TRIGGER WARNING: This story includes themes of child sexual assault, trauma, and violence.
Ugly, robin-egg blue wallpaper with pink flowers covered the interior of the mystery house I found myself in. It looked like something an overly religious grandmother would use to decorate her home.
I didn’t recognize it. My grandmother, while overly religious for sure, never decorated her house like this, nor did anyone else I know.
I descended a dark staircase to the basement where a depressive and frightened energy clung to the walls, trapped. Far off in a corner, a man crouched on top of a bed with his pants at his knees. A young girl, no older than 10, lay frozen underneath him.
I didn’t need to see any more of that hideous wallpaper to know it was a sinister front to conceal the horrors happening within the house. It was repulsive, like a smile drawn on a pig’s face out of shit.
Approaching the overweight, hulking man from behind, I grabbed him and slit his throat. Blood sprayed the air as his heavy body slid to the ground and disintegrated into dust. The young girl looked at me with an expressionless gaze before finding solace in my arms as I carried her out of the basement, leaving the nightmarish house behind.
The girl was me in a past life and this violent out-of-body experience from across lifetimes surfaced during a visit to a “mental health gym” called Inception.
I opened my eyes to a dim room where I lay in a reclining chair with sensors stuck to my scalp feeding into a laptop.
Inception is run by a family of Detroiters who use alternative healing modalities to help visitors address trauma and stress.
Located in Farmington Hills, Inception utilizes different techniques like floatation therapy, salt therapy, infrared saunas, and neurofeedback to reset the body and mind.
“When your computer freezes, what do you do? You reboot it,” Art McCullar, the father of owner David McCullar, says when I ask him in the gym’s lobby what I’m about to experience. “How do you reboot your brain? That’s what you’re about to do.”
During my visit, I did Inception’s “IINNER RESET” circuit which includes 30 minutes each of magnetic resonance therapy, neurofeedback or “brain training,” and floatation therapy. Since the gym’s float tank was out of commission at the time, we substituted with red light therapy.
The 90-minute session addresses the impact of trauma by calming the nervous system and getting the body out of fight, flight, or freeze mode.
Most people can appreciate relaxing in a sauna, and float spas have been cropping up all over metro Detroit in recent years. Inception, however, takes it to the next level. While a visit may certainly leave you feeling recharged, you may also come face to face with traumatic events locked within your subconscious — past and present.
My apparent past life trauma surfaced during the brain training, where you lounge in a recliner wearing an eye mask and headphones. Sensors attached to your head monitor your brain activity while soft music plays, and when they find a blockage or thought pattern you need to address, the music skips.
It can be slightly annoying at first like listening to a scratched record with incessant skipping that makes its own remix, but murdering a child molester in an out-of-body experience was far more jarring.
David McCullar says the brain training technique is based on quantum theory — the idea that whatever is observed changes. He offers a metaphor to explain the purpose of the skipping music.
“Consider this, you’re driving down the road and you drift to the left and you start hearing this loud noise,” he says, mimicking the sound of a highway rumble strip. “What is that? That’s the feedback mechanism letting you know that if you keep going that way, you’re going to hit the median. That’s what neurofeedback is. It lets your brain know what it’s doing so the brain can self-correct … When you’re in that chair, the brain is observing those skips and pauses and it’s saying, ‘Why are we going to these states of danger when we are in a safe environment?’ The brain then begins to regulate the nervous system where you get into parasympathetic rest and digest, because at that moment there’s literally no threat in front of you.”
Fight, flight, or freeze
David tells me my experience confronting past trauma with violence is common during brain training.
“It sounds like you moved from [the freeze response], and typically when you come out of freeze there’s anger associated with it,” he explains. “Fight or flight is your first line of defense, but when you freeze there’s a sense of helplessness happening, so you shut down. It happens all the time … the trauma is in the body, so when you start to create these altered states within the system, it’s an opening that’s happening.”
He continues, “People come out of brain training and have this moment where they realize they’ve been abused by their family or that they’re in bad workplaces or bad relationships. Inception is allowing you to get space between your thoughts and get out of the stimulus-response loop that we’re typically stuck in. When you have that space, all of a sudden you start to see things that were always present.”
“Brain training” therapy was the first offering David started his business with roughly 16 years ago. Back then he ran it with his father, it was called Neurofitness Center, and it didn’t include float therapy or any of the other modalities.
At the time, David had been suffering from severe anxiety, depression, and vomit-inducing panic attacks. Things had come to a head after a fallout with his church community left him feeling isolated.
“I went from being part of a community that I was in three or four days out of the week to nothing,” he remembers. “And that was a traumatic experience for me and my other friends who were part of that community and left due to … some character flaws. Now we’re talking about spiritual traumas, but it was really just lifelong stressors that broke the camel’s back in 2006. I became very reclusive and I would project about an event a week ahead and be so anxious … just my thoughts could have me go into a vomiting episode.”
He began to look into self-development and alternative therapy techniques. That’s when he discovered brain training through physicist and author Lee Gerdes, who operates Cereset (formerly Brain State Technologies) out of Scottsdale, Arizona.
“When I saw it, I was like, this is something that can help me and that I can potentially bring back to Michigan if it works,” David says. “Me and my dad flew out to Scottsdale and my anxiety had decreased by 50% in one day. After that, I actually went out and ate for the first time in public since I started having these vomiting panic attacks, so I knew it was working.”
The McCullars expanded the business with other therapies and opened Inception in 2016.
Whether neurofeedback can actually treat things like stress, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, however, depends on who you ask.
Neurofeedback has been studied as a potential clinical treatment since the 1970s when it was found to be effective in high-anxiety patients.
McCullar points us to several peer-reviewed studies, including one by researchers at the University of Tehran and Iranian National Center for Addiction Studies where patients reported “a significant reduction in anxiety-related symptoms” following 30 neurofeedback sessions over three-months. Another case study points to a veteran suffering from PTSD-induced depression and restless sleep whose symptoms “move(d) toward clinical insignificance” after four months.
Others aren’t so sure. A 2020 analysis of 17 neurofeedback studies suggests its impact on mood disorders is relatively low.
Still, David maintains the validity of neurofeedback for anxiety based on his own experience.
“It was always about me first,” he says. “I don’t have anything fluffy at Inception, because I have to experience it, and if it doesn’t really do anything for me, I don’t want to put it out there for my clients.”
The youngest person David has treated using Inception’s IINNER RESET was a two-year-old with delayed speech.
“Really the kid was just frozen,” David says. “As soon as we started training, next thing you know he started to formulate words. It goes back to your body’s resources. If your body is going to fight this imaginary thing in front of you and the system is using all its resources to do that, you’re not gonna have the ability to speak properly, or do math problems and things of that nature because your resources are being used for protection.”
He adds that it’s important to address imbalances as early as possible since trauma responses are often formed in childhood. To bring Inception to a younger generation, McCullar has partnered with the Detroit Hispanic Development Corporation to install a mini reset station in the nonprofit’s office. Here, kids from age six up to 25-year-old adults can experience a shortened 30-minute IINNER RESET circuit.
“We hope to continue to go forward and do that same model across other nonprofits,” David says. “We’ve already started to talk to a few high schools as well to get a reset station installed. It just comes down to getting the funding.”
Reframing “trauma”
The word “trauma” alone can be triggering. While images of a horrific experience surfaced during my Inception visit, McCullar says trauma isn’t just limited to extreme situations.
“When you hear the word trauma, people think it’s like the trauma wing of the hospital, but anything that’s overwhelming to the nervous system is trauma,” he says. “That could literally be winning the lottery, that could be being married, giving birth, falling off your bike as a kid. It just really depends on the nervous system and how it perceives danger and threat. I had a traumatic experience going into a hyperbaric chamber a few weeks ago and I felt my body going into freeze like I was being trapped.”
While the IINNER RESET is one means of addressing trauma and enabling the body to cope with stress triggers, Inception also offers a specific “trauma release therapy.”
Scroll through Inception’s Instagram page and you’ll find videos of trauma release therapy participants convulsing and shaking uncontrollably on the floor.
“What you see the clients doing on the floor is all involuntary,” David says.
The session includes a series of Tension & Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE) that McCullar says evokes a tremor mechanism in the body. He learned the TRE technique through Dr. David Berceli, a body worker who noticed how animals and children in war-torn countries would shake after violent experiences.
“When bombs were being dropped, he noticed all the kids were shaking, but none of the adults were,” David says. “And so he figured out that was a safety mechanism. He saw it in animals in the wild, too. After traumatic events, they shake. They discharge that energy out of their bodies, and they go on with the rest of their lives. They don’t end up with post-traumatic stress. So he figured out a way to re-engage the trauma response that our body has naturally and he created this series of exercises. I’ve been doing it for 15 years.”
David says experiencing trauma is a part of being human, but most people don’t have good coping methods to regulate their nervous system.
“We’re already dealing with our mental health, we just don’t know that we’re doing it, by going to drink and smoke, have sex, buy and consume, or whatever else,” he says. “Inception is just a safe, healthy environment that encourages the body to do its own healing, which it is capable of doing.”
David has plans to expand Inception far beyond its metro Detroit location with the help of radio personality Charlamagne tha God, who is working with the McCullars to open a reset station in South Carolina.
Charlamagne is a huge fan of Inception. The two became friends after David began tagging him on Inception’s Instagram posts back in 2019. Eventually, Charlamagne slid into Inception’s DMs and David invited him to come try it for himself.
“I was tagging Charlamagne, Big Sean, everybody in the space in my posts every day because everybody was talking about mental health, but nobody was really talking about solutions,” David remembers. “Or the only solution they were talking about was talk therapy, which is fine, but there are way more tools in the toolbox.”
After one visit, Charlamagne was hooked. David remembers the radio host saying he had “never experienced peace like that before.” He repeatedly visited Inception, quickly spreading the word on his show, and even appeared on Fox 2 promoting the mental health gym.
For now, the McCullars plan on opening reset stations with shortened circuits around the country and expanding them to full gyms with all the healing modalities in the future.
During an appearance on The Breakfast Club, Icewear Vezzo said about Inception’s brain training, “That shit fucked me up, bro.” He meant it in a good way, as he expressed plans to return for another session.
Just before I head into the IINNER RESET chambers I meet one of McCullar’s aunts, Ann “Cookie” Jones, who’s just finished her session for the day. She’s been coming to Inception twice a week for the past three months.
“I have lost quite a few family members — my mom in 2019 [and] my aunt in 2021, who was like my second mom — so I was very depressed and sad,” she tells me calmly. “The first day that I came here, that was the first night I slept all the way through in about three years. I can’t tell you what it did, how it did it, but I have a smile on my face that I have not had in a long time.”
Six months before my visit to Inception, a tormented voice had cried out to me as I meditated in front of my altar, saying, “He raped me.” Petrified, I cut my meditation short and cleansed the space, fearing that an unwanted presence had come through the ether.
A psychic medium would later tell me the voice was me from a past life, screaming to be freed from the agony that had followed me into this timeline. I ignored it, but couldn’t overlook how that trauma had manifested itself in my relationships with men in my present life.
No matter what we believe, our time in this universe goes far beyond what we will experience in this lifetime. We carry the past experiences of our souls with us, and they shape us in ways we don’t realize.
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