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.
Research grade MDMA has been convincingly shown to be effective method for the treatment of PTSD
Geral T. Blanchard • September 26, 2021
New perspectives on old medicines
Thanks to the pioneering research of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic studies (MAPS), Imperial College, Johns Hopkins University, and UCLA, many of the medicine and plants feared by earlier generations are experiencing a resurgence of interest as highlighted on NBC's Today Show.
The unjustified government hysteria of the 1970s and beyond concentrated on inadequately understood psychedelic and entheogen medicines. Today professionals are much better informed about the safety and effectiveness of many medicines like MDMA, psilocybin, LSD, ibogaine, and ayahuasca.
One of the comforting comparisons between psychedelics (like psilocybin and LSD) is that MDMA is more gentle, predictable and reliable, keeping patients safely grounded in reality at all times. While their consciousness is enhanced (bigger, more expansive, and complete), patients also seem to experience what I liken to be a “split-screen” form of cognitive and visual processing. With remarkable ease, persons can immediately switch from one way of receiving and applying information to another.
Not to be confused with often contaminated street drugs like Molly or Ecstasy, research grade MDMA has been convincingly shown to be an extraordinarily effective method for the treatment of PTSD. After just three six-hour medicinal treatments, approximately three quarters of patients will no longer qualify for a PTSD diagnosis. When indigenously inspired ceremonies and rituals are added to the treatment protocol, many psychotherapists believe the results are even more extraordinary. (This is outlined in my book, Awakening the Healing Soul: Indigenous Wisdom for Today’s World.)
Frequently, misleading names are used for the non-hallucinogenic and non-addictive drug, MDMA. Some experts categorize it as an empathogen, others a psychointegrator or entactogen, and still others refer to MDMA as a clarigen. Collectively, the terms suggest you can, with improved clarity, comfortably integrate (not forget) a traumatic experience while possibly having a spiritual awakening in the process. The brain, in lay terms, seems to be reset or rebooted to a pre-trauma or even pre-addiction state. During and after treatment, fear and anxiety are tamped down and traumatic memories no longer feel as frightening and overwhelming. They are re-experienced in an entirely different way, through the lens of a corrective and emotionally undistorted form of consciousness. Often addictive behaviors precipitously decline and panic states disappear following treatment.
Collectively, the terms suggest you can, with improved clarity, comfortably integrate (not forget) a traumatic experience while possibly having a spiritual awakening in the process.
The medicine also appears to awaken a person’s natural and innate healing abilities, what some persons call the wisdom of their inner healer. With an expanded consciousness, a patient's defensive walls drop. They will often observe their abuse (and often their abuser(s) and themselves), in more compassionate and even forgiving terms, but certainly not in a dangerously naïve way. Clarity is added to the mix and a new and an updated trauma narrative is integrated.
Every treatment must include an attendant who can help ensure the patient’s sense of comfort, security, and safety. Attendants are usually trained in adjunctive modalities such as massage, breathwork, yoga, or sound therapy. Additionally, they document illuminating and insightful comments made by the patients which are reviewed the following day. Often patients will say things like, “Wow, that’s brilliant! Did I really say that?” Following the experience, they recognize just how skilled and empowered they now are to be the centering force in their lives, what psychotherapists often call the locus of control. Rather than feeling helpless, patients develop and recognize a greater sense of personal agency.
One patient who had been diagnosed as suffering from PTSD offered her reflections on MDMA treatment:
“I understand that trauma is a powerful and impactful life event that can leave people feeling profoundly damaged and changed. Now I am beginning to question whether trauma can also be seen as a positive and life-altering event that leaves people feeling profoundly changed for the better, even enlightened. I wonder if this approach [indigenously inspired and with psychotherapy on both ends] could be regarded as another powerful event, a healing trauma of sorts, one that paves over previously painful events. My therapy has been every bit as memorable as my trauma, but it feels like this recent shift is positive and lasting.”
*********
MDMA is currently undergoing Phase III research and is almost assuredly headed for FDA approval in the very near future. Consequently, therapists and the public in general must ready themselves for the advent of what is termed MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. In response, I am poised to offer training on its ethical use, the capabilities and limitations of the medicine, and when it is contraindicated.
With MDMA-assisted psychotherapy being just around the corner, I harken back to the words of Terence McKenna who adroitly said, “The situation that we now must deal with is not one of seeking the answer, but of facing the answer.” Let’s be well prepared.
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
More Articles
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.