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Do you feel that including drugs in the therapy was a benefit over more common dialog-type therapy? If so how was it different?

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Oh yes, nitrous oxide for example lets me surface and approach traumatic events without over-whelming anxiety that blocks the memory out. I've done years of talk therapy without drugs and the problem is that it's hard to let go of my ego personality when I'm talking to another person and it also takes a long time to get a therapist up to speed about what is going on with me internally, because I don't often even know. I did MDMA therapy with an alternative/underground therapist in the 90's and didn't get much out of it because it felt like the experience conformed to her expectations. I didn't feel free to let my mind wander.

I'm not knocking dialog-type therapy or psychedelic therapy, but maybe I'm built different and as a computer programmer figured out how to use these drugs to debug myself.

> blocks the memory out.

Not sure if this is happening with you, but please all be aware that "repressed memory" is a controversial topic and one prevailing view on this is that recalling memories that are inaccessible is actually more like injecting false memories.

I wish I knew this 5 years ago when someone close to me was accusing dozens of people of abuse, which I believed ... But they turned out to be suffering psychosis, paranoia and false memories.

No, I'm not recalling things that never happened, but rather facing things I wish I could forget

Thank you - great info. Hope you keep making progress.

> it's hard to let go of my ego

This is what mindfulness meditation is best for. Drugs are just a cop out.

"Drugs are just a cop out" sounds like a massive ego talking. A tool is a tool, and there's no shame in using powerful tools to achieve a goal. Sometimes our goals might be to overcome a challenge with sub-par tools, like climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen, but most of the time our goals are simply the accomplishment in of itself, utilizing whatever tools we have available.

Very well said. Drugs are tools like anything else and can be used or abused by the user.

Why does it matter how someone achieves this? If it helps them and doesn't hurt anyone else, your view on the "correct" way to achieve it is really only you virtue signalling.

I'm curious about this as well, a lot of studies have shown that psychedelic therapy is most effective when bracketed by talk therapy -- the brain plasticity (or anti-inflammatory effects, the jury is still out) induced by psychedelics open the mind to the suggestions of talk therapy and that without talk therapy (or some kind of self dialogue perhaps?) psychedelics are not as effective.

The studies are designed this way to keep the shaman in the equation when the drugs become treatments. Informal polling over decades shows MDMA is pretty impressive on its own.

We need a clinical study where a group of veterans with PTSD is given MDMA and an isolated quiet place to go for several hours. Each of them is told they're receiving a drug that cures PTSD. The placebo effect paired with the brain rewiring effect of MDMA will cure more people than any other method and demonstrate that the effect is self-contained.

I'd take the bet that MDMA + talk therapy is more effective than MDMA alone, based on the theory of action that recollection is not a read-only operation in the brain, and traumatic memories remain as such in no small part due to the intense negative emotions experienced when recalling them. By forcing/encouraging recollection of traumatic memories, while subduing the negative emotions with MDMA, the connection between those strong negative emotions and the memories are weakened.

Basically, the MDMA subdues the negative emotions, and the talk therapy forces recollection. Without the latter, you just have a pleasant trip, but I highly doubt real progress would be made against the trauma.

It depends on how much study you do before hand and how much you go into the session with intention. If you're not good at self-education then I agree a therapist as a guide is helpful.

Worst-case scenario you might just have a wonderful time for several hours and decide you'd like to do it again with some kind of guide.

Anecdotally it's very uncommon to hear about people having a bad time or even a neutral experience on MDMA in any number of settings.

There's a ton of free lectures on psychedelics and therapy. Ram Dass aka Richard Alpert comes to mind. Stanislav Grof is another. I can't afford to see a therapist anymore, but maybe going right to the source for free is better. I do a lot of writing too. Actually at this point I'd be surprised if I got any benefit out of doing a trip with a psychedelic therapist.

> and that without talk therapy (or some kind of self dialogue perhaps?) psychedelics are not as effective.

Probably because there aren't any people there looking for specific boxes to check

Doing this in front of one of them is a horrible idea because it all gets documented. That's not a very relaxing environment tbh, it isn't a relationship where you are both on equal footing

And this all gets exacerbated if the therapist has their own issues that you aren't aware of

Absolutely. Both are necessary.

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