Not a migraine. Not a choice. Just the cruelest headache known to medicine.

A Pain So Precise It Has a Schedule

If you're here, it's likely because someone you love—or you—wakes up in the early morning hours, heart racing, one eye watering, skull imploding from within. You may have been told it’s a migraine, or sinuses, or anxiety. It’s not.

This is male pattern cluster headache—a neurological disorder so excruciating it has earned the name “suicide headache.” It’s rare, it’s underfunded, and it is catastrophically misunderstood.

This post is here to tell the whole truth about it, including the latest research on treatments from mainstream medicine to psilocybin microdosing, and to give both sufferers and their loved ones practical tools and deep understanding.

I’ve lived with Male Pattern Cluster headache for the past 37 years.

I love that you love her. I’m just… really tired.

You’ve done the inner work.

You’ve read The Ethical Slut. You’ve journaled about jealousy, lit candles, done breathwork, and talked yourself through your partner’s giddy post-date glow with the patience of a saint and the emotional endurance of an Olympic decathlete.

But lately, every time they say, “You’d really like them?”—you feel your eye twitch.

Welcome to Compersion Fatigue—the emotional burnout that can hit even the most enlightened polyamorous, open, or non-monogamous soul.

There’s a peculiar kind of haunting that doesn’t knock over vases or show up on night vision cameras. It shows up in your daughter’s panic attacks during Algebra II.

It slides into your son's DMs disguised as a nihilist meme.

It sits beside young people at dinner tables where nobody really eats together anymore, and it whispers in their ear that nothing matters and everything is their fault.

Welcome to the living legacy of trauma, where yesterday’s wounds show up wearing today’s hoodie and doomscrolling tomorrow’s headlines.

As of 2025, we’re witnessing a national mental health crisis among American youth that social scientists are describing as both unprecedented and structural (Twenge, 2024; CDC, 2023).

But this crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It has a family tree.

This post is a journey into that family tree—and a toolkit for transformation.

What Is the Living Legacy of Trauma?

Narcissists, it turns out, come in four flavors—none of them vanilla.

A sweeping new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality took on the Herculean task of poking the self-important beehive that is narcissism.

The researchers—Skyler T. Maples, Craig S. Neumann, and Scott Barry Kaufman—did what psychologists rarely do.

They asked: What if we stopped pretending everyone with narcissistic traits fits into two neat bins (Grandiose or Vulnerable), and instead actually looked at people as… well, people?

Rather than just correlating traits like self-esteem and aggression (which is kind of like shaking up a snow globe and measuring the flakes), they ran both variable-centered and person-centered analyses.

In other words, they didn’t just ask, “How are traits related?” They asked, “ Just who the hell are these people?”

And they found them. Four types. Four narcissistic archetypes squirming under the microscope like cockroaches in a therapist’s waiting room.

Marriage is a contract written in disappearing ink.
You think you know what you’re signing — but identity, culture, and the private terrain of suffering are always amending the terms when you’re not looking.

Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in marriages where the husband transitions to female.

The research offers a compassionate lens. Reality offers a harder one.

Patterns of Marriage Stability After Transition: Love Is Not Enough

Resentment is a classic sign of relational devitalization. And it’s a stubborn little beast.

It survives logic, outlasts apologies, and festers even in therapy sessions where everyone’s crying and nodding and vowing to “move forward.”

It hides behind polite smiles, weaponized silence, and passive-aggressive dish placement.

In couples therapy, it’s often the uninvited third partner, sitting in the corner like an unpaid intern with a grudge and a clipboard.

But here’s the hard clinical truth: the only cure for resentment is grieving what you didn’t get.

Not revenge. Not justice.

Not a better version of the person who hurt you. Not even closure, which is often just revenge with a self-help filter.

No—grief. Real, guttural, bone-deep grief. The kind that doesn’t expect the other person to change. The kind that recognizes you might never get what you needed.

Let’s begin, as all modern tragedies do, with a man alone on a couch.

He’s got high-speed Wi-Fi, Uber Eats on the way, porn in one tab, and TikTok in another. He’s not in pain exactly—but something’s off. And he doesn’t know why.

In the Red Pill worldview, we have a word for this state. Not “depression.” Not “anhedonia.” Not “ Limbic Capitalist malaise.”

They call it… sedation.

But don’t mistake it for rest.
This isn’t a nap.
It’s a cultural coma.

It’s a Tuesday night.

Your therapist has just helped you reframe a lifelong shame spiral.

You’re proud.

You’ve learned the difference between a boundary and a punishment.

You understand how your nervous system works. You can name your triggers without blaming anyone. You’re... dare we say it... evolving.

Then your phone buzzes.

It’s your sibling in the family group chat, forwarding a meme about how therapy ruins people.

Your mother follows up with a reminder to “just let things go already,” and your uncle weighs in with anunsolicited opinion about how “you kids just need thicker skin.”

And just like that, your healing becomes the most threatening thing in the room.

“Looksmaxxing” sounds like something your gym-bro cousin would shout while deadlifting a car bumper. In reality, it’s much weirder, much sadder, and very, very online.

At its most basic, looksmaxxing refers to the obsessive pursuit of physical attractiveness, usually by young men, often in forums that resemble a CrossFit cult led by a depressed algorithm.

This isn’t just “glow-up” culture or “self-care” with a protein shake.

This is jawline micrometers, skull shape tier lists, and people earnestly discussing whether they need leg-lengthening surgery to improve their Tinder matches. It’s a slippery slope paved with retinol and despair.

What Even Is “Inappropriate Flirting”?

Let’s be clear upfront: flirting, in and of itself, is not a crime.

It’s a dance, a glance, a linguistic wink. It’s been with us since people figured out how to lock eyes across a firepit. But inappropriate flirting?

That’s something different. That’s when the dance turns into a stomp, the glance into a leer, and the wink into an HR complaint.

Unappropriated flirting isn’t just about bad timing or awkward delivery. It’s about ignoring context, consent, or common sense.

It’s when one person thinks they’re being charming—and the other person’s nervous system hits the eject button.

So let’s walk through eight modern examples, complete with breakdowns of why they miss the mark and how to avoid stepping on social rakes with your big flirty boots.

If the mere idea of someone looking at you — really looking at you — makes your stomach flip, your throat tighten, and your sense of self fragment into a thousand regrettable sixth-grade memories, congratulations.

You might be experiencing scopophobia: the intense, often irrational fear of being watched.

But wait — isn’t that just social anxiety?

Or maybe the spotlight effect? Or just being mildly neurotic in a surveillance-saturated society?

Yes. And no. And it's complicated.

Let’s walk through it. Carefully. While avoiding eye contact.

First, What Is Scopophobia?

Most couples in trouble don’t come in screaming.
They come in silent.

Their love isn’t loud. It’s tired. Their fights aren’t explosive. They’re low-stakes and unresolved. Their sex life isn’t dead, exactly—it’s more like quietly uninhabited.

And when they talk about their pain, it’s often framed through logistics:
“We don’t connect anymore.”
“I don’t feel close to them.”
“I’m not sure if we’re in love or just roommates.”

This isn’t codependency. It isn’t narcissistic abuse.
It’s mutual emotional undernourishment.

It’s what happens when two people who were raised on relational crumbs try to build a feast together—with no recipes, no language for hunger, and no shared permission to say, “I need more.”