Milestones

 

“I’m not sure if the passage of time affects our core identities so much as reveals them to us.”  
-Jennifer Egan

I walked out of my therapist’s office for the last time this week.  In October of 2014 I sat on Dr Z’s couch for the first time and wept deeply, opening myself to the pain for the first time after long years of hiding from it.  I was lost within what felt like a lifetime of sorrow, seeing no escape save through the barrel of a gun.  Yet a few days ago I smiled from the very same spot on that couch and told Dr Z that, despite looking deeply, I could not find anything painful or difficult inside that needed to be discussed in therapy and so I was ending our therapeutic relationship.  

There have been so many struggles, so many harrowing moments of remembered suffering, obstacles to be overcome and in the surmounting of them the realisation that they were doorways to healing.  

In my first medicine session I walked in knowing that this was IT; this was my Hail Mary play.  If I did this, this crazy idea of psychedelic-assisted therapy, this last desperate attempt to stop the constant and terrible pain, and it didn’t work I would have been dead in a matter of weeks.  Yet I walked out of that session completely changed.  I haven’t had a single thought about self-harm since that day.  

From my perspective, to say this work has been a miracle is a vast understatement.  

That Saturday afternoon my life took a 180-degree turn.  That first session was so transformative and effective, it felt like I’d done years of therapy in an afternoon; I wanted more.  Over the next 4 years I would dive deeply into this work and had to venture far into the darkness to find my way back to the light.  

I would learn that the word ‘abuse’ applied to much of my young life.  I will never forget the despair I felt in realising that my father did not care for me, did not have my best interests in mind, and was, in fact, the monster who nearly killed me.  I waded through horror, anger, fear, loss, and despair.  I relived my young life with new eyes and watched the little boy who was me suffer and lose his very sense of self in a desperate attempt to survive the horror that was his life.  

I would have to re-learn the lessons my trauma taught me, including how to love and trust myself.  This was the most difficult of all.  When a child is abused, he or she will often internalise that abuse as deserved.  It is a cruel reality that a child needs the parent so much, is evolutionarily programmed to trust them so implicitly, that when a parent is abusive the child will take the blame rather than completely upend their world and blame the person they depend on for survival.  

I distrusted myself to the extreme.  I did not think I was ever good enough. I always knew everyone else was better and happier than me, that I was inferior.  I was unlovable because clearly my father did not love me; I was such a disappointment.  If your own father can’t love you how can anyone else?  

I lived in constant psychological pain for most of my adult life.  Even when I put on a brave mask to the outside world inside I was quaking in terror of the next disappointment, failure, or loss; the next confirmation that I was a lesser, less-deserving creature than real human beings.  Each time I felt that, the abuse happened all over again.  The voice of condemnation in my head was my father’s.  Even when I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years he was still on my shoulder like the Devil in an old cartoon, whispering hatred into my ears.  

That voice is finally silent.  Not gone, it may never fully die, but it’s below the level of hearing.  Sometimes I know it’s there, but I no longer pay attention to it or give it credence.  It’s a reminder of how far I’ve come, that I’ve won the battle for myself.  

I look back at the last four years with so much gratitude.  Four years may seem like a long time to some.  If you’re just starting your journey or haven’t yet, four years may seem interminable.  Given the turn-around in my life, in my mental and emotional health, in the simple ability for me to enjoy life and engage with it authentically, four years is incredibly fast.  I don’t think I could have made this much progress in 30 years of mainstream therapies.  In many ways, my beliefs about myself and trauma were so fundamental to my experience that I often doubt I could have achieved any appreciable wellness with standard therapies.  I needed something that took me out of my own story so that I could see it for what it was.  

A radical innovation is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (PAP): professionally supervised use of ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, LSD and ibogaine as part of elaborated psychotherapy programs. Clinical results so far have shown safety and efficacy, even for “treatment resistant” conditions, and thus deserve increasing attention from medical, psychological and psychiatric professionals. But more than novel treatments, the PAP model also has important consequences for the diagnostics and explanation axis of the psychiatric crisis, challenging the discrete nosological entities and advancing novel explanations for mental disorders and their treatment, in a model considerate of social and cultural factors, including adversities, trauma, and the therapeutic potential of some non-ordinary states of consciousness.[1]

I won’t deny there were times I wished I could just ‘get there,’ to finish and be healed already.  This was another shadow of my father, always demanding perfection.  I remember the precise moment when I realised I would never be fully healed, that the journey never ends.  I was on a train between Portland and Seattle, looking up from my book at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and I suddenly knew the goal I’d been reaching for the last 18 months since my first medicine session was unattainable.  There was no perfect me, there is no state in which a human is incapable of further growth or refinement.  The journey never ends, we grow and heal and love until we die.  

There was a great relief in that moment, knowing that there was no absolute standard that I had to measure up to, that my sense of ‘not being there yet’ was pure fabrication and illusion.  I knew that if I did the best I could every day, even those days when I could have done better but I still tried just a little, that was the goal.  I had already achieved the end game- I was aware of my wounds and doing the work.  Every day I got up and spent even a moment working towards wholeness was a victory of grand proportions.  

I’m lucky.  Maybe that sounds strange in this context but I’m grateful for my gifts.  This work was perfect for me because I’m stubborn and I throw myself head-first into anything I do.  After that first session that had such an amazing impact on me it was game on and I didn’t look back.  I welcomed the hard, painful, scary parts because I instinctively knew they were where the healing happened.   

Not everyone can so eagerly and willing dive in and face their personal menagerie of terrors, not everyone can sit at home and encounter the deepest pain in their soul and feel grateful for it.  I’m lucky that with the abuse I endured I had the tools I needed to crawl my way out once I found the right path.  

I hope there is someone out there without these gifts that had a great childhood, that loves his/her life and always has.  I hope that they were allowed to have that experience because of the suffering I had to endure.  As hard as it was, as close as I came to ending myself, I have always been a survivor and could take it.  I want to believe there is balance on that level out there.  

This past March I encountered what I think was my core wound.  When I screamed out a lifetime of rage and grief in a few moments I finally freed that little boy who’d been hidden away for a long time.  When I allowed Dr Y to comfort me and truly felt the vulnerability of that child, I became whole again.  

Today I am happy and content in a way I could not have imagined even a year ago.  My mind has never been this quiet.  I know hard times are coming, life will always throw as much pain our way as it does joy, but that pain doesn’t scare me any longer; I know I won’t make the hurt about me.  Sure, I will have hard times but those times won’t be interpreted as being about who I am as a person.  They’ll just be shitty things that happen in my life and I’ll deal with them and move on.  

I am able to love myself, to know that I’m a good person and that I provide value to this world.  This isn’t arrogance, it’s healthy self-esteem and internal validation.  Those are all things I never could have said a short time ago.  

Because of this ability to love myself I can show up to others in a healthy and whole way. I am able to healthily love a woman who thrills me and who loves me with equally as much fervour.  I am able to accept that love without self-consciousness or doubt.  I am able to see that I provide her with as much in this relationship as she provides to me.  

Am I done with therapy forever?  Unlikely.  I just know that right now, in this moment, I’m good.  I have skills and tools and knowledge of myself to weather bigger storms than ever before.  Though there are details of my life that would make it easier (let me make sure I have my PowerBall ticket for this week…) I can honestly say that my life is perfect, complete, and utterly fulfilling.  This would not have been possible without the miracle of psychedelic-assisted therapy.  

I have so much gratitude as I begin this new chapter of my life.  

References

1. Shenberg, E. (2018). Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy: A Paradigm Shift in Psychiatric Research and Development.  Frontiers in Pharmacology, (9) 733.