Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
MDMA and Our Relationship with Emotions, part 1
Geral T. Blanchard • June 26, 2022
MDMA is understood as a relational medicine. It cultivates and then nourishes new ways of perceiving, understanding, and integrating relationships.
That includes relationships with people, your past, other animals, elements, the spirit world, your purpose, and your emotions.
Once a strong emotion – perhaps long associated with a crisis or trauma – shows up, we are inclined to allow it to take us captive. We get stuck in its dense and dark energy. We become it. And when that is allowed to happen, say “goodbye” to insight and inspiration. Once in its full grip, we are cut off from the normal flow of life, a flow that wants to take us forward, enlighten us, and evolve us.
If we are flexible and momentarily shrewd, we just might sit with a strong emotion and mindfully wonder, “What might it teach me about myself?” Not teach me something about a damn perpetrator that I’ve always been pissed off with, but, gently, how can it lead me to a greater understanding of myself and my relationship with an ultimately benevolent universe. Can it lead me back to me? Is it like a wakeup call?
So the goal is to momentarily relax into the discomfort, seeing it from a 35,000 foot high perspective, trying to understand how big and menacing it really is as I fly over Nebraska far, far below. At that point in time and space I may recognize emotions are invisible, and how I am being very reactive to invisible things of my own creation. Somebody else simply triggered it after somebody else triggered them, and on and on it goes. Do I want to be swept away in a chain reactions? Who should I blame -- anyone? Where, instead, could I concentrate my focus?
Landing in Oklahoma City (ugh!, more trauma) I am left to respond and not just react. From a heightened level of consciousness I have thrust into the role of observer. From such a posture, it is too small, too convenient, or maybe even too lazy, to cast myself in a story of past victimhood. Ultimately, what I do with life either liberates me or imprisons me in negative emotional states.
So I enter my mind’s machinations – ta-dah! It note how it reactively does its thing, working overtime in an effort to heroically protect me. It does the best it can with its left brain constructs -- a dichotomous black and white, right and wrong, comparative, and judgmental perspective to most everything – all of which creates an emotional ouch. And it can ruminate and obsess for me too. “Please,” I say to ego, “take a break my friend, you’re working way too hard at this.”
The mind is the invisible ego we can’t see; the brain is the physical biocomputer that gets most of the blame, you know, for being “broken” or in some way “damaged” (thank you DSM). Truth is “ouch happens,” but a continuation of suffering is optional; it depends on where we place our focus.
When we formulate a new relationship with our mind -- a creation not always in complete cahoots with the left brain -- freedom from negative emotional impacts is achievable. That new rapport involves pausing and then observing from a self-created distance, like from an elevated platform, or from our seat on the plane.
When we simply notice emotions there is less inclination to wear them and become them. They simply are what they are: fleeting invisible concoctions of our mind and its friend, left brain.
Now, should we choose to be gentler with ourselves and dis-identify from being so vastly different from “others,” the groundwork is laid to be more forgiving of those “others,” in fact, to connect with the Vast Self. That’s a right brain function. From a 35,000 foot perspective, it’s really hard to see “others” in strictly negative and disconnected terms, let alone as big and powerful victimizing monsters, or as a comedian once called them, “reptiles with bad hairdos.”
So the “heavenwork” leads to the groundwork. Maybe that is why Creator (or was it Boeing?) made airplanes, so we could see things more clearly and not have a crash landing after feeling some seemingly outer turbulence. It’s usually not something outer, some external force that is as problematic, as much as it is our inner turmoil, what we are so emotionally attached to – ya know, our old story.
When we are flying across the Atlantic we can’t, in a grumpy or fearful mood, demand that the pilot stop the flight and let us off. I’m a victim; I didn’t ask for a middle seat next to an inebriated talker! The lesson is to sit with the emotion, learn from it, ride it out, and land being a little more enlightened. As author Penache Desai suggests, perhaps each unpleasant (and pleasant) situation carries the potential to enlarge us. Like a strong wind on a stormy day, depending how a pilot wants to work with it, she has two choices: stay grounded and frustrated, or approach the wind head-on and us its energy for uplift.
**********
“You cannot escape yourself, no matter how hard you try. The only option is to end your resistance [to existence].”
and
“When you oppose someone, it is an energy within yourself that you are opposing. When your 'buttons get pushed,' it is because the buttons are there in the first place.”
- Penache Desai in
You Are Enough
*********
Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
More Articles
In recent years psychotherapists have become increasingly aware of the risk of transmitting trauma intergenerationally. By examining the impact of the Holocaust, or the experiences of Native Americans who were systematically abused by colonizers including the Catholic Church, it becomes obvious that indirect passage of depression, despair, anxiety, and damaged self-regard are but a few of the ancestral legacies of uninterrupted abuse. If, however, trauma can be passed from generation to generation without direct experience, could it also be possible for the reverse to happen?
Just as we have started to witness the reality of individual post-traumatic growth (PTG) – not just bouncing back after trauma but bouncing forward – could we entertain the concept of intergenerational growth (IG) – in other words, thriving from generation to generation?
There can be two levels at which trauma is processed. The first tier may be a time of quiet denial or the dissociation of nearly all thoughts of how painful the past was. The body feels it, but the mind does not speak it. On the second level a person awakens to the entirety of it, often an unpredicted and sudden onslaught of previously suppressed details with extensive associated pain. When trauma is reconstituted at the second level it often happens unwillingly. A person may be swept away by an awakening that seems very ugly. It feels like too much to absorb in its entirety. The result is often to feel afraid, even shattered – at first. Now with everything out in the open, what must be done with it?
At the second level of awareness, it is almost impossible to go on pretending that everything is fine. No longer can the visuals and emotions be kept submerged. One wonders, “Damn it, will I ever get better?”
Traumatized persons, with their pervasive pain, typically seek mood altering experiences. This can include ascetic restrictions, hedonistic over-eating, chemical dependency, sexual dependency, sexual anorexia or celibacy, romance addiction, relationship dependency, compulsive gambling, TV or movie binging, rock climbing, auto racing, reliance on antidepressants and/or antianxiety medications, religious addiction, and so much more that can serve to pacify, distract, and avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings. By thrill-seeking, the higher the risks being engaged, the greater mood alteration one can experience. It’s a big dopamine splash and more.
These are the adult versions of childhood thumb sucking, according to Dr. Harvey Milkman, the author of Craving for Ecstasy (the feeling of ecstasy, not the drug). Harvey pointedly said, “Growing up consists of finding the right substitute for your thumb.”
There are many emotional reactions to a drug-free spiritual awakening experience and a ceremonial MDMA journey. While this article focuses on empathy – both the feeling and the cognitive component – it is obvious to those who have awakened from a spiritual emergency that a variety of related emotions arise.
It is one thing to imagine how another person feels. Psychopaths, despite what the general public believes, are very good at empathy on an intellectual level. Even criminal psychopaths can put themselves in another person’s position and understand their perspective. It is bigger, better, and far healthier when empathy, in its deepest sense, allows us to “feel with” other people by recognizing a sense of oneness with them, what’s called unity consciousness. To hurt others would be to hurt ourselves.
It’s impossible to talk about projection without incorporating a discussion about Sigmund Freud and Donald Trump. In this article I will skip Donald but throw in a little Carl Jung. Freud, of course, named several distinctive defense measures – reality distorting strategies to keep us safe. Two of the big ones are displacement and projection.
First, a definition of projection: This is evident when an individual attributes their own unacceptable impulses onto others. For example, a person might accuse others of engaging in thievery when, in fact, they are swindling money from their employer. Some of the behaviors and thoughts we are most ashamed of could be called shadows. We can see them first in other people before we can “call them out” in ourselves. We are defending against humiliation and mortification lest we be exposed.
Does this empathogen work in a similar manner as psychedelics, blasting us off to a sudden and dramatic awakening of the mind and soul? Not necessarily. Much like massive stress, psychedelics and MDMA can knock people off an unhealthy path and offer them an entirely different trajectory, but there is a lot of arduous individual work that must follow the use of these propellants.
So, could it be concluded that MDMA is a transcendent spiritual event -- a chemical event, or perhaps a neurological experience? By themselves, both seem unlikely. They can change activity in the brain, but enlightenment comes from hard work before and after their use. Entheogens and empathogens likely have a catalytic but not a primary casual effect in awakening.
Many events in life can change us, some in profound ways, others somewhat superficially. Some positively, some negatively. Some temporarily, some permanently. Let’s break it down.
With the “help” of psychology and the diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD, an entire trauma industry has developed. Much help has been delivered and, unfortunately, in many instances the assigned labels stick like glue and there can be difficulty relinquishing the newly imposed identity of “breakage.”
Many life events are transformative:
Many great minds have come out of India. Like countless spelling bee champions, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose who later took on the name of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo became a highly regarded spiritual teacher and author in the twentieth century. His main insight was that what many humans experience during altered or higher states of consciousness are glimpses of the future of evolution. And, he contended, one day these states of expansion will be normal for the whole human race.
Countless numbers of people are seeking the unity consciousness that MDMA can offer. It can make them feel bigger. And more deeply connected and powerful. Like many billions of tiny ants inching a fourteen-wheeler up a hill, every tiny bit of effort pulls the big rig along. Similarly, each one of the eight billion or so people residing on our planet today may, via a combined assemblage of singular efforts, raise their individual consciousness, while tugging the entire race forward.
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment. They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time.
Dark nights of the soul as Saint John of the Cross called those long, despairing periods of our life, are never easy, in fact they are usually dreadful. They are so necessarily awful and so damn long because some of us don’t do subtlety very well. If we are open to these moments, even a tiny bit, they can serve as an internally calculated and blaring wakeup call that will guide us to solace.
John Nelson, in Healing the Split, refers to a fleeting or ephemeral sense of a higher purpose, not fully conceptualized, but compellingly near the heart. It holds answers to life’s pain but isn’t quite within our grasp…at least until the dark clouds engulf us. Then, with great staying power and inexperience matched with trust, a spiritual emergence nears surface awareness. And it always happens, as psychiatrist Stan Groff defined it, around the time of a blurry spiritual emergency.