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 Your Life Review
Geral T. Blanchard • Dec 30, 2022
Jimmy Stewart played the temporarily confounded George Bailey in the Christmas movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life.
As a somewhat strange version of an after-death story unfolds, George is granted an opportunity to observe a life review, his own. It included the secret factors that drive our common existence, which is quite different than how he had long imagined this earthly existence to be, but rather as it really is.
He was propelled by what many would label a spiritual emergency. It was only after George was given a complete panoramic summary of how his life patterns coalesced, from beginning to end, that his life journey was made sense and was righted. All the isolated acts, when considered together, offered cohesive insights, meaning, and deep appreciation to George. In the end, all the pain and suffering was not without value; the tapestry he examined came to be seen as the chronicle of a rewarding, warm, and wonderful life.
Well, something similar happens during many MDMA psychotherapy assisted treatments. From trauma and suffering, a patient may start weaving their story together beginning in childhood, one painful recollection after another. But is it really a painful retelling? As all the pieces are assembled under the calming effects of the medicine, the deeper meaning and purpose of it all becomes clear. As Ram Dass would customarily say, it is all “grist for the mill,” experiences to be milked for their valuable insights and teaching about life in general. After all, as Buddhist Noble Truth number one contends, “Life brings suffering.” So, we must figure out how to deal with it.
In a conventional therapy session you may have 45 - 50 minutes to start excavating your past. Maybe one or two painful moments will be unearthed. Emotionally, they may tear you apart. Then the therapist spends the last few minutes suturing you up, all in readiness for the next brief encounter. There has to be a better way.
With an MDMA treatment that lasts over six hours, a person can dig deeper, go spelunking in the darkness of the underworld, and see the big picture. Most people walk away from this kind of experience with a fuller understanding of the inevitabilities and vicissitudes of life and assign new meaning to them. The takeaways are usually not about good guys and bad guys, any need to punish, sue, or incarcerate, but to compassionately make sense of the world we live in – often times not taking things so personally as we all share many of the same struggles and vulnerabilities.
Like watching a movie with a degree of mental and emotional detachment, MDMA guided self-observation can be indispensable to the healing process.
As religions have known for centuries, somehow in this process of watching our life review impartially and nonjudgmentally, an astonishing kind of transformative magic can happen. It’s like the movie stuff kids and adults are so fond of. Once our old habits are “caught in the act,” particularly by an MDMA kind of witnessing, it seems like an internal combustion takes place, and with the passage of hours unhelpful habits, along with old emotional pains, burn themselves out, vanishing on their own. No punishment is needed. We simply observe them, perhaps stare them down, but lovingly so.
George Bailey took the “if onlys” and the “what ifs” that were previously misunderstood, and joyfully transformed them all into blessings. The very events George thought of as regrets and deprivations were, as he later came to understand, essential elements of his spiritual struggles and stepping-stones to social fulfillment.
It is similar to what the famous psychologist Erik Erikson taught us about ego integrity. I believe what he meant was that all of us are capable, upon reflecting on the experience of one’s one and only life excursion, twists and turns, pitfalls and stumbles, as something that had to be, with no alternatives required for us to find happiness. No regrets. No self-condemnation needed.
Often MDMA patients say words offering up thankfulness for the traumas they experienced. Additionally, others have commented, “I got more out of this six hour treatment than I did from the last six months of psychotherapy.” Or as an eighteenth century German mystic said of the alchemy of the soul, “Without the pain it might take me thirty years to learn something that suffering teaches me in five minutes.”
May the
force – Clarence – be with you.
*********
Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
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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.”
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.
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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.
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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.