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, Storytelling, and Hallucinations
Geral T. Blanchard • September 3, 2022
First, it’s important to clarify that MDMA, unlike LSD, Psilocybin, and ayahuasca does not produce hallucinations. Hallucinations include hearing, feeling, or smelling something that doesn’t exist in actuality and, based on that, we often draw conclusions that guide our lives with varying results.
While images and symbols, much like in our dreams, may arise under the subtle influence of MDMA, they are not characterized by a break from reality. In fact the reality of our relationships becomes enhanced or enlarged to such an extent that we finally “get it.”
Secondly, it might be helpful to understand the impact of MDMA as causing the re-writing of a story we have been incessantly telling ourselves, particularly about ourselves. Positive psychologist, Jonathan Haidt, points out that the brain is not so much a logic or reality processor as it is a story processor. It latches onto a glorious or gloomy story we have long told ourselves and keeps retelling it to such an extent that personal growth is stymied. We seek information that matches our story or that opposing data is deemed to be incorrect; this is called confirmation bias.
We are the only storytelling animals in existence. We are addicted to stories. Even when the body goes to sleep, the brain still generates narratives in our dreams. This requires a large brain but, unfortunately, with it in tow we often turn on ourselves. Researchers cumbersomely define dreams as intense sensorimotor hallucinations with a narrative structure. Often our brains know things we don’t know in the daytime world of the mind, and storytelling with added hints of deep abiding truths can be released in the night. It may be a form of autotherapy that helps challenge or correct daytime delusions, and a time when we can practice “fight or flight” dilemmas.
Nobel laureate Francis Crick proposed how dreams may help us weed out useless and inaccurate information from our mind (remember the mind is not the brain). Crick likened dreams to a disposal system saying, “We dream to forget.” Similarly, I further contend dreams can help us remember many unpleasant things we have suppressed during the daytime hours.
The left brain is the classic “know it all;” when it can’t come up with a factual answer to a question, it simply can’t bear to admit it. As Jonathan Gottschall explains in
The
Storytelling Animal, “The left brain is a relentless explainer, and it would rather fabricate a story than leave something unexplained.” It can’t sit with mystery or ambivalence very easily. Gottschall goes on: “The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to [discovering] meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.”
Mythologist Joseph Campbell has said, “the only way you can describe a human being truly is by describing his imperfections.” And when we hear another person telling a story of their imperfections, we move a little bit closer to doing the same ourselves. It moves us closer to reality.
We are braver when we go where others have gone before us, on the path only infrequently traveled, the path of vulnerability. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr wrote: “Locked inside the black vault of our skulls, stuck forever in the solitude of our hallucinated universe, [stories are] the closest we’ll ever come to escape.”
We make up a lot to cope with modernity. Fabrications are like suction, they pull us in. And fiction, like cocaine, can become our drug. Yet, often fiction teaches us a lot about the world because, as with MDMA, with its influence we are more inclined to let our guard down.
Conspiracy theories are today’s version of unchallenged “hallucinations.” They are not limited to lunatics or idiots. They arise like a reflex when life’s meaning isn’t immediately clear. Conspiratorial thinking is the lazy storytelling mind’s compulsive need to explain things, fit them into an understandable (albeit totally incorrect) category, and bring a feeling of clarity to a world of mayhem. Religions – a unified systems of beliefs and creeds -- can often serve a similar purpose by offering shared meaning. When the beliefs are not based in fact we are disinclined to give them up, even when they have been debunked again and again. It is if we move from individual “hallucinations” to a societal “hallucinations” – and when everyone is doing it seems right and we are likely to miss it.
A life story is largely a personal myth. It is not an objective account. The inauthenticity often gets in the way of intimacy. But this myth, much like our dreams, can help reveal who we are deep down. And many of us fear that deep down we are really shallow. A life story I tell about myself is only loosely based on a true story. For the most part, I am an unreliable narrator, a figment of my own yearning imagination.
Psychologist, Michelle Crossley, tells us that depression often arises from an “incoherent story,” an “inadequate narrative account of oneself,” or “a life story gone awry.”
Time and again, however, persons during MDMA treatments self-correct. They adjust life stories that have outlived their usefulness – narratives previously containing embellishment, blame, shame, and judgment – to better approach reality. And with truth in the mix, clarity and healing, especially from confounding traumas, stand a better chance of reaching fruition.
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“Stories are working on us all the time, reshaping us in the way that flowing water gradually reshapes a rock.”
- Jonathan Gottshall in The Storytelling Animal
“Memory is an unreliable and self-serving historian.”
- psychologists, Carol Tavris and Eliot Aronson
“The future looks bleak for reality.”
- an online gamer
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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.
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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.