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 - Locus of Control
Geral T. Blanchard • December 4, 2021
Healing from adversity requires an understanding of healthy forms of self-control
Trauma can rob us of a sense of personal agency, self-leadership, the view that we are in charge of ourselves.
Preparing people for an MDMA medicine journey, I have often mentioned Black Elk, the famous Lakota medicine man who came from a family of bear healers. Wherever he went, Black Elk felt centered in himself. But when I first heard his quote, “When I was on top of Harney Peak in the Black Hills, I was at the center of the universe,” I took his words literally. I thought that the mountain itself had to be a magical place – a power location. So off I went to South Dakota and climbed to the peak hoping for a magic show of some sort. Perhaps I would be transformed by the energy of the place, much like what people say happens to them at Machu Picchu. Nope! Turns out, what Black Elk was really saying is that wherever he is he feels grounded in the strength Creator gave him. It must have taken a lot of work to end up at that point – the spot of internal calm. In Black Elk’s cosmology there were many roads (ways/religions) to reach Wakan Tanka, or what other tribes referred to as the Great Spirit. But what was most important to note was the place of connection, where the roads crossed. And where they bisected (philosophically speaking), that cognitive location was regarded as sacred. Similarly, when the difficult path of suffering crossed the path of comfort, that “place” in life was regarded as holy, and it afforded people strength and confidence. It mattered not where any person was on their Healing Path, it mattered that they were on a Healing Path.
Black Elk also believed the outer world and the inner world, the physical world and the invisible Great Mystery in the beyond, are actually one of the same.
If anything linked Black Elk to the great mystics of all time it was the conviction that no division exists between the seen and the unseen, the Christian and the atheist. And when he would retreat to a quiet and isolated place on the Pine Ridge Reservation to commune with Wakan Tanka, he could feel power arising from all directions, connections, intersections, and energies. That place of retreat helped bring him home, to his internal locus of control. So wherever he went, there he was, centered in himself.
Black Elk’s people also participated in a peyote cult, the Native American Church, otherwise known as the “medicine eating church.” While indigenous people sought altered states and numinous energies for spiritual growth, perhaps we are now at a time in history when MDMA represents a similar search for contentment, for anchoring in ourselves and our bigger world. This is a new time with a new medicine for seekers.
More academically, psychologists have defined locus of control as the degree to which persons believe they have control over the direction of their lives, rather than being buffeted about by external forces. Similar concepts includes the World Tree or axis mundi. They refer to a line through the earth’s center that connects it, and us, to everything deep in the earth as well as to everything in the heavens above.
African Zulu healers, sangomas, reference something comparable. I believe they see each human being who is undergoing a healing ceremony as being at a meeting point of all the energies, coming from all the directions, converging as a powerful surge of convulsive vitality. When a sangoma (usually a woman) holds a silver staff it is a symbol representing this powerful point of convergence. That is why I carry my Zulu staff into every treatment room, to summon and attract all the energy forces, relatives, and ancestors bedside to support patients.
Perhaps the most inspirational explanation of these ancient concepts comes from the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell who wrote about heroic journeys: “We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”
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“Placing the locus of control for my emotions into someone else gives them the power over me and my emotions, and it denies my autonomy and power over my life. It creates a victim mindset.”
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Alex, a patient in A Dose of Hope: A Story of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy by Dan Engle
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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.