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 Polyvagal-Informed Therapy, part 1 of 4
Geral T. Blanchard • March 6, 2022
Often intense stress and fear (trauma) gets lodged in our bodies. Some therapists refer to this as a body memory or a cellular memory.
As long as the body hangs on to the trauma, your psychology will hang on too. Consequently, it is important to know how to release this anchor so you can gently drift away to a better emotional location. Research grade MDMA has helped many accomplish this task.
MDMA & POLYVAGAL THEORY, PART I
To assist the medicinal process it is helpful to know a good deal about the nervous system and various brain regions. This handout focuses on one of many important body systems involved in maintaining and releasing trauma, the polyvagal system.
When trauma leaves us feeling out of control it is often a system wide sensation of hyperarousal. The vagus – the tenth cranial nerve -- is implicated in an automated reaction to stress and triggering events. It keeps us cycling through emotional and physical upset. We refer to this roller coaster process as dysregulation; when someone has difficulty regulating and resetting their brain, nervous system, and even body organ processes (i.e., irritable bowels, rapid heart rate, irregular breathing, etc.).
Understanding the neurology of trauma takes us from feeling “crazy” to merely having a dysregulated system. No need for blame or shame. What was once perceived, almost exclusively, as a weak emotional reaction located in our personality has actually taken residence in our autonomic nervous system. The old axiom, “what goes up, will come down,” is befitting when attempting to understand this process. Psychologists call these ups and downs pendulations -- when patients detect the ebbs and flow of their internal processes.
So how can we interrupt this habituated and automated internal system? Let’s focus on few very simple techniques that can re-regulate this system, sometimes in just seconds or minutes: singing, drumming, humming, chanting, and the use of Tibetan singing bowls. All can change the vibration pattern in the nervous system.
Choral singing and chanting are used in every culture to unite and heal people. These activities, especially the creation of low belly tones, impact the vagus nerve, as well as the gut, lungs, chest, throat, and mouth.
The sounds open and expand the viscera and diaphragm by creating new vibrations. They provide alternate sensory signals that can quiet down an overstimulated nervous system.
Drumming refocuses the mind, whether a person is doing it, or simply listening to it. It also reregulates internal vibrations – or energy movement – in the body. If a thought can cause us to momentarily “spin out,” the sound of a drum can more dramatically change our mind, disrupting our ruminative (hanging on) process.
Tibetan singing bowls, particularly large crystal bowls, can send comforting waves of deep sounds that almost immediately calm the vagus nerve system and alter brain wave activity to deeply relaxing alpha waves. No drugs are needed.
Peter Levine, a psychologist who has worked closely with vets diagnosed with PTSD, noted how certain tones are particularly helpful. One of them occurs when we make the sound of vooo (soft o, like ou in you), as if we are a foghorn. Do this while exhaling, concentrating on the vibrations starting in the belly and moving upward through the chest, throat, mouth, and even being felt on the lips. Repeating this sound while alone, or better still in the company of others, releases tension with each exhalation.
The primary function of these techniques is to disrupt an autonomic/automatic fear response in the body. No longer does it have to feel like the body is betraying us, we simply need to team up with our body to reregulate it each time things seem to be going array. If victimization is about the loss of power over our life and our body, these techniques are about empowerment.
Drumming, singing, and humming are integral parts of a daily meditation regimen and are especially important the week before, and right after, an MDMA treatment. With new vibrations that bring bodily feelings and sensations alive, and with greater clarity in our thinking, growth beyond trauma is expedited.
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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.
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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.