TRANSCRIPT
People often ask me what I think about using psychedelics to heal from childhood trauma, and I’d like to share the two reasons why I would not and do not recommend them. In both cases, I would say use psychedelics at your own risk, at your own potential peril, and for very different reasons of risk.
The first reason is that, well, this is kind of obvious. Some people flip out on psychedelics. It brings up their trauma too fast. It brings up their emotions too fast. It brings up their memories too fast. It’s too quick, it’s too intense. Too many things come up. They don’t have an inner structure or even an external structure in their life, a social structure, to be able to handle the emotions and the knowledge that comes up. I’ve seen this happen many, many times, starting back from when I was a therapist.
Now, when I say psychedelics, what am I talking about? Well, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, ketamine, LSD, mescaline in various forms. I’ve seen people use all of these. I even heard of people using these different psychedelic drugs to help themselves heal. I heard a lot of stories when I was a therapist. People who ended up in psych wards, lost their jobs, lost their romantic relationships, did things that were very self-destructive or destructive to other people. Couldn’t function, couldn’t think straight, lost their ability to sleep. Too much stuff kicked up, too much grieving, too much intensity, and it was just too fast. Even people, yeah, really becoming psychotic. Really, it just became so overwhelming that it’s like too many things, too many intrusive thoughts.
I would say for people who are traumatized, especially if you’re really traumatized, or even if you’re not sure how traumatized you are, why take the risk? There are so many other ways to look within, gently open up that door to looking in one’s psyche, to feeling one’s feelings, to slowly beginning the grieving process in a more organic way than kickstarting it with that electrical jolt that, you know, can really open things up in an out-of-control way. So that’s part one.
Part two, why I don’t recommend psychedelics. This is strange because it’s almost the exact opposite. I don’t recommend psychedelics to a lot of people because I’ve seen what happens when they work too well. When people say, “Oh my God, I tried everything else, and only psychedelics work. Only psychedelics help me connect with my history and my trauma.” I think that’s sad because I see that they miss out on the empowerment of figuring out how to do it within themselves, within the strength of their own personality.
As I say that, I can hear people using the argument against me: “Yeah, but I tried everything! I tried everything!” And so what I’ve done out in the world when people have said to me, “I have tried everything and nothing worked except this drug or that drug,” I say, “Please tell me.” Because I actually, at first, for a long, long time, I was very curious, and to some degree, I still am. When people say, “I tried everything,” my answer is, “What did you try?” And I really want to listen.
What I’ve heard when I’ve listened to people say, “I tried everything and nothing worked except this drug,” is that what I often heard is they didn’t really try that much. And I can understand why, because a lot of times the trying without the drug is very, very painful. It can be very, very slow going. There are a lot of defenses to work through. It takes a lot of inner resources. It takes a lot of looking at the mirror and seeing one’s own limitations. I think for a lot of people, it’s easier to bypass this whole process, take a drug that’ll help you get in there quick, avoid all the long-term pain. And the result of that is the people who don’t try as long or as hard, they don’t gain that sense of confidence and mastery in themselves. Nothing can replace that feeling that they know that they are creative and strong enough and persistent enough to figure things out without a drug.
Interestingly, I think this dependence that people can get on psychedelics is very parallel to the dependence—and I’m talking a psychological dependence—that people get for psychopharmaceutical psychiatric drugs, which are in many ways the exact opposite of the psychedelics. In that the psychopharmaceutical drugs open people up, they reveal the psyche. Psyche delos in Greek, you know, they make the psyche manifest. Whereas the psychiatric psychopharmaceutical drugs, the anti-depressants and the anti-psychotics and the mood stabilizers and the anti-anxiety drugs, they do the opposite of making the psyche manifest. They make the psyche more closed down. I heard someone describe them as psyche-laic drugs. They put the feelings down, put the memories down, put the history down, calm the person down a lot, but make them less able to access that deeper inner world.
Yet these two opposing types of drugs are now both being promoted more and more by psychiatry, by therapists, by mental health professionals. I think it’s a lot because a lot of therapists haven’t done that inner work themselves. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t know how to model creating and building a long, slow process to look within, to heal, to know themselves, to find their way, and to learn that model for how to heal traumas that can be applied again and again and again. To know what to do as a reflex when more traumas are discovered.
And so many different methods. I know so many therapists who have never meditated. They’ve never done a massive journaling effort. Many don’t even have anyone they can really talk about their deepest pain with. I mean, how many therapists out there themselves are taking heavy psychiatric drugs to keep their feelings in line or are taking psychedelic drugs to help themselves stay alive emotionally from within? And I really wonder to what degree is that appropriate, that these therapists are even working with other people? Because what are they teaching people to do?
So as I close this video, I’d like to say that actually this is the fifth time I have taken on this subject. In the four previous times, I just didn’t feel it was good enough what I was saying. It’s a hard subject to take on. It’s a controversial subject, certainly in the world of mental health and psychiatry. People are so now promoting psychedelic drugs and pushing people, “You got to try mushrooms! You got to try this one! You got to try that one!” There are whole, you know, groups of therapists out there who assist people, and honestly, they scare me. I’ve met a lot of these therapists. I don’t feel they’re mostly that deep at all. I don’t feel they’re mostly that resolved at all. A lot of them seem to be addicted to psychedelics themselves. Some of them sometimes flip out themselves.
The other thing is I’ve seen—well, I’ve talked to a lot of their clients, and I’ve heard a lot of the inside guts of what they do. These therapists do in their sessions, and frankly, a lot of them scare me. So that’s why I like the idea, when it comes to both psychedelic drugs and psychiatric psychopharmaceutical drugs, to take a conservative approach. To really try everything else before getting into something that can really lead you astray.