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, Morality, and Forward Thinking
Geral T. Blanchard • Aug 21, 2023
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.” Harvey clarified: “Dependence means that after repeated exposure to an event that decreases neuronal activity in the brain, a person leans on that experience in order to feel adjusted or normal.” Dependency is about getting “hooked” on an indulgent satiation activity (calmative) that covers up subjective distress. That distress may have its origins in childhood abuse, a natural disaster, interpersonal violence, chronic illness, and so on.
Unfortunately, with most forms of dependency, a person will make decisions that are deceptive, manipulative, and may harm themselves and others. That can lead to immense guilt. Further, if one is labeled as an “addict,” shame (the sense of absolute worthlessness) can kick in. Morality takes a back seat to the power of dependency. Making amends or apologizing, which is a fundamental tenet of 12-Step programs, may assuage some guilt, but the more difficult task is to challenge core shame that is developed by feelings of being damaged goods and deeply flawed – whether from early life abuse or from circumventing societal and personal morality.
MDMA can help people face the dereliction of their personal values and interpersonal code of conduct. It does so by softening the powerful emotional attachments to harsh judgments which, if left unchallenged, only increase self-disdain and promote an addictive cycle. MDMA doesn’t lower standards but lowers defensive walls and with it, denial. This cunning and gentle empathogen can help a person stare down their wearisome acts, errant thinking, and self-persecutorial lambasting.
Next, many patients reset their core sense of self by owning their mistakes and hurtful ways with absolute clarity, no minimization. Simultaneously they make a commitment to face all that is difficult and frightening in their life post-trauma, while simultaneously reaffirming their deepest core values. In this way they realize not only how they have violated others, but how they dishonored their best and most virtuous parts – the result being shame. Patients discover something richer, more treasured, and worth living for, namely their “golden shadow” that Jung wrote about.
Discovery of the divine that lives in all of us provides a reboot to life. With that as a supportive and guiding force, there isn’t such a compelling need to hide, isolate, lie, and distract oneself. What was once a breakdown is now seen as a potential shift-up.
A more thoughtful, insightful, and nonautomatic self begins to emerge during a ceremonial MDMA treatment which, ideally, is followed by regular psychotherapy. Because MDMA does not cause a loss of conscious awareness, it allows for a self-examination of the kind not previously attempted. Before there wasn’t the courage, or even a template, for this kind of work.
During an MDMA session, patients counsel themselves. Later they use a psychotherapist’s collaboration to further uphold the insights and guidance acquired. Therapy keeps resuscitating all that is the best in this person, meaning a core authentic, secure, and innocent set of virtues previously smothered and squelched during their childhood -- a time that was filled with confusion, fear, betrayal, and injury. For optimal results, the patient must always work harder than the therapist.
Beyond that, there is the matter of becoming a substantial moral being, by one’s own standards which, when “under the influence” of this truth-revealing medicine. The medicine promotes pro-social activity and enhanced compassion for others, but also for oneself. Remember, this is an empathogen, a relational medicine that helps social beings become more social, less selfish.
Ending the Faustian bargain with the devil, much to the patient’s surprise, next comes this realization: It is the goodness uncovered in me that will deliver me.
Paradoxically, old scaffolding of supportive yet codependent people -- external sources of support -- are nowhere near as useful as what you will resurrect from within your core being – that same place where shame arose. Ironically, shame can be seen as arising from violating one’s own values – that best part of themselves. While they never intended to look inward, deeply, it was during a lonely “dark night of the soul” with its painful reckoning, that they realized they must deliver themselves, free themselves. This comes with less reliance on others, and with that comes a humble pride, the opposite of shame.
Virtually every shame-based person has not only become angry at others -- who might have seen through them, or confronted them, they have unmercifully raged in their direction. That only leads to more shame because the “loved ones” become abused ones. With assistance from MDMA, shame diminishes, and with it, associated rage declines too. That’s the way of it.
Maybe at this painful time in their life a comprehensive self-examination and thorough healing may occur. The isolating sense of “I” can be replaced by a connecting “We.” As Muhammad Ali said, “I went from ‘me’ to ‘we,’ and then to ‘whee!’” He went from being an angry pugilist to a world statesman. It’s in all of us.
May the light of your true spirit break through.
*********
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?”
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.
In this time of homogenized living and spiritual bankruptcy, there is also a hankering to come alive and connect to something bigger than what is found in day-to-day life. That yearning coming from inside us often leads to psychedelic searching, hoping that with enough jangling of the brain something new, deeper, and more satisfying will emerge. I call this sought after altered state of consciousness (ASC) a vivification. It can be approached with or without drugs.
Natural vivification can be defined as the awakening of our innate spiritual core. We’re naturally wired for it, but often we can’t seem to access this spirit while living a mundane secular life. Vivification often arises after years of living a dull, unsatisfying, and torpid existence. Like a flower awaiting springtime and the opportunity to bud, our contemporary human way of existing longs for a bright awakening.