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 Dark Nights of the Soul #5
Geral T. Blanchard • August 20, 2023
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.
The self, or ego, dwells within a larger awareness, or a field, far more immense than anything humans can fully imagine. When we emotionally fall out of order, a dark night originating from a larger consciousness serves the purpose of determinedly, even harshly, guiding us back on track. It will suck at first before any relief or rewards can be discerned. But endure we must.
Robert Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist and pioneer in the fields of humanistic and transpersonal psychology, referred to this time of bleak melancholy as “divine homesickness.” It is haunting, unrelenting, and leaves us with no peace. With it comes a pervasive sense of unworthiness, self-deprecation, anger toward people in our lives (past and present) and leaves us with the feeling that we have been forsaken. A person in the grip of a dark night can feel completely alone, not understood (heck, we don’t understand ourselves) and paralyzed. We may wrestle with deep guilt and feel as though we are personally responsible for everything wrong in the world, thanks to all our screwups. Suicide offers a solution.
Dark nights are like what Catholics call purgatory, that halfway station between life and death, heaven and hell. Another way of seeing it is as a place and time for inner cleansing. A time to sweep the house clean of all that no longer serves us. That includes any sense of being unclean and undeserving, often as a result of a difficult and trauma-filled life when we took on the pain and burdens of our tormentors, at least for a time. Now we have to decide, as a Labrador coming out of the water, if we will shake it off, or even if we are worthy of shaking it off.
Sooner or later, a Divine Light shines new insights upon us. This offers a much-desired ray of hope. Paradoxically, from the depths of despair comes a light of recollection – a vision of where we must go to find relief.
Drawing from a carefree and more pure time in our past, the future as we now imagine it can be brighter. The answer had been there all along before the hurt and negativity of abusers entered our narrative, contaminating it and discouraging us.
Seen this way, the dark night – the overwhelmingly sad state of mind – is part of a natural renewal process. Our job is to trust it and bravely get on board. Then we “make ourselves over” from the wisdom residing deep within us. This is all about the integrity that our inner physician beseeches us to follow. There is no need, not any longer, to fear our inner physician.
It helps an individual, who has lost their way in the dark, to forgo their worldly responsibilities for a time and enter into a retreat to find the answers resting inside of them. At such a time they can practice honest introspection and reevaluate their priorities without outside influences and distractions. Spirit regenerates.
Another author (quoted in Healing the Split) penned this: “There is no doubt that I am better off now, in every way, than before. My relations with my family are infinitely attuned, my writing much deeper, my friends much truer, my sense of self more steady, my clarity sharpened, and so on and on. In short, nothing bad, ultimately came out of my ‘break with reality.’”
Not always is a drug required to jumpstart this process, but many people have chosen a ritualized, ceremonial, and sacred MDMA treatment to reset their lives after great pain. When trusted friends bear witness to this spiritual process, changes get validated and tend to be lasting.
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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.
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.