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 Tree Rings: The Dendrochronology of Life
Geral T. Blanchard • September 5, 2022
Traumatic experiences may represent a tiny fraction of a person’s life story. Many other things likely happened as well. It is useful to put everything that has occurred to us in proper perspective so as not to skew and darken our complete life experience.
If we over-identify with a specific time period and persistently share that narrative with friends, family, and therapists, two rather predictable issues may develop: 1) a sense of helplessness and 2) depression.
Several years ago I was forced to fell a giant white oak tree in my backyard. The majestic behemoth suffered from oak leaf wilt and could no longer sprout leaves. When I counted the rings that tallied her long life, I determined she was at least 135 years old. There were thick bands along with much narrower bands that revealed periods of normal and abundant moisture, life enhancing periods that were contrasted by strained times of drought. Interestingly, I was able to locate a time -- only a decade before her passing -- that seemed to coincide with a massive flood in the area.
So the old oak’s story was long and variegated -- multi-colored if you will -- that preceded my arrival on the planet by many decades. As with humans, not every year, or every decade, is the same as the one before. How a person’s perspective of life events is described may be like a woven tapestry of colors, or it may reflect one continuously dark experience, an extended dark night of the soul. No clear pattern may be evident except, perhaps, for how we choose to tell the story. Of course, we would never deceive ourselves, would we? But if it is our personally crafted narrative, and further if the telling is not carefully scrutinized, we may wrongly assume it to be accurate; quite assuredly the result being self-inflicted suffering.
Psychotherapist Byron Katie has written about the natural human habit of believing most every thought, and nearly every word, that emerges from our mind. It’s all regarded as truth, particularly if we have repeated the same ideas and narratives for years and had it validated by well-intentioned therapists. She warns us, however, “When you argue with reality you lose, but only 100 percent of the time.” And in her cryptic manner, she added (paraphrased), “I love what I think, but rarely am I tempted to believe it.”
Certainly I’m not suggesting that we challenge the core reality of our traumatization. Nor am I saying it wasn’t a difficult time in our life. But memories can change with each re-telling and the stories can become confabulated, in other words, distorted and somewhat inaccurate with the passage of time. They can also develop a long shelf life. We owe ourselves better if healing is to occur.
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Comparing trees to humans can be useful. Patrice Bouchardon, writing in her book The Healing Energy of Trees, has compared the life experience of a tree to a human life in five ways:
1) An emotion is always triggered by an event or experience which seems to be the reason why we feel as we do. In fact, the true reason, the root cause of our sensitivity, is out of sight resting in the unconscious, just as tree roots are hidden the earth.
2) In any given situation that prompts an emotional response, we tend to react in the same way. This habit of reaction becomes the trunk of our behavioral pattern, the inflexible core story of our existence.
3) Driven by our feelings, we come up against the need to make a choice and branches may split off.
4) If we carry through with the idea of our life being fertilized by often malodorous pain, we may bear fruit just as a tree does. It can turn out as sour or sweet.
5) After a while, with wounds being ignored or suppressed, or thinking the problems are gone or even solved, they can surprisingly reappear. They may resurface in a different guise, but are recognized and explained as the same ole thing. Similarly, the many acorns shed from an oak tree during a drought may lie underground for a time, out of sight and momentarily forgotten, but later they assuredly reappear in the form of a new life, first remembering and then re-membering a resumption of the bigness that still awaits. The oak may not be an exact copy of the original version, but a close relative. It may survive, or even thrive, thereafter.
Bouchardon asks us to consider during which periods in our life we have evolved the most. What situations provoked the most change, whether times of emotional drought or times of love aplenty? Times of interpersonal harm, or times of nurturance?
Sometimes, following a drought, the next year’s copious rainfall erases harmful remnants of the past. And sometimes after trauma we have a growth spurt, perhaps arising as an inner surge spawned by an MDMA treatment. Our seed of life and growth is activated once again.
We pave over an old, negative, life-changing, and unforeseen trauma with a positive trauma -- namely a planned, powerful, even bewildering, life-enhancing event.
Bouchardon says: “It is all too easy to think being sick is the opposite of being well – that we are either in one state or the other, either in a crisis or everything is fine. If we remain stuck in this polarized attitude we miss out on learning all that an illness or problem can teach us about our own personal growth [potential] and enlarging our repertoire of behavior. Realizing that an illness follows a specific sequence helps us out of this trap.” The worldly problems we encounter can lead us to a deeper encounter with ourselves, the potential concealed within us.
Analogously, Bouchardon goes on, “If you wish to discover trees by touch, you must first close your eyes.” Similarly, if we want to discover our core, soul, or life force we must first blindfold our eyes and look inward. She adds, “Approaching life in this way means being less obsessed by the [outward] circumstances of our problems and more free to look at which of our life tasks we are being challenged to work on.”
Each tree, like each human being, has an energy field that extends beyond its physical container. Since a tree has none of the distortions and fluctuations like the human ego can produce, its energy pattern is more constant -- more consistent than ours. As with humans, there remains a “still, small voice within” like the tree’s consciousness that reminds itself to “keep growing.” And a tree’s indomitable spirit always seems determined to sprout and extend its branches. Similarly, the human brain, upon undergoing a medicinal empathogen treatment, extends its neuronal branches called dendrites. They allow for a more accurate way of processing new insights and information, a fresh way of narrating a life story, one that is filled with both a history of terror and an eventual outcome of exuberance.
“Observe closely in what part of your body you hear a particular sound. You will come to realize that you can hear through places other than your ears, which turns our accepted ideas upside down but opens a gateway into new realms of understanding the world we live in.” Patrice Bouchardon in
The Healing Energies of Trees.
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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.