MAPS’ latest recruit is trauma pioneer Bessel Van der Kolk author of The Body Keeps the Score

Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa says ‘trauma is at the root of most unnecessary human conflict and misery.’

This summer, August 2022 topical spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl launched The Collective Trauma Summit; he talks about activating a “collective immune system.”

Trauma, on the scale from ‘victim of war atrocity’ down to ‘feel nervous when you see a policeman’, is up there with depression as global burden. According to the US Department of Veteran affairs it touches 350 million people worldwide. That’s in comparison to depression’s head count of 249 million. Trauma is thought be behind many conditions for which there are no currently prescribed medications or therapies: including post-traumatic stress disorder and its domestic derivative complex ‘C’ PTSD, plus substance use and personality disorders.

“The results in terms of experiences, and the secondary analyses, are spectacular”

Dr Bessel Van der Kolk, trauma trailblazer and author of The Body Keeps the Score, is overseeing stage three trials for MAPS MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD in Boston.

Back in the mid-2000s he told MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and program director Dr Michael Mithhoefer, not to try psychedelics for PTSD.

Since then, Dr Van der Kolk’s become an avid convert: “The results in terms of experiences, and the secondary analyses, are spectacular… transformations that I have not seen with any other treatment modality,” he reports.

The Federal Drug Administration has designated MAPS’ own MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD program officially a ‘breakthrough therapy’, that offers ‘substantial improvement over available therapy for a life-threatening condition.’

“We have lost our minds. Here we have a chance to reclaim them”

It wants to treat a million people every year and train 300,000 therapists by 2031. In keeping with its charitable vibe, MAPS is focussed on widespread availability, including for example BIPOC and low income sectors. The model will be available free of charge, and MDMA is out of patent. 

“To my mind, psychiatry lost its soul in its marriage to the drug industry as psychiatrists largely became a bunch of drug pushers,” says Dr Van der Kolk, “we have lost our minds; here, we have a chance to reclaim them. But boy, am I worried about profits. That sort of stuff can really get in the way of creating optimal healing environments. I’m really worried that people will do this by themselves or with friends or in unprotected situations, because you really open up Pandora’s box with MDMA-AT.”

Dr Van der Kolk says he “…mainly joined at that point to keep things very serious and very strict. Because I had seen how it blew up the last time,” alluding to scandals from 2015 dug up by New York Magazine’s The Cut podcast and intrepid news hounds at campaigning news source Psymposim.

“The results are spectacular… transformations that I have not seen with any other treatment”

Undergoing MDMA treatment himself convinced Van der Kolk of its potency. “I was just lying there going, ‘Oh shit, are you sure this is a party drug? Because I felt all the pain that had been dumped on me throughout the years. People asked me all the time: How do you deal with all this stuff? And I always said, ‘Oh, as long as you have a good support system and as long as you have a good marriage and you have good friends, you get to talk about your stuff, It doesn’t really become part of you.’ Well, I was wrong. On MDMA, I got to see that indeed this stuff had come inside of me, burrowed itself into the very core of my being. And it has affected me, my perception of things.”

While MDMA shrinks amygdala activity subduing fear, healing takes place by fully experiencing repressed thoughts and feelings, like during LSD and psilocybin therapy. Yet, “It’s quite different from a psychedelic,” says Dr Mithoefer, “The term proposed is ‘entactogen’ meaning it brings one closer to others and oneself,” comments on the decision to use MDMA, “but it’s not a new idea, in the 70s and 80s a number of therapists used it.” In his later Vital lecture, UK thought leader and Awakn chief Dr Ben Sessa says he believes MDMA is the best drug for therapy.

“Processing trauma in therapy can be very challenging and painful. It's not a cakewalk”

When patients take MDMA says Dr Mithoefer, “There’s often more insightfulness and less perceived loss of control. It doesn't tend to cause hallucinations, and people are more in touch with their surroundings than with psychedelics. However, even with MDMA this is all relative. If you're processing trauma in therapy, it can be very challenging and painful. So it's not a cakewalk.”

What shone out to Dr Van der Kolk was the self-compassion, evolving rapidly into acceptance, that MDMA treatment accessed inside its patients. “They stopped judging and beating up on themselves. They had a sense of internal generosity, a capacity for self-acceptance: and with that, the accepting of other people. They’d no longer defend against parts of themselves they couldn’t stand… and project on others.” What would normally be ‘triggering’ leading to self-defeating reactions is purged from the system… once felt in full.

“Part of functioning well is knowing what you feels, know, and needs to be done”

Pioneering child psychologist John Bowlby famously said, ‘What cannot be told to the mother cannot be told to the self.’ Resulting from this inner conflict is ‘alexithymia – ‘experiential avoidance of emotions as an emotion regulation strategy.’ Canonical 20th century psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall called it ‘disaffection’, “an inability to contain and reflect upon an excess of affective experience.”

The disaffected respond by ‘pulverising all trace of feeling, so that an experience which has caused emotional flooding is not recognised as such and therefore cannot be contemplated,’ according to 1989’s Theatre of the Body. This sounds like most people I know, to be honest. (McDougall also identified ‘normopathy’, the fear of difference).

Alexithymia was coined in 1973 by psychiatrist John C. Nemiah, a Yale and Harvard Medical school graduate and editor of the American Journal of Psychiatry. Some folks think it’s just a personality trait; ‘guys who can’t express their emotions’. Poor emotional intelligence is certainly a hallmark. Sufferers can certainly feel ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ but have little vocabulary to examine or discuss their state any further. In their relationships they are distant, over-rationalised and lack intimacy. They often lack assertiveness, and make decisions without taking their emotions into account leading to a dissatisfaction they cannot pin down. This develops into dysphoria, ‘a profound sense of unease.’

One of the most difficult parts of my own ADHD diagnosis was the chapter in Gabor Maté’s Shattered Minds that told me I didn’t have an identity.

“What you see in the MDMA-assisted therapy is that people have a self. They say, ‘This is who I am’.”

Instead I was a series of behavioural diktats intended to please others, or get them off my back at least. 

“The latest neuroscience stuff in the area of trauma is very much about the loss of sense of self that comes from it. And indeed the vast majority of our subjects in the MDMA-assisted therapy study had terrible Alexithymia scores,” said Dr Van der Kolk on Norway’s Psykologvirke podcast, “as long as you live with caregivers who don’t see you, that really impairs your capacity to know who you are and what you’re feeling. This is very much part of becoming a well functioning human being: to know what this creature that you inhabit feels, and knows, and needs to be done.”

Beautifully, “What you see in the MDMA-assisted therapy is that people have a self,” observes Dr Van der Kolk, “They say, ‘this is who I am. This is what I feel, this is what’s important to me. That’s what’s unimportant to me. And I’m no longer dependent on what you feel to dictate what I feel. I have my own feelings’.”

More MDMA therapy articles here on New Psychonaut: