Trauma and Psychedelic Healing

About 12 years ago now, I trained as a psychic. (Yes! You can train as a psychic). After my training completed, I opened up a private practice offering people psychic readings. People would come to me with their struggles, problems and issues, and I would look at their energy and share what I saw with them. Over time, I realized that I kept seeing the same thing over and over; the reason that people were struggling in their lives, 8 times out of 10, was because they had childhood trauma.

Childhood trauma, also termed developmental trauma, is what happens to us when we are young, our brains are still developing, and we don’t get the care we need. This kind of trauma can take many forms, and can be as simple as having had a caregiver who was too stressed out to give you the attention that you needed in a moment when you needed it. In those traumatic moments, our little developing brains and nervous systems don’t get what they need, and we end up with developmental gaps.

Although we continue to grow up, the gaps remain. At some point, we become adults who are walking around with (usually multiple) developmental gaps. 

These gaps can cause all sorts of problems in adulthood such as struggles with relationships, career, physical health, depression, anxiety and the like. Here is a great 11 minute video aptly named “Why Your Life Is So Messed Up” that describes childhood trauma really beautifully, if you’d like to learn more.

Not only can this kind of trauma wreck havoc on your personal life, health and relationships, but it can cause all kinds of problems within a society.

Developmental trauma, if left untreated, is almost always passed down through the generations. My father was hit as a child and, thankfully, he did not hit me, but there were other ways that his actions traumatized me. It was not his fault  –  he was a traumatized person, which made him a traumatized parent, which made me a traumatized child. 

We are currently seeing developmental trauma on a mass scale, and it has created a mainstream culture that is very unwell. The war, genocide, racism, sexism, homophobia, other forms of oppression and dis-ease that we see throughout society are all rooted in developmental trauma that has been passed down through generations. 

If we truly want to see a shift, both in our personal lives and in society, we must address these developmental gaps that most of us are walking around with.

Fortunately, there has been a lot of great research in the past 50 years or so about how this kind of trauma works. We now have a decent understanding of what developmental trauma is, how it affects not only the mind but also the body, and particularly how it affects the nervous system.

The nervous system is particularly important when it comes to trauma, because the nervous system is the physical mechanism through which we process life. If I have an experience of any sort, good or bad, my nervous system will respond to that experience, and because my nervous system is the boss of my entire body, my body will then respond to the experience as well.

The nervous system, we have recently learned, is actually constantly remodeling itself. You might have heard the term neuroplasticity, which has become a bit of a buzz word these days. This word is defining the phenomenon of the nervous system being “plastic”, or moldable. This is both good news and bad news from a trauma perspective. It means that if, as a young person, you were exposed to the stress of not having your needs met, your nervous system will mold itself into a configuration that matches that stress, and as you go into adulthood your nervous system will continue to be molded in such a way. This creates the difficulties that I mentioned above, such as having a hard time being in relationships, or a hard time relaxing, or chronic depression, etc.

Another way to say all of this is that the energy of the trauma gets “trapped” in the body, via the nervous system.

The good news is that, because the nervous system has this plastic quality, we can actually release the energy of the trauma from the body and create new ways of being. These are sometimes referred to as new neural pathways. As these new neural pathways take root, we begin to feel more ease, more flow, more aliveness, and more capacity to meet life as it actually is, rather than as it was when we were young.

If we look at what the science says about psychedelics, we can see that they are fantastic tools for this neurological rewiring. The psychedelic session itself can open new neural pathways. We are also learning that in the days and weeks following the session, there is a lot of rewiring that can happen then as well. This is a big reason that psychedelics have been used for healing trauma for centuries, and a big reason why the modern day psychedelic healing landscape is currently expanding so rapidly.

In a carefully facilitated psychedelic therapy session, it is possible to revisit those young places within us that did not get their needs met (the “developmental gaps” that I mentioned earlier). For example, if I was a child who was constantly criticized by my parent, a psychedelic therapy session may allow me to regress back into my younger self, and meet my facilitator who can act as the loving, supportive and non-critical parent that I didn’t have. In this way I can bridge the developmental gap and receive now what I so desperately needed but was not able to receive back then.

It is also worth considering that when the nervous system is in a constant state of stress, as it is with childhood trauma, there are toxic effects that accumulate in the body – stress hormones, for example, are incredibly toxic to the body. Psychedelics have a fantastic way of helping the body release the toxicity of trauma; shaking, trembling, yawning, burping, sweating and sighing during a psychedelic session are all examples of this.

Psychedelics can also help us to heal from trauma because they expand our consciousness. As developmental trauma is being addressed in a psychedelic therapy session, new possibilities may begin to emerge for the client. They may feel ease for the first time in their bodies, or understand that they have many more options than they realized regarding a place in their lives where they perviously felt stuck.

We have also learned, fairly recently, that psychedelics open something called a critical period. Critical periods normally happen when we are young and our nervous systems are still developing. They are windows of development during which the brain becomes even more plastic than usual, and extra responsive to its environment (for better or for worse). It turns out that in the weeks following a psychedelic session, a critical period is opened. (This is why integration support after a psychedelic therapy session is so important.) Here is a super interesting article about critical periods and psychedelics, if you’d like to learn more.

Of course, psychedelics can also work in the opposite way –  they can heal trauma, but in wrong context they can reinforce or even amplify the energy of the trauma that is already trapped within us, or they can even create new trauma. Sometimes this is obvious, but this can also happen without anyone realizing it. Because of this, psychedelics must be used and administered with great care. 

To use myself as an example, of how this can happen, I have sat in psychedelic healing ceremonies with facilitators who were truly skilled, but were not trauma – informed. When my developmental trauma would come up in their ceremonies, they did not know how to recognize it, and neither did I. The result is that my nervous system bypassed the trauma, and it remained unresolved and stuck in my body. This went on for years until I found a facilitator who understood how to work with trauma, and when I sat in her ceremonies I was able to bridge the developmental gap that had been coming up and release the energy of the trauma from my system. As a result of this new healing my capacities, sense of my self, my wellness and my vitality have all increased immensely. 

If we work with psychedelics carefully, we can minimize harm and access profound healing. The keys to this include, as I mentioned above, working with trauma – informed facilitators, as well as taking smaller doses of medicine. Smaller doses allow the nervous system to stay in what we might call the “optimal arousal” zone. This zone is where the nervous system goes when it’s not stressed out and has a general sense of safety. In this zone, the nervous system is able to do the remodeling that I mentioned earlier. If the nervous system is stressed out, then it will not be able to remodel. Big doses, even if someone can “handle them”, will stress out the nervous system. Smaller doses make the psychedelic session digestible.

An undigestible psychedelic therapy session can, at it’s best, leave the client without any real long term changes, and at its worst it can leave the client with serious long term consequences that can takes years or decades to repair.

Psychedelics are an extremely powerful tool. Like any power tool, we must learn how to use them safely and wield them wisely. However, this is not meant scare you; Just like power tools are extremely useful (you can get SO MUCH done with them – imagine trying to build a house without them) so it is with psychedelics. It is possible, in a well – guided psychedelic therapy session, to do an immense amount of trauma healing. In this time that we are living in, with so much suffering and oppression in the world and so much at stake, I believe that we do need the wise and careful use of psychedelics –  the power tools of the healing world.