Transform Trauma with Psychedelics: Bessel van der Kolk on Healing at the 2024 PAT Global Summit

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 they're after a lesson. 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 this mainly in people with not early childhood trauma or with adult also trauma, although sometimes also in childhood trauma. But the issue that after mdma, people say, yes, it happened and I did the best I could back then, but I was just a little kid and know. 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 and the kid did the best she could. And that was really horrible for you back then. But then you created capacity for your mind to grasp the difference between past and present. It's a huge issue. Chapter 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. Very deep sense of it's happened back then, it's not happening right now.