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 Flipping our Thoughts
Geral T. Blanchard • October 30, 2022
Healing comes when we reassess some of our habitual thoughts and feelings.
On the flip side of every negative experience there is a positive shadow, a message filled with insights and potential for growth. Realistically, it may take years to get to a full appreciation that all of what life presents – including sadness, hurt, trauma, and more – has a helpful message encoded in it. The responsibility we have to ourselves is to take another look at our reactivity so we can decode it and see how so-called “negativity” prompts to make some positive inner conversions.
The inner environment is often filled with self-aggression masked as anger toward circumstances or people outside of us. But upon closer examination our adversaries are usually as busy as we are seeking similar acceptance and understanding. The searching urge is commonly built on a precarious foundation of shame such that when acceptance and understanding is offered, it seems fraudulent – presumably somebody just wants something from us, so we pull away.
In the midst of this inner pain, the same things others are grappling with, holds a golden nugget of insight. For instance, our shared insecurity, commonly born of pain, has the potential to promote empathy. In many instances, we can compassionately understand others through ourselves. Two presumed negatives can give rise to a positive. With that awareness we can immediately feel safer and more willing to extend forgiveness to all – ourselves included.
“Each painful emotion is a confused form of brilliance,” wrote Susan Piver in The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship. That discernment alone is brilliant and worth remembering. In Buddhist philosophy this is Vajrayana, the viewpoint that strong emotions are not simply afflictions, but are wisdom emanations in themselves that we can’t allow to slip by us undiscovered.
What Piver is reminding us to do is to stay in touch with reality, the common human experience, and in so doing, diminish separateness.
The better we know our own emotional pain, the better we can understand the pain of others. Therein lies the opportunity for connection.
Change usually doesn’t come from inner examination and self-policing alone; too often that creates inner blockages. Positive change mostly comes from relationships, especially troubled ones when, eventually, we see ourselves in others and recognizing our common humanity. There is continuous resonance between the inner and outer world, something modern physicists call quantum entanglement. MDMA has a knack for helping us understand traumatic relationships from the Vast Self perspective. And when our sovereign ego can shrink, the divine in us can expand. With this understanding it is safe to conclude that big changes can be cultivated out of big messes. Our cognitive and emotional evolution occurs as a result of challenging predicaments. So, have you had any big relationship messes? Okay then, you may be all set to dramatically grow.
Our thinking is not free standing, it is part of the ever-penetrating World-Soul as Ulrich Dupree explained in the book Ho‘oponopono, a traditional Hawaiian perspective on forgiveness. Every relationship problem, he contends, is a challenge and offers learning opportunities. He wrote, “People and problems we perhaps see as foes, are really our best friends, because they show us where we have work [to be done].” And Dupree offers consummate advice: give up! By that he means we must forsake our opposition against all that we defend ourselves from in hopes of feeling safe and accepted. To do otherwise is the equivalent of asking pain to come back with a vengeance.
This is the emotional burden we carry after trauma or abandonment – separation, anger, and grasping. With is comes delusion, whereby what we focus our thinking on is what later unfolds in our lives. Then our thoughts fall into the habit of confirming the original thinking that gave rise to the pain. British philosopher, James Allen, author of As a Man Thinketh wrote, “You are today where your thoughts have brought you, and tomorrow you will be where your thoughts will bring you.”
One of the intentions behind an MDMA treatment is to move your relationship thinking to relationship discernment, developing clearer judgments without being judgy. Without being preachy. Without condescension. Life becomes so much easier when we recognize how all of us are a part of the Whole.
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“The better you know your own pain, the more you will understand the pain of others. In this view, ‘negative’ feelings can be examined as ways to open more thoroughly to others. Check! Inarguable!” - Susan Piver in
The Buddhist Enneagram: Nine Paths to Warriorship
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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.”
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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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