I am still working on this workshop. I have not given up on it. The information is all in my head so it is coming soon! I am starting out by writing all the texts, at least for the first module. So far, I have ‘mercury throughout history’ and ‘what being poisoned looks and feels like.’ While writing this last one I touched on the ‘mercury archetypes’ we have come up with in our community. I think I first heard about the ‘lone wolf’ archetype from Sandra Gentry. Thank you Sandra! The ‘lone wolf’ is the archetype for the mercury toxic male.
I mention him in The Detox Manual. He is the 38 year-old guy who is lives in his mother’s basement, can’t hold down a job even though he has and advanced degree, has difficulties forming relationships, and spends most of his time playing video games or researching conspiracy theories or his medical symptoms. I’m sure this rings a bell! There are a whole lot of these guys out there! I met one of them who fit this description to a T a few years back. I think he had a degree as an engineer. His father had given up on trying ‘tough love’ and being mad at him and he dwelt in the basement without paying rent. He had a job as a caretaker at a school and just barely held on to that. He was convinced that his problems were because he had been poisoned by fluoride and knew an awful lot about fluoride. I, of course thought his problem was mercury. I discussed this with Andy who commented that heavy metal poisoning is so complicated and confusing that even technically trained people can get off track.
Like all generalizations, these archetypes are not 100%. Some of the male and female ones will get mixed up a bit, too.
To illustrate the mercury archetype in women, I often think of my aunt, a kind and lovely person. She had a terrific ‘familial tremor’ (as did my father) and was extremely ‘high strung.’ You might also describe that as extremely anxious. I remember her as living in a million-dollar house in DC with hardly any heat and full of broken furniture. She was obsessed with some extremely important intellectual project which she was going to be able to bequeath to us kids. This involved many notebooks and newspaper clippings. She had volunteered out of the goodness of her heart for a decades-long long medical study that involved eating no fat and she was consequently rail thin. She opened her house to a destitute and rather ominous Russian landscaper who caused no end of trouble to everyone. I will add that she lived to be in her nineties!
I think these two real people illustrate what I am talking about quite well. This discussion has caused me to remember something Andy told me about autism. There is a theory that mercury affects boys more than girls. That estrogen is somehow protective, that the girl’s blood brain barrier is thicker, or something like that. Andy told me that mercury causes symptoms in boys which tend towards autism. Girls are affected just as just as much, he said, it just looks different. Later I read something, somewhere that felt instinctively true. Girls, I read, don’t get autism as much. Instead, they get kind of overly excited, and overly brilliant. The writer used the word “sparkly.” This will get missed because it is not unattractive in a little girl.
I hope you have enjoyed this talk. Please like and share and all those good things.