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 Shadow Work
Geral T. Blanchard • Jul 25, 2022
Patients who request psychotherapy assisted MDMA treatments are propelled into this type of healing work when other methods of trauma recovery were only partially successful.
In part, the guilt from being stigmatized by abuse naturally prompts victims to shine a spotlight of exposure onto those persons who have caused the interpersonal harm.
Intrapersonal examination is a necessary prelude to resolving traumas that others have inflicted on us. Unfortunately, conventional forms of trauma therapy customarily begin with interpersonal exploration, focusing attention on the dark and hurtful forces of the world residing outside of us. If a person isn’t careful, they can almost gleefully delight in condemning and punishing others, pointing out another person’s flaws and, thereby, never spotting their own dark side, the shadow as Jung called it. In this way a victim can trip themselves up on the path to recovery.
Therapists are often too eager to align themselves with their victimized patient’s agenda staying stuck in the necessary, but time limited need, to work on proper attribution of responsibility. In the quest for deserved justice, and to relieve some patient guilt, this frequently enjoins healers in a somewhat satisfying “bashing ceremony” when all evil impulses are vociferously projected almost exclusively onto the “other.” Along with this initially well-intended collusion, therapists may also tiptoe around shifting the spotlight back on the victim’s own shadow side, feeling like by doing so they might be disrespectful or disloyal.
In the traditional indigenous world, some people have used the terms windigo and wetigo. A modern conceptualization of wetigo refers to a mind virus that serendipitously spreads from a culture’s collective unconscious into an individual’s mind. It is this clandestine mental virus that causes a person to disavow and thereby never know themselves completely.
Having a perpetrator in one’s world has to be addressed, but at some later point the opportunity to know the dark parts of ourselves is what will propel the greatest growth. Staying stuck in wetigo -- with the spirit of righteous resentment and a desire to punish -- inadvertently feeds one’s own dark side. When that happens we become a threat to ourselves, we can become possessed by this concealed virus.
Psychologically, the shadow can be regarded as the undesirable, inferior, and unexamined aspects of one’s personality – the parts of us that can cause harm to others. These repressed and unappealing facets can fuel unhealthy behaviors, unless or until we come to recognize and own them.
Being victimized can focus the conscious spotlight on external factors, the not-self, the bad guys, and unresponsive systems. While they merit attention and justice may have to be applied, an exclusive outward scrutiny – including projection – can further distance us from ourselves. When that happens, and the more a victim identifies with a sanctimonious bright persona, the more destructive their own shadow becomes; they unwittingly feed it. The longer a person stays trapped in a victim identity, the more arduous it becomes to grow.
Therefore, it’s important following abuse, that wounded persons do not re-victimize themselves by getting lost in a victim identity. The original traumatic experience, if addressed in a comprehensive fashion, can bring victims back home again, full circle, when they have the privilege to meet their complete self, warts and all.
Guilt keeps many people from waking up from their reactionary stance to trauma and moving into self-reflection. In a binary worldview of “good guys” and “bad guys,” a searching and fearless self-examination doesn’t clamor for attention. Positioning all evil outside of ourselves is the sign of an unhelpful entity working within – wetigo. And pesky unconscious feelings of guilt are not only a major cause of our shadow’s habit of projection – assigning our own worst attributes onto others so that we don’t have to look at ourselves – too often, however, victims can become far too eager to assign their abuser’s worst traits onto themselves. He becomes me.
The abuser can awaken a victim’s fears of their own darkness which serves to postpone honest personal reflection, and with it, healing. It’s like a form of self-flagellation or expiation develops. And this usually occurs with insufficient evidence. In an uncanny way, victimization can cause a person to lose track of themselves should they become obsessed with abusers. The process can stunt personal development.
If we don’t look at our shadow and our guilt (for things done or simply fantasized) we may always walk around in a frightened “deer in the headlights” trance and, just below conscious awareness, we may find ourselves replaying a tape -- a monologue of our fears of being found out and exposed as the fraud or imposter we subconsciously believe we are.
So, trauma can be inflicted by others and it can be self-inflicted too. Either way, two perpetrators can get involved; in football parlance it’s called “piling on.” To avoid this diversion from recovery, awakening to the deeper recesses of our psyche is critical to full healing.
********
During an MDMA three phase treatment, quite naturally the starting point is to take an honest and kind look at ourselves – the intrapersonal search. In the second treatment, once we have gotten to know ourselves a little better, focus can move more into interpersonal realms. Finally, in the third session, some patients explore their bigger and more expansive position in the animal world of relatives, into the world of their ancestors, or in the vast universe. In this process they step out of the spell of the wetigo, the collective psychosis of the world and into a more real, sacred, and safe world.
********
“The indigenous people have been tracking the same ‘psychic virus’ for many centuries calling it wetiko in Cree, windigo in Ojibwa, a term that refers to a diabolically wicked person or spirit who terrorizes others by evil acts. The wetigo parasite feeds on and harvests the emotions of fear and terror. Terror is the cause of its insidious ‘ill-usory ill-logic.’ In wetiko disease, the psyche takes the terror that haunts it from within, and in its attempts to master it, is unwittingly taken over by it, thus becoming another instrument of terror in the world. We have then become the very thing we most feared, as we psychologically terrorize ourselves.”
- Paul Levy in
Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil
*********
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.