Re-entry of Psychedelics into Psychotherapy for Trauma

Embracing the body's role in trauma healing

While trained early on in conventional talk-therapy and appreciating the evolution of psychotherapy into a more relational, authentic, and mutual exploration of self and others, I have become increasingly aware and attentive to the ways in which the body holds our histories of trauma and needs to be engaged to release its reactive burdens, and to heal our traumas. As Bessel van de Kolk, a well-known leader in the field of trauma treatment reminds us, the body bears the burden of trauma, and talk alone is rarely enough to heal it.

Embracing psychedelic medicines for healing and awakening

Some of the healing has to occur in the attitudes of the helping professions. The field of psychotherapy was challenged decades ago to include the experience of the body as a holder of emotional pain, stress and distress, as well as aliveness. Most recently attention has been shifting away from psychiatric medications that treat symptoms by dampening them but with diminishing returns and sometimes disabling side-effects, and toward older and often more natural, traditional, and indigenous medicines classed as psychedelics (‘mind manifesting’ rather than pain dampening). The field of psychotherapy is now experiencing a revolutionary revival, often called a renaissance, of psychedelic medicines as allies for healing and awakening. These include psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, MDMA, even the much-maligned LSD, and others such as ibogaine for addictions, and 5-Me-O-DMT.

Therapeutic psychedelics granted breakthrough status for treating PTSD & depression

Administered and ingested with a therapeutic mindset in a setting that is safe and conducive to inner exploration, in conjunction with therapeutic sessions that both prepare for and integrate experience in altered states, these consciousness-altering substances have proven to be significantly more effective with some diagnoses than other pharmacologic agents, so much so that in spite of their illegality, the Food and Drug Administration recently granted MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms ‘Breakthrough Status,’ for experimental use in clinical trials for traumatic stress (PTSD) and treatment-resistant depression (TRD). These trials have been so successful that therapeutic psychedelics are becoming legally prescribable in a few pioneering states like Oregon and Colorado and are increasingly used everywhere.