The follow-up research revealed many details of how abuse affects development. For example, each time they were assessed, the girls in both groups were asked to talk about the worst thing that had happened to them during the previous year. As they told their stories, the researchers observed how upset they became, while measuring their physiology. During the first assessment all the girls reacted by becoming distressed. Three years later, in response to the same question, the nonabused girls once again displayed signs of distress, but the abused girls shut down and became numb. Their biology matched their observable reactions: During the first assessment all of the girls showed an increase in the stress hormone cortisol; three years later cortisol went down in the abused girls as they reported on the most stressful event of the past year. Over time the body adjusts to chronic trauma. One of the consequences of numbing is that teachers, friends, and others are not likely to notice that a girl is upset; she may not even register it herself. By numbing out she no longer reacts to distress the way she should, for example, by taking protective action. Putnam’s study also captured the pervasive long-term effects of incest on friendships and partnering. Before the onset of puberty nonabused girls usually have several girlfriends, as well as one boy who functions as a sort of spy who informs them about what these strange creatures, boys, are all about. After they enter adolescence, their contacts with boys gradually increase. In contrast, before puberty the abused girls rarely have close friends, girls or boys, but adolescence brings many chaotic and often traumatizing contacts with boys. Lacking friends in elementary school makes a crucial difference. Today we’re aware how cruel third- , fourth- , and fifth-grade girls can be. It’s a complex and rocky time when friends can suddenly turn on one another and alliances dissolve in exclusions and betrayals. But there is an upside: By the time girls get to middle school, most have begun to master a whole set of social skills, including being able to identify what they feel, negotiating relationships with others, pretending to like people they don’t, and so on. And most of them have built a fairly steady support network of girls who become their stress-debriefing team. As they slowly enter the world of sex and dating, these relationships give them room for reflection, gossip, and discussion of what it all means. The sexually abused girls have an entirely different developmental pathway. They don’t have friends of either gender because they can’t trust; they hate themselves, and their biology is against them, leading them either to overreact or numb out. They can’t keep up in the normal envy-driven inclusion/exclusion games, in which players have to stay cool under stress. Other kids usually don’t want anything to do with them—they simply are too weird. But that’s only the beginning of the trouble. The abused, isolated girls with incest histories mature sexually a year and a half earlier than the nonabused girls. Sexual abuse speeds up their biological clocks and the secretion of sex hormones. Early in puberty the abused girls had three to five times the levels of testosterone and androstenedione, the hormones that fuel sexual desire, as the girls in the control group."
  • "THE DSM-V: A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD OF “DIAGNOSES” -- When DSM-V was published in May 2013 it included some three hundred disorders in its 945 pages. It offers a veritable smorgasbord of possible labels for the problems associated with severe early-life trauma, including some new ones such as Disruptive Mood Regulation Disorder, Non-suicidal Self Injury, Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Dysregulated Social Engagement Disorder, and Disruptive Impulse Control Disorder. Before the late nineteenth century doctors classified illnesses according to their surface manifestations, like fevers and pustules, which was not unreasonable, given that they had little else to go on. This changed when scientists like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch discovered that many diseases were caused by bacteria that were invisible to the naked eye. Medicine then was transformed by its attempts to discover ways to get rid of those organisms rather than just treating the boils and the fevers that they caused. With DSM-V psychiatry firmly regressed to early-nineteenth-century medical practice. Despite the fact that we know the origin of many of the problems it identifies, its “diagnoses” describe surface phenomena that completely ignore the underlying causes. Even before DSM-V was released, the American Journal of Psychiatry published the results of validity tests of various new diagnoses, which indicated that the DSM largely lacks what in the world of science is known as “reliability” —the ability to produce consistent, replicable results. In other words, it lacks scientific validity. Oddly, the lack of reliability and validity did not keep the DSM-V from meeting its deadline for publication, despite the near-universal consensus that it represented no improvement over the previous diagnostic system. Could the fact that the APA had earned $100 million on the DSM-IV and is slated to take in a similar amount with the DSM-V (because all mental health practitioners, many lawyers, and other professionals will be obliged to purchase the latest edition) be the reason we have this new diagnostic system? Diagnostic reliability isn’t an abstract issue: If doctors can’t agree on what ails their patients, there is no way they can provide proper treatment. When there’s no relationship between diagnosis and cure, a mislabeled patient is bound to be a mistreated patient...In a statement released in June 2011, the British Psychological Society complained to the APA that the sources of psychological suffering in the DSM-V were identified “as located within individuals” and overlooked the “undeniable social causation of many such problems. ”30 This was in addition to a flood of protest from American professionals, including leaders of the American Psychological Association and the American Counseling Association. Why are relationships or social conditions left out? If you pay attention only to faulty biology and defective genes as the cause of mental problems and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers."
• Chapter 11 - Uncovering Secrets: The Problem of Traumatic Memory
  • "In the spring of 2002 I was asked to examine a young man who claimed to have been sexually abused while he was growing up by Paul Shanley, a Catholic priest who had served in his parish in Newton, Massachusetts. Now twenty-five years old, he had apparently forgotten the abuse until he heard that the priest was currently under investigation for molesting young boys. The question posed to me was: Even though he had seemingly “repressed” the abuse for well over a decade after it ended, were his memories credible, and was I prepared to testify to that fact before a judge? I will share what this man, whom I’ll call Julian, told me, drawing on my original case notes. (Even though his real name is in the public record, I’m using a pseudonym because I hope that he has regained some privacy and peace with the passage of time. 1) His experiences illustrate the complexities of traumatic memory. The controversies over the case against Father Shanley are also typical of the passions that have swirled around this issue since **psychiatrists first described the unusual nature of traumatic memories in the final decades of the nineteenth century."
  • "FLOODED BY SENSATIONS AND IMAGES -- On February 11, 2001, Julian was serving as a military policeman at an air force base. During his daily phone conversation with his girlfriend, Rachel, she mentioned a lead article she’d read that morning in the Boston Globe. A priest named Shanley was under suspicion for molesting children. Hadn’t Julian once told her about a Father Shanley who had been his parish priest back in Newton? “Did he ever do anything to you?” she asked. Julian initially recalled Father Shanley as a kind man who’d been very supportive after his parents got divorced. But as the conversation went on, he started to go into a panic. He suddenly saw Shanley silhouetted in a doorframe, his hands stretched out at forty-five degrees, staring at Julian as he urinated. Overwhelmed by emotion, he told Rachel, “I’ve got to go.” He called his flight chief, who came over accompanied by the first sergeant. After he met with the two of them, they took him to the base chaplain. Julian recalls telling him: “Do you know what is going on in Boston? It happened to me, too.” The moment he heard himself say those words, he knew for certain that Shanley had molested him—even though he did not remember the details. Julian felt extremely embarrassed about being so emotional; he had always been a strong kid who kept things to himself. That night he sat on the corner of his bed, hunched over, thinking he was losing his mind and terrified that he would be locked up. Over the subsequent week images kept flooding into his mind, and he was afraid of breaking down completely. He thought about taking a knife and plunging it into his leg just to stop the mental pictures. Then the panic attacks started to be accompanied by seizures, which he called “epileptic fits.” He scratched his body until he bled. He constantly felt hot, sweaty, and agitated. Between panic attacks he “felt like a zombie”; he was observing himself from a distance, as if what he was experiencing were actually happening to somebody else...Julian was a popular athlete in high school. Although he had many friends, he felt pretty bad about himself and covered up for being a poor student by drinking and partying. He feels ashamed that he took advantage of his popularity and good looks by having sex with many girls. He mentioned wanting to call several of them to apologize for how badly he’d treated them. He remembered always hating his body. In high school he took steroids to pump himself up and smoked marijuana almost every day. He did not go to college, and after graduating from high school he was virtually homeless for almost a year because he could no longer stand living with his mother. He enlisted to try to get his life back on track. Julian met Father Shanley at age six when he was taking a CCD (catechism) class at the parish church. He remembered Father Shanley taking him out of the class for confession. Father Shanley rarely wore a cassock, and Julian remembered the priest’s dark blue corduroy pants. They would go to a big room with one chair facing another and a bench to kneel on. The chairs were covered with red and there was a red velvet cushion on the bench. They played cards, a game of war that turned into strip poker. Then he remembered standing in front of a mirror in that room. Father Shanley made him bend over. He remembered Father Shanley putting a finger into his anus. He does not think Shanley ever penetrated him with his penis, but he believes that the priest fingered him on numerous occasions. Other than that, his memories were quite incoherent and fragmentary. He had flashes of images of Shanley’s face and of isolated incidents: Shanley standing in the door of the bathroom; the priest going down on his knees and moving “it” around with his tongue. He could not say how old he was when that happened. He remembered the priest telling him how to perform oral sex, but he did not remember actually doing it. He remembered passing out pamphlets in church and then Father Shanley sitting next to him in a pew, fondling him with one hand and holding Julian’s hand on himself with the other. He remembered that, as he grew older, Father Shanley would pass close to him and caress his penis. Paul did not like it but did not know what to do to stop it. After all, he told me, “Father Shanley was the closest thing to God in my neighborhood.” In addition to these memory fragments, traces of his sexual abuse were clearly being activated and replayed. Sometimes when he was having sex with his girlfriend, the priest’s image popped into his head, and, as he said, he would “lose it.” A week before I interviewed him, his girlfriend had pushed a finger into his mouth and playfully said: “You give good head.” Julian jumped up and screamed, “If you ever say that again I’ll fucking kill you.” Then, terrified, they both started to cry. This was followed by one of Julian’s “epileptic fits,” in which he curled up in a fetal position, shaking and whimpering like a baby. While telling me this Julian looked very small and very frightened. Julian alternated between feeling sorry for the old man that Father Shanley had become and simply wanting to “take him into a room somewhere and kill him.” **He also spoke repeatedly of how ashamed he felt, how hard it was to admit that he could not protect himself...How do we make sense of a story like Julian’s: years of apparent forgetting, followed by fragmented, disturbing images, dramatic physical symptoms, and sudden reenactments? As a therapist treating people with a legacy of trauma, my primary concern is not to determine exactly what happened to them but to help them tolerate the sensations, emotions, and reactions they experience without being constantly hijacked by them. When the subject of blame arises, the central issue that needs to be addressed is usually self-blame—accepting that the trauma was not their fault, that it was not caused by some defect in themselves, and that no one could ever have deserved what happened to them. Once a legal case is involved, however, determination of culpability becomes primary, and with it the admissibility of evidence. I had previously examined twelve people who had been sadistically abused as children in a Catholic orphanage in Burlington, Vermont. They had come forward (with many other claimants) more than four decades later, and although none had had any contact with the others until the first claim was filed, their abuse memories were astonishingly similar: They all named the same names and the particular abuses that each nun or priest had committed—in the same rooms, with the same furniture, and as part of the same daily routines. Most of them subsequently accepted an out-of-court settlement from the Vermont diocese. Before a case goes to trial, the judge holds a so-called Daubert hearing to set the standards for expert testimony to be presented to the jury. In a 1996 case I had convinced a federal circuit court judge in Boston that it was common for traumatized people to lose all memories of the event in question, only to regain access to them in bits and pieces at a much later date. The same standards would apply in Julian’s case. While my report to his lawyer remains confidential, it was based on decades of clinical experience and research on traumatic memory, including the work of some of the great pioneers of modern psychiatry."
  • "NORMAL VERSUS TRAUMATIC MEMORY -- We all know how fickle memory is; our stories change and are constantly revised and updated. When my brothers, sisters, and I talk about events in our childhood, we always end up feeling that we grew up in different families—so many of our memories simply do not match. Such autobiographical memories are not precise reflections of reality; they are stories we tell to convey our personal take on our experience. The extraordinary capacity of the human mind to rewrite memory is illustrated in the Grant Study of Adult Development, which has systematically followed the psychological and physical health of more than two hundred Harvard men from their sophomore years of 1939–44 to the present. Of course, the designers of the study could not have anticipated that most of the participants would go off to fight in World War II, but we can now track the evolution of their wartime memories. The men were interviewed in detail about their war experiences in 1945/1946 and again in 1989/1990. Four and a half decades later, the majority gave very different accounts from the narratives recorded in their immediate postwar interviews: With the passage of time, events had been bleached of their intense horror. In contrast, those who had been traumatized and subsequently developed PTSD did not modify their accounts; their memories were preserved essentially intact forty-five years after the war ended. Whether we remember a particular event at all, and how accurate our memories of it are, largely depends on how personally meaningful it was and how emotional we felt about it at the time. The key factor is our level of arousal. We all have memories associated with particular people, songs, smells, and places that stay with us for a long time. Most of us still have precise memories of where we were and what we saw on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, but only a fraction of us recall anything in particular about September 10. Most day-to-day experience passes immediately into oblivion. On ordinary days we don’t have much to report when we come home in the evening. The mind works according to schemes or maps, and incidents that fall outside the established pattern are most likely to capture our attention. If we get a raise or a friend tells us some exciting news, we will retain the details of the moment, at least for a while. We remember insults and injuries best: The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents into our minds. Even if the content of the remark fades, our dislike for the person who made it usually persists. When something terrifying happens, like seeing a child or a friend get hurt in an accident, we will retain an intense and largely accurate memory of the event for a long time. As James McGaugh and colleagues have shown, the more adrenaline you secrete, the more precise your memory will be. But that is true only up to a certain point. Confronted with horror—especially the horror of “inescapable shock” —this system becomes overwhelmed and breaks down. Of course, we cannot monitor what happens during a traumatic experience, but we can reactivate the trauma in the laboratory, as was done for the brain scans in chapters 3 and 4. When memory traces of the original sounds, images, and sensations are reactivated, the frontal lobe shuts down, including, as we’ve seen, the region necessary to put feelings into words, the region that creates our sense of location in time, and the thalamus, which integrates the raw data of incoming sensations. At this point the emotional brain, which is not under conscious control and cannot communicate in words, takes over. The emotional brain (the limbic area and the brain stem) expresses its altered activation through changes in emotional arousal, body physiology, and muscular action. Under ordinary conditions these two memory systems—rational and emotional—collaborate to produce an integrated response. But high arousal not only changes the balance between them but also disconnects other brain areas necessary for the proper storage and integration of incoming information, such as the hippocampus and the thalamus. As a result, the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces: images, sounds, and physical sensations. Julian saw a man with outstretched arms, a pew, a staircase, a strip poker game; he felt a sensation in his penis, a panicked sense of dread. But there was little or no story."
  • "The greatest advances, however, came in the study of hysteria, a mental disorder characterized by emotional outbursts, susceptibility to suggestion, and contractions and paralyses of the muscles that could not be explained by simple anatomy. Once considered an affliction of unstable or malingering women (the name comes from the Greek word for “womb”), hysteria now became a window into the mysteries of mind and body. The names of some of the greatest pioneers in neurology and psychiatry, such as Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud, are associated with the discovery that trauma is at the root of hysteria, particularly the trauma of childhood sexual abuse...Pierre Janet...helped Charcot establish a research laboratory devoted to the study of hysteria at the Salpêtrière. In 1889...Janet published the first book-length scientific account of traumatic stress: L’automatisme psychologique. Janet proposed that at the root of what we now call PTSD was the experience of “vehement emotions,” or intense emotional arousal. This treatise explained that, after having been traumatized, people automatically keep repeating certain actions, emotions, and sensations related to the trauma...AMNESIA, DISSOCIATION, AND REENACTMENT -- Janet was the first to point out the difference between “narrative memory” —the stories people tell about trauma—and traumatic memory itself. One of his case histories was the story of Irène, a young woman who was hospitalized following her mother’s death from tuberculosis. Irène had nursed her mother for many months while continuing to work outside the home to support her alcoholic father and pay for her mother’s medical care. When her mother finally died...even after an aunt arrived and started preparing for the burial, Irène’s denial persisted...In addition to amnesia for her mother’s death, Irène suffered from another symptom: Several times a week she would stare, trancelike, at an empty bed, ignore whatever was going on around her, and begin to care for an imaginary person. She meticulously reproduced, rather than remembered, the details of her mother’s death. Traumatized people simultaneously remember too little and too much. On the one hand, Irène had no conscious memory of her mother’s death—she could not tell the story of what had happened. On the other she was compelled to physically act out the events of her mother’s death. Janet’s term “automatism” conveys the involuntary, unconscious nature of her actions. Janet treated Irène for several months, mainly with hypnosis. At the end he asked her again about her mother’s death. Irène started to cry and said, “Don’t remind me of those terrible things. . . . My mother was dead and my father was a complete drunk, as always. I had to take care of her dead body all night long. I did a lot of silly things in order to revive her. . . . In the morning I lost my mind. ” Not only was Irène able tell the story, but she had also recovered her emotions: “I feel very sad and abandoned. ” Janet now called her memory “complete” because it now was accompanied by the appropriate feelings. Janet noted significant differences between ordinary and traumatic memory. Traumatic memories are precipitated by specific triggers. In Julian’s case the trigger was his girlfriend’s seductive comments; in Irène’s it was a bed. When one element of a traumatic experience is triggered, other elements are likely to automatically follow. Traumatic memory is not condensed: It took Irène three to four hours to reenact her story, but when she was finally able to tell what had happened it took less than a minute. The traumatic enactment serves no function. In contrast, ordinary memory is adaptive; our stories are flexible and can be modified to fit the circumstances. Ordinary memory is essentially social; it’s a story that we tell for a purpose: in Irène’s case, to enlist her doctor’s help and comfort; in Julian’s case, to recruit me to join his search for justice and revenge. But there is nothing social about traumatic memory. Julian’s rage at his girlfriend’s remark served no useful purpose. Reenactments are frozen in time, unchanging, and they are always lonely, humiliating, and alienating experiences. Janet coined the term “dissociation” to describe the splitting off and isolation of memory imprints that he saw in his patients. He was also prescient about the heavy cost of keeping these traumatic memories at bay. He later wrote that when patients dissociate their traumatic experience, they become “attached to an insurmountable obstacle”: “[U]nable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is . . . as if their personality has definitely stopped at a certain point, and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements.” He predicted that unless they became aware of the split-off elements and integrated them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. This phenomenon has now been well documented in contemporary research. 20 Janet discovered that, while it is normal to change and distort one’s memories, people with PTSD are unable to put the actual event, the source of those memories, behind them. Dissociation prevents the trauma from becoming integrated within the conglomerated, ever- shifting stores of autobiographical memory, in essence creating a dual memory system. Normal memory integrates the elements of each experience into the continuous flow of self-experience by a complex process of association; think of a dense but flexible network where each element exerts a subtle influence on many others. But in Julian’s case, the sensations, thoughts, and emotions of the trauma were stored separately as frozen, barely comprehensible fragments. If the problem with PTSD is dissociation, the goal of treatment would be association: integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that “that was then, and this is now.”"
• Chapter 12 - The Unbearable Heaviness of Remembering
  • "While politics and medicine turned their backs on the returning soldiers, the horrors of the war were memorialized in literature and art. In All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel about the war experiences of frontline soldiers by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque, the book’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer, spoke for an entire generation: “I am aware that I, without realizing it, have lost my feelings—I don’t belong here anymore, I live in an alien world. I prefer to be left alone, not disturbed by anybody. They talk too much—I can’t relate to them—they are only busy with superficial things. ” Published in 1929, the novel instantly became an international best seller, with translations in twenty-five languages. The 1930 Hollywood film version won the Academy Award for Best Picture. But when Hitler came to power a few years later, All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the first “degenerate” books the Nazis burned in the public square in front of Humboldt University in Berlin. Apparently awareness of the devastating effects of war on soldiers’ minds would have constituted a threat to the Nazis’ plunge into another round of insanity. Denial of the consequences of trauma can wreak havoc with the social fabric of society."
  • "THE SCIENCE OF REPRESSED MEMORY -- There have in fact been hundreds of scientific publications spanning well over a century documenting how the memory of trauma can be repressed, only to resurface years or decades later. Memory loss has been reported in people who have experienced natural disasters, accidents, war trauma, kidnapping, torture, concentration camps, and physical and sexual abuse. Total memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidence ranging from 19 percent to 38 percent. This issue is not particularly controversial: As early as 1980 the DSM-III recognized the existence of memory loss for traumatic events in the diagnostic criteria for dissociative amnesia: “an inability to recall important personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is too extensive to be explained by normal forgetfulness.” Memory loss has been part of the criteria for PTSD since that diagnosis was first introduced. One of the most interesting studies of repressed memory was conducted by Dr. Linda Meyer Williams, which began when she was a graduate student in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970s. Williams interviewed 206 girls between the ages of ten and twelve who had been admitted to a hospital emergency room following sexual abuse. Their laboratory tests, as well as the interviews with the children and their parents, were kept in the hospital’s medical records. Seventeen years later Williams was able to track down 136 of the children, now adults, with whom she conducted extensive follow-up interviews. More than a third of the women (38 percent) did not recall the abuse that was documented in their medical records, while only fifteen women (12 percent) said that they had never been abused as children. More than two-thirds (68 percent) reported other incidents of childhood sexual abuse. Women who were younger at the time of the incident and those who were molested by someone they knew were more likely to have forgotten their abuse. This study also examined the reliability of recovered memories. One in ten women (16 percent of those who recalled the abuse) reported that they had forgotten it at some time in the past but later remembered that it had happened. In comparison with the women who had always remembered their molestation, those with a prior period of forgetting were younger at the time of their abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers. Williams also determined that the recovered memories were approximately as accurate as those that had never been lost: All the women’s memories were accurate for the central facts of the incident, but none of their stories precisely matched every detail documented in their charts. Williams’s findings are supported by recent neuroscience research that shows that memories that are retrieved tend to return to the memory bank with modifications. As long as a memory is inaccessible, the mind is unable to change it. But as soon as a story starts being told, particularly if it is told repeatedly, it changes—the act of telling itself changes the tale. The mind cannot help but make meaning out of what it knows, and the meaning we make of our lives changes how and what we remember. Given the wealth of evidence that trauma can be forgotten and resurface years later, why did nearly one hundred reputable memory scientists from several different countries throw the weight of their reputations behind the appeal to overturn Father Shanley’s conviction, claiming that “repressed memories” were based on “junk science”? Because memory loss and delayed recall of traumatic experiences had never been documented in the laboratory, some cognitive scientists adamantly denied that these phenomena existed or that retrieved traumatic memories could be accurate. However, what doctors encounter in emergency rooms, on psychiatric wards, and on the battlefield is necessarily quite different from what scientists observe in their safe and well-organized laboratories. Consider what is known as the “lost in the mall” experiment, for example. Academic researchers have shown that it is relatively easy to implant memories of events that never took place, such as having been lost in a shopping mall as a child. About 25 percent of subjects in these studies later “recall” that they were frightened and even fill in missing details. But such recollections involve none of the visceral terror that a lost child would actually experience. Another line of research documented the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Subjects might be shown a video of a car driving down a street and asked afterward if they saw a stop sign or a traffic light; children might be asked to recall what a male visitor to their classroom had been wearing. Other eyewitness experiments demonstrated that the questions witnesses were asked could alter what they claimed to remember. These studies were valuable in bringing many police and courtroom practices into question, but they have little relevance to traumatic memory. The fundamental problem is this: Events that take place in the laboratory cannot be considered equivalent to the conditions under which traumatic memories are created. The terror and helplessness associated with PTSD simply can’t be induced de novo in such a setting. We can study the effects of existing traumas in the lab, as in our script-driven imaging studies of flashbacks, but the original imprint of trauma cannot be laid down there. Dr. Roger Pitman conducted a study at Harvard in which he showed college students a film called Faces of Death, which contained newsreel footage of violent deaths and executions. This movie, now widely banned, is as extreme as any institutional review board would allow, but it did not cause Pitman’s normal volunteers to develop symptoms of PTSD. If you want to study traumatic memory, you have to study the memories of people who have actually been traumatized. Interestingly, once the excitement and profitability of courtroom testimony diminished, the “scientific” controversy disappeared as well, and clinicians were left to deal with the wreckage of traumatic memory.**"
  • "NORMAL VERSUS TRAUMATIC MEMORY -- In 1994 I and my colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital decided to undertake a systematic study comparing how people recall benign experiences and horrific ones. We placed advertisements in local newspapers, in laundromats, and on student union bulletin boards that said: “Has something terrible happened to you that you cannot get out of your mind? Call 727- 5500; we will pay you $10.00 for participating in this study. ” In response to our first ad seventy- six volunteers showed up. 26 After we introduced ourselves, we started off by asking each participant: “Can you tell us about an event in your life that you think you will always remember but that is not traumatic?” One participant lit up and said, “The day that my daughter was born”; others mentioned their wedding day, playing on a winning sports team, or being valedictorian at their high school graduation. Then we asked them to focus on specific sensory details of those events, such as: “Are you ever somewhere and suddenly have a vivid image of what your husband looked like on your wedding day?” The answers were always negative. “How about what your husband’s body felt like on your wedding night?” (We got some odd looks on that one.) We continued: “Do you ever have a vivid, precise recollection of the speech you gave as a valedictorian?” “Do you ever have intense sensations recalling the birth of your first child?” The replies were all in the negative. Then we asked them about the traumas that had brought them into the study—many of them rapes. “Do you ever suddenly remember how your rapist smelled?” we asked, and, “Do you ever experience the same physical sensations you had when you were raped?” Such questions precipitated powerful emotional responses: “That is why I cannot go to parties anymore, because the smell of alcohol on somebody’s breath makes me feel like I am being raped all over again” or “I can no longer make love to my husband, because when he touches me in a particular way I feel like I am being raped again. ” There were two major differences between how people talked about memories of positive versus traumatic experiences: (1) how the memories were organized, and (2) their physical reactions to them. Weddings, births, and graduations were recalled as events from the past, stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Nobody said that there were periods when they’d completely forgotten any of these events. In contrast, the traumatic memories were disorganized. Our subjects remembered some details all too clearly (the smell of the rapist, the gash in the forehead of a dead child) but could not recall the sequence of events or other vital details (the first person who arrived to help, whether an ambulance or a police car took them to the hospital). We also asked the participants how they recalled their trauma at three points in time: right after it happened; when they were most troubled by their symptoms; and during the week before the study. All of our traumatized participants said that they had not been able to tell anybody precisely what had happened immediately following the event. (This will not surprise anyone who has worked in an emergency room or ambulance service: People brought in after a car accident in which a child or a friend has been killed sit in stunned silence, dumbfounded by terror.) Almost all had repeated flashbacks: They felt overwhelmed by images, sounds, sensations, and emotions. As time went on, even more sensory details and feelings were activated, but most participants also started to be able to make some sense out of them. They began to “know” what had happened and to be able to tell the story to other people, a story that we call “the memory of the trauma. ” Gradually the images and flashbacks decreased in frequency, but the greatest improvement was in the participants’ ability to piece together the details and sequence of the event. By the time of our study, 85 percent of them were able to tell a coherent story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Only a few were missing significant details. We noted that the five who said they had been abused as children had the most fragmented narratives—their memories still arrived as images, physical sensations, and intense emotions. In essence, our study confirmed the dual memory system that Janet and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière had described more than a hundred years earlier: Traumatic memories are fundamentally different from the stories we tell about the past. They are dissociated: The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography. Perhaps the most important finding in our study was that remembering the trauma with all its associated affects, does not, as Breuer and Freud claimed back in 1893, necessarily resolve it. Our research did not support the idea that language can substitute for action. Most of our study participants could tell a coherent story and also experience the pain associated with those stories, but they kept being haunted by unbearable images and physical sensations. Research in contemporary exposure treatment, a staple of cognitive behavioral therapy, has similarly disappointing results: The majority of patients treated with that method continue to have serious PTSD symptoms three months after the end of treatment. As we will see, finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks or improve concentration, stimulate vital involvement in your life or reduce hypersensitivity to disappointments and perceived injuries."
  • "LISTENING TO SURVIVORS -- Nobody wants to remember trauma. In that regard society is no different from the victims themselves. We all want to live in a world that is safe, manageable, and predictable, and victims remind us that this is not always the case. In order to understand trauma, we have to overcome our natural reluctance to confront that reality and cultivate the courage to listen to the testimonies of survivors. In his book Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (1991), Lawrence Langer writes about his work in the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University: “Listening to accounts of Holocaust experience, we unearth a mosaic of evidence that constantly vanishes into bottomless layers of incompletion. We wrestle with the beginnings of a permanently unfinished tale, full of incomplete intervals, faced by the spectacle of a faltering witness often reduced to a distressed silence by the overwhelming solicitations of deep memory.” As one of his witnesses says: “If you were not there, it’s difficult to describe and say how it was. How men function under such stress is one thing, and then how you communicate and express that to somebody who never knew that such a degree of brutality exists seems like a fantasy.” Another survivor, Charlotte Delbo, describes her dual existence after Auschwitz: “[T]he ‘self’ who was in the camp isn’t me, isn’t the person who is here, opposite you. No, it’s too unbelievable. And everything that happened to this other ‘self, ’ the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch me now, me, doesn’t concern me, so distinct are deep memory and common memory. . . . Without this split, I wouldn’t have been able to come back to life.” She comments that even words have a dual meaning: “Otherwise, someone [in the camps] who has been tormented by thirst for weeks would never again be able to say: ‘I’m thirsty. Let’s make a cup of tea. ’ Thirst [after the war] has once more become a currently used term. On the other hand, if I dream of the thirst I felt in Birkenau [the extermination facilities in Auschwitz], I see myself as I was then, haggard, bereft of reason, tottering.” Langer hauntingly concludes, “Who can find a proper grave for such damaged mosaics of the mind, where they may rest in pieces? Life goes on, but in two temporal directions at once, the future unable to escape the grip of a memory laden with grief.” The essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbelievable, and unbearable. Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.
  • "NANCY’S STORY Few patients have put that duality into words as vividly as Nancy, the director of nursing in a Midwestern hospital who came to Boston several times to consult with me. Shortly after the birth of her third child, Nancy underwent what is usually routine outpatient surgery, a laparoscopic tubal ligation in which the fallopian tubes are cauterized to prevent future pregnancies. However, because she was given insufficient anesthesia, she awakened after the operation began and remained aware nearly to the end, at times falling into what she called “a light sleep” or “dream,” at times experiencing the full horror of her situation. She was unable to alert the OR team by moving or crying out because she had been given a standard muscle relaxant to prevent muscle contractions during surgery. Some degree of “anesthesia awareness” is now estimated to occur in approximately thirty thousand surgical patients in the United States every year, 32 and I had previously testified on behalf of several people who were traumatized by the experience. Nancy, however, did not want to sue her surgeon or anesthetist. Her entire focus was on bringing the reality of her trauma to consciousness so that she could free herself from its intrusions into her everyday life. I’d like to end this chapter by sharing several passages from a remarkable series of e-mails in which she described her grueling journey to recovery. Initially Nancy did not know what had happened to her. “When we went home I was still in a daze, doing the typical things of running a household, yet not really feeling that I was alive or that I was real. I had trouble sleeping that night. For days, I remained in my own little disconnected world. I could not use a hair dryer, toaster, stove or anything that warmed up. I could not concentrate on what people were doing or telling me. I just didn’t care. I was increasingly anxious. I slept less and less. I knew I was behaving strangely and kept trying to understand what was frightening me so. “On the fourth night after the surgery, around 3 AM, I started to realize that the dream I had been living all this time related to conversations I had heard in the operating room. I was suddenly transported back into the OR and could feel my paralyzed body being burned. I was engulfed in a world of terror and horror.” From then on, Nancy says, memories and flashbacks erupted into her life. “It was as if the door was pushed open slightly, allowing the intrusion. There was a mixture of curiosity and avoidance. I continued to have irrational fears. I was deathly afraid of sleep; I experienced a sense of terror when seeing the color blue. My husband, unfortunately, was bearing the brunt of my illness. I would lash out at him when I truly did not intend to. I was sleeping at most 2 to 3 hours, and my daytime was filled with hours of flashbacks. I remained chronically hyperalert, feeling threatened by my own thoughts and wanting to escape them. I lost 23 pounds in 3 weeks. People kept commenting on how great I looked. “I began to think about dying. I developed a very distorted view of my life in which all my successes diminished and old failures were amplified. I was hurting my husband and found that I could not protect my children from my rage. “Three weeks after the surgery I went back to work at the hospital. The first time I saw somebody in a surgical scrubsuit was in the elevator. I wanted to get out immediately, but of course I could not. I then had this irrational urge to clobber him, which I contained with considerable effort. This episode triggered increasing flashbacks, terror and dissociation. I cried all the way home from work. After that, I became adept at avoidance. I never set foot in an elevator, I never went to the cafeteria, I avoided the surgical floors.” Gradually Nancy was able to piece together her flashbacks and create an understandable, if horrifying, memory of her surgery. She recalled the reassurances of the OR nurses and a brief period of sleep after the anesthesia was started. Then she remembered how she began to awaken. “The entire team was laughing about an affair one of the nurses was having. This coincided with the first surgical incision. I felt the stab of the scalpel, then the cutting, then the warm blood flowing over my skin. I tried desperately to move, to speak, but my body didn’t work. I couldn’t understand this. I felt a deeper pain as the layers of muscle pulled apart under their own tension. I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel this. ” Nancy next recalls someone “rummaging around” in her belly and identified this as the laparoscopic instruments being placed. She felt her left tube being clamped. “Then suddenly there was an intense searing, burning pain. I tried to escape, but the cautery tip pursued me, relentlessly burning through. There simply are no words to describe the terror of this experience. This pain was not in the same realm as other pain I had known and conquered, like a broken bone or natural childbirth. It begins as extreme pain, then continues relentlessly as it slowly burns through the tube. The pain of being cut with the scalpel pales beside this giant.” “Then, abruptly, the right tube felt the initial impact of the burning tip. When I heard them laugh, I briefly lost track of where I was. I believed I was in a torture chamber, and I could not understand why they were torturing me without even asking for information. . . . My world narrowed to a small sphere around the operating table. There was no sense of time, no past, and no future. There was only pain, terror, and horror. I felt isolated from all humanity, profoundly alone in spite of the people surrounding me. The sphere was closing in on me. “In my agony, I must have made some movement. I heard the nurse anesthetist tell the anesthesiologist that I was ‘light. ’ He ordered more meds and then quietly said, ‘There is no need to put any of this in the chart. ’ That is the last memory I recalled. ” In her later e-mails to me, Nancy struggled to capture the existential reality of trauma. “I want to tell you what a flashback is like. It is as if time is folded or warped, so that the past and present merge, as if I were physically transported into the past. Symbols related to the original trauma, however benign in reality, are thoroughly contaminated and so become objects to be hated, feared, destroyed if possible, avoided if not. For example, an iron in any form—a toy, a clothes iron, a curling iron, came to be seen as an instrument of torture. Each encounter with a scrub suit left me disassociated, confused, physically ill and at times consciously angry. “My marriage is slowly falling apart—my husband came to represent the heartless laughing people [the surgical team] who hurt me. I exist in a dual state. A pervasive numbness covers me with a blanket; and yet the touch of a small child pulls me back to the world. For a moment, I am present and a part of life, not just an observer. “Interestingly, I function very well at work, and I am constantly given positive feedback. Life proceeds with its own sense of falsity. “There is a strangeness, bizarreness to this dual existence. I tire of it. Yet I cannot give up on life, and I cannot delude myself into believing that if I ignore the beast it will go away. I’ve thought many times that I had recalled all the events around the surgery, only to find a new one. “There are so many pieces of that 45 minutes of my life that remain unknown. My memories are still incomplete and fragmented, but I no longer think that I need to know everything in order to understand what happened. “When the fear subsides I realize I can handle it, but a part of me doubts that I can. The pull to the past is strong; it is the dark side of my life; and I must dwell there from time to time. The struggle may also be a way to know that I survive—a re-playing of the fight to survive—which apparently I won, but cannot own.” An early sign of recovery came when Nancy needed another, more extensive operation. She chose a Boston hospital for the surgery, asked for a preoperative meeting with the surgeons and the anesthesiologist specifically to discuss her prior experience, and requested that I be allowed to join them in the operating room. For the first time in many years I put on a surgical scrub suit and accompanied her into the OR while the anesthesia was induced. This time she woke up to a feeling of safety. Two years later I wrote Nancy asking her permission to use her account of anesthesia awareness in this chapter. In her reply she updated me on the progress of her recovery: “I wish I could say that the surgery to which you were so kind to accompany me ended my suffering. That sadly was not the case. After about six more months I made two choices that proved provident. I left my CBT therapist to work with a psychodynamic psychiatrist and I joined a Pilates class. “In our last month of therapy, I asked my psychiatrist why he did not try to fix me as all other therapists had attempted, yet had failed. He told me that he assumed, given what I had be able to accomplish with my children and career, that I had sufficient resiliency to heal myself, if he created a holding environment for me to do so. This was an hour each week that became a refuge where I could unravel the mystery of how I had become so damaged and then re-construct a sense of myself that was whole, not fragmented, peaceful, not tormented. Through Pilates, I found a stronger physical core, as well as a community of women who willingly gave acceptance and social support that had been distant in my life since the trauma. This combination of core strengthening—psychological, social, and physical—created a sense of personal safety and mastery, relegating my memories to the distant past, allowing the present and future to emerge.”

• "Researchers estimate that, in our country, about 1 out of 6 boys and 1 out of 4 girls are sexually abused before the age 18."
• "About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child"
• "Some child sexual abuse survivors may show symptoms of PTSD, including agitated behavior, frightening dreams, and repetitive play in which aspects of the abuse are expressed. They might exhibit other fears and anxieties..."
• "If childhood sexual abuse is not effectively treated, long-term symptoms may persist into adulthood. These may include:
  • PTSD and/or anxiety
  • Depression and thoughts of suicide
  • Sexual anxiety and disorders, including promiscuity
  • Difficulty maintaining appropriate boundaries with others, including enmeshed or avoidant relationships
  • Poor body image and low self-esteem
  • The use of unhealthy behaviors, such as alcohol abuse, drug abuse, self-mutilation, or bingeing and purging, to help mask painful emotions related to the abuse"

• Tim Ferriss:
  • "I was routinely sexually abused from ages two to four—that seems to be accurate based on conversations with my mom about the timeline—by the son of a babysitter. So if you imagine sort of the most disgusting, repulsive activities that you might envision with that statement, that is what happened. And I don’t know if it was on a weekly basis. I don’t know if it was multiple times a week, but it was frequent over a period of two years. "
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "For a very long time, up until age 35 or so, I felt like I had no memories before age six or five. And this type of amnesia actually showed up a lot for me in the sense that whenever I had a very stressful set of circumstances, a crisis of some type, a severe injury. I would experience this dissociation and I would black out my memory for the next, let’s just call it two to five hours would disappear. I would have no recollection of what happened."
  • "And I didn’t have any memories I could recall or did recall about this abuse until five or six years ago when I had a number of experiences with a psychedelic combination of plants called ayahuasca. And for more on that, we can refer people to other podcasts where I’ve talked about this, but at the time, let’s just call it five years ago, for sake of simplicity, the memory came up—and psychedelics are well known, not necessarily in the scientific literature, although there are some recordings of this, but more anecdotally across thousands and tens of thousands and millions of users over time, hypermnesia. So the opposite of amnesia, remembering things that you haven’t thought of in decades—the color and texture of the corduroy couch you had when you were an infant, that type of thing—and about five years ago, I would say, I had these crystal clear memories of sexual abuse come to me. The layout of the house, the other kids who were being cared of, so to speak, at the house. What the mother looked like, what the son looked like, being led up the stairs to the upstairs bedroom, the floor plan of the house. I know exactly where the house is. I know the driveway, I know the names, these are all things that I know. And it came flooding back to me. And at the time I thought to myself, “Huh, that’s interesting. That definitely happened. I remember that happening.”"
  • "And it came back to me in high resolution, but I didn’t feel any suffering associated with it. And I tucked it away, I put it back in the box, locked the box. And that was that. Until I had my first 10-day Vipassana silent retreat. And thankfully, had Jack Kornfield there as one of the lead facilitators. And to increase the depth of the experience, I’d fast beforehand. So it was fasting for about five days. And then began to use increasing dosages of psilocybin mushrooms, which contains psilocybin. So I started at 300 milligrams, went up to 600, and ultimately landed at 900. And I want to say around day six of this silent retreat, all of this abuse came back to me like a tidal wave. And it was replaying as if I were wearing a virtual reality headset."
  • "I was immersed. I wasn’t an observer. I was actually being traumatized and re-traumatized 24/7 for this period of time. Any moment that I was awake, this movie was playing and I would sweat through my sheets at night, fall asleep for an hour or two, then wake up to go back into meditation and the movie would start again. And I was so distraught. There was so much anguish. And I felt like I was either already having a psychotic break, or certain to have a psychotic break and that I would not be able to manage life when I left the silent retreat that I sought out Jack as an emergency to spend time with him and speak with him."
  • "And it was at that point after that that Jack made a number of recommendations for resources that we’ll talk about later, but included books by Peter Levine, like Waking the Tiger, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk and a handful of other things."
  • "It was at the tail end of that retreat that I realized these, let’s just call it 17 seemingly inexplicable behaviors of mine, these vicious cycles or triggers that I had been treating like separate things, separate problems to be solved, were all downstream of this trauma, if that makes any sense. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but I was like, “Oh, now that you click that puzzle piece into place, these really strange behaviors, this self-loathing, this rage that was seemingly so exaggerated and disproportionate, leading to the near suicide in college, which was as close as you can get to taking your life without actually doing it. All of these things fell into places making sense. And on one hand there was this relief that it made sense and that I wasn’t broken in all these different ways. I had just sort of suffered this acute trauma and blocked it."
  • "And it was also very overwhelming because I didn’t necessarily know how to work on this root cause, this trauma. And that’s when the direct work began. I cleared everything in my calendar and everything waited, everything that could wait, waited. And these memories at that point had started to trickle up to awareness. And I’ll just give another example that I’ve never spoken about publicly, which is in elementary school, feeling numb and priding myself on pain tolerance. This ability to dissociate and for whatever reason, really—well, for obvious reasons I guess, wanting to develop the ability to withstand pain. And for a very short period, I would bring this pocket knife to school and press it into the back of my left thumb, I remember this really clearly, until my thumb would start to bleed and then I’d move it a millimeter or two and then press it into my thumb and make it bleed. And do this over and over again without changing my facial expression. I’m in class, I’m sitting in math class doing this, looking at the blackboard tracking things."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "And so I began working, this is a few years ago, on compiling this book on healing. And I’m very fortunate in the sense that this sexual trauma never seemed to affect my sex life, my sort of vitality in sex. It was one of the few places actually that I felt integrated and felt, period. Where I actually felt deeply without dissociating. And so I started working on this book, the healing book. And I was writing this chapter, drafting this chapter on the abuse."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "Tim Ferriss: Totally. And I was chatting with a friend of mine before this call and I haven’t spoken to many people at all about any of this, but he also suffered quite a lot of trauma. And he said something to me, which I’ve also thought quite a bit in the last few years. And that is your childhood adaptive responses are perfect, that dissociation in a way is a miracle of evolution. The fact that we develop this ability to split our psyche, compartmentalize to survive, is really miraculous. And there just comes a point, at least for me, where these old adaptive coping mechanisms have outlived their usefulness. And that’s been a huge part of my journey. And telling my parents was also extremely difficult. I was worried about destroying them in a way, if that makes sense."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "we as a species have so much shame associated with this behavior that has been socialized, that somehow it is the victim’s fault. Just think about what rape victims go through when they report, how much they have to defend the believability of their story or what they might have done or not done to contribute. So you can only imagine how much shame there is for young people that don’t know what is happening to them or why it’s happening to them. So it’s pervasive in our world. And it is one of the most devastating behaviors that someone can enact on another at any age. If it happens before the age of 10, because we’re all still developing our brains, it changes the neural pathways in our brains to such an extent that the behaviors that I know we’re going to talk about that you’ve struggled with and that I’ve struggled with are just a normal way of responding once that kind of trauma occurs."
  • "And for me, my trauma began, my sexual trauma began when I was nine years old and continued until I was 12."
  • ...
  • "Your psyche is too strong to just take those experiences and sweep them under a rug and never ever look at them again. They come back...But back to my experience with you, I still, up until 2017 or 2018, when I was first on your show, I was very, very secretive about my past. I still felt an enormous amount of shame. I still felt that it made me damaged goods. I was not really willing to discuss it with anyone at any length, beyond my closest, closest friends and partners. And I hadn’t even talked about it at length with my family who didn’t really seem to want to know."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "Hakomi therapy, H-A-K-O-M-I, which is something that I found very helpful for learning to feel again, after a lifetime of numbing and dissociation. So as a kid who is in retrospect, very, very, very sensitive, all of what happened was just such an utter assault on my senses that it obliterated my capacity or desire to feel anything. And it’s been a process to relearn how to feel, and to embrace that sensitivity as a gift and not just a liability."
  • ...
  • "In my case, I’m hyperreactive to any type of stressor. So I have a panic response, given my history, and there are other types of trauma that I’ve experienced. I was very badly physically bullied up until sixth grade. School was absolutely terrifying for me for a long time. That plus sexual trauma, plus other things, have led me to be very cardiac hyper-responsive. Even a minor disagreement or a loud noise can send my heart rate to a hundred plus beats per minute, where it will stay for hours."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "I think for me, and that’s so interesting the different responses people and bodies have to their trauma. I have often joked, and maybe it’s not really that funny, but I position it as a joke, that I am just a head. And then I’m not. I don’t know that my head is even still fully connected to my body. I am very cerebral. And my wife knows this, my former partner, Maria Popova. We joke about it all the time that I just love to talk. I am a talker. I like to analyze everything. And being connected to my body is much, much harder for me. I’m very comfortable face to face with someone, looking at them, looking into their eyes, and engaging intellectually and verbally."
• ...
• Debbie Millman:
  • "It’s really quite extraordinary how plastic the brain actually is, and how you are able to, over time, create different neural pathways that allow you to respond differently than you may have in the past. And quite a lot of people that have experienced severe trauma do have that exaggerated panic response where something that might not ruffle someone else that hasn’t experienced severe trauma might see as a minor thing, that people that have experienced severe trauma will see as catastrophic. That if one small bad thing happens, that means that everything is fucked. That means that everything is screwed up. That means that you’re just terrible. And it’s more evidence that you’re not worthy of being alive or being happy."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "Yeah, but that is absolutely the way that people that have experienced severe trauma respond. It’s if you aren’t dealing with and experiencing and managing that trauma, you never get a place to detangle any future trauma to that past trauma, and so they become instantly attached. And that’s why that sort of giant feeling of everything being that globalizes that new trauma or that new frustration or that new paper cut, whatever it is to that past trauma happens. And I don’t know why in our DNA this isn’t better integrated in our daily lives and our experiences of ourselves, but humans metabolize our emotions fairly quickly in the grand scheme of things. We have the ability when were hot to take off our sweater, if we’re cold, we put it back on. When we’re hungry, we eat and we metabolize and digest our food and so forth. But when it comes to these types of traumas, there’s a fear that somehow reengaging with them will destroy us, and it won’t. If we have the right tools to help us through these things, they won’t."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "Yeah, I fantasize a lot because I do work with Mariska Hargitay and I have these sort of fantasies about sort of an SVU episode of vengeance. But I just don’t think I have it in me. That rage, I still do overreact to things. I still, when something bad will happen, I’ll feel doomed, but not anywhere as near what it was, what it used to be. And I have become so much more sensitive to life and to things that are living that I don’t think I have it in me anymore to do that, but I haven’t forgiven him. I’m wondering in the work that you’ve done, have you been able to forgive your perpetrator?"
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "Oh, so far, and the work is not done, and in a way I look forward to the work because as I do more work and learn more than I can hopefully share more. But I will say, just in the progress that I’ve made in the last handful of years I’ve realized through say the HRV training, looking at my cardiac hyper-reactivity to very small things, little noises, certainly different situations, tense conversations, I have a full blown panic response, even though I can keep a calm face, and part of that is retreating into stories. And this is something I repeat to myself, and this is while I’m sober, although it began as a realization in the space of working with psychedelics, is “Don’t retreat into story, don’t retreat into story.” And retreating into story means defaulting to these old stories that I’ve used for so long that I never, for decades, questioned them, right?"
  • "And one of the stories is related to personalizing things. So if somebody does something that I take to be a breach of trust, a betrayal of some type and I begin to spin this story and construct this narrative of how this person has completely betrayed me. I am unsafe. This person is dangerous, they are a threat. I have to cut them out of my life. It is very binary, black and white. And I think there’s a place for that, there is a place for that. I mean, the “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” type of mentality, I do think there is a place for that. But it has been such a default, like if you choose that as a response, that is fine. If it is a reaction, if you’re like a slug that’s getting poked with a stick and you’re just reacting, reacting, reacting, then I think it’s worthy of reexamination."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "Yeah, if you feel like it’s involuntary. Sometimes these responses, you almost feel like you don’t have any control over how you respond."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "Yeah. And I would also say that looking at it through the lens, just as an exercise, of using physiology to change psychology, working on and training the heart as a muscle so that you can take what we think of as an autonomous function heartbeat and actually gain some control over it, shows me, at least in certain instances, that I’m not creating a story that then gives me a physical response. I’m having a nonverbal panic response to a perceived threat that is nowhere in my prefrontal cortex. I mean, this predates language. And then given that really strong physiological response, I’m crafting a story to justify it. Does that make sense?"
  • ...
  • "in my case, it has become clear, not always, but a lot of the time, I’m having this almost reptilian panic response. And then my prefrontal cortex kicks in, and within a nanosecond manufactures a story that justifies the huge physical response. And then my mind will find evidence to support that story."
• Debbie Millman:
  • "Yeah, absolutely. And you can’t control your reptilian brain. As hard as we try, you can’t will that adrenaline to kick in. It just doesn’t work that way."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "Yeah. So it’s been fascinating to work at it from both ends, meaning working on the psychology, using words, using books, using resources, exercises that are clearly prefrontal cortex, to affect my physiology, to calm myself, to decrease hypervigilance, which is extremely energetically expensive. I mean, I’ve battled fatigue my whole life. And I think that’s a big part of it is that I’m always, as my friend Josh Waitzkin would put it, I’m always at a simmering six of sympathetic nervous system activation, like fight or flight. I’m always at a six."
  • "Yeah. And it’s just much more effective. It’s much more enjoyable to be at either a zero or a one, and then being able to jump to 10 when action is required. But if you’re constantly at a low boil, you’re just exhausted. So to work with words to decrease that hypervigilance and to change my physical response, and then also to work on the physical response directly to work on nonverbal, say somatic release and so on, to then relax the cognitive gum that keeps familiar stories playing as defaults. And so I’ve tried to work in both directions."
• Tim Ferriss:
  • "I absolutely think so, but what I think I’ve become aware of as a question is—again, it’s very basic, but what are you unwilling to feel? And the reason I bring that up in the context of, let’s just say work, is if there’s something, and again, much of this is subconscious that I don’t want to feel, or that I’m finding very uncomfortable, I will plunge into projects and work."
  • "Yeah, as a way to just overwhelm whatever the truth of that experience might be otherwise. And the truth of an experience—I’ve mentioned the word revelation a few times. Sometimes the truth and the solution is put right in your face. It’s a gigantic billboard put in your face, and the message is obvious. But very often for me, the truth and the solution, and maybe the alternative to your old stories and patterns, is a whisper from across the room, and you really have to pay attention to get the message. And if you’re not subconsciously or consciously ready to do that, well, going through 1,000 emails and having 15 conference calls and committing to three new projects, well, turn on the music in the room to such a high volume that you’re never going to hear the whisper. And I think I’ve voluntarily drowned out the signal as a coping mechanism."

• "Dissociation during and after the trauma: Children may daydream during inappropriate sexual encounters as a coping mechanism to escape the reality of the situation. After the event, feelings of depersonalization, reduced responsiveness to surroundings, and detachment from others is common. Poor integration of trauma memories can result in flashbacks that progress to PTSD."
• "Anxiety or arousal responses when recalling the trauma: PTSD sufferers have a higher baseline sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity than most people. SNS activation, otherwise known as the “fight or flight” response, occurs when a person is first attacked. The stress hormone cortisol floods the system, leading to increases in blood pressure, muscle tenseness, rapid breathing, and reduced perception of pain. The parasympathetic nervous system, or “learning” brain, shuts down almost entirely, along with any non-essential neural circuits. Feelings of anxiety, nervousness, and depression may surface along with stress. While we need our SNS to survive life-threatening situations, these pathways can become too deepened in the mind, causing the brain to have trouble distinguishing a true emergency from a partner’s embrace, a news story about rape, or a nightmare. Many sexual trauma survivors with PTSD experience sexual inhibition and the inability to become aroused with a sexual partner."
• "Intrusive thoughts, followed by cognitive suppression: The trouble with dissociation and extreme anxiety is that these mental conditions interfere with the coding, storage, and retrieval of traumatic memories. Survivors may experience amnesia in the immediate aftermath, only for severely disturbing memories to resurface later on.  A person with PTSD could experience a memory that is simultaneously vivid and vague. Fear structures in the brain linking sensory details of the abuse together can become triggered, causing intense unpleasant emotions to flood the system."
• "Avoidant coping such as denial or minimizing: Once the abuse has occurred, many survivors deny that a problem, symptom, feeling, or need exists. They may blame themselves, seek rationalization for what happened, or assure themselves they’re fine. They may come to admit what happened, but deny the consequences and avoid seeking help. Sexual abuse survivors sometimes engage in behavioral strategies designed to reduce or avoid unpleasant thoughts and emotions associated with their traumatic experiences—excessive worrying, abuse of drugs or alcohol, self-harming, or engaging in promiscuous acts. Some survivors retreat in social isolation and depression to avoid any potential hurt."
• "Re-experiencing: Some survivors feel like they are reliving childhood trauma all over again through flashbacks, dreams, or intrusive thoughts. Certain people, places, life events, or news stories can serve as triggers, bringing unwanted memories or sensations back to their present thoughts."
• "Survivors frequently encounter waves of depression, anger, guilt, shame, and distrust. They may mourn the “death” of the innocent child who existed before the trauma occurred. Their opinions, perspectives, and personalities typically remain forever shaped by what happened to them. Family and friends may notice irritability, anger, or numbness. The ability to maintain steady employment and relationships can be seriously hindered in some cases."
• "Avoidance is the most significant factor in prolonging and intensifying trauma-related PTSD. This short-term strategy for resolving distress may seem to confirm that you are in control of your mind, but research shows that 70% of sexual assault survivors experience moderate to severe distress, which is a larger percentage than for any other violent crime. Repressed memories have a way of coming back—sometimes when you least expect it and feel you’ve truly put the past behind you—for instance, when you’re about to get married or have your first child. Major life events commonly serve as emotional triggers. It can be difficult for even the most supportive family members and friends to comprehend."

• "One of the most distressing aspects of living with a trauma-related disorder is experiencing a flashback— a vivid experience in which you relive an aspect of a past traumatic event as if it is happening in the present. Some flashbacks involve reexperiencing the physical sensations or bodily responses associated with the original trauma. These bodily experiences, aptly known as somatic flashbacks, are more than a memory: they center on the physical sensations of past traumas."
• "Flashbacks can take various forms. For some people, they manifest as vivid visual images, almost like watching the traumatic event unfold in the theater of their mind. Others might encounter flashbacks through sounds, smells, or somatic sensations deeply linked to the trauma. As mentioned, a somatic flashback is a present reexperiencing of the physical sensations felt during past trauma. How a person physically experiences a somatic flashback depends greatly on the nature of their initial trauma."
• "To better understand somatic flashbacks, it is helpful to understand how trauma can be stored in the body as somatic memory. Somatic memory, also known as body memory, refers to the physical sensations of discomfort, unease, and pain that remain in the body after trauma. If not properly addressed, somatic memories can manifest over time through digestive issues, poor posture, chronic pain, fatigue, insomnia, and other physical sensations."
• "Somatic memories caused by trauma often exist below the level of consciousness but can be brought to the surface by various triggers, such as certain types of sights, touch, sounds, emotions, and situations. Somatic flashbacks can be understood as the vivid reawakening of your somatic memories."
• "Somatic flashbacks, though, are just that: momentary flashbacks. If someone experiences ongoing negative physical (or emotional) sensations long after a traumatic experience, they are likely not experiencing somatic flashbacks but rather dealing with an underlying trauma-related disorder. Unfortunately, for people with trauma-related disorders, the mental and physical manifestations of their traumatic experiences can continue long after the perceived threat is no longer present."
• "When we experience stress or trauma, our mind and body gear up to protect us from the perceived threat by engaging our natural survival mechanism. This mechanism, known as the trauma response, can include a range of reactions such as fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and flop."
• "Ideally, the trauma response is time-limited and self-regulating. In other words, our mind and body kick into high gear to face the challenging experience, and then we return to our baseline to properly process the events of the past. However, returning to the baseline can be more challenging for some people. Proponents of somatic therapy believe that the continuation of symptoms related to stress and trauma indicates the body’s inability to move through the course of its survival instinct fully. By this logic, somatic flashbacks may be caused by unresolved, underlying trauma."
• "The mind processes and stores information differently during trauma than under normal circumstances. Namely, during a traumatic event, the mind and body are focused on survival, not as much on processing and storing information. Once the traumatic event has passed, the mind and body attempt to process and store the event as a memory based on available information. Yet, depending on the severity of the traumatic event and the person’s ability to engage in a healthy way with their past experience, the event’s storing, processing, and recollection can be disordered, leading to somatic flashbacks and other mental health challenges."
• "During a somatic flashback, the brain and body have difficulty differentiating between the past and present. When a person who struggles with a trauma-related disorder or endured previous trauma is triggered, their body can be sent into a state of overdrive where the brain and body confuse the perceived present threat with the threat of past trauma—unnecessarily activating a trauma response."
• "The trauma response is the body’s way of protecting itself from a perceived threat. That being said, for people with trauma-related disorders, there is a dysregulation in the body’s natural response to stress, and they can experience disproportionate or inappropriate bodily reactions. Remember, somatic flashbacks differ from memories. More often than not, these flashbacks are not recalled consciously but occur in a way that is intrusive and outside of the individual’s control. Through various therapeutic modalities, it is possible to address this dysregulation and help the individual better manage the emotional and physical effects of stress."
• "Flashbacks are a common feature of both post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD). Depending on the situation and the person, flashbacks can occur with varying levels of frequency and intensity. During a flashback, some people completely relive their traumatic experience, while others more momentarily or partially relive just one aspect of the original experience."

• "One particularly harmful form of trauma is when a child is a victim of sexual abuse. Statistically, the majority of children know their abuser, and in approximately half of those situations the child is sexually abused by a peer or older child. These statistics highlight the close relationship children have to the person who abused them, which adds to the complexity of the trauma experience (experts often refer to this as betrayal trauma). It is often very confusing to a child who trusts—maybe even loves—someone who is sexually abusing them. Such conflicting emotions may cause the child to question their understanding of the situation, their ability to trust others, and their relationship with their own bodies."
• "When a child is hurt by someone who is supposed to be protecting them, it is difficult for their developing minds to sort through the experience and make sense of the situation. However, regardless of the child’s relationship to the person who abuses them, every child who is a victim of sexual abuse has experienced a trauma that no child should have to endure. (To learn more about our efforts to help parents and communities reduce the risk of child sexual abuse, visit Saprea Prevention.)"
• "The brain is a complex organ, and there’s still so much to learn about its functions, abilities, and health. Studies on trauma and its impacts on the brain, however, have helped us understand that there are two areas of the brain that are especially important in working with trauma survivors: the limbic system and the frontal lobe."
  • "What Is the Limbic System?"
    • "The limbic system plays an important role in our brain function: it alerts our bodies when it perceives a threat. It can help our bodies respond to a situation by urging us into fight, flight, or freeze mode."
    • "The limbic system will often go through the same cycle, trying to prepare the body to protect itself from the threat. In situations of sexual abuse, however, the body is often unable to escape. The alarmed limbic system ends up flooding the body with adrenaline that has nowhere to go. Instead, this unreleased stress can remain held in the body while the brain functions in a state of high alert, constantly on the lookout for signs of danger—even when the abuse is not happening. This continual hypervigilance creates a pattern in the child’s brain where their mind and body are nearly always preparing to respond to a potential threat."
    • "How does the limbic system try to protect me?
      • "In other cases, the brain may disrupt the memory of the events, or dissociate all together, leaving the child with periods of time that they won’t remember as they get older. Additionally, the brain may try to protect the body by experiencing physical pain, which can disrupt the hormones in a way that often leads to emotional and mental health challenges. The brain may also learn to associate smells or environments with the abuse, and so as the child encounters similar smells or environments in the future, the brain sends off warning signals (usually referred to as triggers)."
      • "For example, to help you survive the trauma of the abuse, your limbic system may have prompted your still-developing brain to dissociate while the abuse was happening. This means that you may have experienced the sensation of leaving your body and watching the abuse from a third-person point of view. This strategy was your limbic system’s way to help distance your brain from a situation that would’ve been otherwise unbearable. But while this strategy was useful—even essential—at that time in your life, it may no longer be the most helpful technique in adulthood. Now, dissociation may lead to you feeling disconnected from your body, detached from your own thoughts and emotions, or unable to fully engage with the present. It may be disrupting your daily life and providing additional challenges to your healing journey."
    • "The Limbic System and the Window of Tolerance"
      • "However, there are times when triggers, environmental stressors, or relationship stressors happen, and we find ourselves moving out of our window of tolerance and into states of hypoarousal or hyperarousal."
      • "Hyperarousal (Fight/Flight)"
        • "When we are in this state, it feels like what’s happening in the moment is too much for us and we can’t handle it anymore, causing our limbic system to go into fight or flight. Below is a list of common symptoms of hyperarousal."
          • "Self-judgment/self-criticism"
          • "Intrusive imagery/flashbacks"
          • "Need for control"
          • "Nightmares"
          • "Physical pain"
          • "Anxiety/panic"
          • "Obsessive compulsive behaviors/thoughts"
      • "Hypoarousal (Freeze)"
        • "Hypoarousal is the opposite of hyperarousal. It is also a stress response, but instead of engaging with the stress, we feel like we are shutting down. The body and brain become so overwhelmed by the stressor and, as a survival mechanism, it’s almost as though they refuse to acknowledge the presence of that stressor. Hypoarousal may even occur as a result of being in a hyperaroused state for too long. Below is a list of common symptoms of hypoarousal."
          • "Dissociation"
          • "Disconnection"
          • "Separation from self"
          • "Memory issues"
          • "Depression"
          • "Shame"
  • "What Is the Frontal Lobe?"
    • "The frontal lobe is the area of the brain where we employ strategies for evaluating, thinking critically, and choosing action. This is very much the “decision-making” center of the brain. And this part can learn, including learning new patterns of thought, behaviors, and strategies."
    • "The frontal lobe is actively developing in childhood (think about how much a baby changes during their first five years of life) and continues to develop well into adulthood. In fact, research suggests the frontal lobe is still growing into an adult’s late twenties or early thirties. What this means is that the limbic system, which is active from infancy, takes a more active role in responding to childhood sexual abuse; the frontal lobe, which needs much more information, experience, and time to grow, is unprepared to deal with sexual experiences at a young age, much less sexual abuse. (It is for these reasons that Saprea firmly asserts that a child cannot consent to sexual activity, especially in situations where sexual activity is with an adult or older child who is developmentally more advanced.)"
    • "What Is Neuroplasticity and How Can It Help Me Heal from Child Sexual Abuse?"
      • "That being said, neural pathways can be created for behaviors and habits that serve us well, as well as for behaviors and habits that impede our progress. Triggers are a great example of a disruptive, frustrating neural pathway. With a trigger, the limbic system learned to associate something (a smell, for example) with a traumatic event from the past. And every time the survivor encounters that smell, the limbic system goes down that familiar path and tells the body it’s in danger, which in turn engages the body’s survival response."

• "Methods: The authors draw from approximately 128 international scholarly articles on CSA published between 1979 and 2009."
• "Numerous studies suggest that sexual victimization in adolescence significantly increases the likelihood of sexual victimization in adulthood. Studies suggest that sexual victimization in childhood or adolescence increases the likelihood of sexual victimization in adulthood between 2 and 13.7 times."
• "Several researchers speculate that mediating factors caused by CSA contribute to higher risk of sexual revictimization. Childhood abuse may interfere with normal development of interpersonal relatedness and affect regulation, which in turn decrease abuse victims’ awareness of danger. Negative long-term effects of CSA may be attempts to avoid or cope with negative emotional states, but that such emotional avoidance can create challenges in recognizing danger cues. Some female CSA victims may associate sexuality with pain, punishment, and other negative outcomes, leading them to believe that coercion and trauma are “normal” aspects of sexual relations. This, in turn, would leave CSA victims with a “higher threshold of tolerance” for coercive or forceful sexual advances."

• "For several decades, some, studies have reported that about one-third of male abusers may have been a victim in their childhood (Finkelhor, 1979; Senn et al., 2012). Therefore, although it cannot be stated that there is intergenerational transmission of abuse, because the majority of victims are female and they do not subsequently become abusers, it is relatively common for abusers to have witnessed or suffered abuse during their childhood (Clayton et al., 2018)."
• "Sexual Revictimization"
  • "Suffering further episodes of sexual victimization during adolescence and early youth is common among victims of CSA. Authors such as Walker et al. (2017) concluded in their meta-analysis that the prevalence of revictimization reached almost 50% of the cases. Some studies have reported that female victims of CSA are three to five times more likely to suffer further sexual assault than those who have not suffered CSA (Pereda et al., 2016; Godbout et al., 2019)."

• "What Is a Flashback?"
  • "When we experience an event with powerful emotions or sensations (especially ones like fear, distress, or pain), sometimes our memories of that event are stored in a way that our brain can quickly access to remind us to avoid similar situations in the future."
  • "When these memories come back suddenly to our mind involuntarily and intrusively, they are described as flashbacks. Put another way, flashbacks consist of “the intrusive re-experiencing of traumatic experiences in the present."
  • "The neurological cause of flashbacks has not yet been determined. Nevertheless, for individuals who cope with the effects of past abuse, flashbacks can greatly disrupt their lives and interfere with wellbeing."
• "What Does Having a Flashback Feel Like?"
  • "Flashbacks and intrusive memories are experienced in a broad range of ways that are influenced by many factors. Some trauma survivors describe flashbacks as abrupt and frequent—sometimes like watching repeating images in their mind’s eye or recalling sounds from their memory. Others experience vivid recollections in which they, in a sense, relive parts of the traumatic event from their past. In these cases, survivors can even have difficulty distinguishing their memory from what is happening around them in the present moment."
  • "For many survivors, experiencing a flashback is extremely distressing. They are typically caused by triggers and can sometimes lead to other unsettling symptoms such as panic attacks or dissociation. Flashbacks may leave the survivor with feelings of fear, anxiety, shame, or uncertainty about how to prevent one from happening again. Whatever the outcome, these recurring intrusive memories of the traumatic events interrupt survivors’ lives and bring frequent reminders of the pain they continue to carry."
• "How Are Flashbacks Connected to Child Sexual Abuse?"
  • "It is quite common for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to endure flashbacks and sudden intense memories of their abuse, even after many years have passed from when the abuse occurred. This is because the trauma of the abuse continues to impact the brain, even after the abuse itself is no longer a part of the survivor’s life. It does so by keeping the limbic system, the part of the brain that seeks to avoid pain and find relief, in a state of hypervigilance. This hypervigilance first occurred during the abuse in childhood, when the limbic struggled to keep the survivor safe and to process what was happening."
  • "Since then, the limbic system—for many survivors—remains on edge, always on high alert for any signs of danger. And when it does associate a detail in the present with a traumatic memory, the limbic system can be triggered into fight, flight, or freeze mode. In these moments of heightened distress, the memory can become so vivid that the limbic system links the sensations of the past— such as sight, sound, and smell—with the sensations of the present. And the frontal lobe, the analytical part of the brain, struggles to catch up and communicate the separation between the past and present. The end result can escalate into a flashback, where the aspects of a traumatic memory can seem like they are playing out in real time."

• "Why Does My Relationship with My Body Matter?"
  • "And while everyone has felt some degree of displeasure or dissatisfaction towards their body, survivors of child sexual abuse can experience such tension and conflict on an entirely different level."
• "In What Ways Can Child Sexual Abuse Impact a Survivor’s Relationship with Their Body?"
  • "Trauma lives in both the brain and body. And for survivors of child sexual abuse, this trauma was instilled at a very young age, while the brain is still developing and the body is still maturing. In some cases, survivors endured their abuse before they had reached puberty. They may have been abused before they had any other experience with sexual intimacy or even had a full understanding of what sexual intimacy is. And even though our bodies are designed to respond to sexual stimuli, a survivor may still feel ashamed of or confused by how their body responded to the abuse, even though the body’s physiological reactions were perfectly normal."
  • "Whatever the age and maturity level when the abuse occurred, survivors of child sexual abuse experienced a violation of their bodily autonomy. While such a violation is no less devastating when experienced in adulthood, it can be especially confusing and disorienting for a child or teen who has yet to develop an understanding of or a relationship with their own body and how it functions."
  • "These feelings of confusion, shame, fear, and betrayal can live in the body for years and even decades after the abuse has stopped. Even into adulthood, the physical, emotional, and sexual trauma they endured as a youth can remain present and continue to affect their relationship with their own body."
  • "This complicated relationship between a survivor’s brain and their body can manifest in many ways. Below are some examples of how trauma can impact a survivor’s body:"
    • "Body ownership"
      • "Body ownership is about understanding that your body is your own. It does not belong to anyone else. At a young age, we are often taught this concept through the importance of setting boundaries, respecting others’ boundaries and understanding that others are not entitled to touch or see certain areas of our bodies just because they want to. Survivors may feel a lack of this body ownership from the unwanted experiences they endured and how severely their boundaries were violated. Such experiences might leave survivors with the impression that someone else is in charge of their body and that their own wants, needs, and autonomy are not worth considering."
    • "Body shame"
      • "Body shame occurs when you perceive your physical self as the cause of the experience you went through—either through the messaging of others or a perception that your body failed you in some way. For some survivors, this shame can manifest as feelings of betrayal toward their body because of how it responded to the abuse, how their body garnered the attention of the abuser, or because of their body’s response to the trauma (if, for example, it defaulted into freeze mode, rather than fight or flight). Though these are very normal responses to the trauma of sexual abuse, survivors may feel ashamed by what their body did or didn’t do during the abuse and towards the sense of helplessness that resulted."
    • "Body satisfaction"
      • "When a survivor’s early experiences with their body are tied to the trauma of sexual abuse, it can be more difficult for that survivor to have feelings of satisfaction or contentment with their body. Again, while it is common in our society to feel dissatisfied with our bodies or to fixate on what aspects of our bodies we think need to be improved, for survivors, this lack of body satisfaction can run on a much deeper level. And it can impact not only how survivors view their bodies but how they view their overall worth and ability."
    • "Body disconnection"
      • "For some survivors, the most formative memories of their own body are rooted in trauma. And in some instances, the body itself can feel like a reminder of that trauma. As a way for survivors to protect themselves from this trauma, they may start to distance themselves from their body’s experience, including what sensations their body may be feeling, what functions their body serves, or what physical needs they have. This survival response is known as body disconnection and may have first developed when the abuse began. However, survivors may continue to experience this disconnection from their bodies long after the abuse has stopped in order to avoid certain memories or triggers. And because the communication between the mind and body is so important, this disconnection can interrupt a survivor’s healing. It can also lead to additional health problems in cases where a survivor is so disconnected that they don’t notice pain or other problems their body is experiencing."
    • "Physical health"
      • "The trauma of sexual abuse can impact not only how a survivor views their own body but also what they physically experience. Sometimes when trauma lives in the body, it can contribute to other ailments, such as chronic pain, illnesses, injuries, or chronic health problems. The continual anxiety, fear, and/or hypervigilance a survivor may experience might manifest as physical symptoms such as nausea, shallow breathing, muscle tension, or tightness in the chest. In some instances, survivors may face difficulties with certain physical activities, as these activities require an engagement with the body that a survivor may try to avoid, especially if they’re feeling disconnected from the body. Avoidance of such physical activities can sometimes exacerbate health problems or other physical issues."
    • "Body Objectification"
      • "Because of how their body was treated by those who abused them, survivors may sometimes feel as though their body is nothing more than an object. It’s quite natural for a survivor to internalize the objectification they were submitted to at such a young age. These feelings of objectification can contribute to a survivor viewing their body as an object of disgust or shame, influencing their perceived desirability or potential to be loved and wanted by others. On the other hand, internalized objectification can contribute to a survivor feeling as though the only thing their body is good for is sex. They may pursue high-risk sexual situations or engage in compulsive sexual behavior."

• "What Is a Panic Attack?"
  • "A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense fear that triggers severe reactions when there is no real danger or apparent cause. Panic attacks are typically unexpected, coming on without any warning, and can last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. Although panic attacks are not life-threatening, they are often very frightening for those who experience them. In some cases, the overwhelming fear can be so intense that the individual might think they are suffering a heart attack or another health condition they may not surive."
• "What Causes a Panic Attack?"
  • "A tragic event"
  • "Memories of trauma"
  • "Chronic illnesses"
  • "Underlying anxiety or panic disorders"
• "What Does a Panic Attack Feel Like?"
  • "Accelerated heart rate"
  • "Fear of having no control"
  • "Fear of possibly dying"
• "Why Do Many Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse Have Panic Attacks?"
  • "As discussed above, there are a variety of stressors that can cause panic attacks. However, one cause that is more common among survivors of trauma is symptoms of post-traumatic stress. This can be especially true for survivors of child sexual abuse who experienced their trauma at a young age while the brain was still developing. Because even after the abuse stops, and the child or teen ages into an adult survivor, their limbic system can remain hyperalert, on constant lookout for any signs of danger. With the brain already in this heightened state of stress, a survivor may be more susceptible to panic attacks. They may also have more difficulty managing the symptoms should one occur."
• "Does a Panic Attack Mean I Was “Triggered”?"
  • In some cases, yes. Unfortunately, when the brain is always in a state of hypervigilance, it may react to something it thinks is a threat when, in actuality, what the brain reacted to was not a threat but a reminder of the very real threats of the past. These reminders of past trauma are what we call triggers. Triggers can be anything from a song to a scent to a ceiling fan to the appearance of a stranger in the store. However seemingly small or insignificant these reminders may be, they carry a strong enough connection to the past trauma for the hyper aroused brain to pick up on. The limbic system will then react to this connection by setting off alarm bells, believing you to be in danger. For instance, you may see a curtain pattern that reminds you of a room from your childhood where you were sexually abused. Making the connection, your limbic system might confuse the past with the present and perceive you to be in the same danger you experienced as a child.
  • And because the threat of danger can seem so real, your body may respond to these alarm bells in a number of ways. You might have a flashback, forget where you are, or feel a physical pain in your neck and shoulders. In some cases, you may zone out, which is called “dissociating.” And in other cases, you may experience a panic attack. In these instances, the survivor can be seized by a sudden panic, overcome by an intense fear and certainty that danger is imminent.

• Psychological
  • Child sexual abuse can result in both short-term and long-term harm, including psychopathology in later life.[12][26] Indicators and effects include depression,[8][27][28] anxiety,[10] eating disorders,[29] poor self-esteem,[29] somatization,[28] sleep disturbances,[30][31] and dissociative and anxiety disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder.[9][32] While children may exhibit regressive behaviours such as thumb sucking or bedwetting, the strongest indicator of sexual abuse is sexual acting out and inappropriate sexual knowledge and interest.[33][34] Victims may withdraw from school and social activities[33] and exhibit various learning and behavioural problems including cruelty to animals,[35][36][37][38] attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD).[29] Teenage pregnancy and risky sexual behaviors may appear in adolescence.[39] Child sexual abuse victims report almost four times as many incidences of self-inflicted harm.[40] Sexual assault among teenagers has been shown to lead to an increase in mental health problems, social exclusion and worse school performance.[41][42]
  • CSA is associated with experiencing additional victimization in adolescence and adulthood.[44][45] Correlations have been found between childhood sexual abuse and various adult psychopathologies, including crime and suicide,[18][46][47][48][49][50] in addition to alcoholism and drug abuse.[43][45][51] Males who were sexually abused as children more frequently appear in the criminal justice system than in a clinical mental health setting.[33] A study comparing middle-aged women who were abused as children with non-abused counterparts found significantly higher health care costs for the former.[28][52] Intergenerational effects have been noted, with the children of victims of child sexual abuse exhibiting more conduct problems, peer problems, and emotional problems than their peers.[53]
  • A specific characteristic pattern of symptoms has not been identified,[54] and there are several hypotheses about the causality of these associations.[8][55][56]
  • Studies have found that 51% to 79% of sexually abused children exhibit psychological symptoms.[48][57][58][59][60] The risk of harm is greater if the abuser is a relative, if the abuse involves intercourse or attempted intercourse, or if threats or force are used.[61] The level of harm may also be affected by various factors such as penetration, duration and frequency of abuse, and use of force.[12][26][62][63] The social stigma of child sexual abuse may compound the psychological harm to children,[63][64] and adverse outcomes are less likely for abused children who have supportive family environments.[65][66]
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Main articles: Dissociation (psychology) and Post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Child abuse, including sexual abuse, especially chronic abuse starting at early ages, has been found to be related to the development of high levels of dissociative symptoms, which includes amnesia for abuse memories.[67] When severe sexual abuse (penetration, several perpetrators, lasting more than one year) had occurred, dissociative symptoms were even more prominent.[68] Recent research showed that females with high exposure to child sexual abuse (CSA) develop PTSD symptoms that are associated with poor social functioning, which is also supported by prior research studies.[69] The feeling of being "cut-off" from peers and "emotional numbness" are both results of CSA and highly inhibit proper social functioning. Furthermore, PTSD is associated with higher risk of substance abuse as a result of the "self-medication hypothesis" and the "high-risk and susceptibility hypothesis".[70]
  • Besides dissociative identity disorder (DID), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), child sexual abuse survivors may present borderline personality disorder (BPD) and eating disorders such as bulimia nervosa.[71]

• Estimated date ranges for 7th - 12th grade for Sam:
  • August 1997 - June 1998: 7th grade
  • August 1998 - June 1999: 8th grade
  • August 1999 - June 2000: 9th grade
  • August 2000 - June 2001: 10th grade
  • August 2001 - June 2002: 11th grade
  • August 2002 - June 2003: 12th grade
• The date ranges above were estimated using the dates available on the calendar on JBS's website.
• JBS says they're "for grades 7-12" in their X (Twitter) account bio, so I'd assume the earliest that Sam could have started at JBS would have been at the beginning of 7th grade (~August 1997.)
• In the United States, middle school typically goes up to 8th grade (source), and thus I think the latest that Sam could have began at JBS, given that he began there after transferring out of middle school, would have been at the end of 8th grade  (~June 1999.)
• Sources indicating that Sam graduated in 2003: here, here.
• There are numerous sources that indicate that Sam attended JBS: here, here, here, here, [CCF21a], etc.

• Decades later, Annie would write:
  • "I have experienced drama like the OpenAI drama — I grew up in it. I was repeatedly told “not to talk about it,” and to allow another person to remove my human agency." [AA23m]
  • "Child-me...was told to stay quiet about other people's secrets - even when it made me physically ill." [AA23m]
    • I presume that it was Annie's mother who told her to stay quiet, based on this and [AA24t].

• My understanding is that this occurred as part of 4-year-old Annie's subconscious/automatic trauma response and/or as a mental defense mechanism.
  • That is, I think Annie's 4-year-old mind repressed the memories of this event because she was extremely young, and the event was extremely traumatic for her younger self in a way that was hard for her to even conceptualize, much less fully understand and remember.
• Annie does not begin to fully recall her repressed memories until decades later, in a gradual process that intensifies from mid-2018 onwards (as the rest of this timeline describes.)
• Decades later, about her gradual process of recalling her repressed memories, Annie would write:
  • On 11-8-2018: "With all the casual profundity of a yoga teacher, Joe asked, what is your earliest memory?' Without pause for an inhale I responded, 'probably a panic attack.'...I began having panic attacks at a young age. I felt the impending doom of death before I had any concept of death." [AA18b]
  • On 4-21-2023: "I had a history since childhood of OCD, anxiety, depression, IBS, disorder eating - all covers for PTSD..."After quitting my dispensary job, my relatives find a loophole to withhold said money. They knew the health conditions and my plan, and they're millionaires. I sell some things, go back to an older job, and eventually ask (for the first time ever) my millionaire relatives for financial help and am essentially told to "work harder." I got $100 for an ankle MRI copay, after much 'discussion'"...I do two family therapy sessions and am professionally advised to stop doing family therapy sessions...{in 2020} I'm offered {by Sam} a diamond made from Dad's ashes instead of money for rent or groceries. Dad just wanted cremation. I go for no contact with relatives...I have two years of remembering horrific things I'd buried and told myself I made up, and experience adult SAs that brought up even more memories." [AA23k]
  • On 10-15-2023: "I had only fuzzy memories of sexual abuse until I went no contact {with Sam and her other relatives}, because of the emotional and financial and other abuses. I was unpacking my own sexual health, both by myself and in therapy, since 2012. Attempting to understand experiences like mid-sex projectile vomiting." [AA23u]
  • On 3-27-2024, Annie wrote: "{In summer 2020} I decided to go full no contact with my relatives {Sam, Jack, Max, and Connie.}...After a couple months, I had to stop work trading on the farm because of {health issues with} my ankle again. Even small plantings and weeding was too much...I scrambled with my legs up the wall in constant ankle and knee pain...{In September 2020} my body was physically hurting in so many ways...I was still too sick to teach yoga. I had considered and attempted various mindless computer jobs, and found myself completely incapable. After going no contact because of financial and emotional abuse, I was flooded with memories of sexual abuse I had repressed. I had flashbacks of the sexual and physical abuses my whole life, though it wasn’t until the silence of no contact that I had the space to connect the dots. In college and after, I had projectile vomited multiple times during sex with men I loved and trusted. I remember talking about this and related things with therapists, unable to wrap my mind around how violently my body had responded. *Now, literally on my ass from tendon and nerve and hormonal and digestive and ovarian cyst pain, I had a lot of time to remember the flashbacks’ details*...Most of my emotional and thought space was on various sexual healings of my own...My days were hazes of PTSD flashbacks with whatever grounding exercises I could do, whatever floor yoga and stretching I could do, and physical therapy...I had two adulthood sexual assaults while living on Maui that triggered more flashbacks. I’m grateful for those assaults in a fucked up way, for the clarities they gifted me. Half awake feeling unequivocally, “I’ve experienced exactly this before.” Though I was more set back emotionally and financially, managing even more flashbacks of old memories flooding in and incapacitating me...My last escorting experience was with a man who was experimenting with his queerness, and wanted me to bring another man in. I invited a filming partner, as I had started making hardcore porn on OnlyFans and PornHub at that point. Before the filming partner came over, the client said “I’m so gay!” — while his dick was in my mouth between words of the dick about to be in his mouth — followed by “omg I’ve never said that before” and a distant stare. I felt that stare, back to a stare I’d experienced decades ago." [AA24b]
  • "I survived listening to my body fall apart as it told me the stories I had not yet been ready to hear the full depths of." [AA--f]
• It seems that, before Annie started to recall her repressed memories, she only remembered that Sam had "read her books at bedtime." [EW23a] Only decades later did her recollection change: "As Annie tells her life story, she felt special and loved when, as a child, Sam read her bedtime stories. Now those memories feel like abuse." [EW23a].

• Annie published 18 reasons I spent 18 years criticizing my appearance on her blog (allhumanarehuman.medium.com) on March 6, 2019 $⟹$she started to criticize her appearance in 2001.
  • "18 reasons I spent 18 years criticizing my appearance
    • 1. OCD
    • 2. Anxiety
    • 3. Depression
    • 4. A lack of awareness about how a uterus is literally an additional organ inside the abdomen’s of roughly half of all humans
    • 5. A belief that a stomach that does not fold when a whole body folds is a body that exists
    • 6. A belief that any body’s appearance is fixed its entire lifetime
    • 7. A belief that anything in this physical world is fixed, ever
    • 8. Media of all forms (especially advertising)
    • 9. Equating appearance (and perspectives on appearance) with value
    • 10. Equating numerical values with black and white rules, always
    • 11. A belief that I could control my body completely with enough will power
    • 12. A belief that controlling my body could control my entire life
    • 13. A belief that controlling my body could control its inevitable decay (lack of knowledge that fearing death is fearing actually living life)
    • 14. Equating control with peace and happiness
    • 15. A tendency towards being self-critical
    • 16. Ego
    • 17. Privilege
    • 18. Taking this existence way extra seriously"

• Justification for the lower and upper bounds on the date range:
  • Lower bound = April 22, 2003:
    • in [MLW25a] (the legal complaint from Annie & her lawyers), it is written:
      • "The last acts of rape committed by Defendant, Sam Altman, against Plaintiff, Ann Altman, occurred when Defendant, Sam Altman, was an adult and Plaintiff, Ann Altman, was a minor." [MLW25a]
    • Sam was born on on April 22, 1985.
    • The age at which one becomes a legal adult, in Missouri (where the alleged sexual abuse took place, where Sam and Annie grew up, and where Annie's lawsuit was filed) is 18 (source: here.)
    • Therefore, for {Sam's last acts of rape against Annie} to have taken place when Annie was an adult, they must have taken place on or after April 22, 2003.
  • Upper bound = end of 2006:
    • in [MLW25a], it is written:
      • "For the approximate years of 1997 through 2006, Defendant, Sam Altman, repeatedly anda continually sexually assaulted, sexually penetrated, sexually abused, raped, sodomized, and battered Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
    • [MLW25a] does not indicate when exactly the last act of rape by Sam Altman of Annie Altman occurred. It also does not indicate when exactly in 2006 the final act of abuse by Sam Altman of Annie Altman occurred.
    • Therefore, the lowest (i.e. chronologically earliest) upper bound is: the end of 2006.
  • (Note: I understand that the style of writing I am using here may seem a overly rigorous/verbose. Please know that this is not an attempt on my part to appear erudite, but rather a purposeful stylistic choice -- I want to make my thought process clear & legible, and leave no room for ambiguity.)

• I inferred the year that Annie graduated from JBS by looking closely at the bottom-right corner of the pictures she posted in [AA24i]:

  • 

• This implies:
  • August 2006 - June 2007: 7th grade (for Annie, at JBS)
  • August 2007 - June 2008: 8th grade
  • August 2008 - June 2009: 9th grade
  • August 2009 - June 2010: 10th grade
  • August 2010 - June 2011: 11th grade
  • August 2011 - June 2012: 12th grade
• I made the same assumptions/used the same reasoning to make the esitmates here as I did (above) with my estimates regarding Sam's time at JBS.

• 2005: Steve Huffman (aka "spez") and Alexis Ohanian meet Paul Graham (co-founder of Y Combinator), and pitch him a startup idea, hoping to get into Y Combinator (aka YC.) Graham rejects their idea, but calls them the next morning, and has another conversation with Huffman and Ohanian where he tells them to build a "front page for the Internet." With this idea, which becomes Reddit, Huffman and Ohanian join YC's first batch, of which Sam was also a member.
• In ~October 2006, Condé Nast acquires Reddit for ~$10-20 million.
• (If the story told by Yishan Wong (former Reddit CEO) here on Reddit is to be believed:) Beginning sometime in the late 2000's, Sam and some of his associates at Y Combinator begin the execution of a years-long effort to dilute Condé Nast's ownership in Reddit, and return Reddit to the control of YC & Reddit's original founders. (This effort seems to have ultimately succeeded.) --

• From [CCF21a], beginning at 24:31:
  • Charlie Brennan: "At one point, you were the CEO of Reddit for 10 days."
  • Sam Altman: "That's true."
  • Charlie Brennan: "What was the story there?"
  • Sam Altman: "We had a CEO quit during a board meeting, which is like, a very rare thing to happen, never seen it before or since. Uh, and it took us a little while to figure out the succession plan, we were caught totally off guard. So, everybody -- the management team sort of, yeah, technically reported to me...I was a recent investor, and {had} joined the board, and kind of, was the only person local. So, I got very involved for a few days, and uh, then, we had an interim CEO, and then after that the original founder returned to run the company."

• ""Not to brag like the drug bro I am, but I took 100mg of Zoloft for 10 years soooooo" [AA22e]"
• "Getting myself off a high dose of 10 years on an anti-depressant I didn't exactly get myself onto" [AA24t]
• Annie eventually tapers herself off of Zoloft at age 22 (in ~2017) [AA19b, EW23a].

• (I only include this because it becomes relevant later on, in the context presented in "Period lost, period found" [AA19b].)
• Annie stops taking birth control pills at age 22, just before her 23rd birthday (~2017.)

• The flashbacks Annie describes {to the sexual abuse she experienced from Sam during her childhood} will re-appear later on in this timeline.
• How I determined the date range during which Annie went to college at Tufts:
  • 1) From [AA15a] and [EW23a]: It seems that Annie began college at Tufts University in ~September 2012.
    • the letter in [AA15a] is dated "March 30, 2015", and in the letter, Annie says that she's "been a full-time student for six semesters" (i.e. if I understand correctly, March 30, 2015 was a date within Annie's 6th semester); the title of [AA15a] makes it clear that Annie's request to graduate early (i.e. after 6 semesters) was denied. So infer that Annie's first semester was the Fall 2012 semester (I'll discuss below how I determined the date upon which that began.)
    • [EW23a] says Annie graduated after 7 semesters. So I infer that Annie's last (7th) semester was the Fall 2015 semester.
  • 2) From [AA19b]: Annie's major in college was Biopsychology.
  • 3) At Tufts, the Biopsychology major is offered within the School of Arts and Sciences.

    • 

  • 4) From the Academic Calendars on the Tufts website, select that for the School of Arts and Sciences, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, SMFA at Tufts, School of Engineering and Tisch College --> one can find the start and end dates for the Fall 2012 and Fall 2015 semesters (respectively):

    • 

    • 

• See also: Sam Altman says doing psychedelics during a weekend retreat in Mexico changed his life -- Business Insider (published September 24, 2024)
• Sam Altman - Wikipedia is where I got the information that Sam co-founded Hydrazine Capital with his brother Jack Altman.

• In this letter, Annie states that:
  • For the first time, during her current semester {her 6'th semester}, she has started to consider not going to medical school (e.g. to get a MD or DO degree}, and has instead started to consider other (related) career options, such as becoming a nurse, physician's assistant, or a therapist.
  • She wants to have a "summer of my own therapy: taking counseling seriously in a way I have never before felt ready to...working towards whatever euphemism you prefer for “getting my head on straight” or “re-centering.”"

• February 21, 2015: Paul Graham announces that Sam Altman will become president of Y Combinator in the next batch (i.e. "batch" meaning, in my understanding, a group of companies funded by Y Combinator, which Y Combinator advises & works closely with for a few months during a certain time of the year.)
  • On February 21, 2015, Y Combinator's next (i.e. upcoming) batch was the Summer 2015 batch, which ran from June 2015 - August 2015.

• Annie doesn't specify, in [AA24u], when this occurred.
• I think it's likely that this occurred between December 22, 2015 and June 2020, because:
  • 1) I think it's unlikely that one of Annie's siblings would have asked her to be their surrogate while she was still in college (as I explained earlier in this timeline, it seems that Annie graduated college on December 22, 2015)
  • 2) As I'll describe later in this timeline, Annie went no contact (i.e. stopped communicating with) her siblings (and mother, I think) in June 2020, so I don't think that one of Annie's siblings would have asked her to be their surrogate after that.

• I infer that the separation (or divorce?) between Jerry and Connie occurred before the date that "Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny" [TF16a] was published in the New Yorker because, in that article, Connie is referred to as "Connie Gibstine" (rather than "Connie Altman"), which implies that, by the date of the article's publication, Connie had separated or divorced from Jerry.

• "A blogger recently asked Altman, “How has having Asperger’s helped and hurt you?” Altman told me, “I was, like, ‘Fuck you, I don’t have Asperger’s!’ But then I thought, I can see why he thinks I do. I sit in weird ways”—he folds up like a busted umbrella—“I have narrow interests in technology, I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people. When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. His great weakness is his utter lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us. I found his assiduousness alarming at first, then gradually endearing. When I remarked, after a few long days together, that he never seemed to visit the men’s room, he said, “I will practice going to the bathroom more often so you humans don’t realize that I’m the A.I.”"
• "“Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”"
• "Altman’s mother, a dermatologist named Connie Gibstine, told me, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.” If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand. Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”
• "One evening at Altman’s house, his younger brothers, Max and Jack, were teasing him that he should run for President in 2020, when he’d be thirty-five: just old enough. Max, twenty-eight, said, “Who better than you, Sam?” As Altman tried not very vehemently to change the subject, Jack, twenty-seven, said, “It’s not purely little-brother trolling. I do think tech needs a good candidate." “Let’s send the Jewish gay guy!” Altman said. “That’ll work!”
  Jack eyed a board game called Samurai on the bookshelf and said, “Sam won every single game of Samurai when we were kids because he always declared himself the Samurai leader: ‘I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything.’ ”
  Altman shot back, “You want to play speed chess right now?,” and Jack laughed."
• "Max was working at the Y Combinator company Zenefits; Jack co-founded a performance-management company, Lattice, which had just gone through YC. The two brothers moved in with Altman temporarily three years ago and never left. Altman recently hired a designer to upgrade his gray IKEA sofas to gray SummerHouse sofas, and he hung some handsomely framed photographs taken from space, but the house maintains an upscale-student-housing vibe. His mother told me, “I think Sam likes having his brothers around because they knew him when, and can give him pushback in ways that other people can’t. But it’s tricky, with the power dynamic, and I want it to end before it explodes.”"

• (I only include this because it becomes relevant later on, in the context presented in "Period lost, period found" [AA19b].)
• How I estimated "~January 2017":
  • In [AA19b], Annie said that she stopped taking birth control pills and Zoloft "just before" her 22nd birthday. Since Annie was born on January 8, 1994, I'm estimating that this occurred in approximately January 2017.

• At point in time {it seems to me}:
  • Jerry (Sam's dad) is still living and working (overtime) in St. Louis (with a heart condition) [AA24c]
  • Annie has been (repeatedly) asking Sam to provide money and resources to Jerry {i.e. to help with his heart condition, or so he doesn't have to work overtime in his late 60's, or so he can retire.} [AA23q]
    • From what I can tell, Sam has not provided Jerry with money or resources [AA24c].

• You may be thinking, "Why are you including this? This doesn't seem relevant."
• I am including this because, as I cover later on in the Responding to Objections/Comments I've Seen From Others section, someone noted than Annie has "ate only beige foods for most of her life", with the implied argument being that Annie is sort of "crazy."
• I don't think this is a convincing argument for Annie being "crazy." To clarify: it is relatively common for some people, especially during childhood, to be sort of a "picky eater" and only want to eat "beige foods", i.e. foods whose color is generally white or beige. {More on this in a bit.}
• Also -- as I understand it, Sam's sexual abuse of Annie when she was 4 years old was the reason why she developed unusual eating patterns in the first place.
  • c.f. 18 reasons I spent 18 years criticizing my appearance -- by Annie Altman -- published March 6, 2019
  • Annie, in [AA23k]: "I had a history since childhood of OCD, anxiety, depression, IBS, disorder eating - all covers for PTSD. Also tonsillitis yay" 

• Annie (starting at 1:09 in the video): "I was a very picky eater for most of my life. I was a vegetarian by choice as a little kid...I chose {to do this} in kindergarten...I also was very picky, and a very controlling type {of} person, and so food became a thing to control...and it also became a really physical, textural thing. The textures of different foods were really freaking me out, and I had all of these taste aversions, and very real reactions...so basically for the first two decades of my life I subsisted on eggs, and cheese, and peanut butter, and bread, and potatoes, and rice, and tortillas. And a lot of those things, for the majority of that time, weren't like..."good" quality. It was {like} Wonderbread...so I would say, up until the end of high school, sof or the first 18 years of my life, I ate no green things. I started incorporating Caesar salads, and that was a huge deal to eat greens, to give you a show of it. And then in college I got more into cooking and I would, you know, put vegetables and things in muffins, and I'd find ways to incorporate it and get myself to eat these things...{but} I was still like {mainly eating} eggs, cheese, grains..."beige" foods...{but} I still held on to this. I was like..."One day, you're gonna crave broccoli"...If you've dealt with picky eating, you understand when you have something and it's great and it just shifts your whole mindset, of..."I've been missing out on that for that long?" And over my first year into transitioning {to a} plant-based {diet} it was just eating more and more of these fruits and vegetables that, for so long, I hadn't been interested in eating...my body, I think, was so excited that I was finally giving it fruits and vegetables."

• The video that Sam linked: "Am I an egomaniac for putting myself on YouTube?"

• Annie writes, "My Dad {Jerry} died in May 2018, and access to his Will was withheld from me by my mother {Connie} and three older siblings {Sam, Jack, Max} for an entire year." [AA24b]

• Annie notes that her Dad and her were very close, especially in the last few years before he died. {c.f. [AA18a] for more details.}
• In [EW23a], Elizabeth Weil writes,
  • "At the funeral, Annie told me, Sam allotted each of the four Altman children five minutes to speak. She used hers to rank her family members in terms of emotional expressivity. She put Sam, along with her mother, at the bottom."
• From [BB24a]:
  • Ellen Huet: "When their dad passed away in 2018, Annie remembers that Sam dictated to each of his younger siblings how many minutes they could talk at the funeral.
  • Annie Altman: "To be at your dad's funeral, to be like, oh, I'm the oldest sibling, so I get to choose how long all the sibling -- which, it is bizarre, and there's a level of it that's so hilarious and so benign, surface-level, classic older sibling bullshit where it's like, 'all right, older sibling wanting to make up the rules to the game.'" Like there's a level of it that's very light and funny -- and there's also a level of it that's very dark and deeply unsettling, of how does that behavior come up in other places if you believe that you get to be the authority on something that you are not the authority on."
    Ellen Huet: "A spokeswoman for OpenAI told us that Sam recalls these incidents differently, but she declined to elaborate."
• Quotes from Annie's speech [AA18a]:
  • "Read at Central Reform Congregation on May 28, 2018:"
  • "My dad trusted my intuition more than I ever have. He often reminded me of the strength of my mind-body connection, a concept I am both extremely passionate about and skilled at underestimating. He created and held space for all of my feelings, and those of you who have talked to me ever know that I have more than a few of those all of the time."
  • "Sam said we could each talk for about five minutes, less if possible to not make you lovely people sit here all day, and Jack correctly pointed out how I will definitely be using all five of my minutes."
  • "You may know that I come from a family that loves to rank things in order to make meaning of them. I love that too, and I also love talking about feelings, as someone who has so many of them. This led me to make a list about a year ago ranking my immediate family in terms of emotional expressivity, from most to least. Obviously I take “first place” on this list, which is probably part of why I wanted to make it. Next comes my dad, then Max, then Jack, and then Sam and mom alternate what would be first place if this list went from minimal to Annie levels of emotional expression. As I typed this out last night, Jack immediately questioned my list and checked in with Julia, his wife, for her opinion. (She agreed with my list, for the record.) It led to an interesting discussion on how different people express different emotions, which my dad knows is, along with family movie night, pretty much all I’ve ever wanted from my family. Also Jack last night, “I can just keep talking if you want me to write your speech, just keep it really meta, you can have my five minutes, it’ll be great.” Sam, I may really need Jack’s minutes here as when I read this out loud it was about 8 minutes — I’ll do my best to talk a little faster."
  • "My dad and I were always very close, talking about all the feels, all the music, and all the athletic activities. I fondly remember us sharing boxes of chocolates when I was little, and by share I mean I would bite each chocolate in half, happily devour it if its insides were cream or more chocolate, and promptly stick it back together and give it my dad if its insides were fruity or coconut. My dad’s memory of this story was that he was the one getting the “good” deal — he honestly believed he was the luckier one, sitting there eating spit-covered chocolate."
  • "We grew even closer in the past few years, as he was my #1 supporter and confidant in all my choices and adventures, most recently in moving to the Big Island of Hawaii, teaching yoga knowing full well it is not a “career” one can “support themselves” with, and even choosing to live in a car for a few months (re: there is little money in yoga and also Annie goes into extreme minimal hippie phase). He was characteristically 1000% supportive of my current creative endeavor of writing a book called “The Humanual,” about how no one knows how to human and also there are reoccurring themes in the humaning thing. He even began to say things like I did along the lines of, “this would be perfect for this part of The Humanual.”"
  • "My dad came out to visit me in February {2018}, when I finally moved into a non-mobile home. He was one month into “Seaganism,” as he brilliantly termed the concept of eating a vegan diet with the addition of seafood. He made the shift with the new year, after patiently sitting with me through my angry vegan phase, welcoming in my phase of being anti-factory farming rather than anti-animal consumption, and listening as I did my best to clumsily describe how the people I was the most annoying towards about eating a more plant based diet were the ones I loved the most. During his visit I pointed out several places friends of mine like with local seafood, and instead he decided to just share food with me the whole time. We made smoothie bowls, tofu scramble, and pancakes, we went out for Thai food, veggie sandwiches, and chili and we split everything. He was so excited to learn to prepare new foods and when he got back to St. Louis I received almost daily texts with pictures of the meals he was making for himself. From his visit onwards he was eating fully plant based, with the exception of consuming whey powder and other forms of dairy accidentally. My brothers are convinced that he changed his diet to be closer to me, much like his interest in rowing and involvement with the St. Louis Rowing Club, and I know they are right."
  • "Grief shows how much love there was to lose, reminding me of the quote that, “You can never love someone as much as you can miss them.” He is no longer physically here and I miss him already. I do not get another in person conversation with him, a video chat or phone call, a deep talk about life while we stretch with our legs up the wall. There is no one I want to dissect which part of The Humanual this whole situation is supposed to be, along with all my feelings about it, more than my dad."
  • "In January {2018} my dad sent me a text, part of which read, “And just for clarification, I don’t just support your lifestyle now or your physical and emotional endeavors now; I support your life. I will always support your life. These are aspects of your life, so I support those too. And there is not a “now”, as Yoda might say. There is only life, for as long as that may be.”"
  • "My dad was active, with people, and doing what he loved, I had said up until his last day before my mom correctly clarified it as “his last hour.”"
  • "I will keep him alive through me, through the genes and memories of his I am lucky enough to hold on to. I will do my best to see the good in people and give them the benefit of the doubt, to remember that my only “job” in life is to be happy, and to works towards trusting myself and my intuition half as much as you believed in me. I will allow myself to express all my emotions as openly as I choose, especially the ones that involve hugging our loved ones often and reminding them how much they are loved. I love you more than all the words I’ve ever said, will say, and could say. Thank you for being my dad; a true legend by the Babe standards, a testament to the power of love and community, and the only person who would have genuinely encouraged this speech to be even longer if that was what I wanted. I will always be a daddy’s girl and specifically yours."

• C.f. [AA18b] for more details. It seems that Jerry's death may have been what triggered, or intensified, Annie's gradual process of recalling her repressed memories.

• I found the legal case relating to Jerry (full name: Jerold Donald Altman)'s death on the official Missouri courts government website that seem to corroborate this:
  • https://www.courts.mo.gov/cnet/cases/newHeader.do?inputVO.caseNumber=18SL-PR01960&inputVO.courtId=CT21
  • https://www.courts.mo.gov/cnet/cases/newHeader.do?inputVO.caseNumber=18SL-PR01960&inputVO.courtId=CT21#header

From section 473.033. Notice of letters — duty of clerk — publication — form. of Chapter 473 Probate Code -- Administration of Decedents' Estates of the Revised Statues of Missouri (bolding is my own):

"The clerk, as soon as letters testamentary or of administration are issued, shall case to be published in some newspaper a notice of the appointment of the personal representative, in which shall be included a notice to creditors of the decedent to file their claims in the court or be forever barred.  The notice shall be published once a week for four consecutive weeks. The clerk shall send a copy of the notice by ordinary mail to each heir and devisee whose name and address are shown on the application for letters or other records of the court, but any heir or devisee may waive notice to such person by filing a waiver in writing.  The personal representative may, but is not required to, send a copy of the notice by ordinary mail or personal service to any creditor of the decedent whose claim has not been paid, allowed or disallowed as provided in section 473.403.  Proof of publication of notice under this section and proof of mailing of notice shall be filed not later than ten days after completion of the publication."

In my (amateur) understanding, this means that Annie, being one of Jerry's heirs, should have received a notice, by mail, of the appointment of the personal representative (her mother Connie Gibstine) in July 2018?

But it seems to me that Annie didn't learn of her father's will until late 2019?

• "For context: Connie (biological mother) kicked me off her health insurance less than three months after Dad died, when I was 24 and could have stayed on her work one for two more years" [AA24h]

• The general idea (to me) is that Annie starts to process/realize that a panic attack is not her earliest memory. c.f. 2 bullet points below.

• Reading [AA18b] in its entirety makes the connections a bit more clear here. The piece basically details Annie's gradual process, from the time of her Dad's death in May 2018, to the date of [AA18b]'s publication on November 8, 2018,  of remembering/realizing that a panic attack is not her earliest memory. {Presumably, her earliest memory is her memory of being (sexually) abused by Sam, but it takes Annie a bit to fully process this memory, because it's so traumatic, and her brain repressed the memory as a defense mechanism when she was 4 years old.}
• To me, if you look through Annie's writings over time, in chronological order, they seem to reflect a gradual process of Annie remembering that Sam sexually abused her when she was 4. Here is a sample of her writings, in which you can see how her writing changes over the course of nearly 6 years. To me, Annie's writings do seem consistent with a gradual process of remembering (her memories of her childhood sexual abuse that her mind (as a trauma response) had repressed earlier in her life. (Though, of course, there are other possible explanations.)
  • 11-08-2018: "Reclaiming my memories" [AA18b]
  • 02-21-2019: "Period lost, period found" [AA19b]
  • 03-06-2019: "18 reasons I spent 18 years criticizing my appearance" [AA19c]
  • 09-22-2020: "An open letter to relatives" [AA20a]
  • 06-07-2021: "An Open Letter To The EMDR Trauma Therapist Who Fired Me For Doing Sex Work" [AA21c]
  • 11-22-2023: "“How We Do Anything Is How We Do Everything”" [AA23m]
  • 03-27-2024: "How I Started Escorting" [AA24b]

• "Two months ago I met with Joe K, the owner of Urban Exhale Hot Yoga, to discuss the podcast episode we were going to record together. (I have since recorded podcasts with four other teachers at the studio and am completely unsure how to express my gratitude to Joe — honestly perhaps less words about it?) While I would be the one asking Joe questions on the podcast, he had an important question for me. With all the casual profundity of a yoga teacher, Joe asked, “what is your earliest memory?”
• "Without pause for an inhale I responded, “probably a panic attack.” I feel like Joe did his best asana poker face, based on projecting my own insecurities and/or the hyper-vigilant observance that comes with anxiety."
• "I began having panic attacks at a young age. I felt the impending doom of death before I had any concept of death. (Do I really have any concept of death now, though? Does anyone??) I define panic attacks as feeling “too alive,” like diving off the deep end into awareness of existence without any proper scuba gear or knowledge of free diving. Panic attacks, I’ve learned, come like an ambulance flashing lights and blaring a siren indicating that my mind and my body are… experiencing a missed connection in terms of communication — they’re refusing to listen to each other. More accurately: my mind is disregarding the messages from my body, convinced she can think her way through feelings, and so my body goes into panic mode like she’s on strike."
• "I went to a sound bath at the yoga studio about a month ago, the second sound bath I’ve ever attended. (I cried at both and if you know me you know that I am happy about things that help me cry.) Sound baths are a guided meditation where you lay in corpse pose and receive sounds of specific frequencies, allowing vibrations to “wash” over and through you. Some shit is bound to surface in the tides."
• "My dad died five months ago now, and to say I’ve learned a lot is an enormous understatement. I was and am a “daddy’s girl.” The most recent panic attack, and perhaps darkest one I’ve experienced, happened the week he died. My dad was one of the most genuinely positive people I’ve ever come across. He had an incredible capacity to continually focus on the light, the good, what was “right” in any situation. I felt his presence during parts of the sound bath — a concept past me would have rolled her eyes about."
• "Laying in bed later that night, Joe’s question popped back into my consciousness with a kind “please make your way into child’s pose.” I realized I had deceived myself (classic humaning) with my response to his question, “what is your earliest memory?”
• "Joe, and whoever is reading, I would like to formally change my answer. I am also without an exact answer. I am non-sarcastically “trusting the process” to potentially receive one. I know that a panic attack is not my answer, and my ego likes to remind itself that knowing what is not my truth leads me at least somewhat closer to said truth.""
• "I can reflect on and connect with feelings of panic and still have space to choose a positive perspective. Searching for ways to cope with existence has lead me to yoga, dance, singing, ukulele, cooking, baking, writing… to asking all the questions I know to ask so that I can open myself up to knowing just how many more questions life has to offer. Without panic attacks, I may have lived my whole life without starting a YouTube channel, a podcast, or this blog."
• "Emotions come and go, so it keeps seeming. Emotions and memory are directly linked, re: the amygdala. I have little to no control over my emotional response; I do have control over my reaction and subsequent actions."
• "I write my own history. Though TBD on the first memory of that history. Here’s to exploring."

• "The podcast episode that three of these immediate biological relatives came on before those happenings, and refuse to post about, was originally supposed to be about “projecting” and instead became about “feedback."" [AA20b]
• Again: as I understand it, at this point in time, Annie still has not yet fully remembered the abuse she experienced Sam (and her other brothers) during her childhood. This is why she is ok with doing this podcast episode with Sam and her other brothers.

• "I started taking birth control pills at the age of 15 (I’m currently 25) and decided to stop taking them right before my 23rd birthday {~2017}. Also around this same time {~2017} I finished tapering off of Zoloft, which I started taking at age 13 {~2007} to help with symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety, and Depression. Also also around this time {~2017} I drastically altered my diet...I promptly lost my period and learned that changes relating to diet, hormonal birth control, and psychiatric medications are three of the main factors that can disrupt hormonal balance (stress being the baseline factor)."
• "I’m experiencing a second puberty, or maybe an aftershock of sorts from first puberty and/or a year without my period. It feels like a hormonal “do-over” filled with moments of deja-vu: three new crushes in one week, intense crying and laughter in the same hour, and generally going about my day acting like I’m far less confused by all this internal “shifting” than I’m actually feeling. Plus days that feel exceptionally “average” leaving me extra confused about how dramatic life felt the day before. I’m fortunate to have received a liberal education and even so there were inevitable gaps in the information I was given, and open to receiving, about puberty."
• "I majored in Biopsychology in college, with a minor in dance, and took all the prerequisite courses for medical school. Then I noped out of the pre-med route to focus on movement, writing, comedy, music, and food. I got certified as a yoga teacher, worked for an online CSA (community-supported agriculture) company, began writing more frequently, started slowly going to open mic nights and putting videos on YouTube, and began a podcast and this blog. I’m learning to give myself space to explore what genuinely excites me without justification and I’ve felt levels of self-consciousness around my career swerve that I had not experienced since first puberty. HOW will I get my intellectual ego stroked without constant science classes? How can art really have no “right” answer? Am I really the only one who can validate how my feelings feel??"
• "It’s been almost a year now since I got my period back and I feel I’ve been going through a sort of spiritual and scientific second puberty, to continue the soap operatics. A year extra filled with learning about my body’s cycle(s) and signals. Witnessing my hormones re-regulate has felt parallel to to self-soothing, not that I consciously remember learning that, and my first time with “my moon.” I started eating eggs again, including runny yolks for the first time, and ate fish for the first time in my life because my body very literally demanded them. A year without my period, after a decade of having it, felt like equal parts reset and emptiness."
• "I believe a large portion of shame takes root during puberty and then manifests as sexual repression, (sexual) aggression, body dysmorphia, addiction, and/or mood disorders. I can say for certain that has been my experience. Shame encourages ignorance by stifling conversations. Additionally, shame creates a feedback loop where ignorance is shamed and so questions and curiosity are discouraged."

Source: https://x.com/paulg/status/1796107666265108940

From [NYT23a]:

• "He {Sam} also began working on several projects outside the investment firm, including OpenAI, which he founded as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside a group that included Elon Musk. By Mr. Altman’s own admission, YC grew increasingly concerned he was spreading himself too thin."

From [WSJ23b]: 

• "In 2019, Altman was asked to resign from Y Combinator after partners alleged he had put personal projects, including OpenAI, ahead of his duties as president, said people familiar with the matter."
• "Altman turned Y Combinator into an investing powerhouse. While serving as the president, he kept his own venture-capital firm, Hydrazine, which he launched in 2012. He caused tensions after barring other partners at Y Combinator from running their own funds, including the current chief executive, Garry Tan, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Tan and Ohanian didn’t respond to requests for comment."
• "Altman also expanded Y Combinator through a nonprofit he created called YC Research, which served as an incubator for Altman’s own projects, including OpenAI. From its founding in 2015, YC Research operated without the involvement of the firm’s longtime partners, fueling their concern that Altman was straying too far from running the firm’s core business."
• "By early 2018, Altman was barely present at Y Combinator’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., spending more time at OpenAI, at the time a small research nonprofit, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "The increasing amount of time Altman spent at OpenAI riled longtime partners at Y Combinator, who began losing faith in him as a leader. The firm’s leaders asked him to resign, and he left as president in March 2019."
• "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.”"
• "Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct."
• "To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
• "For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure."

• "1. OCD
• 2. Anxiety
• 3. Depression
• 4. A lack of awareness about how a uterus is literally an additional organ inside the abdomen’s of roughly half of all humans
• 5. A belief that a stomach that does not fold when a whole body folds is a body that exists
• 6. A belief that any body’s appearance is fixed its entire lifetime
• 7. A belief that anything in this physical world is fixed, ever
• 8. Media of all forms (especially advertising)
• 9. Equating appearance (and perspectives on appearance) with value
• 10. Equating numerical values with black and white rules, always
• 11. A belief that I could control my body completely with enough will power
• 12. A belief that controlling my body could control my entire life
• 13. A belief that controlling my body could control its inevitable decay (lack of knowledge that fearing death is fearing actually living life)
• 14. Equating control with peace and happiness
• 15. A tendency towards being self-critical
• 16. Ego
• 17. Privilege
• 18. Taking this existence way extra seriously"

• Annie's illnesses include:
  • PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome)
  • A flare-up of her IBS (Irritable bowel syndrome)
  • Achilles tendinopathy and posterior tibial tendinopathy (aka posterior tibial tendon dysfunction), for which she has to go into a walking boot, for the 3rd time in 8 years.
    • 1st time: Achilles tendinopathy and a bone spur
    • 2nd time: Achilles tendinopathy
    • (this) 3rd time: Achilles tendinopathy and posterior tibial tendinopathy
  • Tonsillitis
  • Sources: [AA24b, AA23k, AA--f, AA--g, AA23m, EW23a]

• From [AA20b], which Annie posted May 19, 2020:
  • "This time a year ago, I gave notice to leave a job I enjoyed because of being in paperwork-process of money left to me from my dad that I was notified of a year after he died. I decided to use this privilege."
  • "I openly shared about my plan to use the next six months to finish writing a script that was and is extremely important to me, to give more time to the podcast and other other projects, and mostly to give myself more time both to grieve..."
  • "...and to manage my physical and emotional health that needed attention."
  • "Despite their already enormous wealth, the rest of my immediate biological relatives choose to use the option they were then given to override my dad’s wishes and withhold the money."

• In [AA23m], Annie writes, "Though separated, my parents were still legally married and so my mother had the “surviving spouse” option to ignore Dad’s wish to make me the primary beneficiary of his 401K."
• In [AA23b], Annie writes, "Aww you’re nervous I’m defending myself? Refusing to die with your secrets, refusing to allow you to harm more people? If only there was little sister with a bed you could uninvited crawl in, or sick 20-something sister you could withhold your dead dad’s money from, to cope."

• "She {Annie} quit her job at a dispensary because she had an injured Achilles tendon that wouldn’t heal and she was in a walking boot for the third time in seven years. She asked Sam and their mother for financial help. They refused. “That was right when I got on the sugar-dating website for the first time,” Annie told me. “I was just at such a loss, in such a state of desperation, such a state of confusion and grief.” Sam had been her favorite brother. He’d read her books at bedtime. He’d taken portraits of her on the monkey bars for a high-school project. She’d felt so understood, loved, and proud. “I was like, Why? Why are these people not helping me when they could at no real cost to themselves?”"" [EW23a]

• Interviewer: "Annie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far."
• Annie Altman: "I’m passionate about mind-body connection, and connection generally. Part of this comes from ways I’ve felt extremely disconnected through several mental health labels and experiences. I’m extra-extroverted, and very curious – when I was little I would introduce myself to strangers with my full name and ask them how their day was going. I love learning, I love learning about people, I love using learning as a tool to help people. I took all of the classes to go to medical school and then noped off of that path, tapering away from academia through work in two different UCSF labs. I accepted that my mental health prefers creativity, and forcing myself into the science field eventually showed itself to be just that: force. I got existential and came to understand that enjoyment of life is meant to be prioritized because no one knows “how to: human” anymore or any less than any other human. There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to be a human. Science isn’t “right” and neither is art. Science and art are connected, and connection seems to be where all the themes of life play out. I began to feel an imperative to “get the word out” about no one ever fully “knowing” what they’re doing as a human being, mostly as a way to self-therapize and remind myself. I need the reminder that it’s okay for me to have no idea what I’m “ultimately” doing, and that I’m primarily a human being. Accepting my love of making things and noticing how clearly art helps me let go of my defenses, I feel that making art is the most effective way for me to communicate. As I was transitioning away from becoming a physician, I slowly began putting videos on YouTube (the first-ever being a comedy song called “A Song for Bo Burnham” inspired by his stand up special I’d just watched) and going to open mic nights for comedy and music. My “official” parting ways with academia was a three-week yoga teacher training on the Big Island of Hawai’i, after which I came back to the East Bay Area to work for an online CSA company called Farm Fresh to You. Five months later I sold my things and moved to Hawai’i, where I chose to live in a car for three months out of my nine months living there. I felt compelled to experience living in a car, and my need to find a way to make this idea (this reminder that had become my focal point instead of medical school) into a succinct art form that felt authentic to me, made the openness of more free time and less living costs incredibly appealing. I began a book version of my idea: no one knows what they’re doing in their human doings and beingness, and that’s really beautiful because it connects us all. It’s like pooping or death. On island I taught yoga, I made more YouTube videos, I ghost-wrote for a YouTuber, I drove for Lyft, I explored outside, I met new people. I wrote more for my book version of the idea than I had ever written on one consecutive thing, journaling my way through all I had learned in life so far and observing for patterns. I reflected a lot alone, especially while living in the car, and I reflected a lot with the people I met who were open to questions about their human experience. My original idea had expanded to say that know one knows how to human, and also that there are themes of being human that all humans encounter, and that talking about these themes helps everyone. I moved to LA last August while transitioning my idea to a movie version about me writing the book version – it was all very Hollywood. I worked as a ghostwriter for a painter and also as a budtender at a dispensary. To support what I was working on creatively, and to help me find much-needed clarity, I began a podcast. I was feeling overwhelmed with non-numerical data and the weight of taking art and life overly seriously. Some part of me also knew that I needed to make a project where it was built-in for me to ask for help. I decided the podcast would be a conversational interview about a human truth, to serve as a reminder that we are all connected through our truths, our joys, and our challenges. I know that open dialogue is super important to me and feel that is where to start with what “goods” I offer. The podcast was originally called “True Shit” (I learned iTunes will not allow even “self-censored” expletives), and that is still the premise of what is now called The Annie Altman Show. Starting the podcast made it clear to me that my overall idea was meant to be verbal. I circled back to my love of stand-up and live performance and knew that the art I was making was intended to be a one-woman show, that has settled on the title “The Hum|Annie.” The Annie Altman Show is what I call the podcast and other creative projects – videos, blogs, food, comedy, and more – that serve as “field mesearch” for the idea that has evolved into The Hum|Annie. The Hum|Annie is an interactive stand up comedy musical philosophy show about how no one ever fully “figures out” how to human, how there’s 10 “C” themes to the human experience, that are connected by and exist within the “C” theme of connection, and how maximizing resource equity minimizing human suffering. These themes in this organization are a tool to check in with our mental, physical, and emotional (which is, to me, synonymous to spiritual) health. That’s what finding and using them has given to me and what I am offering for others to experiment with for them. The Hum|Annie reminds me that I can only be an expert on myself and my humaning, and explores what this can offer to humanity. The Hum|Annie makes fun of things like being my form of brevity, uses my life story to examine common themes in all life stories, and reflects on how self-deprecation differs from honest self-reflection. I believe my role of service is in asking questions and making connections, using tools like play, comedy, and music. I’m an intense proponent of experiential learning and believe doing and sharing my own learning is my most effective tool to offer. Making these projects and this show is me walking the walk of putting my own oxygen mask on first.
• Interviewer: "Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?"
• Annie Altman: "Yes and no, and it’s been a weird and fun combination. I intentionally took a 180 turn within my spiraling circle life path, which is challenging for anyone to do smoothly and I was especially clumsy. The mishaps led to a lot more for me to learn about, such as accepting “mistakes” as a necessary part of any learning process. My relationship with my family as we all grieve has been the most challenging struggle along this process. My dad died from a heart attack on May 2018, on the same day I had a flight booked from Hawaii to St. Louis. We had video chatted the day before and were super close. For me, the grieving process feels like going through all the cycles again and again in slightly different ways in a spiral. The Hum|Annie is dedicated to him. I’m grateful that he was (and is) this project’s biggest cheerleader. The Hum|Annie uses all the knowledge I’ve received from my mental health and grieving journeys so far, which means I must first unpack and sit with how that knowledge impacts me personally. I use the term “mesearch” because all research is biased by the researcher, which, like the placebo effect, is a mostly ignored truth in mainstream Western medical practices. I support scientific and spiritual practices and I am learning to support where I am of the most service to humanity as a whole. I believe there is so much that can benefit humanity through connecting different practices and ideas. Honest reflection, of myself and the world, has been and continues to be a satisfying challenge. For me, sharing parts of it helps my processing.
• Interviewer: "We’d love to hear more about your work."
• Annie Altman: "I specialize in an interest to help connect science and spirituality through exploring my interests in both of them, using myself and my human connections as experiments. I’m grateful to have found a way, through much exploration, that feels authentic to me right now to do my own mental health work, to redirect grief and shame, and to have the privilege of the space to do that work. My intention in sharing parts of my own process is to help make space for others to have the same baseline of privilege I’ve been fortunate enough to receive. People need access to resources to do their own work. I’ve been lucky enough to interact with a variety of guests on the podcast so far, and I’m grateful for the ways I’ve been impacted by each of the conversations. The style of the show has both deepened and lightened as I learn to first relax with myself. This series aims to make use of my black-and-white thinking patterns to help myself and others notice those tendencies more easily, and to help those with more gray-space thought patterns who are curious to learn more about a different perspective from theirs. I feel strongly that open discourse about being human, connecting all our internal parts, and connecting with other humans and the world around us, are all necessary parts of the process of equitable resource distribution. Prioritization of honesty, open communication, and curiosity about connection are very important to me.
• Interviewer: "Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?"
• Annie Altman: "I’m grateful for the words of Maya Angelou for this one, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” From reflections with friends and with myself, I also believe that success is liking who you do your “what” and “it” with, as well as liking the feeling you experience of connection in your doing and beingness. To me, success is connection. To experience connection, I needed to first accept the disconnection I was experiencing and ignoring on my previous path. Part of my process of learning is also unlearning – unlearning a dislike of myself, of what I was doing, of how I was doing it, of who I was doing it with, and of the feelings I was experiencing that I accepted as “how life is.” I feel it important to embrace disconnection as a part of connection, and remember that there are things to be learned from them both. As action is more accessible for me as a starting point right now, I started with figuring out how to really like what I do. I am only doing what I’m doing because I’ve allowed myself to pursue connection – with myself, with others, and with this rock we’re all floating around on together for a little while. My honesty and curiosity about connection are very important to me. I also believe it’s important to address the financial privilege that I had to graduate from college without debt and to have a Biopsychology degree. That privilege has allowed me the flexibility to give most of my attention to this project for the past two years while working a variety of jobs that allow me to explore different interests."

• Ellen Huet: "Now, Sam and his family have given Annie money at times, but she says it always came with heavy conditions that made her nervous. At one point, Sam wanted her to get back on Zoloft, an antidepressant, which she had started as a teen but had stopped later on. She {Annie} forwarded me an email from Sam where he asked her to share her bank statements and to allow him and his mom to sit in on some of her therapy sessions in exchange for her rent and medical expenses being covered. She felt like it was his way of exerting leverage or power over her. Of course, Sam can spend his money as he pleases, but again, he's on stage espousing the virtues of universal basic income -- giving money away for free, unconditionally, -- and Annie says he didn't do the same here for her. There were times when I'd gone back and forth about what to include from Annie's story. It's a very personal, messy family situation, and I'll confess that on occasion I've doubted some unrelated things she's told me. But also, I've looked through corroborating emails and documents. We drove to a lot of places Annie lived, and I met people she lived with. So in late 2019, when she asked for help and says she was told no, she turned to something she considered a last resort. To make money, she started sex work. She made an account on a sugar daddy dating website where people trade money for companionship and often sex."
• Annie: "I was just...I was in a desperate place. I mean...people who have been in a position like this ever know that when you're in a place of selling furniture, you're in a desperate position of "I'm out options." This is a 'plan Z' I would not be doing this if plans 'A' through 'I' had worked out in any capacity."
• Ellen Huet: "The first thing she tried was video chatting with a middle-aged man. She flashed him on camera and he sent her money over Zelle. She posted videos on OnlyFans and PornHub.

• Annie writes, "I sat in my therapist’s office, in my walking boot and hormonal sweat, with my oldest sibling {Sam} there in person holding his phone with our mother {Connie} on FaceTime. The woman who bore me {Connie} told the therapist that it would be “best for Annie’s mental health if she fully financially supported herself,” and my multi-millionaire sibling {Sam} agreed. The therapist was utterly shocked, I was only half-surprised. 
  
  Perhaps with her {the therapist} highlighting that I never asked them {Sam, Connie} for financial help until very ill, and it still being so early in grieving our Dad {Jerry}, and with her {the therapist} highlighting their enormous wealth, the therapist somehow persuaded them to give short-term help for my basic needs...
  
  My mom {Connie} and my brother {Sam} didn’t honor the therapist’s plan for six months of financial support, and my rent money was late or less-than-agreed or had-to-be-groveled-for." [AA24b].
• In [AA23s], Annie specifies, "I was given some rent money for a few months in LA before moving back to Big Island for a work trade. We made a plan with the family therapist (we did two sessions with) for Sam and my mother {Connie} to help with my basic needs while I was sick. That plan was not followed." [AA23s]
• "That financial “help” became inconsistent and/or attached to strings. It would be less than the amount agreed on with the therapist, late for me to actually pay rent so I had to keep asked repeatedly, etc." [AA23t]
• My note: I've estimated that the family therapy session occurred in ~January 2020 based on:
  • Max Altman's text message in [AA24r], where he tells Annie that he, Sam, Jack, and Connie "think it's best" if Annie "pay{s} for things in June {herself}", i.e. if Max, Sam, Jack, and Connie don't adhere to the plan to pay for Annie's basic living, food, and medical expenses that they'd previously agreed to during the sessions they did with Annie with a family therapist, and
  • Annie's statement that Connie and Sam were withholding the "final month of a six month plan for basic life support...while offering a diamond Dad didn't ask to become to be sent to a rural mailbox" [AA24b]

• "I got $100 for an ankle MRI copay, after much 'discussion'"" [AA23k]
• ""Have you ever had to prove the $100 MRI co-pay needed to confirm medically necessary equipment to a blood relative with a net worth of well over $100 million? A very strange first world pain" [AA21d]

• From [BB24d]:
  • Ellen Huet: "Now, Sam and his family have given Annie money at times, but she says it always came with heavy conditions that made her nervous. At one point, Sam wanted her to get back on Zoloft, an antidepressant, which she had started as a teen but had stopped later on. She {Annie} forwarded me an email from Sam where he asked her to share her bank statements and to allow him and his mom to sit in on some of her therapy sessions in exchange for her rent and medical expenses being covered. She felt like it was his way of exerting leverage or power over her. Of course, Sam can spend his money as he pleases, but again, he's on stage espousing the virtues of universal basic income -- giving money away for free, unconditionally, -- and Annie says he didn't do the same here for her. There were times when I'd gone back and forth about what to include from Annie's story. It's a very personal, messy family situation, and I'll confess that on occasion I've doubted some unrelated things she's told me. But also, I've looked through corroborating emails and documents. We drove to a lot of places Annie lived, and I met people she lived with. So in late 2019, when she asked for help and says she was told no, she turned to something she considered a last resort. To make money, she started sex work. She made an account on a sugar daddy dating website where people trade money for companionship and often sex."
  • Annie: "I was just...I was in a desperate place. I mean...people who have been in a position like this ever know that when you're in a place of selling furniture, you're in a desperate position of "I'm out options." This is a 'plan Z' I would not be doing this if plans 'A' through 'I' had worked out in any capacity."
  • Ellen Huet: "The first thing she tried was video chatting with a middle-aged man. She flashed him on camera and he sent her money over Zelle. She posted videos on OnlyFans and PornHub.
• From [AA22c]:
  • "“Take this drug you’ve already used for 10 years, that you worked supported by professionals to stop, and I’ll give you financial support for basic needs while you’re in a walking boot from tendinopathy and managing early PCOS symptoms making you unable to work ‘normal’ hours”"

• Annie will move again later, so it's helpful to clarify this now for those who may not know: Hawai'i (aka Hawaii) is a state in the United States of America, located far away from the rest of the states, in the Pacific Ocean. It contains 8 islands: Big Island, Maui, and 6 others.
• To get an idea of the geography of Hawaii, see Hawaii on Google Maps, and:

• 

• From [EW23a]:
  • "In May 2020, she {Annie} relocated to the Big Island of Hawaii. One day, shortly after she’d moved to a farm to do a live-work trade, she got an email from Sam asking for her address. He wanted to send her a memorial diamond he’d made out of some of their father’s ashes. “Picturing him sending a diamond of my dad’s ashes to the mailbox where it’s one of those rural places where there are all these open boxes for all these farms … It was so heavy and sad and angering, but it was also so hilarious and so ridiculous. So disconnected-feeling. Just the lack of fucks given.” Their father never asked to be a diamond. Annie’s mental health was fragile. She worried about money for groceries. It was hard to interact with somebody for whom money meant everything but also so little. “Like, either you aren’t realizing or you are not caring about this whole situation here,” she said. By “whole situation,” she meant her life. “You’re willing to spend $5,000 — for each one — to make this thing that was your idea, not Dad’s, and you’re wanting to send that to me instead of sending me $300 so I can have food security. What?”"
• In [AA24b], Annie writes:
  • "My Father never asked to become a diamond. I never sent my sibling the farm address. The mailbox was open, in a cluster of mailboxes in the middle of nowhere on the island. Plus, the most financially reasonable thing for me to have done with a diamond at that point was to pawn it for food money — and my sibling {Sam} was aware.
    I decided to go full no contact with my relatives. The family therapist we spoke with recommended I consider this more seriously, after telling me she could not professionally recommend doing more group sessions. She was not the first therapist to tell me to go no contact. Withholding the final month of a six month plan for basic life support, while I was very sick, while withholding money left to me from my Dad, while offering a diamond Dad didn’t ask to become to be sent to a rural mailbox, was my final straw to begin grieving all three of my siblings and my mother. A completely different and similar grieving process as grieving my Dad.
    The distinctions between “family” and “relatives” became more clear everyday."
• From [AA22b]:
  • "What does it say about YOUR mental health, to tell me that I’m somehow both too mentally unwell to make my own decisions and too mentally well to receive emotional or tangible support?"
  • "One reason of many for no contact"
• My note: I've estimated that this occurred in June 2020 based on:
  • Max Altman's text message in [AA24r], where he tells Annie that he, Sam, Jack, and Connie "think it's best" if Annie "pay{s} for things in June {herself}", i.e. if Max, Sam, Jack, and Connie don't adhere to the plan to pay for Annie's basic living, food, and medical expenses that they'd previously agreed to during the sessions they did with Annie with a family therapist, and
  • Annie's statement that Connie and Sam were withholding the "final month of a six month plan for basic life support...while offering a diamond Dad didn't ask to become to be sent to a rural mailbox" [AA24b]
• Thus, it seems that the 6-month plan was for the months of January 2020 through June 2020, and that Sam offered to send the $5,000 diamond he made out of Jerry's ashes during the final month of that plan, i.e. June 2020 -- the same month that he withheld the money he'd previously agreed to send to Annie such that she could afford rent, groceries, and medical expenses.
  • I think this is why Annie says that Sam was "was aware" [AA24b] that "the most financially reasonable thing for {Annie} to have done with a diamond at that point was to pawn it for food money" [AA24b].

• Annie writes:
  • "After a couple months, I had to stop work trading on the farm because of my ankle again. Even small plantings and weeding was too much. One of the owners of the farm kindly and graciously found computer work for him for me to do seated, which gave me more time while I scrambled with my legs up the wall in constant ankle and knee pain. I had both an Etsy Shop and Patreon for my podcast, though they didn’t make enough to even cover my phone bill." [AA24b]
  • "Still unsure how to rest and heal my body, I found a room rental in town and started OnlyFans. I applied for EBT food stamps and Medicaid, which felt so surreal while sharing DNA with millionaires. I had also applied for unemployment in California in April 2020, as at first I didn’t want to clog up the system for people who weren’t directly related to millionaires who could help them. I was one of the millions who had identity theft on their unemployment, and so had to go through paperwork and hearings for it to finally come through in November 2020." [AA24b]

• "{In summer 2020} I decided to go full no contact with my relatives {Sam, Jack, Max, and Connie.}...After a couple months, I had to stop work trading on the farm because of {health issues with} my ankle again. Even small plantings and weeding was too much...I scrambled with my legs up the wall in constant ankle and knee pain...So back to September 2020, starting OnlyFans. I started very softcore, for all sorts of reasons. I was uncomfortable showing much of my body, both because of a history of eating disorders and body dysmorphia and because my body was physically hurting in so many ways. I enjoyed parts of posting, and being front-facing about it all. Sharing pictures and videos on my own terms felt healing for years of insecurities with my body and sexuality and preferences, like exposure therapy for all my conditioning to hide. It felt like a very specific art therapy project. I was confused about liking parts of something that was a plan Z last resort. I was still too sick to teach yoga. I had considered and attempted various mindless computer jobs, and found myself completely incapable. 
  
  After going no contact because of financial and emotional abuse, I was flooded with memories of sexual abuse I had repressed. I had flashbacks of the sexual and physical abuses my whole life, though it wasn’t until the silence of no contact that I had the space to connect the dots. In college and after, I had projectile vomited multiple times during sex with men I loved and trusted. I remember talking about this and related things with therapists, unable to wrap my mind around how violently my body had responded. *
  
  Now, literally on my ass from tendon and nerve and hormonal and digestive and ovarian cyst pain, I had a lot of time to remember the flashbacks’ details." [AA24b]

• To me, this letter seems to be somewhat sarcastic. Annie is "thanking" her relatives in a way that carries subliminal criticisms.
• Example: "Thank you for strengthening my sense of self. I am where I am and doing what I’m doing in part because of each of you. My tenacity and gentleness to take care of myself has increased because of you. The lessons I’ve received from my relationships with you have shifted my perspectives beyond their limitations. Thank you for providing contrast." -- What I think Annie is referencing here is how her relatives screwed her out of her money and (esp. Sam) abused her for a very long time. To this, she had to adapt by developing better ways to take care of herself, and was also forced to move around in a state of relative financial poverty.
  • As with the rest of the letter, Annie includes seemingly-upbeat, purposefully vague one-liners throughout the letter, such as "Thank you for providing me with contrast." (The implied negative connotation isn't too hard to infer.)

• "I had two adulthood sexual assaults while living on Maui that triggered more flashbacks. I’m grateful for those assaults in a fucked up way, for the clarities they gifted me. Half awake feeling unequivocally, “I’ve experienced exactly this before.” Though I was more set back emotionally and financially, managing even more flashbacks of old memories flooding in and incapacitating me." [AA24b]
• "The two assaults were outside of in-person sex work, both right before I started and another final straw of sorts. Adulthood assault{s} are common triggers for remembering more childhood information, patterns get repeated until they are sorted."
  • Source: https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1830774211465617685

• "While deep in my own tendon and hormone and trauma healing, I turned to escorting. Most of my emotional and thought space was on various sexual healings of my own, so extending it to include others felt less intimidating. My days were hazes of PTSD flashbacks with whatever grounding exercises I could do, whatever floor yoga and stretching I could do, and physical therapy. I had to budget basic things like grocery trips based on how much I could walk or carry. I couldn’t carry heavy things or go on long walks, and could manage even shorter beach walks because of the uneven surface. I was constantly stressing about my health and money, and feeling hopeless and powerless. Being sick is very expensive, and also a very challenging state to be in attempting to make money." [AA24b]
• "My ankle and knee and hips would hurt extra some days, and it wasn’t for another year when I was referred to a pelvic floor physical therapist that I knew I was also managing nerve pain." [AA24b]
• "I decided to get on SeekingArrangements again, now living on Maui. My disabilities and desperation made me more open to navigate the website, and I figured it would be very different than in LA. It was different, though I was still resistant to actually meet anyone in person...{eventually,} I took the plunge to meet someone in person." [AA24b]
• "The first client I ever had was in an open relationship, where his partner gave him permission for “paid play partners” that she approved of. We met on video chat, then I met him for coffee, then a few days later he was at my place. We talked, we fucked, he sent me a Venmo, he left." [AA24b]
• "I logged on my computer and paid a bill I was behind on, immediately." [AA24b]
• "My last escorting experience was with a man who was experimenting with his queerness, and wanted me to bring another man in. I invited a filming partner, as I had started making hardcore porn on OnlyFans and PornHub at that point. Before the filming partner came over, the client said “I’m so gay!” — while his dick was in my mouth between words of the dick about to be in his mouth — followed by “omg I’ve never said that before” and a distant stare. I felt that stare, back to a stare I’d experienced decades ago." [AA24b]
• "In the shower after I prayed that would be my last experience in person, and I could switch to all virtual. I knew an article would be coming out soon quoting me in New York Magazine, and I prayed it would give me the exposure to support myself with OnlyFans." [AA24b]
• While deep in my own tendon and hormone and trauma healing, I turned to escorting. Most of my emotional and thought space was on various sexual healings of my own...My days were hazes of PTSD flashbacks with whatever grounding exercises I could do, whatever floor yoga and stretching I could do, and physical therapy......My last escorting experience was with a man who was experimenting with his queerness, and wanted me to bring another man in. I invited a filming partner, as I had started making hardcore porn on OnlyFans and PornHub at that point. Before the filming partner came over, the client said “I’m so gay!” — while his dick was in my mouth between words of the dick about to be in his mouth — followed by “omg I’ve never said that before” and a distant stare. I felt that stare, back to a stare I’d experienced decades ago." [AA24b]
  • ""My last in-person client came out to me as gay followed with “omg I haven’t ever said that out loud before,” as I flashbacked and did my best to stay in “work mode.” Will be more/less something when less ptsd-y" [AA24q]
• From [AA24j]: "Can you imagine how much more I’ll scare them now that I’m getting my tendon/nerve/ovaries cared for, not sucking dick for rent money while my Dad’s Trust was completely withheld, and learning it’s safe and allowed for me to share my story on my terms 🥰"
• From [AA--b]: "Yeah I was super sick...and houseless...and sucking "parts" for...{money?}...and so now -- well, first of all, 'cause that was some outrageously good fuckery (abuse), and -- now I'm un-fuck-with-able!"

• It seems Annie was trying to use EMDR to heal her PTSD, which, as she claims, resulted from having flashbacks to and stronger memories the abuse, e.g. sexual abuse from Sam, that she was subjected to during her childhood.
• It seems her therapist rejected her as a client on the basis of her position as a sex worker.

• From [BI23a]:
  • "Altman's purchase of the Hawaii property has not been previously reported. BI linked the property to Altman by examining business and real-estate filings showing the land was owned by an LLC managed by Jennifer Serralta, whose name appears as a manager on paperwork for other businesses known to be owned by Altman. Serralta, who previously worked in the automotive industry, describes herself on LinkedIn as the chief operating officer of a family office — presumably Altman's — and is his cousin, according to an obituary for their grandmother. Reached by phone, Serralta declined to comment."
  • "In a March post on her personal blog, Serralta wrote that she stayed at a Kailua-Kona property owned by "a friend" while vacationing in Hawaii. Last year, Altman tweeted a photo of himself wakesurfing in Hawaii; the view of the Big Island in the background of the photo precisely matches the view from the Kailua-Kona compound. And in 2021, Altman registered a business, the Sam Altman Qualified Opportunity Fund, at an address adjacent to the property. (It's possible that Altman wanted to register the business to his address but made a mistake; the address he used differs from his own by just one digit and has been owned by the same person since 2007.)"
    • Note: Business Insider's statement seems accurate; see my analysis using Google Maps in [BI23a] in the References, and key excerpts from them section of this post.
    • The Tweet that Sam posted:

      • 

  • "Altman has one family connection to Hawaii: His youngest sibling, Annie Altman, has lived on the islands on and off since 2017. Annie Altman, an artist and entertainer who has supported herself through in-person and virtual sex work, lives a much-different life from her brother's. Annie is teetering on financial insolvency, she told BI, after a lengthy stretch of illnesses. She has not spoken with her brother since 2021, when she refused his offer to buy her a home after learning that a lawyer would control the property, she said."
  • "She had been unaware that her oldest brother owned property in Hawaii until BI asked her about it, she said."

• Annie has stated: "There were other strings attached they made it feel like an unsafe place to actually heal from the experiences I had with him." [AA23g] "The offer was after a year and half no contact {with Sam}, and {I} had started speaking up {about Sam, and his abuse/misconduct} online. I had already started survival sex work. The offer was for the house to be connected with a lawyer, and the last time I had a Sam-lawyer connection I didn’t get to see my Dad’s will for a year." [AA23h]
• From [BB24d]:
  • Ellen Huet: "It's not a clean cut situation. In twenty twenty two, Sam offered to buy Annie a house, but she says it wasn't going to be in her name, and the conditions made her uncomfortable."
  • Annie Altman: "It became clear to me that it was not an offer for my house. It was an offer for a house of Sam's - or a lawyer of his - that I would be allowed to live in."

• 

• Image source: https://x.com/anniealtman108/status/1640418558927863808 [AA23f]

• "To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be. At one point during our dinner in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said. (Mr. Altman pointed out that, as fate would have it, he and Oppenheimer share a birthday.)"
• ...
• "His longtime mentor, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, explained Mr. Altman’s motivation like this:"
• "'Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.'"
• ...
• "In the late 1990s, the John Burroughs School, a private prep school named for the 19th-century American naturalist and philosopher, invited an independent consultant to observe and critique daily life on its campus in the suburbs of St. Louis."
• "The consultant’s review included one significant criticism: The student body was rife with homophobia."
• "In the early 2000s, Mr. Altman, a 17-year-old student at John Burroughs, set out to change the school’s culture, individually persuading teachers to post “Safe Space” signs on their classroom doors as a statement in support of gay students like him. He came out during his senior year and said the St. Louis of his teenage years was not an easy place to be gay."
• ...
• "'He has a natural ability to talk people into things,' Mr. Graham said. 'If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.''”
• "He {Sam} now says that during his short stay at Stanford, he learned more from the many nights he spent playing poker than he did from most of his other college activities. After his freshman year, he worked in the artificial intelligence and robotics lab overseen by Prof. Andrew Ng, who would go on to found the flagship A.I. lab at Google. But poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk."
• "It showed him 'how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,' he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. 'It’s a great game.'"
• ...
• "He also began working on several projects outside the investment firm, including OpenAI, which he founded as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside a group that included Elon Musk. By Mr. Altman’s own admission, YC grew increasingly concerned he was spreading himself too thin."
• ...
• "In the mid-2010s, Mr. Altman shared a three-bedroom, three-bath San Francisco apartment with his boyfriend at the time, his two brothers and their girlfriends. The brothers went their separate ways in 2016 but remained on a group chat, where they spent a lot of time giving one another guff, as only siblings can, his brother Max remembers. Then, one day, Mr. Altman sent a text saying he planned to raise $1 billion for his company’s research."
• ...
• "Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. 'He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,' Mr. Brockman told me. 'That is the algorithm he uses over and over.'"

• From here on the Internet Archive (I just searched for the URL, "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Altman", in the WayBack Machine on the Internet Archive):

  • 

  • 

    • As of 14:50:52 (military time, I assume) on October 5, 2023: the Sam Altman Wikipedia article does not contain any details about Annie's allegations that Sam sexually abused her:

      • 

    • Then: As of 22:50:05, the Sam Altman Wikipedia article does contain details about Annie's allegations that Sam sexually abused her:

      • 

  • 

    • Then: As of 12:09:09 on October 6, 2023, the Sam Altman Wikipedia article DOES NOT contain details about Annie's allegations that Sam sexually abused her

      • 

• From the Revision history of the Sam Altman Wikipedia article:

  • 

    • It seems various people repeatedly tried to edit Sam's Wikipedia page to include details about Annie's allegations that Sam sexually abused her, but that, within literal minutes of each edit being made, Wikipedia users - primarily Wikipedia user "Panamitsu", among others - removed the edits.
    • It also seems that all information about what those edits actually were has also been removed.
      • That is -- from what I can tell, usually, when someone makes an edit to a Wikipedia article, you can go into the Revision history page for that Wikipedia article, and see what edits were made.
      • But with these edits, the links you could normally click on to see the edit details have been removed - they've got strikethroughs (i.e. like this) applied to them, and you can't click on them, and there's a note that says, "edit summary removed" next to all of them:

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

        • 

          • 

           

    • Wikipedia user "Panamitsu" (primarily), along with the other Wikipedia users who repeatedly removed the details, seem to have provided the following explanations for their removals:
      • "possible BLP issue or vandalism"
      • "Undid revision 1178799350 by 2A00:23EE:19D8:4A3:D9A4:325D:C151:C18F (talk) It is a WP:BLP violation. Twitter is not a reliable source and people make false accusations all the time"
      • "Undid revision 1178799655 by 2A00:23EE:1828:A9A0:E292:E724:64E0:FC4A (talk) vandalism"
      • "twitter isn't a reliable source for gossipsheet content.,, reverted"
      • "Take it to talk page, I don't think it should be here, it seems like a WP:BLP violation. I can't even verify if that is his siter"
        • {I think there is a typo here, i.e. I think "siter" was supposed to say "sister"}
      • "Protected "Sam Altman": Violations of the biographies of living persons policy: WP:EXTRAORDINARY WP:BURDEN ([Edit=Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access] (expires 01:26, 16 October 2023 (UTC)) [Move=Require autoconfirmed or confirmed access] (expires 01:26, 16 October 2023 (UTC)))"
  • The version history of the Sam Altman Wikipedia indicates that that the Wikipedia users who made the removals wanted people to "Take it to {the} talk page". That is, they instructed anyone who might want to add details about Annie's allegations to the Sam Altman Wikipedia article to first discuss their intent to do so on the Talk page of the Sam Altman Wikipedia article.

    • 

  • It seems that, on 01:26 on October 6, 2023, Wikipedia user "EI C" "protected" the Sam Altman Wikipedia article:

    • 

    • To be clear: I don't understand exactly what "Protected" means in this context. I don't know what Wikipedia user "EI C" did to make the article "Protected." (I'm not an expert in Wikipedia article revisions.) It seems that Wikipedia user "EI C" made it such that people couldn't add details about Annie's allegations unless they had "autoconfirmed or confirmed access". (I have no clue what that means either.) It also seems that this status was set to expire 10 days from the date & time it was instated (i.e. expire on 01;26, 16 October 2023.)
• October 9, 2023:
  • 09:08 on Oct 9, 2023 -- Wikipedia user "Allbirdy" edits the Sam Altman Wikipedia article, adding details about Annie's allegations:

    • 

    • 

  • Just 25 minutes later: 09:33  on Oct 9, 2023 -- Wikipedia user "Panamitsu", once again, removes these edits:

    • 

    • 

• November 20, 2023:
  • 08:36 on Nov 20, 2023 -- Wikipedia user "Rei" edits the Sam Altman Wikipedia article, adding details about Annie's allegations:

    • 

    • 

  • Just 14 minutes later: 08:50 on Nov 20, 2023 -- Wikipedia user "Panamitsu", once again, removes these edits:

    • 

    • 

  • 09:05 on Nov 20, 2023: Wikipedia user "Rei" re-makes their edit with the details about Annie's allegations, stating, "{My previous edit was} Very much NOT a BLP violation. Matches tone reqs, credits statements to specific individuals, cites secondary sources, etc. If you want to accuse a BLP violation, you need to cite the part of the BLP policy violated. Talk created."

    • 

    • 

  • Over the next hour (primarily), i.e. 09:05-10:50 -- "Rei" argues back and forth with other Wikipeditor editors about including their edits. Ultimately, Rei's edits are removed by Wikipedia editor "Isabelle Belato", with a note that says "Protected "Sam Altman": Edit warring / content dispute;WP:BLP issues. ([Edit=Require administrator access] (expires 10:30, 4 December 2023 (UTC)))"

    • 

• May 23, 2024: Wikipedia user "Somewordswrittendown" adds details about Annie's allegations of abuse, incorporating "guidelines across the various discussion pages that have opened up around this topic; namely, this doesn't source from twitter (stupid rule that needs to be updated) and only includes direct quotes from noted publications."

  • 

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37790899
  • Post before it was flagged & removed: https://web.archive.org/web/20231006140717/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37790899
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
• https://x.com/JOSourcing/status/1710390512455401888

• Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI - Wikipedia
• OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend - Zvi, LessWrong
• Sam Altman’s Knack for Dodging Bullets—With a Little Help From Bigshot Friends - by Deepa Seetharaman, The Wall Street Journal
  • See [WSJ23b] for details.

• Starting at 5:02:
  • Trevor Noah: "{You're} a CEO who many people have termed, like, the 'Steve Jobs of this generation, and the future.' And - you don't say that about youself."
  • Sam Altman: "Certainly not."
  • Trevor Noah: "No, I think a lot of people say that about you, you know, because -- I mean, I was thinking about this, and I was going, 'I think calling you the Steve Jobs of this generation is unfair.' In my opinion, I think you're the Prometheus of this generation."
    • Note: my old username (on X (formerly Twitter) and LessWrong) was "prometheus5015." This LessWrong post was first published on October 7, 2023, two months before this podcast with Trevor Noah was published on Spotify.
  • Sam Altman {*turning away*}: "Wooouughh."
    • Note: it's hard to transcribe Sam's response purely in words. Go watch the podcast clip and you'll see what I'm talking about.
  • Trevor Noah: "No, you really are. You really are. It seems like to me, you have stolen fire from the gods --"
  • Sam Altman: {*laughs/half-chuckles*}
    • Note: once again, it is a bit hard to describe Sam's reaction solely by using words in the English language (or, at least, I am not a good enough writer to do so.) E.g. see this English StackExchange post for an idea of the difficulty.
  • Trevor Noah: "--and you are the forefront of this movement, and this time, that we are now living through. Where once AI was only the stuff of sci-fi and legend. You know, you are now the face - at the forefront - of what could change civilization forever."

As I mentioned -- it's a bit hard to capture, using words alone (in my transcript above), the reaction that Sam had, when Trevor Noah described him as the "Prometheus of this generation", Just watch ~5:02 -- 5:50 in the video below.

The reason I focus on this is because it increases my probability (which is already quite high) that Sam Altman is aware of & has read this post. My old username on X (formerly Twitter) and LessWrong, at the time that this podcast with Trevor Noah was first published (on December 7, 2023, on Spotify), was "prometheus5015."

• Starting at 32:28:
  • Sam: "AGI and my family are the two main things I care about, so losing one of those is like...so yeah I mean it was just like unbelievably painful. The only comparable set of life experience that I had, and that one was of course much worse, was when my dad died. And that was like a very sudden thing. But the sense of like confusion and loss...in that case, I felt like I had a little bit of time to just like feel it all. But then there was so much to do. Like it was like so unexpected that I had to pick up the pieces of his life for a little while. And it wasn't until, like, a week after that I really got a moment to just, like, catch my breath and be like, holy shit, like, I can't believe this happened. So yeah, that was much worse."

• "Altman’s firing and swift reversal of fortune followed a pattern in his career, which began when he dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 and gained the reputation as a Silicon Valley visionary. Over the past two decades, Altman has lost the confidence of several top leaders in the three organizations he has directed. At every crisis point, Altman, 38 years old, not only rebounded but climbed to more powerful roles with the help of an expanding network of powerful allies."
• "A group of senior employees at Altman’s first startup, Loopt—a location-based social-media network started in the flip-phone era—twice urged board members to fire him as CEO over what they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior, said people familiar with the matter. But the board, with support from investors at venture-capital firm Sequoia, kept Altman until Loopt was sold in 2012."
• "In 2019, Altman was asked to resign from Y Combinator after partners alleged he had put personal projects, including OpenAI, ahead of his duties as president, said people familiar with the matter."
• "This fall, Altman also faced a crisis of trust at OpenAI, the company he navigated to the front of the artificial-intelligence field. In early October {2023}, OpenAI’s chief scientist {Ilya Sutskever} approached some fellow board members to recommend Altman be fired, citing roughly 20 examples of when he believed Altman misled OpenAI executives over the years. That set off weeks of closed-door talks, ending with Altman’s surprise ouster days before Thanksgiving."
• "This article is based on interviews with dozens of executives, engineers, current and former employees and friends of Altman’s, as well as investors."
• "A few years after {Loopt's} launch, some Loopt executives voiced frustration with Altman’s management. There were complaints about Altman pursuing side projects, at one point diverting engineers to work on a gay dating app, which they felt came at the expense of the company’s main work."
• "Senior executives approached the board with concerns that Altman at times failed to tell the truth—sometimes about matters so insignificant one person described them as paper cuts. At one point, they threatened to leave the company if he wasn’t removed as CEO, according to people familiar with the matter. The board backed Altman."
• "“If he imagines something to be true, it sort of becomes true in his head,” said Mark Jacobstein, co-founder of Jimini Health who served as Loopt’s chief operating officer. “That is an extraordinary trait for entrepreneurs who want to do super ambitious things. It may or may not lead one to stretch, and that can make people uncomfortable.”"
• "Altman doesn’t recall employee complaints beyond the normal annual CEO review process, according to people familiar with his thinking."
• "Michael Moritz, who led Sequoia, personally advised Altman. When Loopt struggled to find buyers, Moritz helped engineer an acquisition by another Sequoia-backed company, the financial technology firm Green Dot."
• "Altman turned Y Combinator into an investing powerhouse. While serving as the president, he kept his own venture-capital firm, Hydrazine, which he launched in 2012. He caused tensions after barring other partners at Y Combinator from running their own funds, including the current chief executive, Garry Tan, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Tan and Ohanian didn’t respond to requests for comment."
• "Altman also expanded Y Combinator through a nonprofit he created called YC Research, which served as an incubator for Altman’s own projects, including OpenAI. From its founding in 2015, YC Research operated without the involvement of the firm’s longtime partners, fueling their concern that Altman was straying too far from running the firm’s core business."
• "By early 2018, Altman was barely present at Y Combinator’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., spending more time at OpenAI, at the time a small research nonprofit, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "The increasing amount of time Altman spent at OpenAI riled longtime partners at Y Combinator, who began losing faith in him as a leader. The firm’s leaders asked him to resign, and he left as president in March 2019."
• "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.”
• "Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct."
• "To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
• "For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure."
• "As the company grew, management complaints about Altman surfaced."
• "In early fall this year, Sutskever, also a board member, was upset because Altman had elevated another AI researcher, Jakub Pachocki, to director of research, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "Sutskever told his board colleagues that the episode reflected a long-running pattern of Altman’s tendency to pit employees against one another or promise resources and responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "Other board members already had concerns about Altman’s management. Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corp., tried to cultivate relationships with employees as a board member. Past board members chatted regularly with OpenAI executives without informing Altman. Yet during the pandemic, Altman told McCauley he needed to be told if the board spoke to employees, a request that some on the board viewed as Altman limiting the board’s power, people familiar with the matter said."
• "Around the time Sutskever aired his complaints, the independent board members heard similar concerns from some senior OpenAI executives, people familiar with the discussions said. Some considered leaving the company over Altman’s leadership, the people said."
• "Altman also misled board members, leaving the impression with one board member that another wanted board member Helen Toner removed, even though it wasn’t true, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported."
• "Altman also misled board members, leaving the impression with one board member that another wanted board member Helen Toner removed, even though it wasn’t true, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported."

• Note: in the link I provided, there's a transcript. The transcript has this feature where it highlights the current word being spoken, with the idea being that you can "follow along" reading the transcript while you're listening to the podcast. Unfortunately, the feature is broken. I think this is due to the inclusion of some ads/commercials at various points throughout the podcast, which create a mismatch between the transcript and the audio.) Specifically, the word highlighted in the transcript is usually a few minutes later than the actual audio.
  • Example from OpenAI Part 1: The Most Silicon Valley Man Alive:

  • 

• Ellen Huet (host of the podcast): "Today, we're going to start on a drive in Hawaii."
• Annie Altman: "We're on north Shore, going deeper into the jungle on the north shore, so we're passing twin falls right now.
• Ellen Huet: "I'm driving through the lush green forests of Maui. Annie Altman, Sam Altman's little sister is sitting in the passenger seat. You heard from her briefly in the first episode."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "We're taking a tour of the different places Annie has moved around in the last couple of years, driving down dirt roads to look at cabins and houses hidden behind enormous tropical plants."
• ..,
• Ellen Huet: "For much of the past two years, Annie hasn't been able to afford a stable place to live."
• Annie Altman: "The place you just passed is one of the places I stayed at longer-term in all of the houselessness...{I spent} two months on a newly-built, {with} no running water or no electricity, house, at the far end, back, of the property."
• Ellen Huet: "And I think she's an important part of Sam's story."
• Annie Altman: "And at the time I had nowhere to stay and no rent money, certainly no deposit money, and barely enough room, barely enough money for rent."
• Ellen Huet: "Recently, over the course of just a year, she moved twenty two times, and that's on average about twice a month. Sometimes she has stayed places for a week at a time, or even just a night or two. Some of them have been illegal rentals without running water. She says she's slept on floors and friends' houses. She stayed with strangers when she didn't have another option."
• ...
• Annie Altman: "The man who lived in the front house messaged me on Instagram, and I stayed in his kids' room the week that they weren't there, and then slept on the floor in the common room the week that the kids were there.
• Annie Altman: "I was houseless. I didn't have somewhere to go."
• Annie Altman: "I stayed in this cabin with the slanty roof right there for three months."
• {A podcast host}: "How many different places have you lived in that didn't have running water?"
• Annie: "Maybe five-ish? Five or six? I don't know."
• Ellen Huet: "Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in San Francisco, her brother Sam was having a spectacular year in 2023. The success of ChatGPT had launched OpenAI into the stratosphere. Sam was named CEO of the Year by Time magazine. He spent months flying around the globe talking to world leaders about AI."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "On stage, on podcasts and interviews, people kept turning to Sam for answers. They were asking him what our AI future would hold. In May of that year, he confidently suggested a future where no one is poor. It's an idea he's talked about for years, and the remarks show that his tune hasn't changed despite growing renown and wealth.
• Sam Altman: "One thing I think we all could agree on is that we just shouldn't have poverty in the world."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "It sounds wonderful, almost utopian. But Sam was saying on stage that everyone should have enough money, enough food, everyone should have a place to live, while his own sister was struggling with homelessness. I want to believe Sam's promises about abundance, but Annie's story complicates a lot of the things Sam has projected about the future."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "Sam is a savvy guy. As his profile has gotten bigger after he helped build the world's leading AI company, he has stopped saying things like AI will kill us all. Instead, he talks about how society will be profoundly changed, but overall it will be for the better. Since his newfound chat GPT fame, he has shifted toward presenting himself and by extension, open AI, as more middle of the road. Sam is allowed to change his views, but people have also so complain to me in private that Sam has a tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth. He's good at telling people what they want to hear in that moment, so it's not surprising that if it's advantageous for him to seem more moderate, that he would start to sound that way."

• Ellen Huet: "What really strikes me is that Sam positions himself as the visionary behind this AI that might put us all out of work, and the visionary behind systems that will save us from that chaos. He's offering fixes to the problems that his own technology will create. Imagine a future where Sam Altman's company has invented AI so powerful that it upends the entire labor economy. We no longer work for money. Instead, we get monthly checks from Sam Altman's income distribution system. I can imagine that his intentions might be good, and that he wants to make a difference here. But what Sam's proposing is ending poverty through systems overseen by him, basically, and that's asking us to put a huge amount of trust in him. Remember, Sam is really good at gaining power. He has a deep drive to be in charge. His company has made promises about adhering to certain principles and then moved away from them. It brings me back to this question we asked in episode one, what I think is the key question of this series. Should we trust this person?"
• Ellen Huet: "Like we said earlier, there's a part of Sam's life that really complicates this image of him. It's the story of his little sister Annie. She says she lives in poverty. Sometimes she struggles with homelessness. She says she survives by doing sex work. Sam is pitching this dream future in which universal basic income will protect everyone who needs it. That sounds lovely in theory, but when it's held up next to Annie's messy, everyday reality, that promise starts to sound a bit hollow. Housing insecurity has defined Annie's life for the past few years. This is a complex and sensitive situation, so I wanted to hear from her myself."
• Annie Altman: "In my experience, it's not only hard to do anything when you are housing insecure, it is impossible. I haven't had a typical day in four years because of how much energy both physically like looking for places or doing things, or looking for jobs and emotionally goes into housing insecurity. It has been the single biggest energy output of my past year."
• Ellen Huet: "In person, Annie is upbeat and smiley. She has good suggestions for health food stores on Maui. She has the word love tattooed across her knuckles. She makes a podcast, Hello and Welcome to the Annie Altman Show All Humans or Human Podcast, and posts videos of her singing on YouTube."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "Sometimes, I and to better understand her story, I want to rewind to her childhood. When we heard from Annie briefly in the first episode, she talked about Sam's domineering attitude within their family, how he dictated they wouldn't have Christmas trees and put himself in charge of how long each sibling could speak at their dad's funeral. Their family has three boys. Sam's the oldest, then Max, then Jack. Annie is the youngest, nine years younger than Sam and the only girl. Her brothers loved science, math, games, nerdy stuff. She was always the artistic, sensitive one. Even when they were children, she sometimes felt like the odd one out, and as they became adults, the bonds between the brothers tightened both personally and professionally. While Sam was running YC, Jack founded a software company that was funded by YC. Jack and Max also both worked with Sam, helping run his investment fund with money from Peter Teel. Then all three started another investment fund together in which they used Sam's personal wealth. The three brothers lived together in San Francisco, brothers, coworkers, roommates, a tight, messy knot of family, business and money. Annie, on the other hand, was not part of the Altman family brand. With each new step in her life, she seemed to veer farther away from the path she felt was expected of her. She completed pre med requirements, but decided not to pursue that further. She did improv classes, stand up comedy, yoga, teacher training. She said her dad was supportive of this turn away from a more traditional path. Her mom, who was a physician, was less excited."
• Annie Altman: "My siblings and mother were very judgmental about the shift and also very "This is just a phase." I was an am at total daddy's girl. With my mother, there was closeness only when I was doing what she wanted me to do, which is a story {that} sadly, I feel like a lot of people can relate to."
• Ellen Huet: "Just a note. We reached out to Sam, his siblings, and his mom for comment in this episode. His mom, Connie Gibstine, responded with this statement:"
• Connie Gibstine: "We love Annie and are very concerned about her well being. Over the years, we have offered her financial support and help and continue to offer it today. Navigating the balance between providing support without enabling self-destructive behavior for a family member with mental health struggles is extraordinarily difficult. We only want the best for Annie and hope everyone will treat her with compassion."
• Ellen Huet: "In 2018, Annie's father died suddenly of a heart attack, and the grief hit her {Annie} hard. Meanwhile, she also started dealing with some chronic health issues, including tendonitis in her ankle that made it difficult to do work that required standing. She quit her job. She was still mourning her dad. She had gotten some life insurance money after he died, but when that ran out a year later, she still found herself in a desperate financial situation. In order to pay rent, she started selling her furniture. She says she asked her family directly for money to pay rent and cover groceries."
• Annie Altman: "I asked my mother for help and she said no, And then {I} asked Sam and he was told to say no because of her {Connie} wanting him to say no, and he's a grown man in his thirties, {worth} millions of dollars."
• Ellen Huet: "Now, Sam and his family have given Annie money at times, but she says it always came with heavy conditions that made her nervous. At one point, Sam wanted her to get back on Zoloft, an antidepressant, which she had started as a teen but had stopped later on. She {Annie} forwarded me an email from Sam where he asked her to share her bank statements and to allow him and his mom to sit in on some of her therapy sessions in exchange for her rent and medical expenses being covered. She felt like it was his way of exerting leverage or power over her. Of course, Sam can spend his money as he pleases, but again, he's on stage espousing the virtues of universal basic income -- giving money away for free, unconditionally, -- and Annie says he didn't do the same here for her. There were times when I'd gone back and forth about what to include from Annie's story. It's a very personal, messy family situation, and I'll confess that on occasion I've doubted some unrelated things she's told me. But also, I've looked through corroborating emails and documents. We drove to a lot of places Annie lived, and I met people she lived with. So in late 2019, when she asked for help and says she was told no, she turned to something she considered a last resort. To make money, she started sex work. She made an account on a sugar daddy dating website where people trade money for companionship and often sex."
• Annie: "I was just...I was in a desperate place. I mean...people who have been in a position like this ever know that when you're in a place of selling furniture, you're in a desperate position of "I'm out options." This is a 'plan Z' I would not be doing this if plans 'A' through 'I' had worked out in any capacity."
• Ellen Huet: "The first thing she tried was video chatting with a middle-aged man. She flashed him on camera and he sent her money over Zelle. She posted videos on OnlyFans and PornHub. She also did in-person sex work for two years. She says she didn't want to, but it was the work that she was able to fit into her unpredictable schedule of dealing with her health issues. Her lack of stable income, led to a long period of housing insecurity. At times, she lived with sex work clients, or even with strangers from the internet. Her sex work contributed to her precarious housing. She didn't have pay stubs or regular income, which limited the kind of leases she could get. It felt like this interconnected web, exactly the kind of vicious cycle that something like universal basic income tries to break."
• Annie Altman: "If I had a security deposit in my bank account - {I} never would have lived with this man, not, not even a little bit of a chance, would I have lived with this man. There's some unhealthy sex work experiences, and I've also had very traumatizing experiences from in-person work that would not have happened if I had secure housing. I'm still in and, have been so long in, survival mode that it really shifts everything. It really shifts everything. Times when it's been really like...places...like staying just for a week and a half {somewhere} and then the floor for a week, and then someone's place for a night, and then a floor for a week - in those places of really moving that much in a short period of time, there's no - I had no energy for anything else. Really feeling a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that I have never experienced, ever."
• Ellen Huet: "It's not a clean cut situation. In twenty twenty two, Sam offered to buy Annie a house, but she says it wasn't going to be in her name, and the conditions made her uncomfortable."
• Annie Altman: "It became clear to me that it was not an offer for my house. It was an offer for a house of Sam's - or a lawyer of his - that I would be allowed to live in."
• Ellen Huet: "She felt like it was a throwback to Sam's attempts to get her on Zoloft and to peer into her bank statements, so she said no. I do want to pause on this because I know it may sound illogical. After all, it would have been a place to live. But from her point of view, Sam had exerted control over her throughout their lives, and this seemed like one more attempt to control her. During those conversations, she was clear with Sam about the hardships she had endured in the past couple of years."
• Annie Altman: "I told him over the series of those phone calls too, that I had started sex work, and distinctly remember when I first told him about doing sex work and he said, quote, 'Good.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Annie was stung, because she remembers that he didn't ask anything more about it. Like she was sharing something that was painful for her and he was blowing past it."
• Annie Altman: "To hear your little sister tell you she's doing something she doesn't want to do related to sex, and for the response to be 'Good.' So I was like, 'Oh, you're glad that I'm starting to post on OnlyFans. It sounds 'good' to you because I'm supporting myself, even if I'm telling you I'm doing this as a plan Z because I don't know what else to do.'"
• Ellen Huet: "A person close to Sam says that Sam remembers the conversation differently. Annie and Sam are mostly estranged. After that conversation, she kept living in Hawaii, struggling in obscurity. Meanwhile, Sam was ascendant. He was doing world tours. {He was} CEO of the year {in Time Magazine.} He officially became a billionaire. Most of the world had no idea Annie Altman existed, let alone that she was depending on OnlyFans for survival. But last fall, New York Magazine published a profile of Sam, and the journalist, Elizabeth Weil, interviewed Annie. The article was the first time a lot of people found out Sam even had a sister, myself included."
• Annie Altman: "Some of the trippiest messages I got from reporters, when that article first came out, were reporters who have watched every interview Sam has ever done, saying 'He's never mentioned a sister.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Annie worries that because she's basically invisible in Sam's public life life, especially compared to his tight relationship with his brothers, reporters won't take her story seriously."
• Annie Altman: "That they will then question my validity, or {be like} 'Oh, well, she's crazy. Maybe...he's just not talking about her because she's so mentally unstable, and so now let's recycle the 'Annie's crazy' narrative and 'This is why she can't be trusted', or 'We should just ignore her.'"
• Ellen Huet: "In the days leading up to the article coming out, New York Magazine reached out to Sam and his family and OpenAI for fact-checking and to confirm details. So Sam knew the story was going to mention Annie. And then the day before the article ran, something spurred Sam to make an unexpected move. He emailed Annie."
• Annie Altman: "And the night before it {the Elizabeth Weil article} came out was Yom Kippur --
• Ellen Huet: "-- the Jewish day of forgiveness --"
• Annie Altman: "Sam emailed me, 'no subject' and in all lowercase, and said, 'hi annie. in the spirit of it almost being yom kippur, i wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness for something. i should have kept sending you money without conditions even though our family had concerns; i was in a tough position of wanting to let mom drive decisions as the parent and seeing how much stress you were causing her (and also agreeing it would be better for everyone if you were  able to support yourself, and thinking that you needed medical help) and it being clear you just weren't really able to function very well. still, i made the wrong call and should just have just kept supporting you; i sincerely apologize. i hope you find peace.' There's no mention of this article that's coming out tomorrow, and there's no mention of the fact checking that he just went through."
• Ellen Huet: "Annie felt that the timing of this email was really telling. That for all this time, while Annie was staying in the background, Sam didn't feel any need to apologize. Then, just as she's about to exert a little bit of power over him, by complicating his image, he reaches out, and invokes their shared Jewish heritage to ask for forgiveness. I asked Annie how she felt about Sam speaking publicly about universal basic income and ending poverty when he hasn't done the same for her."
• Annie Altman: "It was a very big slap in the face. It feels embarrassing to be related to him. It's beyond depressing and heartbreaking and disappointing that someone who I thought had a different moral compass, or who I thought would be there for me when I needed someone and was really sick, wasn't...in the same way I'm gonna be grieving my dad for the rest of my life, I'm gonna be grieving Sam for the rest of my life. And the sadness of...of someone who saw me in a walking boot and didn't say, 'How can I help you.' It's why I use the term 'sibling' and not 'brother.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Even though Annie's story is really complicated, I think it's relevant to all of us. Because when Sam is going around talking about our AI future, he acknowledges that AI could take our jobs and upend society and money as we know it. And he says he'll come up with a solution for us: universal basic income. But, when he's faced with the messy reality of his own sister, suddenly it's not so simple. In public, he is literally saying that there shouldn't be poverty. {That} money will be given away to everyone. In private, when Annie asked for help, he didn't come through for her in the way she needed."

• https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69520118/altman-v-altman/
  • See especially the 6-page legal complaint, filed on January 6, 2025, which provides Annie's reasons for filling the lawsuit, and details about the sexual abuse Annie alleges she experienced from Sam -- https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69520118/1/altman-v-altman/
• Alternate/backup links:
  • https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.moed.217171/gov.uscourts.moed.217171.1.0_1.pdf
    • Alternate link (to the same legal document): https://ia600609.us.archive.org/8/items/gov.uscourts.moed.217171/gov.uscourts.moed.217171.1.0.pdf
  • https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/56412238/Altman_v_Altman
  • https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69520118/1/altman-v-altman/

• See:
  • https://x.com/sama/status/1876780763653263770
  • https://x.com/sama/status/1876867051215585542

• c.f. [EW23a] and Sam Altman is the Oppenheimer of Our Age for the full context.
• More of the context in which the quote was provided:
  • "Annie has moved more than 20 times in the past year. When she called me in mid-September, her housing was unstable yet again. She had $1,000 in her bank account.
  • Since 2020, she has been having flashbacks. She knows everybody takes the bits of their life and arranges them into narratives to make sense of their world.
  • As Annie tells her life story, Sam, their brothers, and her mother kept money her father left her from her.
  • As Annie tells her life story, she felt special and loved when, as a child, Sam read her bedtime stories. Now those memories feel like abuse.
  • The Altman family would like the world to know: “We love Annie and will continue our best efforts to support and protect her, as any family would.”
  • Annie is working on a one-woman show called the HumAnnie about how nobody really knows how to be a human. We’re all winging it."

Note: In my opinion, Annie and Sam tell stories about their dad's death that, to me, seem rather different and hard to reconcile --

Sam's wristwatches:

⬇️ See dropdown section ⬇️  

 

 

Sam can be seen wearing {what seems likely to be} his Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1 in "WIRED25: Sebastian Thrun & Sam Altman Talk Flying Vehicles and Artificial Intelligence", published 10/16/2018:

• 

• It seems that, as of May 23, 2018, Sam also owned a ~$100K Philippe Patek Perpetual Calendar Ref. 1526 watch, which he posted a picture of to Reddit (on May 23, 2023):

  • 

  • The picture of the watch is not currently shown in the Reddit post. I found a link to it in the post's source code (using Inspect Element):

    • 

  • I also found the date & time of the post's creation in its source code:

    • 

    • (Note: as I noted on Twitter, I originally got this date wrong, accidentally mistaking the date and time at which a comment on the post was made for the date and time at which the post itself was made. Sorry about that.)
  • It seems this was the same watch that Sam wore when testifying to congress on Tuesday, May 16, 2023 about AI regulation:

 

 

• If Sam did indeed say this, I am a bit confused, as it seems a bit inconsistent to me that Sam identified Annie's Youtube channel as "aligning with his businesses", yet identified the podcast that he recorded with Annie as "not aligning with his businesses." The reason I state that this seems inconsistent is because I don't see what exactly what it was about Annie's podcast that made it "not align" with Sam's businesses given that Annie's Youtube channel "did align."

• The sole exception here, of course (*as of the day I first published this post, i.e. October 7, 2023*), is Elizabeth Weil's nymag article, but even this article doesn't directly state the entirety of the claims that Annie has made. Instead, it kind of vaguely addresses them, using somewhat inspecific phrasing like "Now those memories feel like abuse", or "Since 2020, she has been having flashbacks" that don't quite capture the gravity of what Annie has been claiming.

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37785072
• https://x.com/JOSourcing/status/1710390512455401888

• "Wanted money and didn't get it" --
  • This is a a misleading characterization. Annie's dad left money to her, but then Connie (in communication with Sam, Jack, Max) overrode Jerry's wishes and blocked Annie from receiving the money, right after Annie quit her job due to a variety of health issues that had cropped up for her that made it hard to work. Annie had told Connie (and, iiuc, Sam, Jack, and Max) before quitting her job that she was going to quit her job with the expectation that she would be receiving the money that Jerry had left to her, with the expectation being that this money would cover Annie's financial needs while she was temporarily unemployed. Connie then blocked Annie from receiving this money only after Annie had already quit her job. Connie knew this was going to happen. So, of course Annie "wanted" the money:
    • She was supposed to get the money -- Jerry had wanted her to have it
    • She was in a desperate financial situation
    • She had told Connie (and Sam, Jack, Max) that she expected that she'd receive the money before she quit her job, and then they withheld it from only after she had already quit her job, putting Annie in a precarious financial position in a way she had not at all been expecting.
• "She disputed the inheritance from a trust fund she felt she was owed after her father died. She blamed her family and started publicly attacking them, including Sam." --
  • I think this is innaccurate and a misleading characterization. As far as I know, the first time Annie directly spoke out against her relatives (Sam, Max, Jack, and Connie) was in these 3 posts that Annie published on X (formerly Twitter) on November 13, 2021. This was roughly two years after Connie, Sam, Max, and Jack blocked Annie from getting the money that her father (Jerry) left to her. Saying
  • "She only started accusing Sam after she wanted money and didn't get it" makes it sound like 1) Annie didn't have a valid reason for the money, she just "wanted" it, and 2) When Annie didn't get the money, she got on social media and started defaming her relatives on social media. Neither of these seem to be the case, as far as I can tell. As I detailed in the previous bullet point, Annie actually did have multiple valid reasons to expect the money: firstly, that her father had left it to her, and secondly, that she had told her family members that she was going to temporarily quit her job to try to fix her health issues with the expectation that she'd be receiving money, and (I presume) those relatives hadn't given any indication that they'd be withholding the money from Annie after she quit her job.
• "She disputed the inheritance from a trust fund she felt she was owed after her father died." --
  • "Felt she was owed" is a misleading characterization that makes it seem like Annie just felt entitled, for no good reason, to money that wasn't supposed to be hers. This is not at all the impression I get. My understanding is that Annie's father, in legal documents (will, 401k), indicated that he wanted Annie to receive money. Annie's relatives overrode these wishes, to block/withhold that money from getting to Annie.
• "She blamed her family and started publicly attacking them, including Sam." --
  • "Blamed" makes it seem like Annie blamed her family without a good reason. But that isn't what happened:
    • Annie's family (Connie, Sam, Jack, and Max) actively intervened to prevent Annie from seeing Jerry's will for ~1 year after his death
    • In 2019, Annie told her family she was going to quit her job, as she wanted time to try to cure her health problems (which were making it hard for her to stand $⟹$hard for her to do her job), and was expecting to receive money that her father had left. So, Annie's relatives:
      • KNEW that Annie expected to receive her father's money
      • KNEW she was going to quit her job
    • Then, only after Annie quit her job, did Annie's relatives then tell her that they were going to withhold the money from her.
      • This put Annie into a desperate financial situation. She was now jobless, low on money, and plagued by health problems that made it hard for her to get a new job.

• "The accusation is based on “repressed memories” from when she was 4 that she “didn’t remember until she was 26”" --
  • In my understanding, though Annie repressed these memories after nearly a decade of being sexually abused, she recalled bits and pieces of her memories for a while, though she didn't fully understand them when they recurred to her. This was happening for years before Annie was 26. Annie projectile vomited during consensual sex during college, back in 2012-2016. Annie published "Reclaiming my Memories" [AA18b] on November 11, 2018, when she was 24. In it, Annie notes that she used to think that her earliest memory was a panic attack, which she described as her "mind...disregarding the messages from my body, convinced she can think her way through feelings, and so my body goes into panic mode like she’s on strike", but that she now thinks that her earliest memory was something else, though she doesn't recall exactly what it is at that time. Annie didn't even know that her father had left 401k funds to her until ~summer 2019 -- months after she published Reclaiming my Memories. Annie didn't even see her father's Will until September 2019. It was only in summer 2019 that Annie, after quitting her job (with the expectation that she'd be receiving 401k funds left by her late father -- which she'd informed Connie, Sam, Jack, and Max of, prior to quitting her job), that she found out that Connie had overrode Jerry's wishes, and blocked Annie, who Jerry had named as the primary beneficiary of his 401k, from getting the funds left to her by Jerry in his 401k.
  • In September 2020, when Annie was 26, she began to have *daily PTSD flashbacks* (which continued for 18 months). Further, from what I've read in *The Body Keeps the Score*, PTSD flashbacks are very different than normal "memories" -- the victim is essentially *re-living* the past traumas, to the point that it feels to them that they are actually back in the point in space and time (for Annie: 1997-2006) where they were being abused.
  • It is not uncommon for victims of trauma and (especially) childhood sexual abuse to repress their memories for an extend period after the abuse initially occurred, only to recall them later on in life. See: The Body Keeps the Score. A specific instance is described here: Tim Ferriss — My Healing Journey After Childhood Abuse].
• "right after she wanted her inheritance and was told she’d get it in monthly installments instead of a lump sum. She refused the conditions then went around saying she’d been denied her inheritance." --
  • Where did you see this? I am genuinely asking, as I don't recall seeing this?
    • (It's very possible that I saw this at some point, but just don't recall it right now, given how much information is in this post.)

• "After several meetings I am writing to make a formal request to graduate at the end of this spring, with almost seven semesters of Tufts residency. I have been a full-time student for six semesters...At the end of this semester I will have completed my Biopsychology major, as well as the university’s distribution and credit requirements."
• "Because I have so treasured my experiences, choosing I was ready to leave was extremely difficult. There is simply no need for the sadness and anxiety I’ve felt relating to school; but it took me a while to both figure that out and to accept it. Education should be a gift, however I’ve recently found it to feel more like a burden. I came to Tufts on the pre-medical track, and it was not until this semester that I let go of my rigid attachment to that plan. While a MD or DO degree may still be in my future, I want to more openly look into becoming a nurse or physician’s assistant, as well as a therapist through psychology or social work graduate programs. I feel confident that I want to go into the healthcare field but I am still discovering what role would be the best fit for me and my happiness, allowing me to make the greatest possible positive contribution to the world. I feel extremely thankful for the support I’ve had, both from teachers and friends, in working through this decision. I am also very fortunate for my relationship with my parents and the emotional and logistical support they have given me in this process."
• "My dream would be a summer of my own therapy: taking counseling seriously in a way I have never before felt ready to, focusing on art projects, dance classes, and guitar lessons, as well as attending yoga and meditation retreats — working towards whatever euphemism you prefer for “getting my head on straight” or “re-centering.” I then want to spend a year traveling the world, creating my own education while carrying with me many important lessons learned from Tufts."
• "Sometimes in meditation the most mindful moments come not from feeling fully aware, but rather from realizing you had momentarily lost your awareness and coming back to the present moment. Depressed feelings usually linger from the past, and anxious thoughts are often about the future — a focus on the present brings me a sense of peace. I have come to the realization that being at Tufts is not giving me the potential to be my best self, and I feel as though staying here another year is not in my best interest. I would like to reiterate that many of my issues are not specific to Tufts, but rather regarding where I am at this point in my life. I am grateful for your time and consideration in reading my words and I hope that you will honor my request."

• Jack: "Switching into a...topic of sort of money and sort of the long-term view of it and how people can think about it most clearly, I'm actually to start with a quick story that I think illustrates a bit of some of your views. This is from when we were very young and our grandma gave us each some stock --"
• Sam: "-- oh this is a good story --"
• Jack: "-- in a company --"
• Sam: "-- alright, you can tell this one."
• Jack: "Okay. So she gave us each some stock in a company that she thought we would like. And so, as you like to point out, I was heavier as a child, and one of the things I liked was Applebee's."

• "A blogger recently asked Altman, “How has having Asperger’s helped and hurt you?” Altman told me, “I was, like, ‘Fuck you, I don’t have Asperger’s!’ But then I thought, I can see why he thinks I do. I sit in weird ways”—he folds up like a busted umbrella—“I have narrow interests in technology, I have no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people. When someone examines a photo and says, ‘Oh, he’s feeling this and this and this,’ all these subtle emotions, I look on with alien intrigue.” Altman’s great strengths are clarity of thought and an intuitive grasp of complex systems. His great weakness is his utter lack of interest in ineffective people, which unfortunately includes most of us. I found his assiduousness alarming at first, then gradually endearing. When I remarked, after a few long days together, that he never seemed to visit the men’s room, he said, “I will practice going to the bathroom more often so you humans don’t realize that I’m the A.I.”"
• "“Well, I like racing cars,” Altman said. “I have five, including two McLarens and an old Tesla. I like flying rented planes all over California. Oh, and one odd one—I prep for survival.” Seeing their bewilderment, he explained, “My problem is that when my friends get drunk they talk about the ways the world will end. After a Dutch lab modified the H5N1 bird-flu virus, five years ago, making it super contagious, the chance of a lethal synthetic virus being released in the next twenty years became, well, nonzero. The other most popular scenarios would be A.I. that attacks us and nations fighting with nukes over scarce resources.” The Shypmates looked grave. “I try not to think about it too much,” Altman said. “But I have guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to.”"
• "Altman’s mother, a dermatologist named Connie Gibstine, told me, “Sam does keep an awful lot tied up inside. He’ll call and say he has a headache—and he’ll have Googled it, so there’s some cyber-chondria in there, too. I have to reassure him that he doesn’t have meningitis or lymphoma, that it’s just stress.” If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand. Thiel told me, “Sam is not particularly religious, but he is culturally very Jewish—an optimist yet a survivalist, with a sense that things can always go deeply wrong, and that there’s no single place in the world where you’re deeply at home.”
• "One evening at Altman’s house, his younger brothers, Max and Jack, were teasing him that he should run for President in 2020, when he’d be thirty-five: just old enough. Max, twenty-eight, said, “Who better than you, Sam?” As Altman tried not very vehemently to change the subject, Jack, twenty-seven, said, “It’s not purely little-brother trolling. I do think tech needs a good candidate." “Let’s send the Jewish gay guy!” Altman said. “That’ll work!”
  Jack eyed a board game called Samurai on the bookshelf and said, “Sam won every single game of Samurai when we were kids because he always declared himself the Samurai leader: ‘I have to win, and I’m in charge of everything.’ ”
  Altman shot back, “You want to play speed chess right now?,” and Jack laughed."
• "Max was working at the Y Combinator company Zenefits; Jack co-founded a performance-management company, Lattice, which had just gone through YC. The two brothers moved in with Altman temporarily three years ago and never left. Altman recently hired a designer to upgrade his gray IKEA sofas to gray SummerHouse sofas, and he hung some handsomely framed photographs taken from space, but the house maintains an upscale-student-housing vibe. His mother told me, “I think Sam likes having his brothers around because they knew him when, and can give him pushback in ways that other people can’t. But it’s tricky, with the power dynamic, and I want it to end before it explodes.”"

• "Sam Altman '03 speaks to students about the development of startups and AI ... and our collective responsibility to make sure they benefit everyone. https://jburroughs.org/news-and-events/sam-altman-03-startups-ai-for-good #JBSalum"

• "Check out my sister {Annie} on youtube!"

• 

• "Read at Central Reform Congregation on May 28, 2018:"
• "My dad trusted my intuition more than I ever have. He often reminded me of the strength of my mind-body connection, a concept I am both extremely passionate about and skilled at underestimating. He created and held space for all of my feelings, and those of you who have talked to me ever know that I have more than a few of those all of the time."
• "Sam said we could each talk for about five minutes, less if possible to not make you lovely people sit here all day, and Jack correctly pointed out how I will definitely be using all five of my minutes."
• "You may know that I come from a family that loves to rank things in order to make meaning of them. I love that too, and I also love talking about feelings, as someone who has so many of them. This led me to make a list about a year ago ranking my immediate family in terms of emotional expressivity, from most to least. Obviously I take “first place” on this list, which is probably part of why I wanted to make it. Next comes my dad, then Max, then Jack, and then Sam and mom alternate what would be first place if this list went from minimal to Annie levels of emotional expression. As I typed this out last night, Jack immediately questioned my list and checked in with Julia, his wife, for her opinion. (She agreed with my list, for the record.) It led to an interesting discussion on how different people express different emotions, which my dad knows is, along with family movie night, pretty much all I’ve ever wanted from my family. Also Jack last night, “I can just keep talking if you want me to write your speech, just keep it really meta, you can have my five minutes, it’ll be great.” Sam, I may really need Jack’s minutes here as when I read this out loud it was about 8 minutes — I’ll do my best to talk a little faster."
• "My dad and I were always very close, talking about all the feels, all the music, and all the athletic activities. I fondly remember us sharing boxes of chocolates when I was little, and by share I mean I would bite each chocolate in half, happily devour it if its insides were cream or more chocolate, and promptly stick it back together and give it my dad if its insides were fruity or coconut. My dad’s memory of this story was that he was the one getting the “good” deal — he honestly believed he was the luckier one, sitting there eating spit-covered chocolate."
• "We grew even closer in the past few years, as he was my #1 supporter and confidant in all my choices and adventures, most recently in moving to the Big Island of Hawaii, teaching yoga knowing full well it is not a “career” one can “support themselves” with, and even choosing to live in a car for a few months (re: there is little money in yoga and also Annie goes into extreme minimal hippie phase). He was characteristically 1000% supportive of my current creative endeavor of writing a book called “The Humanual,” about how no one knows how to human and also there are reoccurring themes in the humaning thing. He even began to say things like I did along the lines of, “this would be perfect for this part of The Humanual.”"
• "My dad came out to visit me in February {2018}, when I finally moved into a non-mobile home. He was one month into “Seaganism,” as he brilliantly termed the concept of eating a vegan diet with the addition of seafood. He made the shift with the new year, after patiently sitting with me through my angry vegan phase, welcoming in my phase of being anti-factory farming rather than anti-animal consumption, and listening as I did my best to clumsily describe how the people I was the most annoying towards about eating a more plant based diet were the ones I loved the most. During his visit I pointed out several places friends of mine like with local seafood, and instead he decided to just share food with me the whole time. We made smoothie bowls, tofu scramble, and pancakes, we went out for Thai food, veggie sandwiches, and chili and we split everything. He was so excited to learn to prepare new foods and when he got back to St. Louis I received almost daily texts with pictures of the meals he was making for himself. From his visit onwards he was eating fully plant based, with the exception of consuming whey powder and other forms of dairy accidentally. My brothers are convinced that he changed his diet to be closer to me, much like his interest in rowing and involvement with the St. Louis Rowing Club, and I know they are right."
• "Grief shows how much love there was to lose, reminding me of the quote that, “You can never love someone as much as you can miss them.” He is no longer physically here and I miss him already. I do not get another in person conversation with him, a video chat or phone call, a deep talk about life while we stretch with our legs up the wall. There is no one I want to dissect which part of The Humanual this whole situation is supposed to be, along with all my feelings about it, more than my dad."
• "In January {2018} my dad sent me a text, part of which read, “And just for clarification, I don’t just support your lifestyle now or your physical and emotional endeavors now; I support your life. I will always support your life. These are aspects of your life, so I support those too. And there is not a “now”, as Yoda might say. There is only life, for as long as that may be.”"
• "My dad was active, with people, and doing what he loved, I had said up until his last day before my mom correctly clarified it as “his last hour.”"
• "I will keep him alive through me, through the genes and memories of his I am lucky enough to hold on to. I will do my best to see the good in people and give them the benefit of the doubt, to remember that my only “job” in life is to be happy, and to works towards trusting myself and my intuition half as much as you believed in me. I will allow myself to express all my emotions as openly as I choose, especially the ones that involve hugging our loved ones often and reminding them how much they are loved. I love you more than all the words I’ve ever said, will say, and could say. Thank you for being my dad; a true legend by the Babe standards, a testament to the power of love and community, and the only person who would have genuinely encouraged this speech to be even longer if that was what I wanted. I will always be a daddy’s girl and specifically yours."

• "Two months ago I met with Joe K, the owner of Urban Exhale Hot Yoga, to discuss the podcast episode we were going to record together. (I have since recorded podcasts with four other teachers at the studio and am completely unsure how to express my gratitude to Joe — honestly perhaps less words about it?) While I would be the one asking Joe questions on the podcast, he had an important question for me. With all the casual profundity of a yoga teacher, Joe asked, “what is your earliest memory?”
• "Without pause for an inhale I responded, “probably a panic attack.” I feel like Joe did his best asana poker face, based on projecting my own insecurities and/or the hyper-vigilant observance that comes with anxiety."
• "I began having panic attacks at a young age. I felt the impending doom of death before I had any concept of death. (Do I really have any concept of death now, though? Does anyone??) I define panic attacks as feeling “too alive,” like diving off the deep end into awareness of existence without any proper scuba gear or knowledge of free diving. Panic attacks, I’ve learned, come like an ambulance flashing lights and blaring a siren indicating that my mind and my body are… experiencing a missed connection in terms of communication — they’re refusing to listen to each other. More accurately: my mind is disregarding the messages from my body, convinced she can think her way through feelings, and so my body goes into panic mode like she’s on strike."
• "I went to a sound bath at the yoga studio about a month ago, the second sound bath I’ve ever attended. (I cried at both and if you know me you know that I am happy about things that help me cry.) Sound baths are a guided meditation where you lay in corpse pose and receive sounds of specific frequencies, allowing vibrations to “wash” over and through you. Some shit is bound to surface in the tides."
• "My dad died five months ago now, and to say I’ve learned a lot is an enormous understatement. I was and am a “daddy’s girl.” The most recent panic attack, and perhaps darkest one I’ve experienced, happened the week he died. My dad was one of the most genuinely positive people I’ve ever come across. He had an incredible capacity to continually focus on the light, the good, what was “right” in any situation. I felt his presence during parts of the sound bath — a concept past me would have rolled her eyes about."
• "Laying in bed later that night, Joe’s question popped back into my consciousness with a kind “please make your way into child’s pose.” I realized I had deceived myself (classic humaning) with my response to his question, “what is your earliest memory?”
• "Joe, and whoever is reading, I would like to formally change my answer. I am also without an exact answer. I am non-sarcastically “trusting the process” to potentially receive one. I know that a panic attack is not my answer, and my ego likes to remind itself that knowing what is not my truth leads me at least somewhat closer to said truth.""
• "I can reflect on and connect with feelings of panic and still have space to choose a positive perspective. Searching for ways to cope with existence has lead me to yoga, dance, singing, ukulele, cooking, baking, writing… to asking all the questions I know to ask so that I can open myself up to knowing just how many more questions life has to offer. Without panic attacks, I may have lived my whole life without starting a YouTube channel, a podcast, or this blog."
• "Emotions come and go, so it keeps seeming. Emotions and memory are directly linked, re: the amygdala. I have little to no control over my emotional response; I do have control over my reaction and subsequent actions."
• "I write my own history. Though TBD on the first memory of that history. Here’s to exploring."

• A relevant snippet begins around ~24:30.
  • Context: "projection" is a recurring motif of discussion throughout the podcast episode.
  • Annie: "This is where, well -- I do believe that projecting can be deflecting and it can be another buzzword in a lot of ways, and also, as you brought up, it points to very intense feelings and very, as you brought up Max {Altman}, {with the} human psychology of things, of, in some ways, we're wired to remember painful experiences so that we do learn from them, and so - to remember negativity, and to remember those things --"
  • Sam {interjecting}: "More than that, I think one thing we're particularly wired for, I don't know why, is to not like hypocrisy..."
• Note: as reported in Elizabeth Weil's nymag article, Sam (and Jack) refuse (Annie's requests to) share a link to the podcast. Annie finds this unfair, seeing as how Sam had been willing to help his other siblings' careers in quite major ways. Sam (and Jack) apparently cited that the podcast episode "did not align with their businesses" [EW23a] as the reason they refused to post the link.
• From [EW23a]: "Among her various art projects, Annie makes a podcast called All Humans Are Human. The first Thanksgiving after their father’s death, all the brothers agreed to record an episode with her. Annie wanted to talk on air about the psychological phenomenon of projection: what we put on other people. The brothers steered the conversation into the idea of feedback — specifically, how to give feedback at work. After she posted the show online, Annie hoped her siblings, particularly Sam, would share it. He’d contributed to their brothers’ careers. Jack’s company, Lattice, had been through YC. “I was like, ‘You could just tweet the link. That would help. You don’t want to share your sister’s podcast that you came on?’” He did not. “Jack and Sam said it didn’t align with their businesses.”" [EW23a]

• "I started taking birth control pills at the age of 15 (I’m currently 25) and decided to stop taking them right before my 23rd birthday {~2017}. Also around this same time {~2017} I finished tapering off of Zoloft, which I started taking at age 13 {~2007} to help with symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Anxiety, and Depression. Also also around this time {~2017} I drastically altered my diet...I promptly lost my period and learned that changes relating to diet, hormonal birth control, and psychiatric medications are three of the main factors that can disrupt hormonal balance (stress being the baseline factor)."
• "I’m experiencing a second puberty, or maybe an aftershock of sorts from first puberty and/or a year without my period. It feels like a hormonal “do-over” filled with moments of deja-vu: three new crushes in one week, intense crying and laughter in the same hour, and generally going about my day acting like I’m far less confused by all this internal “shifting” than I’m actually feeling. Plus days that feel exceptionally “average” leaving me extra confused about how dramatic life felt the day before. I’m fortunate to have received a liberal education and even so there were inevitable gaps in the information I was given, and open to receiving, about puberty."
• "I majored in Biopsychology in college, with a minor in dance, and took all the prerequisite courses for medical school. Then I noped out of the pre-med route to focus on movement, writing, comedy, music, and food. I got certified as a yoga teacher, worked for an online CSA (community-supported agriculture) company, began writing more frequently, started slowly going to open mic nights and putting videos on YouTube, and began a podcast and this blog. I’m learning to give myself space to explore what genuinely excites me without justification and I’ve felt levels of self-consciousness around my career swerve that I had not experienced since first puberty. HOW will I get my intellectual ego stroked without constant science classes? How can art really have no “right” answer? Am I really the only one who can validate how my feelings feel??"
• "It’s been almost a year now since I got my period back and I feel I’ve been going through a sort of spiritual and scientific second puberty, to continue the soap operatics. A year extra filled with learning about my body’s cycle(s) and signals. Witnessing my hormones re-regulate has felt parallel to to self-soothing, not that I consciously remember learning that, and my first time with “my moon.” I started eating eggs again, including runny yolks for the first time, and ate fish for the first time in my life because my body very literally demanded them. A year without my period, after a decade of having it, felt like equal parts reset and emptiness."
• "I believe a large portion of shame takes root during puberty and then manifests as sexual repression, (sexual) aggression, body dysmorphia, addiction, and/or mood disorders. I can say for certain that has been my experience. Shame encourages ignorance by stifling conversations. Additionally, shame creates a feedback loop where ignorance is shamed and so questions and curiosity are discouraged."

• "1. OCD
• 2. Anxiety
• 3. Depression
• ...
• 6. A belief that any body’s appearance is fixed its entire lifetime
• 7. A belief that anything in this physical world is fixed, ever
• ...
• 11. A belief that I could control my body completely with enough will power
• 12. A belief that controlling my body could control my entire life
• 13. A belief that controlling my body could control its inevitable decay (lack of knowledge that fearing death is fearing actually living life)
• 14. Equating control with peace and happiness
• 15. A tendency towards being self-critical"

• Interviewer: "Annie, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far."
• Annie Altman: "I’m passionate about mind-body connection, and connection generally. Part of this comes from ways I’ve felt extremely disconnected through several mental health labels and experiences. I’m extra-extroverted, and very curious – when I was little I would introduce myself to strangers with my full name and ask them how their day was going. I love learning, I love learning about people, I love using learning as a tool to help people. I took all of the classes to go to medical school and then noped off of that path, tapering away from academia through work in two different UCSF labs. I accepted that my mental health prefers creativity, and forcing myself into the science field eventually showed itself to be just that: force. I got existential and came to understand that enjoyment of life is meant to be prioritized because no one knows “how to: human” anymore or any less than any other human. There’s no “right” or “wrong” way to be a human. Science isn’t “right” and neither is art. Science and art are connected, and connection seems to be where all the themes of life play out. I began to feel an imperative to “get the word out” about no one ever fully “knowing” what they’re doing as a human being, mostly as a way to self-therapize and remind myself. I need the reminder that it’s okay for me to have no idea what I’m “ultimately” doing, and that I’m primarily a human being. Accepting my love of making things and noticing how clearly art helps me let go of my defenses, I feel that making art is the most effective way for me to communicate. As I was transitioning away from becoming a physician, I slowly began putting videos on YouTube (the first-ever being a comedy song called “A Song for Bo Burnham” inspired by his stand up special I’d just watched) and going to open mic nights for comedy and music. My “official” parting ways with academia was a three-week yoga teacher training on the Big Island of Hawai’i, after which I came back to the East Bay Area to work for an online CSA company called Farm Fresh to You. Five months later I sold my things and moved to Hawai’i, where I chose to live in a car for three months out of my nine months living there. I felt compelled to experience living in a car, and my need to find a way to make this idea (this reminder that had become my focal point instead of medical school) into a succinct art form that felt authentic to me, made the openness of more free time and less living costs incredibly appealing. I began a book version of my idea: no one knows what they’re doing in their human doings and beingness, and that’s really beautiful because it connects us all. It’s like pooping or death. On island I taught yoga, I made more YouTube videos, I ghost-wrote for a YouTuber, I drove for Lyft, I explored outside, I met new people. I wrote more for my book version of the idea than I had ever written on one consecutive thing, journaling my way through all I had learned in life so far and observing for patterns. I reflected a lot alone, especially while living in the car, and I reflected a lot with the people I met who were open to questions about their human experience. My original idea had expanded to say that know one knows how to human, and also that there are themes of being human that all humans encounter, and that talking about these themes helps everyone. I moved to LA last August while transitioning my idea to a movie version about me writing the book version – it was all very Hollywood. I worked as a ghostwriter for a painter and also as a budtender at a dispensary. To support what I was working on creatively, and to help me find much-needed clarity, I began a podcast. I was feeling overwhelmed with non-numerical data and the weight of taking art and life overly seriously. Some part of me also knew that I needed to make a project where it was built-in for me to ask for help. I decided the podcast would be a conversational interview about a human truth, to serve as a reminder that we are all connected through our truths, our joys, and our challenges. I know that open dialogue is super important to me and feel that is where to start with what “goods” I offer. The podcast was originally called “True Shit” (I learned iTunes will not allow even “self-censored” expletives), and that is still the premise of what is now called The Annie Altman Show. Starting the podcast made it clear to me that my overall idea was meant to be verbal. I circled back to my love of stand-up and live performance and knew that the art I was making was intended to be a one-woman show, that has settled on the title “The Hum|Annie.” The Annie Altman Show is what I call the podcast and other creative projects – videos, blogs, food, comedy, and more – that serve as “field mesearch” for the idea that has evolved into The Hum|Annie. The Hum|Annie is an interactive stand up comedy musical philosophy show about how no one ever fully “figures out” how to human, how there’s 10 “C” themes to the human experience, that are connected by and exist within the “C” theme of connection, and how maximizing resource equity minimizing human suffering. These themes in this organization are a tool to check in with our mental, physical, and emotional (which is, to me, synonymous to spiritual) health. That’s what finding and using them has given to me and what I am offering for others to experiment with for them. The Hum|Annie reminds me that I can only be an expert on myself and my humaning, and explores what this can offer to humanity. The Hum|Annie makes fun of things like being my form of brevity, uses my life story to examine common themes in all life stories, and reflects on how self-deprecation differs from honest self-reflection. I believe my role of service is in asking questions and making connections, using tools like play, comedy, and music. I’m an intense proponent of experiential learning and believe doing and sharing my own learning is my most effective tool to offer. Making these projects and this show is me walking the walk of putting my own oxygen mask on first.
• Interviewer: "Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?"
• Annie Altman: "Yes and no, and it’s been a weird and fun combination. I intentionally took a 180 turn within my spiraling circle life path, which is challenging for anyone to do smoothly and I was especially clumsy. The mishaps led to a lot more for me to learn about, such as accepting “mistakes” as a necessary part of any learning process. My relationship with my family as we all grieve has been the most challenging struggle along this process. My dad died from a heart attack on May 2018, on the same day I had a flight booked from Hawaii to St. Louis. We had video chatted the day before and were super close. For me, the grieving process feels like going through all the cycles again and again in slightly different ways in a spiral. The Hum|Annie is dedicated to him. I’m grateful that he was (and is) this project’s biggest cheerleader. The Hum|Annie uses all the knowledge I’ve received from my mental health and grieving journeys so far, which means I must first unpack and sit with how that knowledge impacts me personally. I use the term “mesearch” because all research is biased by the researcher, which, like the placebo effect, is a mostly ignored truth in mainstream Western medical practices. I support scientific and spiritual practices and I am learning to support where I am of the most service to humanity as a whole. I believe there is so much that can benefit humanity through connecting different practices and ideas. Honest reflection, of myself and the world, has been and continues to be a satisfying challenge. For me, sharing parts of it helps my processing.
• Interviewer: "We’d love to hear more about your work."
• Annie Altman: "I specialize in an interest to help connect science and spirituality through exploring my interests in both of them, using myself and my human connections as experiments. I’m grateful to have found a way, through much exploration, that feels authentic to me right now to do my own mental health work, to redirect grief and shame, and to have the privilege of the space to do that work. My intention in sharing parts of my own process is to help make space for others to have the same baseline of privilege I’ve been fortunate enough to receive. People need access to resources to do their own work. I’ve been lucky enough to interact with a variety of guests on the podcast so far, and I’m grateful for the ways I’ve been impacted by each of the conversations. The style of the show has both deepened and lightened as I learn to first relax with myself. This series aims to make use of my black-and-white thinking patterns to help myself and others notice those tendencies more easily, and to help those with more gray-space thought patterns who are curious to learn more about a different perspective from theirs. I feel strongly that open discourse about being human, connecting all our internal parts, and connecting with other humans and the world around us, are all necessary parts of the process of equitable resource distribution. Prioritization of honesty, open communication, and curiosity about connection are very important to me.
• Interviewer: "Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?"
• Annie Altman: "I’m grateful for the words of Maya Angelou for this one, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” From reflections with friends and with myself, I also believe that success is liking who you do your “what” and “it” with, as well as liking the feeling you experience of connection in your doing and beingness. To me, success is connection. To experience connection, I needed to first accept the disconnection I was experiencing and ignoring on my previous path. Part of my process of learning is also unlearning – unlearning a dislike of myself, of what I was doing, of how I was doing it, of who I was doing it with, and of the feelings I was experiencing that I accepted as “how life is.” I feel it important to embrace disconnection as a part of connection, and remember that there are things to be learned from them both. As action is more accessible for me as a starting point right now, I started with figuring out how to really like what I do. I am only doing what I’m doing because I’ve allowed myself to pursue connection – with myself, with others, and with this rock we’re all floating around on together for a little while. My honesty and curiosity about connection are very important to me. I also believe it’s important to address the financial privilege that I had to graduate from college without debt and to have a Biopsychology degree. That privilege has allowed me the flexibility to give most of my attention to this project for the past two years while working a variety of jobs that allow me to explore different interests."

• "I You’re The Only One Hurting From Holding A Secret Then Maybe Stop Holding It
  ~a story thread~"
• "This time a year ago, I gave notice to leave a job I enjoyed because of being in paperwork-process of money left to me from my dad that I was notified of a year after he died. I decided to use this privilege."
• "I openly shared about my plan to use the next six months to finish writing a script that was and is extremely important to me, to give more time to the podcast and other other projects, and mostly to give myself more time both to grieve..."
• "...and to manage my physical and emotional health that needed attention."
• "Despite their already enormous wealth, the rest of my immediate biological relatives choose to use the option they were then given to override my dad’s wishes and withhold the money."
• "The podcast episode that three of these immediate biological relatives came on before those happenings, and refuse to post about, was originally supposed to be about “projecting” and instead became about “feedback.”"
• "Notice there’s not a single “I feel” statement here."

• To me, this letter seems to be somewhat sarcastic. Annie is "thanking" her relatives in a way that carries subliminal criticisms.
• Example: "Thank you for strengthening my sense of self. I am where I am and doing what I’m doing in part because of each of you. My tenacity and gentleness to take care of myself has increased because of you. The lessons I’ve received from my relationships with you have shifted my perspectives beyond their limitations. Thank you for providing contrast." -- What I think Annie is referencing here is how her relatives screwed her out of her money and (esp. Sam) abused her for a very long time. To this, she had to adapt by developing better ways to take care of herself, and was also forced to move around in a state of relative financial poverty.
  • As with the rest of the letter, Annie includes seemingly-upbeat, purposefully vague one-liners throughout the letter, such as "Thank you for providing me with contrast." (The implied negative connotation isn't too hard to infer.)

• Beginning at 3:17:
  • Sam Altman: "We had like a gate out of our backyard, and there was a hole cut in the gate of Captain {Elementary School}"
• Beginning at 3:41:
  • Charlie Brennan: "And at Captain School, I understand, at the age of 8, you had your first computer. So, in the second grade, you were becoming computer-literate. Is that accurate?"
  • Sam Altman: "Yeah...we got one at home when I was, yeah, maybe in 3rd grade, something like that."
• Beginning at 4:20:
  • Sam Altman: "I actually just bought, the same computer we had at home, which was a Mac LC II, I found one on eBay, and I was amazed how much I remembered about the actual hardware of it. Haven't seen one in 25 years or something."
  • Charlie Brennan: "And from the Ralph M. Captain {Elementary} School, you took your studies to Wydown Middle {School}?"
  • Sam Altman: "Yes."
  • Charlie Brennan: "Most people don't like middle school. How 'bout you, Sam Altman?"
  • Sam Altman: "Uh, I mean, it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good on the whole. I wouldn't want to go back to middle school, but, yeah, I think I have fond memories at this point...high school was great."
  • Charlie Brennan: "High school was John Burroughs {School}, of course?"
  • Sam Altman: "Yeah. I think high school was easier than middle school."
• Beginning at 24:31:
  • Charlie Brennan: "At one point, you were the CEO of Reddit for 10 days."
  • Sam Altman: "That's true."
  • Charlie Brennan: "What was the story there?"
  • Sam Altman: "We had a CEO quit during a board meeting, which is like, a very rare thing to happen, never seen it before or since. Uh, and it took us a little while to figure out the succession plan, we were caught totally off guard. So, everybody -- the management team sort of, yeah, technically reported to me...I was a recent investor, and {had} joined the board, and kind of, was the only person local. So, I got very involved for a few days, and uh, then, we had an interim CEO, and then after that the original founder returned to run the company."
     

• "Have you ever had to prove the $100 MRI co-pay needed to confirm medically necessary equipment to a blood relative with a net worth of well over $100 million?"
• "A very strange first world pain"

• It seems Annie was trying to use EMDR to heal her PTSD, which, as she claims, resulted from having flashbacks to and stronger memories the abuse, e.g. sexual abuse from Sam, that she was subjected to during her childhood.
• It seems her therapist rejected her as a client on the basis of her position as a sex worker.

• "I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman."

• "I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I’m seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing. Please message me with any information, you can remain however anonymous you feel safe."

• "Not to brag like the drug bro I am, but I took 100mg of Zoloft for 10 years soooooo"

• "Was he “really aware of his sexuality really young” or was he abusing his little sister to figure it out hmmmmmm"

• "What does it say about YOUR mental health, to tell me that I’m somehow both too mentally unwell to make my own decisions and too mentally well to receive emotional or tangible support?"
• "One reason of many for no contact"

• "“Take this drug you’ve already used for 10 years, that you worked supported by professionals to stop, and I’ll give you financial support for basic needs while you’re in a walking boot from tendinopathy and managing early PCOS symptoms making you unable to work ‘normal’ hours”"

• "Sam and Jack, I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers. “Forgive them father for they know not what they’ve done” Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten."

• "I’m not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore. (You’re welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.) I’ve finally accepted that you’ve always been and always will be more scared of me than I’ve been of you."
  • Note: The "brother" in question (obviously) being Sam Altman.

• "Must be strange to stalk your younger sibling’s social media after she went no contact from your abuse."
• "Must be stranger to see her pussy and asshole that you touched non-consensually, now posted publicly."

• {Jokingly} "{Sam's 'nuclear backpack'} may also hold our Dad and Grandma’s trusts {which} him {Sam} and my birth mother are still withholding from me, knowing I started sex work for survival because of being sick and broke with a millionaire “brother”"
• Note: [PO23] is a reply to this post.

• "To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be. At one point during our dinner in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said. (Mr. Altman pointed out that, as fate would have it, he and Oppenheimer share a birthday.)"
• ...
• "Mr. Altman’s weekend home is a ranch in Napa, Calif., where farmhands grow wine grapes and raise cattle."
• "During the week, Mr. Altman and his partner, Oliver Mulherin, an Australian software engineer, share a house on Russian Hill in the heart of San Francisco. But as Friday arrives, they move to the ranch, a quiet spot among the rocky, grass-covered hills. Their 25-year-old house is remodeled to look both folksy and contemporary. The Cor-Ten steel that covers the outside walls is rusted to perfection."
• ...
• "He is not necessarily motivated by money. Like many personal fortunes in Silicon Valley that are tied up in a wide variety of public and private companies, Mr. Altman’s wealth is not well documented. But as we strolled across his ranch, he told me, for the first time, that he holds no stake in OpenAI. The only money he stands to make from the company is a yearly salary of around $65,000 — “whatever the minimum for health insurance is,” he said — and a tiny slice of an old investment in the company by Y Combinator."
• "His longtime mentor, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, explained Mr. Altman’s motivation like this:"
• "'Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.'"
• ...
• "In the late 1990s, the John Burroughs School, a private prep school named for the 19th-century American naturalist and philosopher, invited an independent consultant to observe and critique daily life on its campus in the suburbs of St. Louis."
• "The consultant’s review included one significant criticism: The student body was rife with homophobia."
• "In the early 2000s, Mr. Altman, a 17-year-old student at John Burroughs, set out to change the school’s culture, individually persuading teachers to post “Safe Space” signs on their classroom doors as a statement in support of gay students like him. He came out during his senior year and said the St. Louis of his teenage years was not an easy place to be gay."
• ...
• "'He has a natural ability to talk people into things,' Mr. Graham said. 'If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.''”
• "The two got to know each other in 2005 when Mr. Altman applied for a spot in Y Combinator's first class of start-ups. He won a spot — which included $10,000 in seed funding — and after his sophomore year at Stanford University, he dropped out to build his new company, Loopt, a social media start-up that let people share their location with friends and family."
• "He now says that during his short stay at Stanford, he learned more from the many nights he spent playing poker than he did from most of his other college activities. After his freshman year, he worked in the artificial intelligence and robotics lab overseen by Prof. Andrew Ng, who would go on to found the flagship A.I. lab at Google. But poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk."
• "It showed him 'how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,' he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. 'It’s a great game.'"
• "After selling Loopt for a modest return, he joined Y Combinator as a part-time partner. Three years later, Mr. Graham stepped down as president of the firm and, to the surprise of many across Silicon Valley, tapped a 28-year-old Mr. Altman as his successor."
• ...
• "He also began working on several projects outside the investment firm, including OpenAI, which he founded as a nonprofit in 2015 alongside a group that included Elon Musk. By Mr. Altman’s own admission, YC grew increasingly concerned he was spreading himself too thin."
• ...
• "In the mid-2010s, Mr. Altman shared a three-bedroom, three-bath San Francisco apartment with his boyfriend at the time, his two brothers and their girlfriends. The brothers went their separate ways in 2016 but remained on a group chat, where they spent a lot of time giving one another guff, as only siblings can, his brother Max remembers. Then, one day, Mr. Altman sent a text saying he planned to raise $1 billion for his company’s research."
• ...
• "Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. 'He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,' Mr. Brockman told me. 'That is the algorithm he uses over and over.'"

• "One of his clearest childhood memories is sitting up late in his bedroom in suburban St. Louis, playing with the Macintosh LC II he had gotten for his eighth birthday when he had the sudden realization: “Someday, the computer was going to learn to think,” he said."
• "During one of his last visits to his grandmother, who died last year, he bought her groceries and then admitted to his mother that he hadn’t been to a grocery store in four or five years, she said."
• "Dressed in the typical tech CEO uniform of a gray hoodie, jeans and blindingly white sneakers, Mr. Altman described a much more modest upbringing."
• "Mr. Altman grew up in a suburb of St. Louis, the eldest of four children born to Connie Gibstine, a dermatologist, and Jerry Altman, who worked various jobs, including as a lawyer, and died five years ago. The senior Mr. Altman’s true vocation was running affordable housing nonprofits, his family said, and he spent years trying to revitalize St. Louis’s downtown."
• "Dr. Gibstine said her son was working the family’s VCR at age 2 and rebooking his own plane ticket home from camp at 13. By the time he was in third grade, he was helping teachers at his local public school troubleshoot computer problems, she said. In middle school, he transferred to the private John Burroughs School."

• Note: this poem seems to be pretty clearly talking about Sam.

• "I got diagnosed with PCOS, and got walking boot for a third time in 8 years for the same tendinopathy, all in the first year of grieving my Dad."
  • 
• "I had a history since childhood of OCD, anxiety, depression, IBS, disorder eating - all covers for PTSD. Also tonsillitis yay"
  • 
• "I got notified almost exactly a year after his death about my Dad leaving me money, so make a plan to stop working for 6 months and focus on my health.
  • 
• "I got notified almost exactly a year after his death about my Dad leaving me money, so make a plan to stop working for 6 months and focus on my health. I had started a podcast and had other art proects I could do sitting down!"
  • 
• "After quitting my dispensary job, my relatives find a loophole to withhold said money. They knew the health conditions and my plan, and they're millionaires. I sell some things, go back to an older job, and eventually ask (for the first time ever) my millionaire relatives for financial help and am essentially told to "work harder." I got $100 for an ankle MRI copay, after much 'discussion'"
  • 
• "I do two family therapy sessions and am professionally advised to stop doing family therapy sessions."
• "I move back to Big Island so I can work trade for rent, be around community, and actually heal. I'm offered {by Sam} a diamond made from Dad's ashes instead of money for rent or groceries. Dad just wanted cremation."
• "I go {opt for} no contact with relatives."
• "I start spicy work which ends up being way more therapeutic than anticipated, though definitely challenging."
• "I end up moving to Maui. Unemployment comes through after identity theft, so I have a deposit {on?} a place to live."
• "I have two years of remembering horrific things I'd buried and told myself I made up, and experience adult SAs that brought up even more memories."
  • 

• Annie states that (Sam's) technological abuse (shadowbanning) has made it hard for her to make an income / financially support herself.
• She refers to Sam as her "first client" in her (current) sexual line of work.
• "{I have been} under the thumb of this deeply depressed human {Sam Altman}, dealing with his guilt about our dad dying much earlier than he needed to - because our dad was not given money while he was alive, even though he'd had heart issues, and was 67 - can you imagine being a fucking multimillionaire and not giving your dad -- that's for me to talk about in therapy"
• Context: Annie is (somewhat jokingly) talking about making shirts saying she survived Sam Altman's shadowbanning. "The shirts - they're gonna say 'I survived Sam Altman's shadowbanning.' And it's gonna be such a clusterfuck - because the longer that this has gone on - and it's been 4 years now - I no longer care about sounding like a crazy person. There's so much proof - go to my Instagram for "Hi Censorship" highlights. Also, the amount of friends I have had and tested things out with - and seen, when they share things, {versus} when I share things; sharing anything about the podcast..."

• "Altman grew up the oldest of four siblings in suburban St. Louis: three boys, Sam, Max, and Jack, each two years apart, then a girl, Annie, nine years younger than Sam."
• "In 1993, for his 8th birthday, Altman’s parents — Connie Gibstine, a dermatologist, and Jerry Altman, a real-estate broker — bought him a Mac LC II."
• "Several months later, in late May, Altman’s father had a heart attack, at age 67, while rowing on Creve Coeur Lake outside St. Louis. He died at the hospital soon after. At the funeral, Annie told me, Sam allotted each of the four Altman children five minutes to speak. She used hers to rank her family members in terms of emotional expressivity. She put Sam, along with her mother, at the bottom."
• "Altman continued racing his cars (among his favorites: the Lexus LFA, which was discontinued by 2013 and, according to HotCars, “set you back by at least $950,000”). In the early days of the pandemic, he wore his Israeli Defense Forces gas mask. He bought a ranch in Napa. (Altman is a vegetarian, but his partner, Oliver Mulherin, a computer programmer from Melbourne, “likes cows,” Altman says.) He purchased a $27 million house on San Francisco’s Russian Hill. He racked up fancy friends."
• "This is not the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Zuckerberg, who appears, somewhat quaintly compared with Altman, to be content “with building a city-state to rule over,” as the tech writer and podcaster Jathan Sadowski put it. This is the portfolio of a man with ambitions like Musk’s, a man taking the “imperialist approach.” “He really sees himself as this world-bestriding Übermensch, as a superhuman in a really Nietzschean kind of way,” Sadowski said. “He will at once create the thing that destroys us and save us from it.”"
• "Families replicate social dynamics. Power differentials hurt and often explode. This is true of the Altmans. Jerry Altman’s 2018 death notice describes him as: “Husband of Connie Gibstine; dear father and father-in-law of Sam Altman, Max Altman, Jack (Julia) Altman” — Julia is Jack’s wife — “and Annie Altman …”
• "Annie Altman? Readers of Altman’s blog; his tweets; his manifesto, Startup Playbook; along with the hundreds of articles about him will be familiar with Jack and Max. They pop up all over the place, most notably in a dashing photo in Forbes, atop the profile that accompanied the announcement of their joint fund, Apollo. They’re also featured in Tad Friend’s 2016 Altman profile in The New Yorker and in much chummy public banter.
  • @jaltma: I find it really upsetting when I see articles calling Sam a tech bro. He’s a technology brother.
  • @maxaltman: He *is* technology, brother.
  • @sama: love you, (tech) bros"
• "Annie does not exist in Sam’s public life. She was never going to be in the club. She was never going to be an Übermensch. She’s always been someone who felt the pain of the world. At age 5, she began waking up in the middle of the night, needing to take a bath to calm her anxiety. By 6, she thought about suicide, though she didn’t know the word."
• "Like her eldest brother, she is extremely intelligent, and like her eldest brother, she left college early — though not because her start-up was funded by Sequoia. She had completed all of her Tufts credits, and she was severely depressed. She wanted to live in a place that felt better to her. She wanted to make art. She felt her survival depended on it. She graduated after seven semesters."
• "When I visited Annie on Maui this summer, she told me stories that will resonate with anyone who has been the emo-artsy person in a businessy family, or who has felt profoundly hurt by experiences family members seem not to understand. Annie — her long dark hair braided, her voice low, measured, and intense — told me about visiting Sam in San Francisco in 2018. He had some friends over. One of them asked Annie to sing a song she’d written. She found her ukulele. She began. “Midway through, Sam gets up wordlessly and walks upstairs to his room,” she told me over a smoothie in Paia, a hippie town on Maui’s North Shore. “I’m like, Do I keep playing? Is he okay? What just happened?” The next day, she told him she was upset and asked him why he left. “And he was kind of like, ‘My stomach hurt,’ or ‘I was too drunk,’ or ‘too stoned, I needed to take a moment.’ And I was like, ‘Really? That moment? You couldn’t wait another 90 seconds?’”"
• "That same year, Jerry Altman died. He’d had his heart issues, along with a lot of stress, partly, Annie told me, from driving to Kansas City to nurse along his real-estate business. The Altmans’ parents had separated. Jerry kept working because he needed the money. After his death, Annie cracked. Her body fell apart. Her mental health fell apart. She’d always been the family’s pain sponge. She absorbed more than she could take now."
• "Sam offered to help her with money for a while, then he stopped. In their email and text exchanges, his love — and leverage — is clear. He wants to encourage Annie to get on her feet. He wants to encourage her to get back on Zoloft, which she’d quit under the care of a psychiatrist because she hated how it made her feel."
• "Among her various art projects, Annie makes a podcast called All Humans Are Human. The first Thanksgiving after their father’s death, all the brothers agreed to record an episode with her. Annie wanted to talk on air about the psychological phenomenon of projection: what we put on other people. The brothers steered the conversation into the idea of feedback — specifically, how to give feedback at work. After she posted the show online, Annie hoped her siblings, particularly Sam, would share it. He’d contributed to their brothers’ careers. Jack’s company, Lattice, had been through YC. “I was like, ‘You could just tweet the link. That would help. You don’t want to share your sister’s podcast that you came on?’” He did not. “Jack and Sam said it didn’t align with their businesses.”
• "On the first anniversary of Jerry Altman’s death, Annie had the word sch’ma — “listen” in Hebrew — tattooed on her neck. She quit her job at a dispensary because she had an injured Achilles tendon that wouldn’t heal and she was in a walking boot for the third time in seven years. She asked Sam and their mother for financial help. They refused. “That was right when I got on the sugar-dating website for the first time,” Annie told me. “I was just at such a loss, in such a state of desperation, such a state of confusion and grief.” Sam had been her favorite brother. He’d read her books at bedtime. He’d taken portraits of her on the monkey bars for a high-school project. She’d felt so understood, loved, and proud. “I was like, Why? Why are these people not helping me when they could at no real cost to themselves?”"
• "In May 2020, she relocated to the Big Island of Hawaii. One day, shortly after she’d moved to a farm to do a live-work trade, she got an email from Sam asking for her address. He wanted to send her a memorial diamond he’d made out of some of their father’s ashes. “Picturing him sending a diamond of my dad’s ashes to the mailbox where it’s one of those rural places where there are all these open boxes for all these farms … It was so heavy and sad and angering, but it was also so hilarious and so ridiculous. So disconnected-feeling. Just the lack of fucks given.” Their father never asked to be a diamond. Annie’s mental health was fragile. She worried about money for groceries. It was hard to interact with somebody for whom money meant everything but also so little. “Like, either you aren’t realizing or you are not caring about this whole situation here,” she said. By “whole situation,” she meant her life. “You’re willing to spend $5,000 — for each one — to make this thing that was your idea, not Dad’s, and you’re wanting to send that to me instead of sending me $300 so I can have food security. What?”"
• "The two are now estranged. Sam offered to buy Annie a house. She doesn’t want to be controlled. For the past three years, she has supported herself doing sex work, “both in person and virtual,” she told me. She posts porn on OnlyFans. She posts on Instagram Stories about mutual aid, trying to connect people who have money to share with those who need financial help."
• "Annie has moved more than 20 times in the past year. When she called me in mid-September, her housing was unstable yet again. She had $1,000 in her bank account."
• "Since 2020, she has been having flashbacks. She knows everybody takes the bits of their life and arranges them into narratives to make sense of their world."
• "As Annie tells her life story, Sam, their brothers, and her mother kept money her father left her from her."
• "As Annie tells her life story, she felt special and loved when, as a child, Sam read her bedtime stories. Now those memories feel like abuse."
• "The Altman family would like the world to know: “We love Annie and will continue our best efforts to support and protect her, as any family would.”"
• "Annie is working on a one-woman show called the HumAnnie about how nobody really knows how to be a human. We’re all winging it."

• Note: See [EW23b], [EW23c], [EW23d], and [EW23e] for some comments that Elizabeth Weil made on X (Twitter) about this article.

• "Thank you for the love and for calling I spade a spade. I experienced every single form of abuse with him - sexual, physical, verbal, psychology, pharmacological (forced Zoloft, also later told I’d receive money only if I went back on it), and technological (shadowbanning)"

• "Aww you’re nervous I’m defending myself? Refusing to die with your secrets, refusing to allow you to harm more people? If only there was little sister with a bed you could uninvited crawl in, or sick 20-something sister you could withhold your dead dad’s money from, to cope."

• "This tweet endorsed to come out of my drafts by our Dad He also said it was “poor foresight” for you to believe I would off myself before ~justice is served~"

• "@RemmeltE This is also a story about the tech media & its entanglement with industry. Annie was not hard to find. Nobody did the basic reporting on his family — or no one wanted to risk losing access by including Annie in a piece." / X (twitter.com)

• "@RemmeltE @phuckfilosophy of course — worry about losing access to pals, allies, people he funds, people he might fund, others in tech who don't want to talk with journalists who might independently report out a story and not rely on comms...." / X (twitter.com)"

• "@RemmeltE @phuckfilosophy i'm not a tech reporter primarily and i've been in this industry for a long time (and it's a rough industry to be in), so less career risk for me"

• "@RemmeltE @phuckfilosophy Or accept the version of personal lives as delivered by the source. Sam talked about his personal life with me a bit, as did Jack. Just didn't ever reference Annie."

• "{I experienced} Shadowbanning across all platforms except onlyfans and pornhub. Also had 6 months of hacking into almost all my accounts and wifi when I first started the podcast"
• Note: Some commenters on Hacker News claim that a post regarding Annie's claims that Sam sexually assaulted her at age 4 has been being repeatedly removed. c.f. [HN23a], [NM23]

• "https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/sam-altman-artificial-intelligence-openai-profile.html… I feel like you are misrepresenting things here. If the article is correct of course. "Sam offered to buy Annie a house." Isn't that a big financial help?"
• Note: Annie's replies are given in [AA23g] and [AA23h].

• Note: this is Annie's reply reply to [PO23].
• "There were other strings attached they made it feel like an unsafe place to actually heal from the experiences I had with him."

• Note: this is Annie's reply reply to [PO23] and [AA23g].
• "The offer was after a year and half no contact {with Sam}, and {I} had started speaking up online. I had already started survival sex work. The offer was for the house to be connected with a lawyer, and the last time I had a Sam-lawyer connection I didn’t get to see my Dad’s will for a year."

• "I was too sick for “normal” standing jobs. Tendon and nerve pain, and ovarian cysts. “Pathetic” to you seems to mean something outside of your understanding"

• "Also PTSD from sexual traumas. I’m grateful to sex work for how much sex therapy I’ve gotten from the work"

• ".@hackernews keeps removing links to Annie Altman's revelations. Her shadow ban is real. And yours probably is too." 

• Annie {addressing Sam}: "What must it be like, to be an almost-tech billionaire, terrified of the little sibling -- you've lost privileges to call me your sister -- who you repeatedly molested, and physically abused, and emotionally and verbally and then financially and then technologically - and oh also chemically with forced Zoloft - and I'm still alive, and you're still scared, 'cause you're sad. And I'm sad too - the difference is that I've processed it, and I do other things with it..instead of directly abusing people. And what must it be like to be more scared? Because you know the longer this goes on, the worse it's all gonna be when it comes out for you. And knowing my Torah portion was about forgiving my brothers - wow. I mean, you're forgiven, and also - fuck off, forever."

• "Thank you more than words for your time and attention researching.
• All accurate in the current form, except there was no lawyer connected to the “I’ll give you rent and physical therapy money if you go back on Zoloft”"

• "The house offer came after a year and half of no contact.
• Also after both: 1) starting sex work virtually and in person for survival, and 2) speaking out online.
• The offer came connected to a lawyer, and I was told it was so I could not sell the house."

• "I asked for money and resources to be given to our Dad numerous times before he died."

• "Because my parents were still legally married, though separated, my mother was able to block my Dad’s wish and signature to make me the primary beneficiary of his 401k. I had quit the job I was working because of my Achilles and PCOS, while mid-paperwork to receive this money."

• "I had only fuzzy memories of sexual abuse until I went no contact, because of the emotional and financial and other abuses. I was unpacking my own sexual health, both by myself and in therapy, since 2012. Attempting to understand experiences like mid-sex projectile vomiting."

• "I also lost my period for 13 months from 2018-2019, after stopping Zoloft and hormonal birth control, and from various old disordered eating habits."

• "I was given some rent money for a few months in LA before moving back to Big Island for a work trade.
• We made a plan with the family therapist (we did two sessions with) for Sam and my mother to help with my basic needs while I was sick. That plan was not followed."

• "That financial “help” became inconsistent and/or attached to strings. It would be less than the amount agreed on with the therapist, late for me to actually pay rent so I had to keep asked repeatedly, etc"

• Alternate link
• 32:07
  • Annie Altman: "I had to get my passport renewed, and then it got stolen in the mail"
• 32:48:
  • Annie: "When I started the podcast, before I did sex work or any other things that increased shadowbanning, I had shadowbanning immediately, and I had podcast ratings get deleted when it {the podcast} was called 'True Shit' right when I started it. And I could not get through to a real person."
  • Remmelt: "And you don't even know why. You can suspect why, but..."
  • Annie: "Oh yeah. I have all of my theories, and I have emails. I got some emails back and forth with Apple Podcasts about it. There wasn't a phone number, ther wasn't any way I could have the real accountability of, 'Hey, I have this teeny podcast, it's only a few motnhs old, and I'm having a third or more of the ratings get deleted, and I don't underertand why.' And that makes it obviously challenging to grow a podcast.'" 

• "I have experienced drama like the OpenAI drama — I grew up in it. I was repeatedly told “not to talk about it,” and to allow another person to remove my human agency.
• I have lived under my sibling’s authority my whole life.
• The narrative of “Annie is crazy” and “Annie doesn’t know how to take care of herself” is what I was raised and conditioned in. That narrative, along with intentionally conditional love, is what was used to control me my whole life.
• When I went “no contact,” I learned even more about the control he wielded. It’s not just me, it’s his social and professional circles also. It’s terrifying how many people have told me privately they support me, but are terrified to speak publicly on my behalf.
• Since going no contact from my living relatives in 2020, my literal and virtual life continue to be extremely restricted. I’ve had multiple accounts get hacked. My podcast ratings and YouTube views seemed to be removed. My presence seems difficult to find on Google. I am not sure how this is happening, and I don’t have the resources to investigate further. At one point recently a high school faculty member, from our same school, spoke with me and attempted to convince me to break no contact.
• Going no contact was far from an easy decision.
• I attempted every other possibility, including family therapy in early 2020. After two sessions together with my mother and brother, my therapist privately advised me that no contact was my best option, which I resisted for another four months. During this time, I was managing PCOS (several ovarian cysts) and repeat Achilles tendinopathy that severely limited my walking and normal movement abilities. I was also grieving our Dad who died in May 2018.
• I quit a job because of being notified of money left to me from my Dad, and made a plan to take six months to heal my body. I notified my relatives of my health and my plan. While in the paperwork process, I was notified that the money was withheld from me until I’m in my 60s. Though separated, my parents were still legally married and so my mother had the “surviving spouse” option to ignore Dad’s wish to make me the primary beneficiary of his 401K.
• Dad had a known heart condition, but still had to work full time until his death in 2018. Dad was very involved in affordable housing and reconstruction of historic buildings in St. Louis City. I had asked my sibling for years to give our Dad the financial help to stop working. Dad openly expressed his dream to retire in Costa Rica.
• Jerry Altman died of a heart attack at age 67, without the dream his son could have fulfilled.
• While still very physically ill and simultaneously managing intense and horrific flashbacks from PTSD, I began in person sex work in late 2020. I was unable to fully financially support myself with the virtual sex work I had already started, and with unemployment benefits from California. I applied for unemployment in 2020, at first not wanting to apply and “clog up” the process, because of my millionaire relatives I naively assumed would help me, and then was delayed in receiving benefits due to identity theft.
• I was too physically ill with PCOS (several ovarian cysts) and repeat Achilles tendinopathy that severely limited my walking and normal movement abilities to work a standing job, and too mentally ill with daily flashbacks to do computer work.
• I also desperately needed money for physical therapy so I could become healthier and support myself in the future. I felt like a zombie getting through every day while budgeting how much labor my body and brain could manage.
• My sibling offered to buy me a home in 2021, reaching out with seemingly kind words after a year and half of no contact. We spoke on the phone three times, and through these conversations I began to suspect the offer was another attempt at control. It seemed I would never have direct ownership of the house. Also, given the nature of my PTSD flashbacks, the house felt like an unsafe place to actually heal my mind and body.
• With regard to the current situation at OpenAI (and with tech in general), I feel the drama is a red herring.
• The best case scenario is middle school-style interpersonal drama, with much higher money and power stakes. The worst case scenario is a distraction from something(s) that are more dangerous.
• Calling employees in the middle of night to secure their public display of loyalty seems like cultish hazing.
• Given my belief that “how you do anything is how you do everything”, and given the power of the technological revolution, I am concerned with where and how that power is being inequitably distributed. I am also concerned about who will benefit from that power, and in what ways.
• I would love to see and support technology being used to equitably distribute basic human resources, which is far different from its current use.
• My intention in sharing my story is to share my most personal and human truth, and to heal. In my own sharing, I wish to encourage others to find their truth and their healing.
• I seek sovereignty for myself, and for child-me who was told to stay quiet about other people’s secrets — even when it made me physically ill.
• I aim to give others the information of my story, while healing my own pains. My wish is to help others find their personal truth and healing from their pains — we’re all human.
• We all advance as humans when we all tell our story.
• Love,
• Annie"

• "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman snapped up a $43 million estate in Hawaii in 2021, adding to his impressive real-estate portfolio."
• "OpenAI CEO Sam Altman owns multimillion-dollar properties in San Francisco, Napa, and Hawaii."
• "Altman, fired then reinstated as OpenAI's CEO this month, has tried to keep a relatively low profile."
• "When Business Insider set out to catalog his assets, we found a previously unknown giant estate."
• "Years before the recent drama at OpenAI turned CEO Sam Altman into a household name, the former Y Combinator president went on an extraordinary 18-month, $85 million real-estate shopping spree, according to records reviewed by Business Insider — including a previously unreported $43 million Hawaii estate on land that locals describe as historically significant."
• "The purchases, which also include multimillion-dollar residences in San Francisco and Napa, California, took place between early 2020 and mid-2021, when Altman was ginning up support for his eyeball-scanning crypto startup, Worldcoin, and releasing OpenAI products in private beta, BI's review of business and real-estate filings found."
• "A spokesperson for Altman declined to comment."
• "Earlier this year, Altman seemed to take a subtle dig at his fellow tech executives for amassing too much wealth."
• ""This concept of having enough money is not something that is easy to get across to other people," Altman said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in San Francisco."
• "But as Altman's wealth has grown, he's become increasingly removed from the daily life of the non-ultra-ultra-rich. His mother told The Wall Street Journal in March that Altman hadn't been to a grocery store in four or five years. In 2021, he hired his cousin to manage his family office."
• "In July 2021, Altman bought a 12-bedroom estate in Kailua-Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, for $43 million. Judging by listing photos, the property has a private inlet and several houses. The estate is adjacent to a national landmark {Kamakahonu (here's its Wikipedia page)} a reconstruction of the royal temple of King Kamehameha I, the first ruler of the unified Hawaiian islands."
  • "A second video highlighted the estate's adventurous amenities, including cliff jumping, motorboating, wakesurfing, Jet Ski-ing, and scuba diving. A person who worked on the second video said the intent was to produce something that friends and family could watch to remember their trips to the residence. (Both videos were removed from YouTube after BI requested comment for this article.)"
• "Altman's purchase of the Hawaii property has not been previously reported. BI linked the property to Altman by examining business and real-estate filings showing the land was owned by an LLC managed by Jennifer Serralta, whose name appears as a manager on paperwork for other businesses known to be owned by Altman. Serralta, who previously worked in the automotive industry, describes herself on LinkedIn as the chief operating officer of a family office — presumably Altman's — and is his cousin, according to an obituary for their grandmother. Reached by phone, Serralta declined to comment."
• "In a March post on her personal blog, Serralta wrote that she stayed at a Kailua-Kona property owned by "a friend" while vacationing in Hawaii. Last year, Altman tweeted a photo of himself wakesurfing in Hawaii; the view of the Big Island in the background of the photo precisely matches the view from the Kailua-Kona compound."
  • The Tweet referenced:
    • [SA22a] https://x.com/sama/status/1512111914939154434 -- posted on April 7, 2022
      • "wake surfing but otherwise exactly that!"

• 

   

  • Here's where I think Sam is in the wake surfing picture, just from visual estimates moving around to different Google Street View Images on Google Maps (with the little orange dude you can drag-and-drop around) near Kamakahonu:
    • 3d view #1:

• 3d view #2:

• 3d view #3 (aerial/drone shot)

• 3d view #4:

• This matches up with:
  • how the background/landscape looks in Sam's wake surfing photo
  • the location of Kamakahonu
  • what Business Insider wrote
• "Altman has one family connection to Hawaii: His youngest sibling, Annie Altman, has lived on the islands on and off since 2017. Annie Altman, an artist and entertainer who has supported herself through in-person and virtual sex work, lives a much-different life from her brother's. Annie is teetering on financial insolvency, she told BI, after a lengthy stretch of illnesses. She has not spoken with her brother since 2021, when she refused his offer to buy her a home after learning that a lawyer would control the property, she said.
  She had been unaware that her oldest brother owned property in Hawaii until BI asked her about it, she said."
• Sam also bought:
  • a $27 million home in San Francisco, which "is the home base for a number of Altman's investment vehicles, according to business and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including the venture firm Apollo Projects, 9Point Ventures, and Uncommon Ventures. In recent weeks, the property functioned as a war room for Altman and his closest allies as he planned his return to OpenAI."
    • The home includes a wellness center, "cantilevered infinity pool", and an underground garage with a "car turntable"
  • a $15.7 million, 950-acre ranch in Napa, with five homes and vineyards
  • "Several Altman companies are or have been registered to the address, including the opaquely named Project 2024 LLC, as well as another Altman venture firm, Hydrazine Capital."
  • a "big patch of land" in Big Sur

• Starting at 5:02:
  • Trevor Noah: "{You're} a CEO who many people have termed, like, the 'Steve Jobs of this generation, and the future.' And - you don't say that about youself."
  • Sam Altman: "Certainly not."
  • Trevor Noah: "No, I think a lot of people say that about you, you know, because -- I mean, I was thinking about this, and I was going, 'I think calling you the Steve Jobs of this generation is unfair.' In my opinion, I think you're the Prometheus of this generation."
    • Note: my old username (on X (formerly Twitter) and LessWrong) was "prometheus5015." This LessWrong post was first published on October 7, 2023, two months before this podcast with Trevor Noah was published on Spotify.
  • Sam Altman {*turning away*}: "Wooouughh."
    • Note: it's hard to transcribe Sam's response purely in words. Go watch the podcast clip and you'll see what I'm talking about.
  • Trevor Noah: "No, you really are. You really are. It seems like to me, you have stolen fire from the gods --"
  • Sam Altman: {*laughs/half-chuckles*}
    • Note: once again, it is a bit hard to describe Sam's reaction solely by using words in the English language (or, at least, I am not a good enough writer to do so.) E.g. see this English StackExchange post for an idea of the difficulty.
  • Trevor Noah: "--and you are the forefront of this movement, and this time, that we are now living through. Where once AI was only the stuff of sci-fi and legend. You know, you are now the face - at the forefront - of what could change civilization forever."

As I mentioned -- it's a bit hard to capture, using words alone (in my transcript above), the reaction that Sam had, when Trevor Noah described him as the "Prometheus of this generation", Just watch ~5:02 -- 5:50 in the video below.

The reason I focus on this is because it increases my probability (which is already quite high) that Sam Altman is aware of & has read this post. My old username on X (formerly Twitter) and LessWrong, at the time that this podcast with Trevor Noah was first published (on December 7, 2023, on Spotify), was "prometheus5015."

• Starting at 32:28:
  • Sam: "AGI and my family are the two main things I care about, so losing one of those is like...so yeah I mean it was just like unbelievably painful. The only comparable set of life experience that I had, and that one was of course much worse, was when my dad died. And that was like a very sudden thing. But the sense of like confusion and loss...in that case, I felt like I had a little bit of time to just like feel it all. But then there was so much to do. Like it was like so unexpected that I had to pick up the pieces of his life for a little while. And it wasn't until, like, a week after that I really got a moment to just, like, catch my breath and be like, holy shit, like, I can't believe this happened. So yeah, that was much worse."

• "Altman’s firing and swift reversal of fortune followed a pattern in his career, which began when he dropped out of Stanford University in 2005 and gained the reputation as a Silicon Valley visionary. Over the past two decades, Altman has lost the confidence of several top leaders in the three organizations he has directed. At every crisis point, Altman, 38 years old, not only rebounded but climbed to more powerful roles with the help of an expanding network of powerful allies."
• "A group of senior employees at Altman’s first startup, Loopt—a location-based social-media network started in the flip-phone era—twice urged board members to fire him as CEO over what they described as deceptive and chaotic behavior, said people familiar with the matter. But the board, with support from investors at venture-capital firm Sequoia, kept Altman until Loopt was sold in 2012."
• "In 2019, Altman was asked to resign from Y Combinator after partners alleged he had put personal projects, including OpenAI, ahead of his duties as president, said people familiar with the matter."
• "This fall, Altman also faced a crisis of trust at OpenAI, the company he navigated to the front of the artificial-intelligence field. In early October {2023}, OpenAI’s chief scientist {Ilya Sutskever} approached some fellow board members to recommend Altman be fired, citing roughly 20 examples of when he believed Altman misled OpenAI executives over the years. That set off weeks of closed-door talks, ending with Altman’s surprise ouster days before Thanksgiving."
• "This article is based on interviews with dozens of executives, engineers, current and former employees and friends of Altman’s, as well as investors."
• "A few years after {Loopt's} launch, some Loopt executives voiced frustration with Altman’s management. There were complaints about Altman pursuing side projects, at one point diverting engineers to work on a gay dating app, which they felt came at the expense of the company’s main work."
• "Senior executives approached the board with concerns that Altman at times failed to tell the truth—sometimes about matters so insignificant one person described them as paper cuts. At one point, they threatened to leave the company if he wasn’t removed as CEO, according to people familiar with the matter. The board backed Altman."
• "“If he imagines something to be true, it sort of becomes true in his head,” said Mark Jacobstein, co-founder of Jimini Health who served as Loopt’s chief operating officer. “That is an extraordinary trait for entrepreneurs who want to do super ambitious things. It may or may not lead one to stretch, and that can make people uncomfortable.”"
• "Altman doesn’t recall employee complaints beyond the normal annual CEO review process, according to people familiar with his thinking."
• "Michael Moritz, who led Sequoia, personally advised Altman. When Loopt struggled to find buyers, Moritz helped engineer an acquisition by another Sequoia-backed company, the financial technology firm Green Dot."
• "Altman turned Y Combinator into an investing powerhouse. While serving as the president, he kept his own venture-capital firm, Hydrazine, which he launched in 2012. He caused tensions after barring other partners at Y Combinator from running their own funds, including the current chief executive, Garry Tan, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Tan and Ohanian didn’t respond to requests for comment."
• "Altman also expanded Y Combinator through a nonprofit he created called YC Research, which served as an incubator for Altman’s own projects, including OpenAI. From its founding in 2015, YC Research operated without the involvement of the firm’s longtime partners, fueling their concern that Altman was straying too far from running the firm’s core business."
• "By early 2018, Altman was barely present at Y Combinator’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., spending more time at OpenAI, at the time a small research nonprofit, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "The increasing amount of time Altman spent at OpenAI riled longtime partners at Y Combinator, who began losing faith in him as a leader. The firm’s leaders asked him to resign, and he left as president in March 2019."
• "Graham said it was his wife’s doing. “If anyone ‘fired’ Sam, it was Jessica, not me,” he said. “But it would be wrong to use the word ‘fired’ because he agreed immediately.”
• "Jessica Livingston said her husband was correct."
• "To smooth his exit, Altman proposed he move from president to chairman. He pre-emptively published a blog post on the firm’s website announcing the change. But the firm’s partnership had never agreed, and the announcement was later scrubbed from the post."
• "For years, even some of Altman’s closest associates—including Peter Thiel, Altman’s first backer for Hydrazine—didn’t know the circumstances behind Altman’s departure."
• "As the company grew, management complaints about Altman surfaced."
• "In early fall this year, Sutskever, also a board member, was upset because Altman had elevated another AI researcher, Jakub Pachocki, to director of research, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "Sutskever told his board colleagues that the episode reflected a long-running pattern of Altman’s tendency to pit employees against one another or promise resources and responsibilities to two different executives at the same time, yielding conflicts, according to people familiar with the matter."
• "Other board members already had concerns about Altman’s management. Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corp., tried to cultivate relationships with employees as a board member. Past board members chatted regularly with OpenAI executives without informing Altman. Yet during the pandemic, Altman told McCauley he needed to be told if the board spoke to employees, a request that some on the board viewed as Altman limiting the board’s power, people familiar with the matter said."
• "Around the time Sutskever aired his complaints, the independent board members heard similar concerns from some senior OpenAI executives, people familiar with the discussions said. Some considered leaving the company over Altman’s leadership, the people said."
• "Altman also misled board members, leaving the impression with one board member that another wanted board member Helen Toner removed, even though it wasn’t true, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported."
• "Altman also misled board members, leaving the impression with one board member that another wanted board member Helen Toner removed, even though it wasn’t true, according to people familiar with the matter, The Wall Street Journal reported."

• "Hello mother’s-lawyer,
• Contrary to your email here, my-short-term-lawyer shared with me that my Father’s Trust has been funded before my mother’s death.
• As I turned 30 this January, I am considering requesting the funds for which my Father’s Trust was established per my Father’s wishes, according to my understanding of my Father’s Will.
• Before I do so, I would like to know the following information:
  • How much was the Trust funded for, and when exactly?
  • Please send details of all assets and all information about the Trust. My-short-term-lawyer mentioned Hydrazine, a fund of my siblings’, and one of my Dad’s buildings with my-Dad’s-old-boss?
  • Please send all documentation you have concerning the Trust, including but not limited to: documents and numbers related to the institution holding the Trust, the trustees, and communication regarding how the trust was funded.
  • Have there been any divisions of the Trust? Please send any information if yes.
  • Please send all documents related in any way to the Trust that I may not be aware of at this point.
  • Why was the funding of the Trust delayed? Why was the Trust funded now after you previously said it couldn’t be funded?
  • My-short-term-lawyer (cc’d), who you spoke with about getting the Trust funded, let me know you said my next step was to “make an ask of the Trust with a monthly budget.” Will you please point to where in the Trust it specifies that stipulation?
  • The Trust mentions different stipulations for different ages, and my 30th birthday was in January. Why was I not contacted about the potential to request a non-prejudicial lump sum in accordance with my Father’s wishes?
• As you may also know, I quit my job in 2019 a year after my Father’s death, understanding that I was the primary beneficiary of my Father’s 401K. I planned to take my time away from work to focus on my health, which had declined severely in my mid-20s. My relatives are aware of my repeated tendinopathy, three times in a walking boot for the same ankle, and Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. I did not receive any such funding, and as a result, my health and well-being have continued to suffer — in direct contradiction to the stipulations in my Father’s Will. The Trust makes it clear that my Dad’s wish was for me to have been supported in these six years since his death. In the absence of the support intended for me in my Dad’s Trust, I’ve experienced two and a half years of houseless and homelessness and daily PTSD flashbacks, and I’ve had to resort to survival sex work to support myself financially while still navigating physical illnesses.
• Please send your confirmation of receipt of this email within 24 hours, and all requested documentation and answers, within 10 business days.
• Thank you,
• Annie"

• "Promise you it’s not something I ever thought I’d start.
• In 2019, while living in LA, I got diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. PCOS is a diagnosis of elimination, and/or “oh hey this ultrasound shows a cyst on your ovary.” Around the same time, I went into a walking boot for my Achilles for the third time in eight years. The first time was Achilles tendinopathy and a bone spur, the second time was plain old Achilles tendinopathy, and this third time was now both Achilles and posterior tibial tendinopathy.
• I got my fourth or fifth tonsillitis in there too, to round things out, or something.
• I had quit a job at a dispensary in the summer of 2019, while in the paperwork process about being the primary beneficiary of my Father’s 401K. My Dad died in May 2018, and access to his Will was withheld from me by my mother and three older siblings for an entire year. The 401K situation, a year after his death, motivated me to finally demand access to my Dad’s Will and other information.
• When notified by the company about my Dad’s 401K, while sitting at a reception desk because I could no longer do the standing shifts, I was both relieved for the help and shocked that information about my Dad would be hidden from me. Especially shocked because my relatives knew about my various physical illnesses and need for financial support.
• All three of my siblings and my mother, all wealthy, had seen the Will the entire time. I told them all about my health challenges, about the money I was receiving from Dad, and about my six month plan to work on my podcast and music and one human show, seated creative projects that would help me as I healed my tendons and hormones and digestion and grief.
• I naively trusted these relatives. I figured the worst case scenario was not being able to monetize my art projects. I accepted this potential worst case because working on my projects would still help me rest my ankle, by giving me a creative outlet other than dancing and yoga, which my health impacted my abilities to continue. I had first gone to the Big Island of Hawai’i in 2017 for yoga teacher training, and then moved back there and taught yoga. (Seems like a place to note that I paid for training, and if I had gone to medical school like was tracked for me it would have been paid for by my relatives.) My relatives knew how important yoga and dance were and are to me, and mocked my interest aside from one singular time two of them took a yoga class taught by me.
• I was very wrong about the potential worst case. Said 401K money from my Dad withheld from me by millionaire relatives, who knew I was sick. I went back to an old job I worked in the Bay Area, and was selling produce boxes with Farm Fresh to You. I was wearing the walking boot I attempted to avoid my third time needing. I was sweating through my sheets almost nightly, and was doing bloodwork and other exams to search for potential thyroid or other PCOS-related conditions. I began selling furniture and clothes, and the microphones I had been using for podcasts and music, so I could afford rent and food.
• In December 2019, after being told “no” for the financial support I asked for the first time ever, I went on SeekingArrangements. Living in LA, I had no idea what I was getting into with that site, which is for sugar dating and escorting. I didn’t meet up with anyone in person in LA, though I did have a couple video chats. I remember the first time a man sent me a Zelle for a video call where I flashed him my boobs — a Zelle that got my account out of the negative. I also remember a man yelling at me through the phone about saying no to coming over for $300 because “WELL HAVEN’T YOU DONE IT FOR FREE A BUNCH!” I was horrified, and felt like the sex work industry was probably “too much” for me. Being scared of what felt like “plan Z” was scary in itself.
• In the beginning of 2020 I did two family therapy sessions. I sat in my therapist’s office, in my walking boot and hormonal sweat, with my oldest sibling there in person holding his phone with our mother on FaceTime. The woman who bore me told the therapist that it would be “best for Annie’s mental health if she fully financially supported herself,” and my multi-millionaire sibling agreed.
• The therapist was utterly shocked, I was only half-surprised.
• Perhaps with her highlighting that I never asked them for financial help until very ill, and it still being so early in grieving our Dad, and with her highlighting their enormous wealth, the therapist somehow persuaded them to give short-term help for my basic needs.
• Again I was wrong about a potential worst case scenario. My mom and my brother didn’t honor the therapist’s plan for six months of financial support, and my rent money was late or less-than-agreed or had-to-be-groveled-for. So in May 2020 I moved back to the Big Island of Hawai’i, where I had lived before living in LA. This was my plan Y — find a low-labor work trade.
• I found a farm with a potential for a work trade, and despite being only a couple months out of the walking boot felt it was overall more healing than staying in a studio apartment I may or may not have enough rent money for, across from a park that was taped off due to Covid restrictions. When I notified one of my siblings of finding a farm work trade, he notified the rest of the relatives who group messaged me they would not be providing any of the final month of support agreed on with the therapist.
• I had planned to use the rent money for food.
• While work-trading on a rural farm, my oldest sibling messaged me asking where to send my diamond made from our Father’s ashes. My Father never asked to become a diamond. I never sent my sibling the farm address. The mailbox was open, in a cluster of mailboxes in the middle of nowhere on the island. Plus, the most financially reasonable thing for me to have done with a diamond at that point was to pawn it for food money — and my sibling was aware.
• I decided to go full no contact with my relatives. The family therapist we spoke with recommended I consider this more seriously, after telling me she could not professionally recommend doing more group sessions. She was not the first therapist to tell me to go no contact. Withholding the final month of a six month plan for basic life support, while I was very sick, while withholding money left to me from my Dad, while offering a diamond Dad didn’t ask to become to be sent to a rural mailbox, was my final straw to begin grieving all three of my siblings and my mother. A completely different and similar grieving process as grieving my Dad.
• The distinctions between “family” and “relatives” became more clear everyday.
• After a couple months, I had to stop work trading on the farm because of my ankle again. Even small plantings and weeding was too much. One of the owners of the farm kindly and graciously found computer work for him for me to do seated, which gave me more time while I scrambled with my legs up the wall in constant ankle and knee pain. I had both an Etsy Shop and Patreon for my podcast, though they didn’t make enough to even cover my phone bill.
• Still unsure how to rest and heal my body, I found a room rental in town and started OnlyFans. I applied for EBT food stamps and Medicaid, which felt so surreal while sharing DNA with millionaires. I had also applied for unemployment in California in April 2020, as at first I didn’t want to clog up the system for people who weren’t directly related to millionaires who could help them. I was one of the millions who had identity theft on their unemployment, and so had to go through paperwork and hearings for it to finally come through in November 2020.
• So back to September 2020, starting OnlyFans. I started very softcore, for all sorts of reasons. I was uncomfortable showing much of my body, both because of a history of eating disorders and body dysmorphia and because my body was physically hurting in so many ways. I enjoyed parts of posting, and being front-facing about it all. Sharing pictures and videos on my own terms felt healing for years of insecurities with my body and sexuality and preferences, like exposure therapy for all my conditioning to hide. It felt like a very specific art therapy project. I was confused about liking parts of something that was a plan Z last resort.
• I was still too sick to teach yoga. I had considered and attempted various mindless computer jobs, and found myself completely incapable. After going no contact because of financial and emotional abuse, I was flooded with memories of sexual abuse I had repressed.
• I had flashbacks of the sexual and physical abuses my whole life, though it wasn’t until the silence of no contact that I had the space to connect the dots. In college and after, I had projectile vomited multiple times during sex with men I loved and trusted. I remember talking about this and related things with therapists, unable to wrap my mind around how violently my body had responded.
• Now, literally on my ass from tendon and nerve and hormonal and digestive and ovarian cyst pain, I had a lot of time to remember the flashbacks’ details.
• While deep in my own tendon and hormone and trauma healing, I turned to escorting. Most of my emotional and thought space was on various sexual healings of my own, so extending it to include others felt less intimidating. My days were hazes of PTSD flashbacks with whatever grounding exercises I could do, whatever floor yoga and stretching I could do, and physical therapy. I had to budget basic things like grocery trips based on how much I could walk or carry. I couldn’t carry heavy things or go on long walks, and could manage even shorter beach walks because of the uneven surface. I was constantly stressing about my health and money, and feeling hopeless and powerless. Being sick is very expensive, and also a very challenging state to be in attempting to make money.
• My ankle and knee and hips would hurt extra some days, and it wasn’t for another year when I was referred to a pelvic floor physical therapist that I knew I was also managing nerve pain.
• I decided to get on SeekingArrangements again, now living on Maui. My disabilities and desperation made me more open to navigate the website, and I figured it would be very different than in LA. It was different, though I was still resistant to actually meet anyone in person.
• I had two adulthood sexual assaults while living on Maui that triggered more flashbacks. I’m grateful for those assaults in a fucked up way, for the clarities they gifted me. Half awake feeling unequivocally, “I’ve experienced exactly this before.” Though I was more set back emotionally and financially, managing even more flashbacks of old memories flooding in and incapacitating me. So I took the plunge to meet someone in person.
• The first client I ever had was in an open relationship, where his partner gave him permission for “paid play partners” that she approved of. We met on video chat, then I met him for coffee, then a few days later he was at my place. We talked, we fucked, he sent me a Venmo, he left.
• I logged on my computer and paid a bill I was behind on, immediately.
• My last escorting experience was with a man who was experimenting with his queerness, and wanted me to bring another man in. I invited a filming partner, as I had started making hardcore porn on OnlyFans and PornHub at that point. Before the filming partner came over, the client said “I’m so gay!” — while his dick was in my mouth between words of the dick about to be in his mouth — followed by “omg I’ve never said that before” and a distant stare. I felt that stare, back to a stare I’d experienced decades ago.
• In the shower after I prayed that would be my last experience in person, and I could switch to all virtual. I knew an article would be coming out soon quoting me in New York Magazine, and I prayed it would give me the exposure to support myself with OnlyFans.
• Then maybe I could give energy to my podcast and writing and singing and teaching yoga again, too.
• Who knows how much financial freedom I could have had from online work outside of the sex industry without the various technological blocks I’ve experienced.
• I had podcast ratings get deleted, and my personal home wifi repeatedly hacked, and more, before I ever started sex work. I learned even more about shadow-banning and more since starting sex work, as that community is the most targeted demographic. I also learned that sex work triggers tech companies because it is so powerful — sex work proliferates the internet and all technology, and perhaps all companies at their base. “The oldest profession.”
• I survived sickness because of survival sex work.
• Escorting: I’m not at all glad that it happened; I am grateful."

• "One time I found a $500k watch at my oldest siblings’ place, casually in an open kitchen cabinet. Another sibling told me how much the watch was, and then got bullied for disclosing to me. I asked why our 60-something Dad (with heart conditions) was making rent and car payments."
• "Surely retiring the father you claimed closeness with was more valuable than a watch????????"
• "If our Dad had his needs taken care of, I would have supported multiple fancy watches"

• "#rememberjerryaltman ❤️"
• "Jerry Altman died in 2018 of a heart attack, at the age of 67. He was working overtime, with known heart conditions.
• The dream he expressed to retire in Costa Rica was never fulfilled by his millionaire son, who could have retired our father that he claimed to love."

• 

• "What would have been our last family trip, I chose not to go for various reasons. I asked our Dad to be given a check for whatever would have been spent on my fancy plane ticket and accommodations. Dad didn’t ever tell me about getting money from Sam, and got quiet about his Costa Rica dream"

• "*one year after full no contact, year and half after the two sessions with the LMFT"
  • Note: I believe LMFT stands for Licensed Marriage Family Therapist, a therapist that "offer{s} expert guidance to individuals, couples, and families experiencing complex relationship-based issues" (source)

• Note: in the link I provided, there's a transcript. The transcript has this feature where it highlights the current word being spoken, with the idea being that you can "follow along" reading the transcript while you're listening to the podcast. Unfortunately, the feature is broken. I think this is due to the inclusion of some ads/commercials at various points throughout the podcast, which create a mismatch between the transcript and the audio.) Specifically, the word highlighted in the transcript is usually a few minutes later than the actual audio.
  • Example from OpenAI Part 1: The Most Silicon Valley Man Alive:

    • 

• Ellen Huet: "For this season, you'll hear reporting done by me and my colleagues at Bloomberg who have been covering AI during the boom of the last few years. We interviewed some of the leading minds in AI to try to cut through the hype and understand the debate about whether AI will be a tool to improve human existence or to extinguish it. But this is also the story of Sam, the man at the center of it all, and we spoke with Sam's friends, family, and collaborators to demystify him and how he rose to power. This first episode is all about how Sam got here. He's a man who has always understood the importance of being in the right room at the right time, with exactly the right few people. The full story of Sam's rise is important because understanding who he is and what he believes will shed light on an urgent question should we trust this man to oversee this technology? In the summer of twenty twenty three, about five months before he was fired, my colleague Emily Chang asked him this exact question at a Bloomberg conference..."
  • Note: I've tried to fix any typos in the transcript, but there may still be some I've missed.
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "To get a better sense of the kind of person Sam is and how he got where he is now. I want to take you back to his adolescence. Sam had a privileged upbringing in Saint Louis. He's the oldest of four siblings. His mom was a dermatologist and his dad was a real estate developer. He attended a private high school called John Burrows. There's an anecdote about him from that period that sticks out. When some students wanted to boycott an assembly about sexuality, Sam stood up in front of the whole school and announced he was gay. It's a pretty gutsy move for a teenager in the early two thousands, and unsurprisingly, Sam was smart.
• Andy Abbot: "And generally Sam he was. He was an exceptional student, He was an exceptional writer, he was an exceptional big personality."
• Ellen Huet: "That's Andy Abbott. He was one of Sam's English teachers, and he's now the head of school. And this is a pretty nerdy school where it's cool to get good grades and be a high achiever. And even in that environment, Sam stood out."
• Andy Abbot: "Sam's just a really natural leader, incredibly charismatic, curious guy. He's atypical you know. He was the editor of the yearbook and he represented the school in the Model United Nations. He designed our website, you know, before we hired people to do our website. He could just do that stuff.
• Ellen Huet: "Sam even played water polo."
• Andy Abbot: "He was pretty good {laughs.} I'm not a connoisseur, but I'm like, he was pretty good."
• Ellen Huet: "He remembers Sam as being really confident, and apparently for good reason. Sounds like Sam was just this exceptional kid."
• Andy Abbot: "Well, he's the smartest guy in the room, and he's charismatic. I remember thinking, and I'm just this is just an embarrassing confession. I hope he doesn't go into technology. He's so creative and he's so, he's such a good writer, and I hoped he would be an author or something like that. And I mean, nobody could have anticipated the magnitude of open Ai, but everybody knew that this guy's better at most things than most of us are."
• Ellen Huet: "This speaks to a pattern that'll become a crucial factor in Sam's career. He's very good at impressing people, especially the right people, older people, people with influence, people who are at a position to help him. Someone who knows Sam says his superpower is figuring out who's in charge and charming them."
• Ellen Huet: "So we have young Sam. Even though he was a teenager, he acted like someone older with more agency and confidence. Adults found this quality of his admirable, and he acted like this toward his three younger siblings too. In a big New Yorker profile on Sam, his younger brother said that as kids, they used to play a board game called Samurai, and Sam always won because he declared himself the leader and said, I have to win and I'm in charge of everything. When Sam's brother told this story, it was a jocular exchange. But Annie, their youngest sibling and only sister, sees it differently. These days, she's estranged from Sam and the rest of her immediate family, but when she was a kid, she remembered that same quality of Sam's wanting to be in charge, and to her it wasn't funny, it was domineering."
• Annie Altman: "From my perspective, with the 9 year age difference, he very much wanted to be, and acted like, the third parent, and like being the older sibling in charge, in control."
• Ellen Huet: "For instance, even though the family was Jewish, they used to get a Christmas tree until Sam put his foot down."
• Annie Altman: "I don't have memories of Christmas tree because when Sam got bar mitzvah'd at 13, he decided that we as a family unit were Jews and needed to no longer celebrate Christmas. There were no more Christmas trees."
• Ellen Huet: "When their dad passed away in 2018, Annie remembers that Sam dictated to each of his younger siblings how many minutes they could talk at the funeral.
• Annie Altman: "To be at your dad's funeral, to be like, oh, I'm the oldest sibling, so I get to choose how long all the sibling -- which, it is bizarre, and there's a level of it that's so hilarious and so benign, surface-level, classic older sibling bullshit where it's like, 'all right, older sibling wanting to make up the rules to the game.'" Like there's a level of it that's very light and funny -- and there's also a level of it that's very dark and deeply unsettling, of how does that behavior come up in other places if you believe that you get to be the authority on something that you are not the authority on."
• Ellen Huet: "A spokeswoman for OpenAI told us that Sam recalls these incidents differently, but she declined to elaborate."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "Sam started building the startup {Loopt} in 2005. The iPhone didn't exist yet, so Looped was trying to do this for flip phones and it was kind of hard to get traction. At one point early on, Sam's company was in a desperate situation. They really needed to get a deal with a mobile carrier. They learned that Boost Mobile, which was part of Sprint, was looking to add a location feature and needed a partner, but they were about to sign with someone else, so Sam flew down to Boost's headquarters in Irvine in southern California. When he tells the story, he says that he just showed up, waited outside the right executive's office, and asked for just ten minutes. Here's how that executive remembers it."
• Lowell Winer: "It's ever recall I got a phone call from Sam and he was in Irvine, and he said that he explained who he was and what Looped was somebody at Sprint had told him to get in touch with us."
• Ellen Huet: "That's Lowell Winer. He was at the time the head of business development for Boost. And he's going to tell a story that has a few asides, but that I think captures a lot about what Sam was like."
• Lowell Winer: "Early on, we were a day or two away from signing a contract with another startup that was further along than Looped. He asked to come by that day, you know, which is incredibly unusual, but given the timing that, you know, we were at the eleventh hour we were at to sign this contract. He had come, you know, referred to us by our parent company, it was worth at least a meeting. So Sam shows up at the office with one of one or two other guys from Loopt. We go sit in the conference room, you know, we share what we were looking to do. Sam started to share about Loopt. He was I think nineteen at the time, you know, I think maybe in cargo short sitting cross legged in a in a chair in the conference room and just kind of holding court."
• Ellen Huet: "I want to pause here for a second on this cargo shorts detail. For a lot of Sam's young life, he was a cargo shorts. Devotee wore them all the time. People kind of poked fun at him for it, to the point where he felt the need to address it on a podcast called Masters of Scale."
• Sam Altman: "Honestly, I don't think they're that ugly, and I find them incredibly convenient. Like I I, you can like put a lot of stuff like I like to. I'd still read paperback books. I like paperback books. I like to carry on around with me. I have like an iPhone seven plus, which is kind of like works really well in cargo pockets. I carry like computer chargers, cables. They're just like, you know, efficient. Why people care about that so much that I can't tell you."
• Ellen Huet: "That last comment? That's very Sam to remark that the things normal people might talk about don't make sense or aren't rational. It's like he has no patience for the things most of us might think are funny. He has more important things to think about anyway. Here he is a nineteen year old in a meeting with mobile network executives wearing cargo shorts, sitting cross legged in a conference room chair. Even though this encounter was almost twenty years ago, Lowell remembers vividly what Sam looked like in that moment, because it was such an odd picture.

• Ellen Huet (host of the podcast): "Today, we're going to start on a drive in Hawaii."
• Annie Altman: "We're on north Shore, going deeper into the jungle on the north shore, so we're passing twin falls right now.
• Ellen Huet: "I'm driving through the lush green forests of Maui. Annie Altman, Sam Altman's little sister is sitting in the passenger seat. You heard from her briefly in the first episode."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "We're taking a tour of the different places Annie has moved around in the last couple of years, driving down dirt roads to look at cabins and houses hidden behind enormous tropical plants."
• ..,
• Ellen Huet: "For much of the past two years, Annie hasn't been able to afford a stable place to live."
• Annie Altman: "The place you just passed is one of the places I stayed at longer-term in all of the houselessness...{I spent} two months on a newly-built, {with} no running water or no electricity, house, at the far end, back, of the property."
• Ellen Huet: "And I think she's an important part of Sam's story."
• Annie Altman: "And at the time I had nowhere to stay and no rent money, certainly no deposit money, and barely enough room, barely enough money for rent."
• Ellen Huet: "Recently, over the course of just a year, she moved twenty two times, and that's on average about twice a month. Sometimes she has stayed places for a week at a time, or even just a night or two. Some of them have been illegal rentals without running water. She says she's slept on floors and friends' houses. She stayed with strangers when she didn't have another option."
• ...
• Annie Altman: "The man who lived in the front house messaged me on Instagram, and I stayed in his kids' room the week that they weren't there, and then slept on the floor in the common room the week that the kids were there.
• Annie Altman: "I was houseless. I didn't have somewhere to go."
• Annie Altman: "I stayed in this cabin with the slanty roof right there for three months."
• {A podcast host}: "How many different places have you lived in that didn't have running water?"
• Annie: "Maybe five-ish? Five or six? I don't know."
• Ellen Huet: "Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in San Francisco, her brother Sam was having a spectacular year in 2023. The success of ChatGPT had launched OpenAI into the stratosphere. Sam was named CEO of the Year by Time magazine. He spent months flying around the globe talking to world leaders about AI."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "On stage, on podcasts and interviews, people kept turning to Sam for answers. They were asking him what our AI future would hold. In May of that year, he confidently suggested a future where no one is poor. It's an idea he's talked about for years, and the remarks show that his tune hasn't changed despite growing renown and wealth.
• Sam Altman: "One thing I think we all could agree on is that we just shouldn't have poverty in the world."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "It sounds wonderful, almost utopian. But Sam was saying on stage that everyone should have enough money, enough food, everyone should have a place to live, while his own sister was struggling with homelessness. I want to believe Sam's promises about abundance, but Annie's story complicates a lot of the things Sam has projected about the future."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "Sam is a savvy guy. As his profile has gotten bigger after he helped build the world's leading AI company, he has stopped saying things like AI will kill us all. Instead, he talks about how society will be profoundly changed, but overall it will be for the better. Since his newfound chat GPT fame, he has shifted toward presenting himself and by extension, open AI, as more middle of the road. Sam is allowed to change his views, but people have also so complain to me in private that Sam has a tendency to talk out of both sides of his mouth. He's good at telling people what they want to hear in that moment, so it's not surprising that if it's advantageous for him to seem more moderate, that he would start to sound that way."

• Ellen Huet: "What really strikes me is that Sam positions himself as the visionary behind this AI that might put us all out of work, and the visionary behind systems that will save us from that chaos. He's offering fixes to the problems that his own technology will create. Imagine a future where Sam Altman's company has invented AI so powerful that it upends the entire labor economy. We no longer work for money. Instead, we get monthly checks from Sam Altman's income distribution system. I can imagine that his intentions might be good, and that he wants to make a difference here. But what Sam's proposing is ending poverty through systems overseen by him, basically, and that's asking us to put a huge amount of trust in him. Remember, Sam is really good at gaining power. He has a deep drive to be in charge. His company has made promises about adhering to certain principles and then moved away from them. It brings me back to this question we asked in episode one, what I think is the key question of this series. Should we trust this person?"
• Ellen Huet: "Like we said earlier, there's a part of Sam's life that really complicates this image of him. It's the story of his little sister Annie. She says she lives in poverty. Sometimes she struggles with homelessness. She says she survives by doing sex work. Sam is pitching this dream future in which universal basic income will protect everyone who needs it. That sounds lovely in theory, but when it's held up next to Annie's messy, everyday reality, that promise starts to sound a bit hollow. Housing insecurity has defined Annie's life for the past few years. This is a complex and sensitive situation, so I wanted to hear from her myself."
• Annie Altman: "In my experience, it's not only hard to do anything when you are housing insecure, it is impossible. I haven't had a typical day in four years because of how much energy both physically like looking for places or doing things, or looking for jobs and emotionally goes into housing insecurity. It has been the single biggest energy output of my past year."
• Ellen Huet: "In person, Annie is upbeat and smiley. She has good suggestions for health food stores on Maui. She has the word love tattooed across her knuckles. She makes a podcast, Hello and Welcome to the Annie Altman Show All Humans or Human Podcast, and posts videos of her singing on YouTube."
• ...
• Ellen Huet: "Sometimes, I and to better understand her story, I want to rewind to her childhood. When we heard from Annie briefly in the first episode, she talked about Sam's domineering attitude within their family, how he dictated they wouldn't have Christmas trees and put himself in charge of how long each sibling could speak at their dad's funeral. Their family has three boys. Sam's the oldest, then Max, then Jack. Annie is the youngest, nine years younger than Sam and the only girl. Her brothers loved science, math, games, nerdy stuff. She was always the artistic, sensitive one. Even when they were children, she sometimes felt like the odd one out, and as they became adults, the bonds between the brothers tightened both personally and professionally. While Sam was running YC, Jack founded a software company that was funded by YC. Jack and Max also both worked with Sam, helping run his investment fund with money from Peter Teel. Then all three started another investment fund together in which they used Sam's personal wealth. The three brothers lived together in San Francisco, brothers, coworkers, roommates, a tight, messy knot of family, business and money. Annie, on the other hand, was not part of the Altman family brand. With each new step in her life, she seemed to veer farther away from the path she felt was expected of her. She completed pre med requirements, but decided not to pursue that further. She did improv classes, stand up comedy, yoga, teacher training. She said her dad was supportive of this turn away from a more traditional path. Her mom, who was a physician, was less excited."
• Annie Altman: "My siblings and mother were very judgmental about the shift and also very "This is just a phase." I was an am at total daddy's girl. With my mother, there was closeness only when I was doing what she wanted me to do, which is a story {that} sadly, I feel like a lot of people can relate to."
• Ellen Huet: "Just a note. We reached out to Sam, his siblings, and his mom for comment in this episode. His mom, Connie Gibstine, responded with this statement:"
• Connie Gibstine: "We love Annie and are very concerned about her well being. Over the years, we have offered her financial support and help and continue to offer it today. Navigating the balance between providing support without enabling self-destructive behavior for a family member with mental health struggles is extraordinarily difficult. We only want the best for Annie and hope everyone will treat her with compassion."
• Ellen Huet: "In 2018, Annie's father died suddenly of a heart attack, and the grief hit her {Annie} hard. Meanwhile, she also started dealing with some chronic health issues, including tendonitis in her ankle that made it difficult to do work that required standing. She quit her job. She was still mourning her dad. She had gotten some life insurance money after he died, but when that ran out a year later, she still found herself in a desperate financial situation. In order to pay rent, she started selling her furniture. She says she asked her family directly for money to pay rent and cover groceries."
• Annie Altman: "I asked my mother for help and she said no, And then {I} asked Sam and he was told to say no because of her {Connie} wanting him to say no, and he's a grown man in his thirties, {worth} millions of dollars."
• Ellen Huet: "Now, Sam and his family have given Annie money at times, but she says it always came with heavy conditions that made her nervous. At one point, Sam wanted her to get back on Zoloft, an antidepressant, which she had started as a teen but had stopped later on. She {Annie} forwarded me an email from Sam where he asked her to share her bank statements and to allow him and his mom to sit in on some of her therapy sessions in exchange for her rent and medical expenses being covered. She felt like it was his way of exerting leverage or power over her. Of course, Sam can spend his money as he pleases, but again, he's on stage espousing the virtues of universal basic income -- giving money away for free, unconditionally, -- and Annie says he didn't do the same here for her. There were times when I'd gone back and forth about what to include from Annie's story. It's a very personal, messy family situation, and I'll confess that on occasion I've doubted some unrelated things she's told me. But also, I've looked through corroborating emails and documents. We drove to a lot of places Annie lived, and I met people she lived with. So in late 2019, when she asked for help and says she was told no, she turned to something she considered a last resort. To make money, she started sex work. She made an account on a sugar daddy dating website where people trade money for companionship and often sex."
• Annie: "I was just...I was in a desperate place. I mean...people who have been in a position like this ever know that when you're in a place of selling furniture, you're in a desperate position of "I'm out options." This is a 'plan Z' I would not be doing this if plans 'A' through 'I' had worked out in any capacity."
• Ellen Huet: "The first thing she tried was video chatting with a middle-aged man. She flashed him on camera and he sent her money over Zelle. She posted videos on OnlyFans and PornHub. She also did in-person sex work for two years. She says she didn't want to, but it was the work that she was able to fit into her unpredictable schedule of dealing with her health issues. Her lack of stable income, led to a long period of housing insecurity. At times, she lived with sex work clients, or even with strangers from the internet. Her sex work contributed to her precarious housing. She didn't have pay stubs or regular income, which limited the kind of leases she could get. It felt like this interconnected web, exactly the kind of vicious cycle that something like universal basic income tries to break."
• Annie Altman: "If I had a security deposit in my bank account - {I} never would have lived with this man, not, not even a little bit of a chance, would I have lived with this man. There's some unhealthy sex work experiences, and I've also had very traumatizing experiences from in-person work that would not have happened if I had secure housing. I'm still in and, have been so long in, survival mode that it really shifts everything. It really shifts everything. Times when it's been really like...places...like staying just for a week and a half {somewhere} and then the floor for a week, and then someone's place for a night, and then a floor for a week - in those places of really moving that much in a short period of time, there's no - I had no energy for anything else. Really feeling a sense of helplessness and powerlessness that I have never experienced, ever."
• Ellen Huet: "It's not a clean cut situation. In twenty twenty two, Sam offered to buy Annie a house, but she says it wasn't going to be in her name, and the conditions made her uncomfortable."
• Annie Altman: "It became clear to me that it was not an offer for my house. It was an offer for a house of Sam's - or a lawyer of his - that I would be allowed to live in."
• Ellen Huet: "She felt like it was a throwback to Sam's attempts to get her on Zoloft and to peer into her bank statements, so she said no. I do want to pause on this because I know it may sound illogical. After all, it would have been a place to live. But from her point of view, Sam had exerted control over her throughout their lives, and this seemed like one more attempt to control her. During those conversations, she was clear with Sam about the hardships she had endured in the past couple of years."
• Annie Altman: "I told him over the series of those phone calls too, that I had started sex work, and distinctly remember when I first told him about doing sex work and he said, quote, 'Good.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Annie was stung, because she remembers that he didn't ask anything more about it. Like she was sharing something that was painful for her and he was blowing past it."
• Annie Altman: "To hear your little sister tell you she's doing something she doesn't want to do related to sex, and for the response to be 'Good.' So I was like, 'Oh, you're glad that I'm starting to post on OnlyFans. It sounds 'good' to you because I'm supporting myself, even if I'm telling you I'm doing this as a plan Z because I don't know what else to do.'"
• Ellen Huet: "A person close to Sam says that Sam remembers the conversation differently. Annie and Sam are mostly estranged. After that conversation, she kept living in Hawaii, struggling in obscurity. Meanwhile, Sam was ascendant. He was doing world tours. {He was} CEO of the year {in Time Magazine.} He officially became a billionaire. Most of the world had no idea Annie Altman existed, let alone that she was depending on OnlyFans for survival. But last fall, New York Magazine published a profile of Sam, and the journalist, Elizabeth Weil, interviewed Annie. The article was the first time a lot of people found out Sam even had a sister, myself included."
• Annie Altman: "Some of the trippiest messages I got from reporters, when that article first came out, were reporters who have watched every interview Sam has ever done, saying 'He's never mentioned a sister.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Annie worries that because she's basically invisible in Sam's public life life, especially compared to his tight relationship with his brothers, reporters won't take her story seriously."
• Annie Altman: "That they will then question my validity, or {be like} 'Oh, well, she's crazy. Maybe...he's just not talking about her because she's so mentally unstable, and so now let's recycle the 'Annie's crazy' narrative and 'This is why she can't be trusted', or 'We should just ignore her.'"
• Ellen Huet: "In the days leading up to the article coming out, New York Magazine reached out to Sam and his family and OpenAI for fact-checking and to confirm details. So Sam knew the story was going to mention Annie. And then the day before the article ran, something spurred Sam to make an unexpected move. He emailed Annie."
• Annie Altman: "And the night before it {the Elizabeth Weil article} came out was Yom Kippur --
• Ellen Huet: "-- the Jewish day of forgiveness --"
• Annie Altman: "Sam emailed me, 'no subject' and in all lowercase, and said, 'hi annie. in the spirit of it almost being yom kippur, i wanted to apologize and ask for forgiveness for something. i should have kept sending you money without conditions even though our family had concerns; i was in a tough position of wanting to let mom drive decisions as the parent and seeing how much stress you were causing her (and also agreeing it would be better for everyone if you were  able to support yourself, and thinking that you needed medical help) and it being clear you just weren't really able to function very well. still, i made the wrong call and should just have just kept supporting you; i sincerely apologize. i hope you find peace.' There's no mention of this article that's coming out tomorrow, and there's no mention of the fact checking that he just went through."
• Ellen Huet: "Annie felt that the timing of this email was really telling. That for all this time, while Annie was staying in the background, Sam didn't feel any need to apologize. Then, just as she's about to exert a little bit of power over him, by complicating his image, he reaches out, and invokes their shared Jewish heritage to ask for forgiveness. I asked Annie how she felt about Sam speaking publicly about universal basic income and ending poverty when he hasn't done the same for her."
• Annie Altman: "It was a very big slap in the face. It feels embarrassing to be related to him. It's beyond depressing and heartbreaking and disappointing that someone who I thought had a different moral compass, or who I thought would be there for me when I needed someone and was really sick, wasn't...in the same way I'm gonna be grieving my dad for the rest of my life, I'm gonna be grieving Sam for the rest of my life. And the sadness of...of someone who saw me in a walking boot and didn't say, 'How can I help you.' It's why I use the term 'sibling' and not 'brother.'"
• Ellen Huet: "Even though Annie's story is really complicated, I think it's relevant to all of us. Because when Sam is going around talking about our AI future, he acknowledges that AI could take our jobs and upend society and money as we know it. And he says he'll come up with a solution for us: universal basic income. But, when he's faced with the messy reality of his own sister, suddenly it's not so simple. In public, he is literally saying that there shouldn't be poverty. {That} money will be given away to everyone. In private, when Annie asked for help, he didn't come through for her in the way she needed."

• "Hi @JBSchool!
• Why so much attention for my sibling who went there, and not for me? Wouldn’t be about donations, would it?
• Would love to see how much money you were given while I was navigating my Dad’s Trust being withheld, tendon/nerve/ovarian cyst pain, and homelessness - want to share?"

• 

• 

• "My siblings’ nickname for me was “Trash Can”
• Can 
  Cannie 
  The Can 
  Miss Can 
  Bad Baby Trash Can
• Didn’t fully grasp the meanness until I was working as a personal care attendant, and the nonverbal wheelchair bound client cut me out a magazine quote that said “YOU CAN!” and gave it me with genuine love ❤️"

• "My long term home was broken into one month after these tweets."

• 

• 

• Note: this is a Tweet reply to [AA24e].
• "My two most valuable items were left untouched."

• "To Jack {Altman} in 2020.
• I’m still curious how grown men allowed their mother to make their financial decisions, and not help their sister (when allowed to call me that) with groceries when I was very physically ill"

•  

  

  • "Okay, I'll text her. I'd like to change the arrangement somehow to involve less checking in, as I'm in agreement with your and (especially) Sam's request for us to take more space. I'd like us to please talk in the future, Sam more too, about why she is able to make any of your financial decisions"

• "For context: Connie (biological mother) kicked me off her health insurance less than three months after Dad died, when I was 24 and could have stayed on her work one for two more years"

• My note: I'm pretty sure this Tweet from Annie is directed at her mother, Connie.
• "You birthed me and raised me, abused me and let others abuse me. Sure you know me well, and I know your bullshit just as well, thanks.
• Haven’t talked with you in over four years, and my PTSD is the best it’s ever been. Please thank your mom for me, for reprimanding you for neglecting me."
  • My note: I think Connie's mom was Marjori Mae “Peggy” Francis Gibstine, based on her obiturary.

• "Can you imagine how much more I’ll scare them now that I’m getting my tendon/nerve/ovaries cared for, not sucking dick for rent money while my Dad’s Trust was completely withheld, and learning it’s safe and allowed for me to share my story on my terms 🥰"

• "If the multiverse is real, I'd love to meet the version of me who did run away to the circus at 5 years old after telling her birth mother about wanting to end this life thing and being touched by older siblings, and said "mother" decided to instead protect her sons and demand to receive therapy and chores only from her female child."

• "My last in-person client came out to me as gay followed with “omg I haven’t ever said that out loud before,” as I flashbacked and did my best to stay in “work mode.” Will be more/less something when less ptsd-y"

• My note: Annie posted this as a Repost of a Tweet that I made.

• 

• "Things Grandma was right about..."dwarf tossing” with my baby body was wrong...{and} hot baths cure most things"

• ✨Stop normalizing men being allowed input into pregnancy challenge✨
• With Love,
  Someone With An Absive Sibling (She Went No Contact With) Who Wanted Her To Be A Surrogate

• "Three years ago I came home to my front door kicked open, and my two most valuable items left untouched. My uke, my hoodie from Goodwill, and my two vibrators from Target were stolen."
• "Amazing how strongly the body remembers emotional anniversaries."

• 3:24 -- "Getting myself off a high dose of 10 years on an anti-depressant I didn't exactly get myself onto"
• 7:56 -- "I was 5 years old the first time I expressed a desire to end my life. I didn't know the word 'suicide' at the time. I knew about death and knew I could be the one to do it. I sat my mother down on my bed to tell her, and it must have scared and/or strengthened the science-worshipping atheism right into her. I didn't know the word for 'sex' either, but I told her why I was climbing into her bed or the bathtub at 2 a.m. for safety. She chose to protect her sons and to bully me, unless I had a friend over, who she would bully and shit-talk them and their parents when they left. So if you're also from, or lived in, St. Louis, I've definitely heard the woman who birthed me say mean things about you. I attempted - this is true - to get her to write her own book instead of passive-aggressively shaming me for pursuing my genuine interests. Unfortunately it didn't work. I've explored labels of, and treatments for, depression, anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, the regular plain post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, ADHD, all the eating disorders, irritible bowel syndrome, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), achilles and posterior tibiopathy, tibial nerve pain, and most recently was diagnosed with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS). I'm just essentially out here out here collecting acronyms, I suppose."
• 11:34 -- "My dad sadly died in 2018 of a heart attack and the woman who birthed me helped to withhold his money, intended for me, from me because apparently disregarding his wishes while he was alive wasn't enough."
• 12:55 -- {Annie has/had} "PTSD from every form of abuse, and then being too physically ill to work any normal job while dad's money was withheld from me, and so starting adult work for survival. Apparently I needed the backbone, and the wakeup call, of clients genuinely caring about my safety more than my living relatives. Sex work was not the will of my dad's word, for his only daughter, and still he would have been proud of me staying alive. This show is for my dad Jerry."
• 20:20 -- "Did you know that serotonin was first discovered in the gut not the brain? Baby me projectile-vomiting out of my crib would have been very comforted to know this. Well, obviously, not as a baby I wouldn't have understood."
• 21:44 -- "I first got into meditating in college. And I had some sort of 'come to Moses moment' one time, running late to a...meeting for a group meditation, and realizing how silly and hilarious it was for me to be rushing to sit still and silent on time. Unravelling the shame conditioning that it would mean I was a bad person, and not simply someonee who was late and came in and sat down quietly. If anything, it would be more disrespectful to the meditation group for me to enter the room all out of breath from running and frazzled from rushing."
• 24:54 -- "Seems like now is the time for me to talk about the sex work...technically my first experience was over video chat at the end of 2019, and then more officially I started virtual and in-person work in 2020. I was very physically ill and out of options, and having daily PTSD flashbacks consumed by my own sexual trauma, self-therapizing already. I attempted an Etsy shop and Patreon and more, and I still couldn't fully monetize my own projects. And I was too sick for any standing jobs. I was also too consumed by flashbacks to work regular hours at an online job. I was scrambling for options. Whatever odd jobs I had capacity for didn't even pay enough, and I needed money even more to get support for all my body {that had} shut down."
• 32:04 -- "When I was little, we got a new family car, and I had a tantrum like I was mourning the death of a loved one. A perfect faded royal blue van, traded out for a gold-ish Suburban. I may or may not have kicked the new car when it came in. I'm definitely better with change now, though I still have that part of me."
• 54:44 -- "My high school senior superlative was 'least likely to not say something'."
• 59:11 -- "To me it seems like the less connection someone has with their feelings, the more likely they are to cause harm rather than account for their thoughts and feelings...I spent a lot of energy attempting to express this to people I love forever, yes, despite all of it, and needed to start no contact with in 2020. I grew up in a house where everyone besides my dad would have rolled their eyes about that, and psychology was referred to as a pseudo-science. So yes, feelings of all kind were belittled. Little me had no idea that asking the woman who birthed me about her obvious sadness would be received so sadly. Certain things from my childhood are funnier with time, and certain are more sad. I don't fully know how to process it all."

• same as [AA24f] above
• 

• "Yeah I was super sick...and houseless...and sucking "parts" for...{money?}...and so now -- well, first of all, 'cause that was some outrageously good fuckery (abuse), and -- now I'm un-fuck-with-able!"

• 

• "Reposting for you to read before you reach out about OpenAI and ChatGPT.
  
  I’m just at the light at the end of tunnel of four years of being sick and broke and shadowbanned. I’d do it again to go no contact and feel physically and emotionally safe for the first time in my life.
  
  Yes business life and personal life and different, and also “how you do anything is how you do everything.” Please vote with your dollars, your attention, and your truth.
  
  #truthcomesouteventually #trueshit #allhumansarehuman"

• Here, Annie provides a set of screen captures (in the form of an Instagram story called "Hi censorship") showing instances she's identified as shadowbanning / unusual activity surrounding various posts she's made on social media. 

• "Victim mentality or survivor mentality? Did that happen “to you” or “for you”? (Note to watch out for spiritual bypassing and erasure of real experiences in your ~reflecting~)
  
  I survived Achilles and posterior tibial tendinopathy. I survived posterior tibial nerve pain that radiated to my ankle, knee, and pelvis. I survived PCOS and those particular ovarian cysts that got intense enough to warrant scans. I survived IBS and every single disordered eating game.
  
  I survived listening to my body fall apart as it told me the stories I had not yet been ready to hear the full depths of. I survived 18 months of nearly all-day PTSD flashbacks of childhood assaults.
  
  I survived my Dad’s will being withheld for over a year, and money he left me being withheld by millionaires relatives. I survived the grief of my decision to go no-contact with said relatives.
  
  I survived being shadowbanned across multiple accounts, while attempting to make a livable income online. I survived an in-person profession that was a plan Z last resort, and learned and was therapized by it.
  
  I survived every form of ab*sive behavior. I survived relatives telling and showing me I was “crazy” for pointing out said ab*se.
  
  I survived grieving my Dad and somehow got even closer with him, and yes forever grieving.
  
  I survived myself.
  
  #everyoneisgoingthroughsomething #allhumansarehuman #thehumannie #trueshit #truthcomesouteventually"

• 

  • The image:
    • "Dec 19, 2019
      
      Hello Internet. I've gotten myself into a very difficult position, as I've been unable to work as much as I've needed due to my mental health and physical health. I put myself in a financially risky position to pursue my one woman show and podcast, and then had unexpected costs with health and technical difficulties. I'm dealing with the consequences of my own decisions and I need help. My Venmo is @Annie-Altman if you're able.
      
      In this calendar year I observed the one year anniversary of my dad's death, discussed another mental health label to add to my collection, got diagnosed with PCOS (scans to rule out adrenal tumors, pelvic ultrasounds, blood tests), had IBS flare up again, had a long-term achilles injury flare up the longest I've experienced it, had almost all of my personal accounts have attempted or successful logins, had people logging on my wifi and other wifi issues (4 new modems, had excessive cell phone service issues, the pity-party list continues. I'm beyond my capacity of what I can handle alone. I -"
  • Annie's post:
    • "#fbf to a silly and sad Annie, “putting herself in a position” to save other people who were harming her.
      
      I’ve since learned part of personal accountability can be noticing my own savior complex, and allowing someone else to experience the consequences of their decisions.
      
      Third sentence there ought to have read 'My millionaire relatives are refusing to give me help, and are withholding money from my dead Dad that I quit a job because of, while sick and in paperwork process to receive what he left in my name.'"

• 

• "Almost all of my social media accounts have been/are shadowbanned, and this is an unfortunate truth for many. OpenAI would be tagged here also if they had a account.
  
  It started for me before any swork {sex work} started. I don't mean that this account would be at 100K or some set number. I do mean it makes no sense to be unable to pass 1K, with over 100 podcasts and other creations, and consistent posting.
  
  Old videos wil {sic} get reduced to something like 2 views on @instagram and @youtube , podcast rating get frequently deleted on @apple @applepodcasts , people will get automatically unfollowed, posts will be restricted in who sees them, and more.
  
  It's been really demoralizing on a lot of levels, which is part of the purpose of shadowbanning. The other purpose of shadowbanning is direct repression of ways I can support myself with my art, like my @etsy and @patreon , or podcast ads for @anchor.fm ."

• "4. All of the events and wrongful acts giving rise to Plaintiff’s claims herein occurred at the parties’ family home located at 22 Arundel Place, Clayton, Missouri 63105 (the “Family Home”) between the approximate years of 1997 through 2006."
• "In approximately 1997, Plaintiff, Ann Altman, was three years old and residing in the Family Home with Defendant, Sam Altman. 6. Beginning at or about that time, Defendant, Sam Altman, forced Plaintiff to touch his penis and perform oral penetration on him. Sam Altman was twelve years old at the time."
• "7. From approximately 1997 to 1999, when Plaintiff, Ann Altman, was between the ages of three to five years old, the foregoing conduct occurred several times per week where Defendant, Sam Altman, forced Plaintiff to touch his penis and perform oral penetration on him. 8. During the aforementioned period of time, Defendant Sam Altman’s acts of sexual abuse progressed to digital penetration of Plaintiff’s vagina and anus, and at times he would also forcibly perform oral sex on Plaintiff."
• "9. At all times relevant herein, Defendant, Sam Altman, groomed and manipulated Plaintiff, Ann Altman, into believing the aforementioned sexual acts were her idea, despite the fact she was under the age of five years old when the sexual abuse began and Defendant was nearly a teenager."
• "10. Beginning in approximately 1999 or 2000, Defendant, Sam Altman, began to penetrate Plaintiff, Ann Altman, with his penis both vaginally and anally."
• "11. The foregoing level of childhood sexual abuse continued for a period of approximately eight or nine years until Plaintiff was eleven or twelve years old wherein Defendant, Sam Altman, regularly continued to commit numerous acts of rape, sexual assault, sexual abuse, molestation, sodomy, and battery upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
• "12. The last acts of rape committed by Defendant, Sam Altman, against Plaintiff, Ann Altman, occurred when Defendant, Sam Altman, was an adult and Plaintiff, Ann Altman, was a minor."
• "COUNT I Sexual Assault"
• "19. At no time did Plaintiff, Ann Altman, consent to the aforementioned sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual penetration, sodomy, and/or sexual contact by Defendant, Sam Altman, nor did Plaintiff maintain the capacity to consent due to her minor status."
• "20. As a direct and proximate result of the aforementioned acts, Defendant, Sam Altman, created in Plaintiff’s mind, a well-founded fear of imminent peril, caused by Defendant Sam Altman’s ability to commit an unwanted and forceful sexual assault and battery, and Defendant, Sam Altman, by committing the aforementioned acts, thereby committed a sexual assault upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
• "21. For the approximate years of 1997 through 2006, at the times that Defendant, Sam Altman, sexually assaulted Plaintiff, Defendant, Sam Altman, intended to commit an unlawful and outrageous touching upon the person of Plaintiff, Ann Altman, without any lawful justification."
• "22. Defendant Sam Altman’s actions amounted to willful and wanton misconduct and/or a reckless disregard for the health and safety of Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
• "23. As a direct and proximate result of the foregoing acts of sexual assault upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman, by Defendant, Sam Altman, Plaintiff has suffered great bodily injury, including but not limited to, physical injuries associated with the harms committed; she has also experienced PTSD, severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression, which is expected to continue into the future; she has experienced embarrassment and humiliation; Plaintiff has incurred numerous medical bills and other health-related bills as a result of medical and mental health treatment for her injuries, and is expected to incur the same in the future; she has lost wages and benefits she would have otherwise received, but for the sexual assault by Defendant; and may suffer such loss of wages and benefits in the future; she has suffered a loss of enjoyment of a normal life as a consequence of her emotional injuries and she has lost her ability to engage in the same kinds of normal activities, all to her damage."
• "WHEREFORE, Plaintiff, Ann Altman, requests that judgment be entered on her behalf against Defendant, Samuel Altman, for actual damages in a sum in excess of Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars ($75,000.00), for punitive damages, and for costs of suit."
• "COUNT II Sexual Battery"
• "19. For the approximate years of 1997 through 2006, Defendant, Sam Altman, repeatedly and continually sexually assaulted, sexually penetrated, sexually abused, raped, sodomized, and battered Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
• "20. At no time did Plaintiff, Ann Altman, consent to the aforementioned sexual assault, sexual abuse, sexual penetration, sodomy, sexual contact, and/or battery by Defendant, Sam Altman, nor did Plaintiff maintain the capacity to consent due to her minor status."
• "21. At the time Defendant, Sam Altman, committed the aforementioned acts, he intended to commit an unlawful and outrageous touching upon the person of Plaintiff, Ann Altman, without any lawful justification."
• "22. As a direct and proximate result of the aforementioned acts, Defendant, Sam Altman, committed an unlawful and outrageous touching upon the person of Plaintiff, Ann Altman, without any lawful justification or consent, thereby committing a battery upon her."
• "23. Defendant Sam Altman’s actions amounted to willful and wanton misconduct and/or a reckless disregard for the health and safety of Plaintiff, Ann Altman."
• "24. As a direct and proximate result of the foregoing acts of sexual battery upon Plaintiff, Ann Altman, by Defendant, Sam Altman, Plaintiff has suffered great bodily injury, including but not limited to, physical injuries associated with the harms committed; she has also experienced PTSD, severe emotional distress, mental anguish, and depression, which is expected to continue into the future; she has experienced embarrassment and humiliation; Plaintiff has incurred numerous medical bills and other health-related bills as a result of medical and mental health treatment for her injuries, and is expected to incur the same in the future; she has lost wages and benefits she would have otherwise received, but for the sexual assault by Defendant; and may suffer such loss of wages and benefits in the future; she has suffered a loss of enjoyment of a normal life as a consequence of her emotional injuries and she has lost her ability to engage in the same kinds of normal activities, all to her damage."
• "WHEREFORE, Plaintiff, Ann Altman, requests that judgment be entered on her behalf against Defendant, Samuel Altman, for actual damages in a sum in excess of Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars ($75,000.00), for punitive damages, and for costs of suit."

• "My sister has filed a lawsuit against me. Here is a statement from my mom, brothers, and me:"
  • "Our family loves Annie and is very concerned about her well-being. Caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult. We know many families facing similar struggles understand this well."
  • "Over the years, we've tried in many ways to support Annie and help her find stability, following professional advice on how to be supportive without enabling harmful behaviors. To give a sense of our efforts, we have given her monthly financial support, directly paid her bills, covered her rent, helped her find employment opportunities, attempted to get her medical help, and have offered to buy her a house through a trust (so that she would have a secure place to live, but not be able to sell it immediately). Via our late father's estate, Annie receives monthly support, which we expect to continue for the rest of her life."
  • "Despite this, Annie continues to demand more money from us. In this vein, Annie has made deeply hurtful and entirely untrue claims about our family, and especially Sam. We've chosen not to repsond publicly, out of respect for her privacy and our own. However, she has now taken legal action against Sam, and we feel we have no choice but to address this."
  • "Over the years, she has accused members of our family of improperly withholding our father's 401k funds, hacking her wifi, and "shadowbanning" her from various websites including ChatGPT, Twitter, and more. The worst allegation she has made is that she was sexually abused by Sam as a child (she has also claimed instances of sexual abuse from others). Her claims have evolved drastically over time. Newly for this lawsuit, they now include allegations of incidents where Sam was over 18."
  • "All of these claims are utterly untrue. This situation causes immense pain to our entire family. It is especially gut-wrenching when she refuses conventional treatment and lashes out at family members who are genuinely trying to help."
  • "We ask for understanding and compassion from everyone as we continue to support Annie in the best way we can. We sincerely hope she finds the stability and peace she's been searching for."
  • "-Connie, Sam, Max, and Jack"

• Beginning around 12:14:
  • Tucker Carlson: "But did your son {Suchir Balaji} ever talk to you about Sam Altman? Did he ever say anything about Sam Altman?"
  • Poornima Ramarao {Suchir Balaji's mother}: "Not to me, but to his friends, a lot. When he was in Catalina Islands {from November 16, 2024 to November 22, 2024 (Suchir died November 22, 2024)}, he {Suchir Balaji} spoke a lot against him {Sam Altman}. He literally didn't like him. In fact, I've seen his chat logs, saying that he wanted to work with Annie Altman in her nonprofit work."
  • Tucker Carlson: "And that would be Sam's sister, who has accused him of sexual abuse?"
  • Poornima Ramarao: "Yes."
  • Tucker Carlson: "Hmm. Really? He wrote that down?"
  • Poornima Ramarao: "Yes. So, he knew what personality Sam Altman had, and his main concerns were the lies...{the} lies that Sam Altman {told}...he was lying a lot, and my son is very ethical, and he couldn't stand it."

• "Patek Philippe’s first commercial manufacturing perpetual calendar was the reference 1526. This is the ultimate permanent calendar for most enthusiasts, including the collectors. Over the years, numerous designers have produced alternate calendar displays. However, nothing has come anywhere close to the 1526’s clear, readable, and visually beautiful dial."
• "The Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar case is made of pure 18k yellow gold and is 34mm in diameter by 11.5mm in thickness. The acrylic crystal is spherical while the back of the casing snaps shut...The casing body is brush polished, while the snapback is finished. The lugs have a modest downward arch—besides, the brown leather strap with Patek Philippe clasp in 18k gold. The calendar info is also displayed on the dial in an ideal manner."
• "The dial has a lovely, homogeneous eggshell-colored patina that complements the rose gold color of the casing wonderfully. The logo and scales are solid enamel and are as polished as a refined connoisseur could anticipate. The gold mark beneath the top left lug is clear, and the signature on the right ring is profound and prominent, indicating that the case is strong and resistant to scratch."
• "In addition, the Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar dial is 100 percent genuine and untouched. It is matte silver in color with attached golden Arabic numerals and hour indicator dots and a written minutes scale around the outside. The golden hands are also distinctive and are leaf style, commonly known as Feuille hands in Patek jargon. The supplemental second’s hand is a tiny version of the golden leaf style. The blued hand along the outside chapter enclosing the moonphase window, whereas the day and month are presented under the 12 o’clock position, indicates the date. The original moonphase disc is blue with gold stars as well as a moon."
• "During the model’s history, just 165 pieces with references to 1526 perpetual calendars were produced...Patek Philippe 1526s are incredibly uncommon."

• "If you’re wondering what watch Sam Altman wears, at least one of his choices appears to be a Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1."
• "In the comparison below, the watch was flipped to put the crown on the right side. From there, you can see the long tourbillon bridge and main dial location seem to match the layout of the Greubel Forsey.
• "Let’s look at the overall layout side-by-side. The image below includes a Greubel Forsey image with a similar red gold/silver dial configuration."

  • 

• The watch may stick out prominently from Mr. Altman’s sleeve, but that doesn’t make it any easier to identify from the video. However, the thickness, short lugs, and bar across the lower left are definitely leaning towards the Invention Piece 1."
• "Not to mention, pieces like this carry retail prices so far from obtainability that the average watch collector finds them to be fun to gawk at and read about, but that’s about it – the way car people might drool over images of the Ferrari Daytona SP3 or Lamborghini Sian (although Greubel Forsey is more along the lines of a Pininfarina Battista or Pagani Utopia)."
• "The price is not the only limitation in acquiring an Invention Piece 1… there were only 33 total watches available in the entire world."
• "If you’re going to spend that much on a timepiece, you probably want people to see it. The Invention Piece 1 is the perfect wingman in that regard. Boasting a diameter of 43.5mm and standing tall at almost 17mm in thickness...At about 13 seconds into the video… wait a minute, is that Sam Altman doing a classic watch geek move of looking down at his wrist to make sure his watch is exposed?"
• "The Invention Piece 1 is available in 18K white gold, 5N red gold, or platinum. 11 pieces were produced in each metal type."
• I found the date of publication and the last modified date using (once again) Inspect Element:

• "To Sam Altman's many titles — ousted-then-returned OpenAI CEO, former Y Combinator president, universal basic income enthusiast, part-time Hawaii resident — we must add one more: Watch guy."
• "Altman owns a watch so rare that only 33 were ever made, according to luxury watch website KeepTheTime. After spotting Altman wearing a chunky gold watch at a Wired event in 2018, BI asked the site for assistance identifying the distinctive timepiece. (BI, which went way too hard, also asked for help from a subreddit for watch enthusiasts, a longtime watch salesperson at Tiffany's San Francisco location, watch experts at several high-end auction houses, and people lurking in the Discord of the open-source intelligence site Bellingcat.)"
• "The watch, the Greubel Forsey Invention Piece 1 in red gold, was priced at 520,000 Swiss Francs when it was released in 2008, a spokesperson for Greubel Forsey confirmed. At the exchange rate of the time, that works out to roughly $480,000."
• "Altman has also flaunted his more modest Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar 1526, one of which sold at Christie's for $106,250 in 2017."
• "Altman posted a photo of the timepiece on the r/watches subreddit in May 2018, with a ❤️ emoji, and was spotted wearing the watch at a congressional hearing this year where he testified to the need for AI regulation."
• "Altman's pricey watch collection is just one part of his ultra-luxurious lifestyle. Business Insider previously reported that he went on an 18-month, $85 million real estate shopping spree in recent years. He was spotted driving a red McLaren F1 around northern California this month. A similar car was expected to sell for up to $15 million at auction in 2015. Altman also reportedly owns a Lexus LFA racing car, one of which recently sold for $1.1 million at auction."