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 - Relationship Building from a Wide Lens
Geral T. Blanchard • December 31, 2022
As an empathogen, MDMA is regarded as being uniquely designed to assist in the healing of serious relationship rifts, particularly those arising from trauma.
Empathogens increase interpersonal empathy, understanding, and connection. Once a healthier sense of connectivity has been restored between broken relationships, many patients experience an enhanced companionship extending far beyond their human acquaintances. Feelings of alienation are replaced by a sense of belonging, not only in a local social sense, but on a planetary level and beyond.
Indigenous cultures, like the Q’ero of Peru’s high Andes, have a worldview that epitomizes a wide lens affiliation. Among the Quechua-speaking people several words stand out that are very instructive: munay, Ayni, and apus. Munay means love. Ayni represents give and take, what they refer to as the “law of right returns.” When the two words come together, they are referring to relationships that are built on deep respect and sacred reciprocity. Apus are spirits residing in the sacred mountains, the Q’ero shrines, old and wise sentinels standing guard over life below.
The Q’ero ethos, like that of so many other Amerindian peoples, is one of animism, meaning they believe all things are alive and have a soul, from the mountains, to the rivers, to Grandma Helen. Everything is vibrating with spirit, all with their own unique frequency or consciousness that resonates with and supports everything around them. Life is a team affair; all players must breathe and dance together in coherence – Ayni. This ought to be common sense everywhere; it is common sentience among many indigenous tribes.
Knowing all things in this universe are connected, the spirit of one living element always has a reciprocal impact on the Whole. We are inextricably linked to a terrestrial and cosmic energy complex, a vast w.w.w. where one facet of creation mirrors all the other elements. Each aspect is a multicolored strand of sacred reciprocity offering conscious consideration of the other. Humans are inseparable from all that lives. As within, so throughout.
Each member of “me” is also a tentacle of the “other.” We pulse with every
apus, including the spirit of those who have harmed us.
To re-member our Self, is to become conscious of, to reassemble, and to restore all our parts – those lost, and those waiting to be discovered. To try and reweave our ties, first we must remember our shared home, our essential identity.
Ayni suggests we respect and love all parts of the larger entity, the Self, to which we are all integral parts. This worldview recognizes the many sacred dimensions of life. Buddhists refer to this concept as right relationship.
Re-membering and perfecting the Whole cannot be accomplished by discarding, what some may deem to be, contemptable parts. Integrity of the totality – respect for all reciprocal relations including the presumed “good” and the “bad” elements -- is central to Q’ero thinking. Restoration is the order of the day, every day.
These are the kinds of lofty ideas many MDMA patients envisage during and after their treatment. And such realizations come during the eyes-closed hours of contemplation that help them see a bigger picture, recall the complete story. After feeling broken and dismembered following abuse, upon losing a part of their soul and feeling separateness, the insight that “I still belong” is pivotal for recovery.
What often results when victimization is not treated in great depth is a denial of one’s communion with all the periodically broken parts, encompassing the “there but by the grace of God go I” notion. MDMA is a forgiving, but not a forgetting medicine. It reminds its students of the safety and value of humility that arises from a sacred way of being, an irrepressible and discerning mind, and a wide lens.
Don Oscar Miro-Quesada, a Peruvian curandero (indigenous healer), reminds us that control and domination, arrogance and supremacy, separate us from the entirety of life. He wrote: “When we surrender the need to figure it all out and cultivate the ability to let it all in, our earth walk becomes a sacred dance of healing service on the planet. More than the world needs saving, it needs loving [munay].”
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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.