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 - an Anthropological Lens on Independence
Geral T. Blanchard • May 16, 2022
I am aware of an anthropologist or two who have taken this entheogen medicine and had insightful flashes and insights – vs. brightly colored geometric prisms often associated with psychedelics – that helped them understand how our culture is evolving and devolving.
From an American perspective, they note how our society values an independent identity (self) far more than most other countries do. This can cause plenty of difficulty, especially when trauma enters the picture.
As highly enculturated Americans, we tend to see things through a singular lens.
It’s all about me – what happened to me, who is at fault and needs to be blamed,
and what my painful experiences have irreparably done to my self-esteem.
Personalizing trauma too much can make adverse experiences more damaging. In
many cultures the conceptualization of trauma -- particularly its presumed and
long lasting effects – is not as highly elaborated and amplified as in the U.S.
MDMA can activate another way of thinking. Another way of seeing, interpreting,
and integrating painful life events. And another way of knowing ourselves. First
we need cultural assistance to help us see beyond our personal and singular
importance. Second, a little more help is needed from the right hemisphere of
our brains to view life from a bigger, interconnected and global perspective – if
not beyond that. If we weren’t so caught up in such a narrowly confining and
scripted view of emotional pain, we might even laugh at some of the absurdities
of our ethnocentric and egocentric view of things. As comedian Emo Philips
quipped, “I used to say that the brain was the most powerful organ in the body.
Then I realized who was telling me this.”
Excessive individualism can be an impediment to recovering from trauma.
Psychologist Robert Levine, author of Stanger in the Mirror, wrote: “If you happen
to have been raised as a full-blooded individualist…consider that numerically
you’re the freak. This independent view is pretty much limited to the United
States and part of Europe. The interdependent view predominates to one degree
or another almost everywhere else.”
Anthropologist Steven Heine adds, “More than 80 percent of the world’s cultures
find it hard to conceive of a truly separate self.” In other words, if we define normal as “the norm,” then the notion of an independent self is clearly abnormal (Did you get that? If not, please read again.). Regarding ourselves as community members or global citizens however, might help us see our life experiences from a less personal and therefore less painful perspective. Perhaps our egocentrism adds to the impact of trauma. One must recognize the constrictiveness of select cultural dogma and how that can accentuate the harmful effects of trauma.
The Japanese word for “self” is
jibun, which literally translates as “one’s share” -- the implication being the share of the social context in which one exists. Outside this framework there is no true self.
Similarly in southern African countries you will hear the word ubuntu which roughly translates, “I am me because of you; no matter how different we are, we complement and complete each other.”
” In other words I can discover myself through experiences with you whether you seem nasty or nice. This even applies to perpetrators of crimes. Nothing happens in a social vacuum and we, as individuals, do not rise above everyone else as superior entities.
Head to Peru where the Q’ero shamans teach the concept of yanantin, which is their way of referencing interpersonal complementarity; each person’s uniqueness helps to perfect their social counterpart as a result of relational interplay. Another Q’ero word is masintin that stresses the chemistry between people. This responsivity teaches us how to socially dance with others, as a part of the whole. And the dance often includes temporary pain (not necessarily an alien concept like chronic PTSD) before a person can, as an integrated member of a supportive community, see their best personal qualities ripen (post-traumatic growth, PTG).
MDMA seems to open the mind to other ways of thinking and knowing, including the ability to distinguish ourselves as part of an interconnected web of humanity, or for that matter, a closely linked member of the animal world. This unity consciousness serves as an antidote to the effects of trauma; it can help us to see the big picture and recover more quickly.
American sociologists are starting to write (summarized in a NYT’s article) about something they call the “culture of complaint,” a victimhood culture with a parasitic psychological community that, in some instances, has created a billion dollar “grievance industry.” There is a fine line between fighting for victim’s rights and unwittingly promoting a victimhood culture that make us hyperaware of this one aspect of life while tacitly discouraging victims from recognizing realistic hope for a resilient response.
Susan Clancy, Research Director of the Center for Women’s Advancement, penned the book, The Trauma Myth. Completing a ten year study of victims at Harvard, she noted three things. First, almost every victim of childhood sexual abuse said they were damaged by the experience. Second, and to her surprise, she found the psychological and cognitive impact victims reported had nothing to do with trauma; the cultural context determined how persons perceived themselves and interpreted their experiences. Rather than reporting fear, shock, or physical harm at the time the abuse occurred, 92 percent of the victims described their predominant reaction as one of confusion, often accompanied by embarrassment. And our culture promulgated much of the confusion about what persons were expected to feel. Third, she discovered, “There appears to be no direct, linear relationship between the severity of the abuse and the psychosocial difficulties victims experience in adulthood.” Clancy’s insights may be extrapolated to suggest that cognitive clarity and psychological peace – of the kind MDMA victims commonly report – can seal and heal the event. Personal truth matters, our societal dictums, not so much.
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“What hurts most victims is not the experience itself, but the meaning ascribed to the experience. It is the retrospective [culturally influenced] interpretation of the event that mediates subsequent impact. Because it is backwards, the trauma model is not just failing to help victims; it is actually causing some of the harm it was supposed [to] explain by simultaneously exacerbating the victim’s damaging beliefs.” Susan Clancy, Ph.D.
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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.
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.