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, Capabilities, and Limitations
Geral T. Blanchard • December 30, 2021
There is a great deal of confusion about what MDMA (an empathogen) and psilocybin, LSD, and DMT (psychedelics) can do to heal a person.
All of them can have near immediate effects and all can have lingering effects. But what is realistic to expect, especially from the more subtle MDMA?
MDMA is thought of as a relational trauma medicine. It can often reset a person to a pre-trauma state and enhance socialization. It is notoriously effective when there has been an interpersonal trauma. And betrayal – via deception, lying, trickery, and/or gaslighting -- is at the core of these traumas. Domestic violence, sexual abuse, religious abuse, family disloyalties, and suicide are common examples.
During (and after) treatment, this medicine will swell your heart so that you can feel emotions more strongly than before and not be as constricted. In the case of the tragic loss of a loved one, MDMA will not erase previous warm and loving feelings, in fact, you just might appreciate the gift of your loved one even more. Yay! Ouch! So anticipate there may be unusually strong moments of sobbing, appreciating, laughing, and discouragement. This grief process -- over what you had or what you may never have experienced earlier in your life -- may heighten your awareness of how love was absent for far too long. After a heartbreaking loss you may be broken open, for a time, to more powerful emotions, not just by the grief but by MDMA’s chemical stimulation as well.
By its very definition an empathogen opens you up emotionally -- warmly and lovingly. The keys to issue resolution are to a) give the medicine time as neurogenesis is slower acting than a blast of DMT or LSD, and b) allow the full release of your grief-praise response which may leave you feeling “all over the place” until integration has occurred. And if you allow the full expression of natural pent up feelings, gratitude and hope can eventually fill the void. In the meantime, your task is to mindfully target enough people and animals to be recipients of your increased sociability and love. Exercise the love muscles. And continue your therapy with a sharper mind at your disposal.
MDMA is far different from antidepressants and antianxiety medications that stifle emotions. Keeping them inside leads to a vacuous cynicism and meager social existence. Many people prefer prescription drugs because they buffer them from a complete life -- from loving mightily and losing compellingly. Sometimes people simply prefer not to feel. But if one is to grow, they must be unafraid to love. And if a person doesn’t release what is inside of them, there will be no development, just a flatlined “life” with no real life to it.
Persons can remain stuck in old emotional baggage that doesn’t get released and transformed into something bigger and better. MDMA does not smother emotions, it brings them out into the open so awareness and healing can occur.
Do not fear what is inside you, unless you decide to hold it in forever. Big emotions means you feel, you understand yourself more fully, you can empathize, you love, and you are fully alive. And some days that will sucks, other days it will be glorious. But usually all emotions, like passing rain clouds, will pass.
Abraham Maslow, who studied self-actualization and peak experiences of the kind some mood altering drugs set in motion, wrote about passionate love. His words: “I wonder if we humans could love – love passionately – if we knew we [or our partners] would never die.” Rollo May, another legend in the field of psychology added, “This is another asset of recognizing our mortality: We learn to love each other. We are able to love passionately because we die.” Sometimes people love like there is no tomorrow because, sooner or later, there will be no tomorrow.
Irreverently, I am reminded of an old Schlitz beer commercial where a group of men were gathered around a campfire out West enjoying each other’s company as the sun was setting. The iconic line that accompanied their socializing was: “You only go around once in life, so you better grab for all the gusto you can.” In other words, feel big and love big while alive; know the experience, viscerally.
Give thanks for those precious moments with your intimates and shed tears from time to time when memorializing their spirit. Cry and praise. But never let their spirit die. As Ojibway Blackwolf Jones reminds us [paraphrased], “Wear their spirit like a loose fitting coat, not getting too attached to what is impermanent.” Cling only to that which now can find a permanent home in you, a loving spirit. Recognize that love is the ultimate medicine, akin to MDMA, but in time release form.
The ultimate goal of MDMA may be to bring relational emotions to the surface. With a clearer mind, and a balanced and growing brain, we can much more effectively do the necessary psychotherapy work that follows the medicinal treatment.
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“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something will make sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
- Vaclav Havel
“The medicine doesn’t give you a fish. It doesn’t even teach you how to fish. It shows you that there are fish and points out where the fish are. The rest is up to you.”
- Dan Engle in
A Dose of Hope: A Story of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy
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Additional Reading:
The Gaslight Effect by Robin Stern
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.