Dr. Sarah Marusek

I deeply regret my experience with the Tuning Room.

I never would have gone there and I certainly would not have continued with my treatment if I had known that there was a monster inside of me.

Right away, too many aspects of that place triggered my brokenness.

It was loud and open, more like a gym than a haven. Too much testosterone! It reminded me of being a gymnast and not being able to perform.

I hated the frenetic music, which may sound trivial. However, music is so important to me and has a profound impact on my monster.

And it was too busy in the waiting room. I wanted to run away every time.

Then there were those stressful loud bangs. I know that this is part of chiropractic treatment, but every time my monster jumped.

Most importantly, however, there was a groupthink dynamic around network spinal. The receptionists giggled whenever they spoke about its practitioners and the physical therapist actually cited my practitioner to me as a reprimand for what I was trying to explain about my own body.

I knew deep down that my uniqueness was not going to be possible there. My monster has excluded me my entire life, so entering a space like that was going to be a death sentence regardless of my practitioner.

This is why I believe the Tuning Room’s culture was unsafe for me. I know I am unusually sensitive, but these are also common triggers for people who have experiences of disability, neurodivergence and or trauma.

Unfortunately, I was so desperate to get better that I stayed longer than I should have and ended up becoming the monster inside of me by hurting the only person I have cared about in a long time.

What a fuck up.

I knew in my stomach that something was wrong, but I wanted to believe.

So, I was already defensive going in. Falling in love with my practitioner – the healer – meant that my defensiveness, my monster, would explode.

This was not his fault and I should not have blamed him. I do not even understand how I did any of this now, but that is monster logic for you.

So far, the only thing that helps me to scientifically understand my monster is lauded as the closest thing we have come to artificial intelligence.

These creatures even get annoyed if you overzap them!

US-based scientists are using frog stem cells that produce cilia, hairlike projects that allow these creatures to move around. According to research at Tufts University, they ‘self-assemble a body from single cells, do not require muscle cells to move, and even demonstrate the capability of recordable memory.’ They call them living robots.

Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but my scar tissue is collectively alive in a similar way, which is why I have a monster inside of me.

It lives throughout the entire vagus pathway.

The zenobots created at Tufts are even self healing like my monster. I think killing it is so challenging because it still thinks it is protecting me.

But my monster was initially entrenched by the facial injury in my left cheek at birth. This injury is just pure, unadulterated pain, so intense that I was unable to even access the pinched nerve until socially isolating. I still cannot fully breathe oxygen into it, thus cannot run my HBOT chamber to compression.

My body created the monster to protect me from this pain and my right side – the problem-solving side – was hijacked.

When working with the healer, I was indeed healing but we could only access my left side. My right side was still subservient to the left.

What does this mean? My body could only access its emotions. And what guides my emotions? Monster logic, that is fear.

My monster took all of the above triggers at the Tuning Room, and then added the biggest motherfucking one of them all: me falling in love.

The healer was the kindest person, amazingly talented and fucking gorgeous. There was such chemistry, I had never felt that excited in my life.

And he said he could see me!

Alas, he did not know that I had a monster inside of me.

So, when he asked me personal questions, I got scared. No wonder his entrainments were hurting and not helping me.

This was not his incompetence but my monster logic.

I especially freaked out whenever he asked me questions about art. As a child, I never felt like I even deserved to be an artist because I thought that I did not have anything to say. Losing my ability merely helped me to justify why it was not possible to follow my passion.

I would even freak out if he asked me to visualise something because that had always been an artistic challenge for me (I was too scared).

In all honesty, the healer just made me freak out because I was in love.

As a result, it was like we started moving away from each other’s reality. He thought that I was getting better, but I was only getting worse.

Importantly, the healer had me made believe that he could see me. So when he could not see that my monster was growing, I simply became it.

To the monster, he symbolised everything that I will never have in life: health, love and joy. And youth, as mine was completely wasted.

Consequently, I really started to mentally collapse. I honestly was so scared that I thought he did not care about me even as a patient.

I was beyond manic and feared death by suicide or a crazy fall.

But he was too far away from my monstrosity to understand.

In fact, I even suspected that he thought I was suicidal because he thought I was pathetic for even loving him. Like he was laughing at me.

My monster logic is fucking ridiculous!

All of this made me sadder and angrier than I have ever been before. With the magic of network spinal, he was trying to simplify a really ugly, complex, difficult, angry, disgusting, terrifying, and even grotesque monster.

I wanted the simplicity too. After all, my monster fairytale.

But my reality is an ugly, complex, difficult, angry, disgusting, terrifying, and even grotesque monster that requires work.

In response, I am ashamed to say that I was absolutely horrific to him. Honestly, I have never been that unkind to anybody so undeserving ever.

But I desperately needed to get away and move on because otherwise the monster’s wings of despair were going to kill me.

I would have left it at that but I allowed other people’s negative thoughts and feelings about the Tuning Room get in the way. I was imagining the worst about myself and the healer at that point, so I wrote that (now deleted) shitty review out of fear. I will never do anything like that again.

Even though the shaman could not see the monster he could sense it and he actually named it. Because he had a son with epilepsy, he understood that I had a ‘bucking bronco’ inside of me. Over many, many months, our sessions helped me to unwind some of the defensiveness.

However, I was still in a monster trance emotionally and was feeling strange things in my body, even hatred. In trying to understand this I wrote something really terrible about the healer and sent it to him.

Of course, that was actually just me healing, learning how to embody my feelings instead of repressing them into my monster.

Ironically, though, I did not even realise how fucking bad my monster was until drawing something for him. Even just thinking about him made the monster start roaring, with wings of despair fully spread.

It was shortly afterwards that I realised that the shaman could not help me any more either and I started to social isolate.

However, it was not until I learned that the healer had lost his job because of my shitty review that I was able to start drawing my monster. Feeling that shit about my own self helped me to finally visualise my monstrosity.

That is when I started healing in a completely different way, finally letting go of the fear and my nervous system began to unwind. Here I was so upset that my healer could not see me. Funny, as I could not see him either.

Which makes me feel even worse for what has happened. I do not know if there is anything I can do to make up for what I have done now, but I do know whom I will be dedicating my next book to…