Running on Aluminum

Jonice Webb’s Running on Empty and the Injury It Cannot Name

Author’s note: This essay works in two registers. The first takes Jonice Webb’s Running on Empty seriously on its own terms, because the symptom profile she describes is real, and the book helps some readers. The second examines what the book cannot see. Both registers are necessary. The book is doing something. Understanding what it is doing requires the second reading.

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Simon skydived on weekends because free fall was the only thing that made him feel anything. He was thirty-eight, handsome and fit, a successful stock analyst with a Porsche and a condo in Boston. He restored old cars in his spare time and raced them. He was, by every external measure, a man whose life had gone right. On the drive home from every jump the numbness and emptiness would return, and he would wish the parachute had not opened. He would imagine himself dead, and what a relief that would be. He had been plagued with thoughts like this for years. He came to Jonice Webb’s office wanting to find out what was wrong with him.

Webb attributes what she finds in Simon to what she calls Childhood Emotional Neglect. His wealthy parents traveled often. His disabled sister absorbed most of the parental attention that remained. Simon grew up running free in the woods behind a large house, alone and untaught in the language of emotion. Webb calls this an emotional vacuum. Her framework is clear and she applies it consistently across the ten symptoms she catalogs in the second half of her book.¹ Every emotionally neglected adult, she argues, carries some combination of these ten. Simon carried most of them.

Webb sees the profile with real clarity. Her ten-symptom catalog describes something specific and measurable, and every clinician who has worked with adults who fit this presentation will recognize what she is describing. What she cannot see, from inside her paradigm, is that the profile she has identified is a neurological injury profile. The symptoms are what happens when the interoceptive network, the vagal afferent system, the prefrontal executive circuitry, and the reward pathways have been damaged. Webb attributes the damage to parental attunement failure. That attribution is where her paradigm produces its error, and where the book begins doing work that has nothing to do with helping her readers.

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Alexithymia

Webb calls alexithymia the common denominator of emotional neglect. She writes that it is present to some degree in every emotionally neglected adult. Her extreme example is Cal: tall, thin, almost emaciated, mid-fifties, engineering degree, working as an appliance repairman, drinking beer alone at night. Cal had planned to kill himself at the end of the Millennium. In therapy he could not access any emotion except anger, which he did not recognize as anger. About a year before coming to treatment he had dug out and destroyed every family photograph he owned, including images of himself as a child. He could not explain why he had done this. He offered no curiosity about the act.

Alexithymia is not a mystery condition. It is the clinical name for what happens when the neural circuits that generate emotional awareness have been damaged or have failed to develop. The insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the nerves that carry signals from gut, heart, and viscera to the brain are the systems that produce felt emotion. When they are damaged, the person experiences what Cal experienced. Feelings do not arise as identifiable states. They pool as undifferentiated pressure and eventually surface as irritation or anger, the coarsest signals the system can still generate.

Aluminum has a documented affinity for exactly these regions. Christopher Exley’s work on aluminum accumulation in the human brain shows preferential deposition in cortical tissue. Gherardi and Crépeaux have documented aluminum biopersistence at injection sites and translocation to distant tissue including the brain.⁸ ⁹ What the schedule delivers to a developing infant is aluminum in a form the body cannot readily clear, at doses and frequencies unprecedented in human history, during the exact developmental window when the interoceptive network is being built. The circuits that would later generate Cal’s ability to name what he felt were being disrupted while they were being formed.

Webb’s therapeutic strategy for Cal is essentially neurological rehabilitation, though she does not describe it that way. Patient, repeated, gentle attention to the body’s signals until the person can name what is there. Two years of therapy in Simon’s case. Longer in Cal’s. What Webb is doing is helping her patients rebuild interoceptive function, or route around the damage where rebuilding is not possible. The strategy works because the nervous system retains some plasticity even after significant injury. Webb sees the recovery and attributes it to her framework. She does not see that the recovery is happening at the tissue level, that she is repairing what her patients came in with, that the thing she is repairing was injured by something she does not name.

Cal, after two years of sobriety and softening, was diagnosed with lung cancer that traveled to his brain. He died within nine months. Webb closes his story with the observation that “the scars of Emotional Neglect do not have to be permanent.”² The word aluminum does not appear in the chapter. The word vaccine does not appear in the book.

Feelings of Emptiness

Webb describes emptiness as a physical sensation. Some people experience it as an empty space in their belly or chest. Others as emotional numbness. A generic feeling of discomfort, a lack of being filled up. Simon experienced it as the reason he needed to jump out of planes. The shot of adrenaline worked miracles, but only briefly. On the drive home, the numbness would return, and he would wish the parachute had failed.

This is vagal-visceral disconnection. The vagus nerve is the primary channel through which the body’s viscera communicate with the brain. Roughly eighty percent of the vagus nerve’s fibers carry signals up from the body to the brain rather than down from the brain to the body. What we experience as felt emotional groundedness, or as the sense of being present in one’s own body, is largely generated by these signals reaching the insular cortex and being integrated into conscious experience. When vagal function is compromised, or when the enteric nervous system that generates the signals is damaged, the felt sense of presence in the body diminishes. What arrives at the insula is thin. The person experiences this as emptiness, as a felt void in the chest or belly.

The enteric nervous system is not incidental here. The gut houses a substantial proportion of the neural tissue outside the brain and generates most of the body’s serotonin. Its function depends on the microbial ecology it hosts. The infant gut is colonized in the first two years of life, and the composition of that ecology sets the terms for lifelong function. A cascade of routine early interventions damages this ecology systematically. Antibiotics get prescribed for conditions the establishment attributes to alleged viral or bacterial causes. Adjuvants provoke ongoing inflammatory response in the gut lining. Formula feeding replaces the microbial transfer of breastfeeding. Cesarean delivery bypasses the vaginal microbial handoff. Each intervention removes an input the developing enteric nervous system needed and adds an insult it was never designed to handle. The child grows up with a gut that cannot generate the felt sense of groundedness her grandparents took for granted.

Simon jumping out of planes is the behavioral signature of a nervous system reaching for enough signal to feel anything at all. Extreme sport, adrenaline, sexual novelty, chemical stimulation: each produces a brief spike large enough to overcome the interoceptive deficit. The relief is real and temporary. The underlying void returns because the underlying damage remains. Webb sees Simon reach for these things and attributes the reaching to unfilled childhood emotional needs. She is describing the behavior accurately. She is misattributing its cause.

Poor Self-Discipline

Webb’s William came to therapy in his late thirties. MBA from a reputable business school. High IQ documented in his twenties. Unable to make himself do difficult, boring, or unpleasant tasks. Once he started something tedious, he would immediately think of something better to do and switch over. Missed deadlines. Frustrated bosses. His wife complained that he sometimes forgot to eat and rarely exercised. He called himself lazy and an underachiever.

Webb attributes this to insufficient structure in William’s childhood. His mother worked full-time and gave him lots of freedom and few chores. She did not, in Webb’s framing, install the internal discipline he needed for adult life. This is a plausible story if you already accept the paradigm. It is not the only story the evidence supports.

What Webb is describing is executive function impairment. The person cannot make himself start a difficult task. Once he starts, he cannot sustain attention, especially if the task is boring, and something more stimulating pulls him away before he finishes. He cannot hold the steps of a multi-part process together in working memory long enough to complete it. The neurological substrate is the prefrontal cortex and its dopamine-driven connections to the reward centers deeper in the brain. When these circuits function normally, the person generates the drive-to-completion signal that bridges intention and action. When they are impaired, the person experiences exactly what William experienced: the intention to do the task, and then the inability to translate that intention into sustained action.

This is the ADHD profile. Rates of ADHD diagnosis in American children have risen from a low single-digit prevalence in the 1970s to over eleven percent today. The schedule has expanded across the same period from a handful of injections to over fifty doses across sixteen distinct vaccines, verifiable against the CDC’s own Pink Book. Aluminum is a documented neurotoxin. Mercury, still present in some vaccines and until recently in most, is a documented neurotoxin. Both concentrate in developmental brain tissue. The prefrontal cortex is one of the latest-maturing regions of the human brain, still under construction well into the second decade of life, still vulnerable to insult during the entire window in which the schedule is administered. The correlation between schedule expansion and ADHD prevalence does not by itself prove causation, though the mechanism is documented and the timing is exact.

William’s mother is not the reason William cannot make himself complete his projects. William’s prefrontal circuitry cannot generate the sustained dopamine signal that would carry him through them. His mother did not install a discipline deficit through insufficient chore assignments. William was neurologically damaged before he was old enough to be assigned chores. The framework Webb offers him produces some relief because it names his struggle and gives him a story about it, and stories help. It does not repair the circuitry, because the circuitry is not what her framework can see.

The Fatal Flaw

Webb describes the Fatal Flaw as a deep-seated, buried belief that one is fundamentally different from other people, and that if others really knew who one was they would not like or love one. She writes that most emotionally neglected adults carry this feeling and try to hide it. She calls it “not a real flaw” but “a real feeling.”³ Her therapeutic work is to help patients see that the feeling is a distortion installed by neglectful parenting, and to dissolve it.

Consider the feeling from the other direction. What if the felt sense of being fundamentally different is accurate? What if the person actually is neurologically different, because early injury damaged the systems the rest of the population uses to feel connected as a default background state? The felt Flaw would then be an accurate perception. The person carries a real biological difference, and the felt sense correctly registers it. What Webb calls a distortion to be dissolved is a signal to be traced back to its physical source.

This reframing changes the therapeutic project. Webb’s approach asks the patient to accept the Flaw as illusion and dissolve it through work on childhood memories. The person does that work, often for years. In the best cases she feels better, because the therapeutic relationship provides some of the interoceptive attunement her damaged systems cannot generate for themselves. The Flaw itself does not disappear. Webb frames its persistence as the ongoing work of recovery. Another reading is that it persists because it was never illusion. The person really is different at the cellular level, and no amount of reframing changes the cellular state.

The industry that produced the injury has a strong interest in patients believing the Flaw is illusion, because a person who accepts that framing directs her lifetime of resources toward therapy and pharmaceuticals aimed at her supposed psychological distortion. A person who correctly identifies the Flaw as accurate perception of tissue damage begins asking different questions. What damaged the tissue. When. What is still damaging it. What was in the injections her mother was told were safe. These questions lead somewhere the industry cannot afford.

The remaining symptoms Webb catalogs follow the same pattern. Counter-dependence, unrealistic self-appraisal, no compassion for self, guilt and shame, self-directed anger, difficulty nurturing others: each is a downstream consequence of the same underlying injuries, and each admits a paradigm-compliant misattribution to parental attunement failure. Webb does not need to be wrong about any specific case for the framework to be doing paradigm work. She needs only to be looking in the wrong place.

The refrigerator returns

In 1943, Bruno Bettelheim published the paper that made him famous. By the mid-1950s he had developed what became known as the refrigerator mother theory of autism. Bad parenting, he argued, produced autistic children. Cold, distant, uncaring mothers who could not attune to their infants drove those infants into the withdrawn state Leo Kanner had described.⁵ The theory became gospel not only among psychiatrists but in the culture at large. It made intuitive sense. It converted a mysterious and heartbreaking condition into a simple problem of who was to blame. Fathers were off the hook. Mothers whose children developed typically knew it was because they were good. Mothers of children labeled autistic were told they had frozen them.

Ann Bauer’s son Andrew lost language at three and a half.⁴ It was 1991. Bauer and her husband, young and poor and struggling, were assessed by North Country social workers who decided the parents were the cause. They were told they could keep their son only if they submitted to frequent visits and attended parenting classes twice weekly. An older relative visited in spring, looked at four-year-old Andrew staring at his hand, and said: “You’ve ruined that beautiful child. You and your careless life. Ruined him. Aren’t you ashamed?” Bauer spent Andrew’s childhood under the refrigerator-mother framework, then under the pharmaceutical framework that replaced it. Andrew died at twenty-eight, decades of medication and forced treatment behind him. Writing later about the COVID response, Bauer noted: “The flaw was never in the remedy, but in those who failed to ‘behave’ and thereby brought the plague upon themselves.” She was writing about her son.

Bettelheim’s theory was demolished after his suicide in 1990. The Orthogenic School he ran turned out to have been a site of decades of abuse. Papers surfaced showing he had known his methods could not cure autism as early as 1964 and continued publishing anyway.⁶ ⁷ The refrigerator-mother framework was retired. The mothers who had been told they caused their children’s autism did not get their years back. They did not get their children back. The therapy industry that had grown up around the framework simply pivoted to the next explanation, which was brain chemistry, which produced its own decades of iatrogenic damage. Bettelheim’s paradigm was replaced. The mechanism that produced the paradigm was not. The pediatrician who administered the schedule was not in the story then. He is not in the story now.

The cloak

What Bettelheim did in the 1950s and 1960s, Webb is doing in the 2010s and 2020s. The vocabulary has softened from psychiatric authority to therapeutic invitation. The professional context has changed. The operation is identical. A pattern of injury shows up in the adult population. It gets attributed to the mother, in book after book. The industry that produced the injury never gets named. The daughters who read the book diagnose their mothers. The mothers, old or dead, cannot answer. The industry continues.

This is one patch in a larger pattern. Childhood Emotional Neglect is one relabeling. ADHD is another, offered to parents of children whose executive function has been damaged. Sensory Processing Disorder is another, offered to parents of children whose interoceptive and vestibular systems have been damaged. What the establishment calls autism spectrum disorder is another, offered to parents of children whose damage is severe enough to be visible at every developmental milestone. What is labeled Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, what is labeled Fibromyalgia, what is labeled Irritable Bowel Syndrome, what is labeled Long COVID, what is grouped under the establishment’s autoimmune category: each is a patch. Each names a real cluster of symptoms and offers an etiology that does not name the chemical substrate. The treatment industry that grows around these labels manages the symptoms without addressing the cause.

The patches together form a cloak. Under the cloak, the substrate of chemical injury is not visible. Every patch offers a different story about the source of suffering: bad parenting in Webb, alleged viruses in the pandemic literature, genetic predisposition in the diagnostic manuals, personal choices about diet where the industry finds them convenient to blame, brain chemistry when the injury has already left the person requiring lifelong medication. What the cloak does not show, because no patch is shaped this way, is the schedule of injections delivered to every infant, the aluminum accumulating in developmental tissue, the antibiotics wiping out the gut ecology in the first years of life, the pharmaceutical cascades initiated for symptoms the industry itself created.

The cloak works because each patch is real on its own terms. CEN and ADHD name real presentations, as does every other patch in the catalog. All of them describe real suffering in real people. Some readers who fit Webb’s profile were emotionally neglected by parents whose own capacity for attunement had been compromised in ways Webb does not investigate, and for those readers the framework fits without needing anything added. The cloak’s work does not depend on Webb being wrong about every case. It works whenever a case goes unexamined for the chemical substrate underneath, and no case is ever examined. What the cloak conceals is not the reality of the suffering. It is the shared upstream cause.

Webb does not know this is what her book does. Bettelheim probably did not know either, at least not at first. The authors of the patches are, for the most part, sincere practitioners who genuinely help some of the people who come to them. Their sincerity is what makes the cloak work. A visibly cynical industry would provoke suspicion. A patchwork of well-meaning frameworks, each offered by a warm and credentialed author who has helped real patients, is nearly impossible to see as a system, because from inside each patch the sincerity is real.

A brick does not know what building it holds up. Webb is holding up a building she cannot see from where she stands. The reader who closes her book and applies its framework to her own mother is one of the people the building was designed to contain. The building was not designed by Webb. It was designed by the interests that benefit from millions of adult women spending decades in therapy for symptoms of a chemical injury the therapists cannot name. Those interests do not need Webb to know. They need only her sincerity and her patient’s. The book on the nightstand between them does the rest.

Closing

A woman in her fifties reads Webb’s book on a Tuesday evening in her living room. She recognizes herself in Chapter 3. She recognizes herself in every one of the ten symptoms. She reads the case of Simon and understands why she has always felt she was on the outside looking in. Cal’s story tells her why she has never been able to name what she feels. In William she finds the reason she has spent her adult life calling herself lazy. She reads about the Fatal Flaw and puts the book down because she has felt this way for as long as she can remember and no one has ever named it before.

She thinks about her mother. Her mother is seventy-eight, living in an assisted care facility outside Milwaukee, or dead six years, buried in a plot her father chose. The woman does not have anywhere to bring the recognition Webb has given her. She cannot ask her mother why she failed to attune to her or name emotions in the house, why she left her daughter to figure out feelings alone. Some of the questions she wants to ask her mother are about things her mother did not do that her mother did not know she was supposed to do, because the book Webb wrote had not been written yet when her daughter was small.

The book does not contain the word aluminum or the word adjuvant. It does not name the pediatrician who administered the schedule in 1968 or 1972 or 1976, the man in the white coat whom the woman’s mother trusted, the man who is absent from her therapy appointments and from every conversation she will ever have about why she is the way she is. The book contains the mother. The book is about the mother. The woman closes it and reaches for her phone to book the next therapy session, where she will begin the work of forgiving her mother for injuries her mother did not cause.

How to Explain It to a Six-Year-Old

Once there was a little girl named Emma. When Emma was a baby, the doctor said she needed some special shots to keep her from getting sick. Emma’s mommy loved her very much, so she said yes. Emma got her first shots the day she was born. She got more shots when she was two months old, and four months old, and six months old, and twelve months old, and every year after that until she went to big school. Every time, Emma cried. Every time, her mommy held her tight and said the shots were to help her. The doctor said the shots were safe. Emma’s mommy believed the doctor, because doctors know about medicine.

Emma grew up. When she was a grown-up lady, she noticed that she felt bad inside. She felt lonely when other people were happy. She could not feel things the way other people did. She could not make herself do her work. She felt like something was wrong with her, deep down, but she did not know what. Emma went to a special helper called a therapist and paid a lot of money to talk about how bad she felt. The therapist gave her a book. The book said the reason Emma felt so bad was that Emma’s mommy had not been a very good mommy when Emma was little.

Emma read the book and cried and cried, because now she understood. She wrote to her mommy and told her all the ways she had been a bad mommy. Her mommy, who was very old now, cried too, because she had tried so hard. Nobody in the book talked about the shots. Nobody at the therapist’s office talked about the shots. The doctor who gave Emma the shots was not there anymore. And while Emma cried and her mommy cried, other little girls were getting the same shots Emma had gotten, because a doctor said the shots were safe, and their mommies said yes because they loved their babies too. And when those little girls grew up, they would read the same book Emma read. And they would cry too. And they would write to their mommies too. And nobody would talk about the shots.

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In Print

Thirteen of my books are now available as paperbacks, printed to order through Lulu and shipped worldwide. The Unvaccinated lays out the completely unvaccinated as a comparison group across twenty chapters and five appendices — as far as I know, the only book of its kind. Medicalized Motherhood follows a woman through 123 documented interventions from teenage pill to postpartum discharge. Drilling for Profit argues that cavities, gum disease, and crooked teeth are a dietary problem the dental profession treats surgically. What Your Vet Can’t Tell You applies the same critique to pets — food, vaccines, and a profession trained by the industries whose products cause the harm. Escape from Psychiatry documents the fabrication of the DSM, the collapse of the serotonin hypothesis, and the specific damage done by every major psychiatric drug class.

Two go to the paradigm underneath the whole shelf. No Contagion, co-authored with Jamie Andrews, catalogues 258 failed contagion experiments and the case against germ theory itself. No Virus takes the examination one layer deeper — the isolation problem, the collapse of virology’s foundational claims, and a disease-by-disease reappraisal of the entities the framework is built on.

Four take on the remedies and paradigm questions mainstream medicine actively suppresses. The DMSO Book covers 100,000 studies, zero deaths, and one approval — the suppressed science of medicine’s most versatile compound. Chlorine Dioxide: The Forbidden Remedy collects the interviews, protocols, and evidence from the doctors and researchers they tried to silence. The Iodine Book recovers an essential mineral driven out of easy reach by bromide, fluoride, and perchlorate — and the pharmacological tradition that kept its therapeutic use alive across the decades mainstream medicine set it aside. The Hydrogen Peroxide Book recovers a century of practice with a compound the body already makes — mitochondrial, phagocytic, part of thyroid hormone synthesis — suppressed precisely because its clinical utility threatened the pharmaceutical direction that captured twentieth-century medicine.

Two more take on the remedies already in your kitchen. Baking Soda locates sodium bicarbonate inside the terrain framework industrial medicine buried — the compound already in your cupboard, and what it does at the level of the blood, kidneys, lungs, digestion, and skin. The Castor Oil Book recovers four thousand years of documented practice on the medicine mainstream healthcare quietly stopped talking about — the kitchen bottle that doesn’t sit well in a system built on prescriptions and procedures.

A physical book reaches the person a Substack post never will — the sceptical relative, the friend who won’t click a link but might open a book, the visitor whose eye lands on a coffee table. The full shelf is at lulu.com/spotlight/unbekoming. Buy one to keep, and one to give away.

References

¹ Jonice Webb with Christine Musello, Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect (Morgan James Publishing, 2013), Chapter 3, “The Neglected Child, All Grown Up.”

² Webb, Running on Empty, closing of the Alexithymia section, Cal case: “the scars of Emotional Neglect do not have to be permanent.”

³ Webb, Running on Empty, Chapter 3, Fatal Flaw section: “The Fatal Flaw is not a real flaw. But it is a real feeling.”

⁴ Ann Bauer, “I Have Been Through This Before,” Tablet Magazine, October 27, 2021.

⁵ Bruno Bettelheim, The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self (Free Press, 1967).

⁶ Richard Pollack, The Creation of Doctor B: A Biography of Bruno Bettelheim (Simon & Schuster, 1997).

⁷ Edward Dolnick, Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (Simon & Schuster, 1998).

⁸ Matthew Mold, Dorcas Umar, Andrew King, and Christopher Exley, “Aluminium in brain tissue in autism,” Journal of Trace Elements in Medicine and Biology 46 (2018): 76–82. doi: 10.1016/j.jtemb.2017.11.012.

⁹ Guillemette Crépeaux, Housam Eidi, Marie-Odile David, Yasmine Baba-Amer, Eleni Tzavara, Bruno Giros, François-Jérôme Authier, Christopher Exley, Christopher A. Shaw, Josette Cadusseau, and Romain K. Gherardi, “Non-linear dose-response of aluminium hydroxide adjuvant particles: Selective low dose neurotoxicity,” Toxicology 375 (2017): 48–57. doi: 10.1016/j.tox.2016.11.018.