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, Trauma, and Antibiotic Theory
In this article I am going to move into the area of hopeful speculation. Sometimes unusual and challenging hypotheses can lead us toward a much-needed paradigm shift.
And with new thinking, new discoveries can be made. Buckle up for this ride.
Many people seeking relief from relational stress find that “the problem is not the problem.” Marital difficulties, for example, may arise when there is underlying trauma that has never been addressed, trauma that may have arisen outside the relationship, perhaps going as far back as childhood. The notion I am positing is that many unhappy people turn to antidepressants and antianxiety drugs to merely subdue the symptoms of their underlying problem. And both types of medication typically wreak havoc on a person’s sexual libido, mental clarity, and emotional aliveness, which can diminish the opportunity for sexual intimacy with its attendant oxytocin release. They also can undermine good communication and healthy bonding with a safe partner.
Dr. Ben Sassa, a British psychiatrist, drew an analogy between mental health issues and a case of the flu. He likens current psychiatry to general medicine. For example, when someone reports symptoms of a cold or the flu they may be given ibuprofen or a decongestant. In doing so, they lower their body temperature and make breathing easier. Problem solved? Not necessarily. They may be painting over potentially elucidating symptoms, but don’t “kill the bug.” Sassa thinks that psychiatry operates like a palliative care profession, failing to get to the core of things.
Expanding on this analogy, MDMA can be regarded, albeit quite metaphorically, as an antibiotic. It allows a person to kill the bug that created so many longstanding relationship issues (intrapersonal and interpersonal), namely untreated and unresolved core traumas.
Interpersonal trauma usually includes betrayals which diminish trust and ultimately can destroy what once were loving and safe relationships. Resolving the underlying issues with the help of MDMA can selectively rebuild trust, not with unhealthy or dangerous people, but because of improved discernment, a person can pick partners more wisely once previously unexamined relationship patterns are examined and corrected.
What folks both in research settings and the underground are noting is that many individuals, upon receiving MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, have come off, and remain off, their SSRIs and SNRIs that they had relied on for years. The reason is that they just don’t have the symptoms of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and low libido anymore because they don’t have the underlying problem anymore, namely PTSD.
If this sort of reaction could happen on a wide scale, my thinking goes, we could diminish the need for other psychotropic treatments that treat very little while offering many side effects that actually dullen emotions, reduce sex drive, and interfere with bonding possibilities.
Further, MDMA makes you the doctor. It awakens your inner physician. No longer are we under the spell of a paternalistic physician-patient relationship with all its pretense of science and objectivity. This is relational medicine.
So while MDMA is certainly not an antibiotic in the conventional sense, it can get to the root of things and not only eradicate symptoms but an entire set of mental health symptoms born of trauma.
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“Don’t send us your white medicine. We don’t need it. We need medicine that walks.”
- Red Cloud, Oglala Lakota, circa 1868
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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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