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.
Holistic Recovery from Alcoholism
Geral T. Blanchard • January 11, 2022
It is true that AA has saved many lives. Twelve-step programming has offered a structured and reassuring promise of sobriety.
Truthfully, Alcoholics Anonymous success rate is astonishingly low, and it is almost heretical to offer constructive criticism of the program.
Despite its narrow focus and limited efficacy, we ought not conclude that “the baby must be thrown out with the bath water.” Holistic adjuncts to traditional programming can fashion comprehensive and effective recovery strategies. They must, however, address the mind, body, and spirituality of persons in the grip of addictions.
One of the cofounders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson, after successfully curtailing his alcohol addiction found he was still beset with tobacco and sexual addictions years later. With those chronic scourges Wilson was flooded with guilt and a resultant depression which caused him to search even more for additional mood altering substances and behaviors. It created a proverbial snowball effect.
A circuitous path, prompted with the help of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, led Wilson to Saskatchewan where a psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, proposed LSD could curb his remaining addictions. It was suggested that a mystical enlightenment might permit another worldview to rise into consciousness. Long story short, Wilson’s life was transformed following ingestion of LSD. His lingering addictions immediately fell away and he promptly concluded that AA must find ways to incorporate spiritual development into their programming. Of course, his use of LSD was covered up for many years lest it damage Wilson’s or AA’s reputations.
In a letter to Heard in 1957, Wilson wrote: “I am certain that the LSD experience has helped me very much. I find myself with a heightened color perception and an appreciation of beauty that had almost been destroyed by my years of depression…. The sensation that the partition between ‘here’ and ‘there’ has become very thin [and now] is constantly with me.”
Osmond had long opined about the importance of seeing the Ultimate Reality, what Hindu mystics were talking about. And with that awakening, inner peace could be cultivated. Later, with research at major universities in Canada, England, and the United States, other psychedelics, plant medicines, and empathogens were discovered to have the ability to suddenly arrest addictive patterns while fostering a powerful spiritual unfolding.
At first this nascent movement appeared counterintuitive and dangerous. It seemed like one drug was being replaced by another and that people would simply be trading one addiction for another. A drug that mimicked insanity, LSD, was being used to find sanity. But it wasn’t addictive. In later years the same phenomenon was discovered with psilocybin.
Insert the advice of philosopher Alan Watts. When asked if people should continue to use LSD after getting a glimpse of God he said: “When one has received the message, hang up the phone.” Wilson got it. His subsequent reflections were couched in spiritual terms. He wrote: “A Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”
The same small town Saskatchewan psychiatrists – Humphry Osmund and Abram Hoffer -- who used LSD to treat addictions were also utilizing seemingly benign nutrients to resolve major mental health problems.
For example, megadoses of vitamin B3 (niacinamide) were used to support alcoholism recovery, and dramatically reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia too. Today B3 is being lauded by other orthomolecular psychiatrists as a possible benzodiazepine look-alike, a nutrient that can ease the notoriously painful process of weaning off benzos by generating a similar, but safer, calming effect.
Psychotherapists now realize that fellowship, while extremely valuable to recovering patients, is but one component of a complex bio-neuro-psychological strategy that can comprehensively guide people’s minds and bodies in the direction of sobriety. If we discount nutritional deficiencies (vitamins, minerals, and amino acids) brought on by an alcoholic lifestyle, recovery rates will remain low. If intestinal health is overlooked – the lower brain, where mood lifting neurotransmitters and pain relievers are made – sadness will continue and injurious attempts at mood alteration with it. If we disregard the body’s various ways of reacting to alcohol’s toxicity, including unsatisfactory metabolism and malabsorption issues, sobriety will be elusive. If we fail to see the role of an overtaxed pancreas in regulating blood sugar levels, little progress will be made. And if toxic chemicals in the brain, cerebral allergies, and resultant inflammation are unexplored, drinking will continue unabated. These are a few of the insights garnered from the field of orthomolecular psychiatry.
Anxiety disorders have long been at the root of addictive cravings, whether to alcohol or opioids. Drugs can tamp down an overactive basal ganglia and the two amygdalae providing immediate relief, but as a result you may find yourself well on the road to addiction. Think of treating underlying anxiety as pulling logs off a bonfire. We wouldn’t use a fire extinguisher to spray the smoke wafting from a fire, we would aim it at the core flames. And abnormal brain waves are often at the root of addictive patterns. Consequently, the home use of an Alpha-stim microcurrent brain stimulator can subdue addictive chemical and food cravings in as little as twenty minutes, however, regular use of this safe instrument may be required.
Our addiction recovery toolkit is growing year by year. If we are willing to challenge existing paradigms and incorporate new knowledge, recovery becomes more realistically attainable than ever.
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“When you come across a step asking you to ‘know God’s will,’ I think of it as letting go of your ego. This is about finding a way to deconstruct our old belief system, to deconstruct our old self, to have the intention and motivation to align ourselves with another power. Take God out of it and try to let go. It’s about taking action to change our habitual patterns of thought and behavior. It doesn’t have to be some God up there running the whole show.”
- Kevin Griffin in
Latin Distilled Spirits
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Additional Reading:
Latin Distilled Spirits: Getting High, Then Sober, with a Famous Writer, a Forgotten Philosopher, and a Hopeless Drunk by Don Lattin
Addiction-Free Naturally by Brigitte Mars
The Craving Cure by Julia Ross
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.”
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.