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 Our Relationship with Emotions, part 2
Geral T. Blanchard • June 26, 2022
We live in a society that medicalizes inconvenient or unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and moods.
One of eight U.S. residents are now being medicated for depression. In an era of pharmaceutical fundamentalism, the healing power of relationships can easily be forgotten when magic potions are everywhere. Understanding ourselves is profoundly influenced by the institutions in which our lives are embedded -- a giant health care industry.
In the West, human feelings are believed to be of little value, so we may as well eradicate them. We prefer to quiet emotions and moods with drugs. Strong feelings are often regarded as threats to us, even though upon close examination, they are self-created. Oddly, emotions are viewed much like a psychological autoimmune disorder, as if our interior life is dangerously turning on us. Many people (like psychiatrists) think of depression, anxiety, grief, and other disconcerting emotions as disturbances or disorders that are to be doused with pills and adjusted by various forms of lifestyle engineering. And we tend to ordain doctors and scientists as priests of our inner world, ignoring the reality of top-down causation.
For a fresh look at old viewpoints – existential philosophy – I have turned to Gordon Marino’s book, "The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age." He examines how we grapple with “good and bad” emotions, everyday “ups and downs,” and ultimately, the kind of lives we lead. Marino’s guiding experts are historical figures -- philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, and a man he refers to as a psychologist, Aristotle. He describes them as “a veritable cadre of neurotics.”
Existentialists have been perennially concerned with questions about the meaning of life, concerns that come to the fore when individuals have become unmoored from an otherwise anchored everyday life. Kierkegaard observed that despair mistakenly seems like it is over something, like losing a spouse or not achieving a dream. But, he clarified, it only seems that way. He taught that despair is always despondency over the self, as if I don’t want to be myself, or I don’t to be this version of myself. Like Freud, he regarded anxiety as much more than a surge of chemicals; it is a capsulized version of our experiences, intimate knowledge about the self. All of this requires necessary self-examination, the kind of intrapersonal introspection that many people explore in the early stages of MDMA treatment.
Albert Camus, a French moralist, is also referenced. He described life as a “collision between human beings” who have an innate craving for meaning within a universe that Camus saw as indifferent as a rock and utterly devoid of importance. Camus said, “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn or laughter.”
One of the gospel messages of existentialism -- whether it be from Kierkegaard or, more recently, Viktor Frankl – is that...
...while suffering can break a person and turn them into rocks, it can just as well provide powerful impetus for spiritual movement. It all depends on how that person approaches suffering and what they do with their emotional pain.
Kierkegaard described anxiety as a potential teacher; Marino (once a boxer and now a philosophy professor) describes it as a form of shadowboxing with ourselves. And alas, just when we seem to get something big figured out, something else comes along for us to worry about. Anxiety, after all, is about living in the future and because of this, this angst impedes our ability to comfortably stay focused and content in the moment before us.
Depression, the first cousin of angst, can be understood as a disturbance in the way we talk to ourselves. We can be debilitated by our thoughts, and the resulting emotional funk can leave us bereft of curiosity and creativity, while creating hopelessness too. During a depression many of our negative thoughts (depressed cognitions) and fervent emotions show up as illnesses, misleading individuals of where their physical maladies arose from. And gloomy emotions can erupt into physical illnesses only to be treated by even more drugs. Thus the contemporary conclusions that “the body keeps the score” but, voila, there is a “pill for every ill.”
Despair and depression can lead some to become addicted to negativity. Addicted to stories of sadness. Addicted to comparisons and competition with others. Addicted to abusive relationships. Even addicted to psychotherapy and doctoring.
When blindsided by emotional stingers, Marino concludes, we might not have much choice in how we feel at that immediate moment, but we do, however, have control over and responsibility for, the way we respond and relate to those feelings. A frequent chord in his book is that our feelings are one thing, and the way we respond to our feelings quite another. It’s about having a set of management strategies to give us a sense of control.
Moods, as Kierkegaard regarded them, were likened to an internal weather system. They get sparked by something external that generates dark and light moods, and much like thunderstorms, they don’t endure. Expectedly, they come and go day after day, season after season, year after year. That ever-present understanding represents a mindful survival skill.
Today, to calm inner storms, to soften and shift harsh thoughts about themselves and others, and to become more honest versions of who they are and want to be, some people seek professional, psychotherapy assisted, MDMA treatment. During such an experience emerging empathy, compassion, and love steer them toward a healthier and more honest perspective of themselves, persons who have harmed them, and life itself. To be whole, as Nietzsche simply implored, is to “become who you are,” deeply. And while becoming more authentic we must take strides to actively disavow any inauthenticity, which may seem obvious but is an important distinction.
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“Kierkegaard taught that Jesus’s love commandment, namely, to love thy neighbor as thyself, first and foremost requires proper self-love.”
- Gordon Marino
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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.
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.