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 Grief
Geral T. Blanchard • December 27, 2022
An indigenous inspired healer, Jez Hughes, has defined trauma as the inability to forget.
Certainly that could be the failure to complete the trauma cycle as described by Peter Levine in
somatic experiencing trauma therapy.
By observing animals in the wild of Africa Levine noted they instinctively know how to physically release pent up feelings associated with a scary situation and, in so doing, quickly return to their natural flow and wellness. An impala, following a near-death chase by a lion, may collapse to the ground (a form of dissociation) to “escape” the terror of the situation. Then, after a short time and the lion having moved on, they spring to all fours kicking, jumping, and pirouetting. This helps our animal relatives let go of the event in a demonstratively effective way.
Oh, if it were only that easy for humans, but our brains want to hang on to painful memories and resolve them on a cognitive level. We may repeatedly ask “Why?” Or perseverate on wishes of revenge thinking that until they are fulfilled we won’t get over the harm done to us. Flashbacks of trauma are visceral reminders of healing that remains to be done, unfinished business that still grips our psyche.
Trauma could be understood as too much life being felt too much at once, the plight of highly sensitive persons. And when trauma effects linger long after the adversity, we may attempt to tamp them down with constant distractions, limitless pleasures, mind deadening or mood-altering addictions. The Mayan culture believes that when someone is lost in addictive activity, particularly to alcohol, they are lost in water – unexpressed grief.
Events that are traumatizing often come “out of the blue.” They are scary times that are suddenly upon us for which we were not adequately prepared, even if it was a natural event, such as the death of a loved one. And when we are broken it can feel like a dismemberment, as if a part of us has been ripped away. Humpty Dumpty has taken a big fall and wonders if he will ever be put back together again.
Interestingly, in many indigenous cultures the person who was torn apart by trauma and then broken down psychologically, often sets out on their own in search of healing, especially when traditional methods were not found to be advantageous.
What I’ve noted in cultures where this occurs is the tendency to go inward for answers rather than give up when others were of no help, formulate individualized remedies, and then upon healing themselves, head home with insights that enable them to become the healer of others. What was originally regarded as horrible pain came to be understood as a necessary wound. The traumatized person returns with gifts harvested from life’s vicissitudes.
Grief is a form of trauma that can cause a breakdown or a breakthrough. We may lose someone to death, to a breakup, or feel grief over the life we always wanted but never lived. Martin Prechtel who lived among the Maya for years wrote a book on the subject, The Smell of Rain on Dust. Learning from the Maya he concluded human beings, without grief experiences, are relegated to a life when then never grow themselves into real, feeling, and emotionally alive persons.
Likening the widowed person to a snake, Prechtel wrote: “It is a time of natural molting, where the armor of rational thought is pulled away long enough to give us the necessary space and time, in which we are open and unhardened enough to let our new vulnerable state and its soft new skin surrender to grief’s able handling of the rudder of our little ship of sorrow and loss.”
Grief can be praise expressed, although for some observers it is difficult to discern this in the confounding initial stages of loss. To have loved deeply and lost suddenly merits a big and often raucous response, something I witnessed when a mother’s infant died before me in the Amazon. I have never seen or heard such a powerful display of emotions and physical gyrations. It frightened me and I wanted to immediately do something to pacify it. My circumscribed perspective construed that her seemingly over-the-top response, if not subdued, was going to be the devastating event that would destroy her too. What she was doing, in reality, was as Peter Levine witnessed among other animals – an immediate and primal shaking off of painful energy. Her natural reaction may have saved her.
Grief’s poetry can be very difficult to understand. For some people who have loved and lost, an MDMA treatment may be a time to sort out the full gamut of how we knew the “other.” Did we lose some of ourselves when they moved on, or did we absorb some remnants of beauty that can passed on as a healing balm for others? Miraculously, this new ancestor may not be just a person in our past, but an energy that bequeaths life to the present and the future.
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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
Awakening the Healing Soul: Indigenous Wisdom for Today’s World
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Transcending Trauma
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Ancient Ethics for Today’s Healers
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Ancient Ways: Indigenous Healing Innovations for the 21st Century
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The Difficult Connection: The Therapeutic Relationship in Sex Offender Treatment
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Sexual Abuse in America
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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.