Bessel van der Kolk | The Future of Trauma Healing Is Already Here

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What if the very medicine you've been searching for to heal deep trauma was already here in today's episode I sit down with the legendary Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to explore the groundbreaking field of psychedelic assisted therapy, particularly the remarkable role of MDMA in transforming the lives of people living with trauma. Dr. Vandeckel shares how MDMA creates a safe space for individuals to revisit painful memories without being overwhelmed by them. This shift allows for profound healing, especially for those with histories of childhood abuse or neglect, people whose suffering has often been resistant to traditional therapies. Together we'll dive into how MDMA fosters self compassion, helps break cycles of re experiencing trauma, and opens the door to integration, bringing the insights from therapy into daily life. This is an inspiring and hopeful conversation about what's possible when science and compassion and courage meet on the path of healing. Let's get started.

My name is Flea Malt, your co host for this session and I'm really happy to be here today with Dr. Bessel Vaniculk. Welcome, Bessel.

Good to be here.

Bessel, you've been one of the pioneers and leaders in the use of psychiatric therapies to treat specific mental health disorders and trauma and post traumatic stress disorder.

I consider myself a student who is following in the footsteps of other people.

Yeah, okay. But certainly a leader today. And Maimo, we could just start with your journey. How did you find your way into psychedelic assisted psychotherapy in particular?

Well, of course, it started a long time ago because I grew up in the 60s. That's the time that people were using LSD and other mind altering substances. So my research team says, oh, we are part of a revolution. I always say, actually, I'm part of the second revolution, because for me, it started many years ago already. And then. So LSD was declared illegal, MDMA was declared illegal. And about 15 years ago, right now, Mick Doblin and Michael Mithoefer had lunch with me and asked me about my opinion about psychedelics. And I thought, boy, that's really. It's a terrific idea because when you're traumatized, you live in a very narrowed reality and your mind really closes down in many ways and you're very vulnerable and you try to control yourself and your reactions, and so you get very uptight. And psychedelics clearly, I thought might have the possibility of opening up people's minds because. And that's very necessary. But I told them these drugs are illegal. I have met many people who used to do psychedelic research in the 60s. They all had terrible careers. And I told Vic and Michael I wouldn't do that. It's too hard. And as usually happens when they give people advice, they didn't take it and they went for it. And they sued the FDA to do a study. When it was done, they had to sue again. And this really took an enormous amount of hard work on their part to make this happen. And when they started the phase three trials, they asked me if I wanted to be the PI of the Boston side of that study, which I eagerly accepted. And, boy, am I grateful that I got to do it because it has been an amazing roller coaster ride. It also has been shown me a technique that looked in some ways more profound than anything that I've studied in my 50 years of doing this work.

Wow.

So, Bessie, you used the metaphor, the common metaphor of rewiring the brain and talked about how trauma, in a sense, rewires our brains in ways that can be very debilitating. And then various treatments can be used to perhaps rewire the brain to heal trauma and to recover and so forth. And so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how psychedelic assisted therapy in particular facilitates that kind of rewiring in positive ways that can heal trauma.

This is really interesting to me is that we have a group of six clinicians who were administering the MDMA treatment. And most of them I have trained and I know quite well. And I thought, boy, these people are very good therapists. I wonder if MDMA will add anything to it, because these therapists are so good. And then that's the great thing about doing research. You find things you did not expect. Some things that you were sure were going to happen don't happen, and other things come up. And so I thought that psychotherapy alone without MDMA would have a major impact, and it didn't. It had somewhat of an impact, but adding MDMA to it made a tremendous amount of difference. And so that gets us in the whole issue that's going to be an issue for our future, and that's the issue of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And there's something in our culture, and certainly psychiatric culture, is very much like, let's find a pill to give to people so they get all fixed up and better. That's not how it's going to be on psychedelics, including mdma, which strictly speaking, is not a psychedelic. You have very profound experiences, sometimes very painful, sometimes very joyful. But the big thing is, how do you integrate it with the rest of your life? What do you learn? And the psychotherapy part is terribly important, actually. And as you may have heard at this point, the advisory committee to the FDA, in their ignorance, voted 9 to 2 and 10 to 1 to not recommend legalization of LVMA. And that was really stunning to me because the data we collected meticulously, thanks to McDouban being able to raise $63 million to do these studies, the data are very clear, outweigh the benefits. And in fact, we were so careful in assessing every small detail of people's risk exposure, and there were no side effects. We studied over 200 people, and we had no medical adverse reactions. They had maybe a minor thing, maybe somebody got a headache sometimes, maybe somebody got a tiny increase in their blood pressure, but. But we really found those side effects. And so the FDA turned this down because they said, we need to know more about side effects. We studied that. That's why you do the research. So things really got very detailed. And in some ways, you're talking to me one month too early, a month from now. The FDA is going to make its final ruling. The issue, whether psychedelics are made legal or not, it's a very big one actually, in that if they continue to be illegal, they will continue to be used because the Pandora's box has been opened and there's a huge underground culture and it will be used, but it won't be studied. And so only if you legalize it can you actually accumulate more and more data and more experiences. And so I very much hope that the FDA will come to its senses and really legalize these drugs under careful conditions. The conditions are important so that we open up the possibility of legal administration of these drugs so it doesn't all go on the ground.

Hey, friends, Fleet Moll here.

I just wanted to take a moment.

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Yes, I was planning on asking a question about that later, but we'll address it now. So, yeah, it was very disheartening to see the report from the advisory committee, the FDA advisory committee and you know, a couple things that I found, a number of things I found confusing there and it seems to be a bit of a residue from the kind of drug war mentality and so forth. And I'm not sure how they conceived the composition of that committee and their level of background in it. But you know, you mentioned the documentation of adverse effects or side effects and from what I read, you know, what technically can be called adverse effects can be what may be considered positive effects for therapy. And so maybe the researchers weren't documenting every way in which the drug was impacting one's state of mind or one's.

Affection, really was reported by ill informed people. He collected this data with exquisite care.

And the other thing was they criticized the protocol around, you know, that it's very difficult to maintain a double blind condition in a randomized clinical trial because one pretty well quickly knows whether one received the psychoactive substance or not. And so this is almost like saying, well, then you can't get there from here. If you can't solve that problem, we're not going to prove it. That just doesn't make any sense at all. And then they were also addressing the risk. And it does seem like with all the research that's going on with psychedelics, particularly the MDMA study, but even though it's been well established, the low risk of medicines, of course, the issue of.

Blinding has always been foremost to the mind, to the researchers. And in fact, Rick Doblin, who I imagine will also interview, negotiated extensively with the FDA what the best protocol would be given this blinding issue. So the FDA approved the protocol? We did. And they approved the notion that we don't give some substance to the other people that makes their body feel a bit in turmoil. I said, everybody's aware of that. And that's why we had blind waiters other than people who did the assessment, had no idea what people were taking. And the people themselves didn't know what they had been taking, although most people who took the MDMA were very aware. Oh, my mind has changed and this is different, but this is actually surprising to me. A number of people in the study who did not get the mdma, who got the placebo, actually thought they had been on MDMA because the setting was so unusual. You know, you lie on a couch in a very nice space and play very nice music with two very nice people. Quite a few people, including Sigar psychiatrist who was in the study, thought that on placebo they had to receive the mdma. So I think that objection was really bizarre. And then the other thing they based is that indeed somebody who was part of an earlier MDMA study had very inappropriate relationship with the patient. And that was horrendous that he did that. But that has nothing to do with the drug. And there's people who are psychoanalysts who have measured the patients and people who do CBT have measured. It doesn't mean that those methods are not useful. That somebody did a terrible thing but has nothing to do with the drug.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it does give hope and yes, that the FDA was very involved in the research protocol all along. So maybe that gives some hope that despite this committee's findings, that the FDA will go ahead and approve the rescheduling. So we can hope for that. So in our culture, we do have a tendency to look for panaceas. And of course, we've all been inculturated to fix ourselves with a pill. And so although these psychedelic medicines have proven incredibly powerful and create very powerful openings, as you said, it's the integration of these medicines with psychotherapy, so psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So I'm curious about your own experience and research and research interests, because you've Been involved with neurofeedback with parts work with psychodynamic therapy with psychodrama with many different modalities. And I would think the exciting part of this research would now be because my understanding of the MDMA studies and some of the other ongoing clinical trials is that there wasn't much psychotherapy going on during the session. It was pre session preparation, post session integration. There's kind of one camp that says let the medicine do its work. But I would think some of the really interesting research going forward could be actually more actively integrating things like neurofeedback or psychodrama or mindfulness meditation training, yoga, these different modalities, more integrating them even more proactively, possibly with the psychedelic medicines.

Yeah, I think that's true to some degree. But the downside is that psychotherapists tend to be a religious loss. They learn a particular technique, think this technique is the answer. And so people say, I'm a Freudian analyst. And they go, oh, that's nice. You follow somebody from the last century and heard some crazy ideas and how do I apply this to Freudian psychoanalysis? Other people say, I'm an EMDR therapist. How do I integrate with the emdr? And I go, actually, why? You learn how to be a psychedelic therapist and see if you still need your treatment that you happen to have learned before, but it's still necessary. So I would not jump to let's do combine different methods with the psychedelics. Although, as you mentioned before, I'm very much into psychodrama and it's actually my favorite clinical activity because it is very interactive and you see profound changes. And my friend Gitter Weitz, who you also know, said, let's combine it with psychedelics. So we set up a weekend, about 10 people, and we did psychodrama with Amazon Academy. The movie is available. It's interesting. People were slightly more open, but I'm not convinced that adding psychodrama to Academy helped made it a better experience. I think they both are useful experiences in different ways, and I'm skeptical that one thing really profoundly enhanced the other one.

Well, so you mentioned, why not just begin with become a good psychedelic therapist? So maybe I can explore what you mean by that. Exactly. So is that primarily just how to be a sitter, how to hold space for the journey itself, or is it the whole spectrum of preparation and integration following that, what do we learn to be a good psychiatric therapist?

Well, one very important part is that even though MDMA is called ecstasy, out in the streets for almost nobody taking MDMA was an ecstatic experience for most people. Very painful material came up. Very scary stuff comes up. And if you're by yourself. And a number of our subjects in our study actually said that I could never have done this without your presence. I could never have come as deep without you. And people oftentimes, during their psychic experiences, are confronted with very painful things, Oftentimes that they had repressed or not dared to go to. And as you start re experiencing and notice what happens to you, happens to you. Thus that can be an extraordinarily painful experience. And having people at that point who are there for you and who can help you to feel what you feel and to can say, it's okay, just go there and see what happens next. So the role of the therapist is very much to encourage people. They give people heart to face very difficult realities. So it's not true that during the experience itself, nothing happens. That pathic presence of people is terribly important as you plow the depths of your so the ability to provide that.

Empathic presence and encouragement. In this context, the client or the patient is someone who has identified traumas and is suffering. So it's likely that very difficult things are going to come up. And the whole thing, I would think, could be very accentuated compared to a conventional psychotherapeutic session. In terms of the therapists themselves, it seemed there would be a higher bar for the inner work they've done. To be able to hold space in an empathic way and not have their own material get triggered. Or if it is, to be able to work with that, to understand the dynamics of transference and countertransference. Seems like the bar gets raised for the ability of the therapist to hold space in that really effective way.

Well, the thing about our culture is that we have really moved towards trying to. We have moved from mental health to behavioral health. That behavioral health means don't be a pain in the ass, as opposed to mental health is how you're doing with yourself. And so the way the young people get trained is to fix people. That's how I was trained. But so when people get miserable, unhappy, something I learned to fix it, say, oh, you should be grateful. Oh, you should look at the bright side. You should look at it. No, you should have the courage to confront the pain of your past. And very few young therapists know that. And very young therapists have the trust that people have innate capacities to resolve things, provided they're able to go there and confront it. Yeah.

So I think that is a really important distinction. And I think maybe in the history of psychotherapy it was often more of a willingness to really go with the patient into whatever reality they were experiencing, to meet them there and join them there to validate and affirm that. So that rather than that, that fix somebody approach.

Another issue I think behind this advisory committee and in general is that our professions are very much focused on what is wrong with you. And we make these endless lists of what's wrong with you. Psychedelics also give you sometimes pleasure, joy and awe in your mind. Our profession is not into pleasure. I say our profession hates the F word, but fun, the notion that people have fun doing something is anathema in psychiatry and psychology. We are there to help you to not be messed up. But having people having fun or people feeling joy, that's not what we do for a living. As our puritanical society. People just might feel good.

Yeah, yeah. I think that's very much a legacy of our kind of puritanical Western society. So another shift I think in, in psychotherapy and that kind of work since let's say the 60s of the human potential movement, things like a stall and other things that were going on is it seemed like psychotherapy became very risk averse. You know, safety is important and we don't want to re traumatize people. But it seemed like it became so risk averse that maybe not much was going to happen that could really lead to breakthroughs for people. And what I've seen with the world of psychiatrist and psychotherapy, it seems like, like psychotherapists have rediscovered their bravery or the field. I mean, it's pretty brave work that's happening to take people into these experiences. So it seems like a real shift in the kind of bravery that's required to hold space and allow patients to experience things in a way that there really could be transformation. Right.

And as part of it you mentioned it already, is that you need to have your own experience. And when I trained, she can obviously see Amazer nitrate. Doing your own work was very much part of the requirement to do this work that is nowhere considered a necessary condition to become good psychotherapist. And in fact, in our submission to the fda, we said that people need to have their own, the therapists need to have their own experiences. And I feel very strongly about it. Like you cannot really know what the psychiatric experiences is like without having had it. And so you need to also have had the experience, as certainly I've had too, of going deep inside and finding some very painful and see that you can tolerate it. And you can confront it, you can come to terms with it. But that means that you're also very much open to feel your pain and to feel the burdens that you carry. And indeed, people get scared. The moment somebody gets agitated or upset. You go like, let's give him a pill so he's no longer agitated. Let's give them advice about what to do so they no longer upset. People are upset for a good reason. And it's perfectly all right for you to be very terrified and scared and angry. Let's see what happens there. And so you need to have a very open heart and open mind in order to help people with their psychedelic experiences and not try to control the process.

Your book, Nobody Keeps the Score, really emphasized the somatic aspect of this work and trauma altogether. So I wonder if we could explore that a little bit. The somatic aspect or dimensions of psychedelic assistance. Psychotherapy.

Part of what got me interested in psychedelics here is that a close friend of mine was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer about 12 years ago. And he was really going rapidly downhill. And we all thought he would not live very long. And then he went to Johns Hopkins to get this psilocybin treatment for end of life. And he had a very profound experience. And he is alive today. He shouldn't have been alive. And that's one of several instances where I go, like, are these drugs capable of changing your hormonal systems, your physiology, your core biological functions and mental health? People really are not interested or don't pay attention much to the underlying physical illnesses. But we have known for a long time. The ACE study, for example, showed it also very clearly. But people know it well before the time that when you get trauma test, you die much earlier. You are more likely develop diseases. So trauma is not like, oh, your way of thinking and your way of understanding the world is your organism. That is a traumatized organism. And so physical illnesses are extremely common among traumatized people. Disease, the guts of musculature, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, all these things are highly correlated with trauma. The system is at work. And for me, what really would be good? But, you know, we need to study effects of these agents on people's core immune systems, on their core physiological systems, way below what happens in their mental processes.

So my understanding of at least the impact of trauma to one degree or another, and it may be memory specific or it may be ongoing, but our nervous system is getting locked into various levels of fight or flight in some way or another. And so if that's ongoing, Then there's this systemic inflammation that builds from that, which is really the root cause of many chronic illnesses. So I'm curious if, even prior to psychedelic assisted psychotherapy or apart from that, with all the work that's been done around trauma and the research on various modalities for healing trauma, has there been research to show whether that has a correlated impact on a reduction of symptomology of things like chronic fatigue and some of these other immune system disorders and so forth?

I don't think yet. That's what my friend Sally McFarland showed in a veteran population, that even if the PTSD symptoms subside, the physical symptoms don't subside. As long as we just measure do they have PTSD or not, you don't really get what you do. But I'm not aware of any studies that can demonstrate that effective treatment changes core neurobiological functioning. That should be done. That should be the frontier of this work. And so the whole body piece is relevant. That again came up in my own MDMA experience. For example, as the principal investigator, I had to go through my own experience and during that experience some very painful stuff came up, but also my body was cramping up. And my sisters were Michael, Annie, midwifer, who are wonderful psychotherapists, but they don't know about working with the body as they try to sort of touch my body to calm myself down, but they didn't know how to do that. My wife, who is spectacularly good body worker, happened to be across the street, so he called her over, hey, can you please work for Bessel? And so she was able to really calm that body down. Now we do ketamine assisted therapy trainings with Phil Wolfson and Geeta and we see a lot of people who really get into somatic expressions and we first help each other to deal with the body experience and to help the bodies to feel safe. But that's not true for hardly anybody else because psychotherapists don't know about how to be with the body. In fact, they're terrified of touching bodies and they don't know the difference between touching somebody's arm and sexual intercourse.

So interestingly, in terms of the relationship between the psychiatric experience and the healing potential within that and the body psychedelic experiences. And of course it varies across different medicines, but can both be lead to a powerful experiences of embodiment, but also can be very disembodied at times. Even ketamine. My own experience with the being in some psychilic assisted therapy retreats with Ketamine. Initially there's a powerful body experience and then at some point it's almost a completely disembodied experience. And then one comes back kind of in. Back into the body, so to speak. I'm curious about your thoughts around this issue of embodiment. Disembodiment as it applies to the therapeutic effects.

You know, the academy is interesting in that regard. My first experience academy myself was also I lost my body, I lost my mind. And when I came back, I didn't particularly like it because I like my body and I like my mind even better. But my wife says that she felt that I really had some major alterations in the way I behaved, even though I was not aware of this. And so you. We are always very bad judges for ourselves and that. And so in our academy training that we do, we notice that some people need to take huge doses of psychedelics before they feel anything. And it was actually Nisha's observation. She said it's because these people have learned to dampen the input from their bodies. And that's what traumatized people do. They try to ignore your body because your body gives you all these heart wrenching and gut wrenching and heartbreaking sensations. And so one thing that you do when you traumatize is you try to suppress that body experience. So Inducia had the idea that maybe if we do somatic experiencing before we do the psychedelics, that people may need lower doses. So now we spend the first day and a half doing somatic experiencing. Not exactly what Peter Levine teaches, but something close to that. And then people need much lower doses for the same effect.

I did some work with Dr. Vade and we had a similar experience. We did a lot of very embodied meditation work. And then people with fairly low doses of ketamine had very potent experiences. So interesting that I interviewed Dr. Andrew Wild and he pointed to kind of what you were pointing to earlier, that the need to explore the potential physical healing benefits from psychiatric medicines. He feels there's tremendous potential there for physical healing and pain, transformational chronic pain and things like that.

Yeah, I agree with that. It deserves a lot of study at this point. We just have a few anecdotes of surprising changes. How consistent that is and how much you can counter it, we have no idea. And we cannot live on anecdotes alone because you may not be able to generalize from those anecdotes.

So can you explore a little bit the role of memory in trauma and in the healing process and in psychoac assisted therapy? And I know We've discussed this before and you were talking. It's not so much about the stories or memories per se, but the actual sensations, the physical experiences that come up. That a client is what their complaint is. Not the literal story that happened 20 years ago, but it's what they're experiencing right now, the fear, the anxiety they're experiencing right now in the moment. But I wonder if you could talk about how that's worked with and how that might get transformed in psychedelic therapy.

So when you get traumatized, you don't really remember, you believe. And that's the critical issue. You don't really understand trauma until you really know that when somebody gets triggered by the kids being noisy or their wife being something or another, they don't go, oh, this reminds me about the time as a kid, you just blow up. So your body relives what happened in the past, but your capacity to understand the context of it disappears. And so the goal of trauma treatment is to make it into a memory so you can say, yes, this happened to me and it happened when I was 4 or 16 or 35. And so you know when it happens and that, you know, it's over. In all the work that I've done, I saw EMDR sometimes being able to accomplish that, mainly in people with, not early childhood trauma, more with adult trauma, although sometimes also in childhood trauma. But the issue that after mdma, people say, yes, it happens. And I did the best I could back then, but I was just a little kid. So your relationship, it becomes a memory. And what happens in MDMA is that people go, are capable of revisiting what happened back there and feel like that person who was raped or molested or whatever back then, but also have an observing capacity to go like, oh my God, that's what I went through back then. And then you get this deep sense of self compassion and you go like, this poor kid, the kid didn't know anything. This kid was totally dependent on these people. The kid did the best she could. And that was really horrible for you back then. But then you created capacity to. For your mind to grasp the difference between past and present. It's a huge issue, like toxic. People relive the past over and over again in their sensations and their actions. And after mdma, people go, yeah, it happens, but it's over. A very deep sense of what's happened back then. It's not happening right now. Pretty big deal. Yeah.

Like you, I have a strong interest in psychodrama work, and I've led a lot of psychodrama work and my experience, we're all often able to help people sort of reconnect with early childhood experiences and memories and shift their relationship to it. Maybe just simply in a kind of wise understanding or even in a cognitive way to see it differently. I was only a small child back then. It wasn't to understand it, but also sometimes in forms of psychodrama actually in the body creating a different experience of not being tracked, being able to fight back, being able to escape, being changing physically, how they related to that situation. And that seems to be very powerful. And I would be really interested to see how that works with psychiatric therapy.

What I think happens when I do whatever psychodrama I do is that it's more for not what happened to you, but what didn't happen to you. So let's say your mom didn't stand up to you when your father would beat you up or something like that. Nobody would protect you. And the psychodrama people sort of regress in a way, and you get something to actually protect you back then, and somebody plays that role and you go like, oh my God, that's what it would have felt like if somebody would have protected me back then. And then they sort of rescript their lives. And so I still think there's enormous amount of benefit from psychodrama, but it's not so much that you deal with the trauma, you deal with what didn't happen. Yes, absolutely. That.

That seems to be a core thing that comes up in my experience of I wasn't protected, nobody protected me. There was nobody there, or my mother or my father didn't protect me from the other or whatever. But that quality of being abandoned, not protected.

Yeah. And I don't see it. MDMA Academy per se would give you that experience. Oh, now what I feel like, what would have felt like if I had been a loved child, let's say so, you know, the mind is incredibly complex, and so one side never fits all. And even though our MDMA data was spectacularly good, it doesn't mean that it takes care of all the things that we're talking about.

Well, it certainly would seem the holding space of the therapist would be very important. And it does seem this isn't always the case, but it's not uncommon that people experiences on psychedelic journeys where one feels kind of held and these. This profound sense of connectedness with the all the oneness, the universe. And there is some sense of almost powerful sense of safety that isn't necessarily related to another human being directly, but just some sense of beingness and connectedness that people experience.

That really raises the whole issue of sense setting. And the very important work of Gould Dolan about how psychedelics change critical periods. And that of course is very profound in that research shows, indicates suggest that all psychedelics, you can actually change your default mode network and your habitual way of dealing with the world. What comes into you during the psychiatric experience is terribly important. And for example, in one of the trainings I was part of, there were some people in the VA said oh yeah, we should do psychedelic therapy. Oh, we have this corner in the waiting room in the office where we can do it. And I'm going to meet in the waiting room while everybody can walk by. I hear all the paging of stuff. No, you need to create a sacred space that's completely there to make you feel safe. And the music that you play and the companionship that you have is so important because during the psychedelic experiences your mind is wide open. And if you see unpleasant stuff or you feel ignored or you feel neglected, that becomes a part experience. So this is our opportunity to really give to people the sort of safe and pleasurable input that they need for them to create a new long term memory.

And from what you described earlier about the seeming placebo effect in the MDMA studies with those clients who did not receive the medicine, it seems points to the importance of set and setting even in regular psychotherapy without the medicine, there could be much more profoundly impactful if we paid more attention to that.

That is true, but most of us are so locked in our habits that nothing, it's very hard to change us. Your friends try to change you and your wife tries to change you. It doesn't particularly work all that well. But with your psychedelics your mind is wide open as new stuff come in. And that's really to my mind, if anything so central to psychedelic experience is that is what makes them so unique is that your mind becomes wide open to change your habits. In some ways PTSD is a habit.

So some of the more in my experience, the more difficult to work with traumas. A lot of this came up in the psychodrama work, the trainings that I did for years, but also I've had close friends that really struggle. It seems to be very early childhood developmental traumas, even intrauterine, perhaps maybe feeling unwanted because maybe they were an accidental pregnancy or something. But there can be these where it just feels like this person, they can be fairly relatively normal functioning, but they have this trapdoor. And when this trapdoor opens, it's just right down the rabbit hole. And it seems to be very difficult for them to access because in many cases it's pre verbal.

I think this is such a critical issue that is that when I became part of the MDMA study or the MAP study, I've done a lot of research on other masses. And what we discovered in our other research is that if you had this very early deep trauma, we couldn't get there. And so when I joined the study, I told people at MAPS now you really should study post traumatic stress disorder, meaning that there was a time in your life that you were okay and then something happened that upset the apple cart. Because my research that I'd done before showed that if you'd never felt safe, if you never felt cherished, that it is very hard to change. Even EMDR did not work all that well for it psychodrama. So I discouraged people from having long term abuse. As a third, I was overruled. And boy am I dad. I got overruled because 88% of the people who were in our study had chronic child abuse neglect in their background, which up to now have been pretty intractable problems. Those people did extraordinarily well. So to my mind, it's the biggest part of the MDMA study is that it really helped tremendously with developmental trauma. And all of us as clinicians know people with developmental trauma and we may sometimes be able to help them a little bit, but we can barely say, this person is walking out of my office just fine. Because that lingering idea of I'm no good, I'm unwanted, I'm unlovable, I'm fundamentally damaged, is an extremely difficult thing to shift. And you made it.

I'm curious. Our colleague Dick Swartz, in his work with the parts work, internal family systems, and in his clinical experience, he's I think, become convinced that there's this self energy, one can get more contact and get more stabilized in what he calls self with a capital S, and that this is an aspect of our being that actually was never touched by the trauma. And that he feels that even people with those attachment issues and that lack of foundation, of having been careful can connect with some level of their being where that can be healed or can replace or, you know, do that reparenting or the foundational attachment, even in a case where it didn't happen initially. I'm curious about your thoughts.

Dick is a really close friend of mine and I love his work, but I'm skeptical, but I would call that a hypothesis. And again, people who develop A particular treatment tend to believe that's a religion. It's all true. But when I hear Dick say it, it's like, okay, we have to do a study to see to what degree that's actually true. I don't quite believe that, actually. Don't think there's a little inside of you that's your wonderful self to some degree there's some relevance to that. But some people are extremely damaged. And to get to a sense of self love and self respect and self awareness, you may be able to get there at the end, but you may not. And I'm not sure Dick doesn't have a long term psychotherapy practice. He does these wonderful demonstrations with people, short time and these very important stuff happens. But I'm skeptical about the claim, worthwhile claim to investigate.

Yeah, I think it's a very rich area for investigation and it's something the field is certainly skeptical about. In my own experience. It also connects with. I've been involved in fairly deep meditation path for the last 50 years or so. And I think there are through meditation methodologies, there are ways to relax into very deep states of being and flow and what's called samadhi in some traditions where I think there is a potential of connecting with something that is perhaps even pre trauma, pre uterine, pre attachment or something like that.

Yeah, that's. I know that people have seen that and this happens. But certainly if you're a person with love, early childhood abuse, neglect, meditation is very hard and gets way up because, you know, you sit there and you meet the inner void inside and the damaged inside. Somebody called Willoughby Britain actually is studying the negative effects of meditation and how terrifying it may be to meet yourself actually in meditation. And so yes, if you're really extremely hardworking, you keep trying it, you may be able to get there, but boy, it is unbelievably hard work, as you know. And if you can speed that process up with mdma, that'd be terrific. Yeah.

So you're saying maybe this could be our final question. You said in the MDMA studies you were seeing there were subjects or clients in the studies that had severe childhood trauma, childhood abuse, and you were seeing profound healing. So is there some kind of reweaving of the attachment foundation you feel is happening through the psychedelic drugs?

In that case, I wouldn't dare to go speculate about it. What we know is that we got some measures in there. I got some measures in there about self compassion and self regulation and negotiating conflict and Alexis Thymia, the ability to articulate what's going on with you. And all those were profoundly changed. But if I'd had my drugs, I would also have given people Rorschach tests. It's something I never published and I really regret not having done so. I did the first study on Prozac for ptsd, and one of the archaeologists I had back then was the Rorschach people's workshops profoundly changed all Prozac. And I wish I had published it, because it's really quite a big deal. And so the Rorschach, to my mind, is the best way of measuring how you understand the world, how you engage with the world, how you see the world. And when you give Rorschach to people, you see all of us make meaning in a different way. And it's actually surprising when you look at the different spots in the Warsaw card that you and I can actually have a conversation, even though internally we live in a completely different world, you know, and my hunch is that the Warsaw could really guide us to see how the mind changes. It's not by the culture. It says, how does the brain change? Everybody wants to talk about amygdala and serotonin receptors, but that has never really led us into a deeper understanding. And we need to bring the mind back into our fields. How does your mental process change? How do you see the world differently? And I think that's. That's the way to go. But to go directly into mechanisms at this point, to my mind is hubris. It's really like, no, we don't know. Webb Telescope shows us how complex the universe is, and our brains are almost as complex as the universe out there. So anybody who comes up with, oh, it's that or it's that, I go to probably not.

Well, even with bringing the mind back in, one could also suggest bringing consciousness back in, which gets us into a bit of an east west overlap there. But there could be profound changes in consciousness.

See, that's why the legalization is so important, because once it becomes legal, regardless of the strictures that you have, you can actually above ground, study these things and the source on the ground. Nobody's going to study these things.

Well, let's hope for the best with the FDA's decision about a month from now. So thank you so much for this. Been very illuminating as always, Cecil, and thank you so much.

Be well. Okay, See you.

Take care.

Thank you for joining me on the Radical Responsibility podcast. Remember, real change happens when we commit to our growth, face our challenges with compassion, and stay open to transformation. If you found found this episode helpful, I encourage you to subscribe and help us spread the message of healing and personal empowerment. Stay grounded, stay present, and stay true to you. Take care.

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