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 the Embodied Mind
Geral T. Blanchard • October 15, 2022
If you have driven rural roads out West, specifically in cattle country, it’s likely you have rattled across a cattle guard every now and then.
I’m referring to steel cross bars elevated off the ground that are placed at the edge of a rancher’s land to keep cattle confined. An Angus will approach it sighting wide open spaces in front of it but will stop abruptly upon seeing the spaces between them. That two foot chasm beneath the bars distresses it and the cow turns around staying on its assigned land.
Then, if you take the offspring of that same Angus and never expose them to a cattle guard but instead paint horizontal lines on pavement near the boundary, they will turn back. In fact the cautionary imprint left on its mind gets passed on for several generations as if the cattle had always grown up around bona fide cattle guards, as if they are familiar with them.
At Tufts University School of Medicine, male mice exposed to chronic social instability and stress during adolescence transmitted stress-associated behaviors to their female offspring across for at least three generations even if they weren’t exposed to significant stress themselves, and never interacted with their fathers.
Offspring of Holocaust victims and progeny of the systematic abuse of Native Americans leaves an imprint as well. At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine a study looked at children of Holocaust survivors and noted they experienced the same hormonal abnormalities that were seen in direct survivors. Additionally, in the 1980s, Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a Lakota professor of social work, coined the term historical trauma. What she noted was “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the life span and across generations” following colonization.
Other early studies of the intergenerational passage of trauma showed increased vulnerability to PTSD, distrust of the world, impaired parental function, chronic sorrow, an ever-present distrust and fear of danger, separation anxiety, boundary issues, and other psychiatric issues. And the influence of PTSD – spoken or unspoken – impacted children on biological and social levels.
Parents pass on genetic characteristics to their children BUT they also pass on acquired characteristics; that is epigenetic traits, especially if they originated in powerful and emotionally charged social experiences such as violence, separation, or the tragic loss of loved ones by oppressors.
The traumas leave an indelible imprint on genetic material in germ cells of individuals and can be transferred to their children, to their children’s children, etc.
So when a person feels chronically depressed and angry, deeply distrustful, prejudiced, filled with anxiety, and wears a defensive “body armor,” their search for trauma may begin but no evidence may be uncovered…at least in this generation. How confounding. Psychiatric patients may carry an amorphous and intractable wound that gets personalized and damages their self-esteem while their best therapeutic efforts do not reveal any discernable causal factors or yield results.
Bessel van der Kolk has renewed our interest in this phenomena in his best-selling book, The Body Keeps the Score. He was referring to cellular memory. More recently, in The Embodied Mind by Thomas Verney, M.D., he concludes there are brain centers throughout our body and the cranium may not be where memories are exclusively held; many are stored in our cells, bodywide, only to be released when we can handle it.
Verney’s book has many significant takeaways:
- The life experiences of parents and grandparents may impact the physical and emotional health of their descendants as if a trauma was directly experienced.
- Traumatic experiences of our ancestors can lead to extra sensitivity to future traumatic events when we react more strongly than expected.
- Genes don’t make us who we are. Gene expression (epigenetics) does. The expression is contingent upon the life we live. Our DNA is the cellular equivalent of the iCloud.
- When cells grow up they remember their childhoods, their conception, or even their parent’s childhoods.
- The bacterial community (biofilms) of our electrical intestines are capable of learning and remembering, much like the electrical transfer of information in our cranial brain.
- The heart, like the gut, contains an intrinsic nervous system that exhibits both short and long-term memory functions.
- What our ancestors didn’t face and resolve accumulates leaving us with pain that it is difficult to “put our finger on,” leaving us puzzled as to what to do about the deep and lasting sadness.
- Much of what happened in previous generations – shameful and unaddressed secrets – has left its mark locked in the cellular structure of the body. The body remembers better and longer than the cranial brain. Therefore body-oriented psychotherapy may be beneficial.
- Ideas about the heart that we carry in our collective unconscious, of it being the center of thought, feeling, and personality, are closer to modern science than previously postulated.
While MDMA is a heart brain and cranial brain medicine, no scientific evidence is available attesting to its effectiveness in resolving intergenerational trauma. Anecdotal accounts, however, are cautiously optimistic.
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“The universe is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.”
- Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of quantum mechanics
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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.