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 Psychic Flypaper
Geral T. Blanchard • September 4, 2022
One of the benefits of working with an empathogen is that you don’t hallucinate. An MDMA patient stays with reality but plunges into a deeper level of self-examination and self-awareness than ever before.
They approach what Jung called the
shadow, the shameful “dark behind” that a person has worked so hard to keep hidden from others. But a person can give themselves away and be seen when they protest very loudly and cynically about the shortcomings and evil of other folks. This is called
projection. Somehow we are unconsciously approaching our dark side when we are busy attributing it to others.
When a person is consciously unaware of their internal self-loathing, they assign similar nasty traits to others. There is something strangely magnetic about this process. Jung referred to this phenomenon as “psychic flypaper.” It offers a hook that similar people in hiding can “hang” their shadow projections on. And when a group of people share a common foe they can easily team up with other accusers, and in so doing, validate their righteousness while hiding from their own unsavory backside. In this way they can be convinced there is nothing shadowy about themselves, problems are always discovered to exist externally.
Entire groups of people can avoid taking a close look at their hurtful interpersonal relations if they team up in this fashion. It has happened numerous times in recent history from Hitler to American politics. Paradoxically, an entire nation can “unite” through this form of divisiveness. Some refer to this as the collective unconscious, others see it as a shared psychosis or, using indigenous language as a highly contagious thought virus known as windigo or wetigo. It is a cultural madness that, when short of personal insight, sweeps us into its fold. Like a virus it gets transmitted from generation to generation and could be regarded as a collective, inherited form of PTSD.
Paul Levy wrote in Dispelling Wetigo: “When there is mutual shadow projection between individuals, groups or nations, each side has an unconscious investment in the other playing out the projected evil so as to prove their own self-righteous innocence.” This is a common remedy for shame that is often put in place by trauma. In the long run, it harms social relationships.
Now, think of a wood tick or a mosquito that hungrily latches on to us and sucks our blood, and therefore spirit, from us. Levy again: “The wetigo bug, which covertly inspired the [interpersonal] conflict in the first place, is then able to gorge itself on the polarization, as it strengthens itself on the very divisiveness and discord it generates.”
The beauty of MDMA is that you, and not a group foisting an intervention on you, will gently guide you back on course. You will, with amazing ease, take your own intrapersonal and interpersonal inventory and sense a strong compulsion to “right the ship.”
An inner moral compass once again finds your true North Star sensibility and decency and no longer is it swayed by the masses who remain in denial.
The MDMA experience always entails two helpers who, as Quakers would say, “bear witness” to your honesty, your bravery, your personal reset. This is much more helpful than having a private personal thought, an idea, or a reflection about an unappealing part of our self, only to let it fade away without helpful changes being made. We have all done that. When we humbly move away from a spot of division, a sense of familiarity with humankind develops, especially our shared vulnerabilities, and in its place a feeling of unity with the family of human beings sets in. With trusted persons observing this transformation, it is difficult to turn back into the disease process of wetiko.
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“Whenever we deal with the darkness within ourselves, our realization nonlocally registers throughout the entire field of consciousness, which changes everything.”
- Paul Levy in Dispelling Wetigo
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
- Pogo comic strip
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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
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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