Therapists can meet anyone half way with a little universal love

“Is this is this what love feels like?”

That’s what a trial subject in Dr Ben Sessa’s BIMA project using MDMA to treat alcohol use disorder said to him during a drug session.

What was his answer? “I thought, ‘Well… no, of course this isn't the noble, lofty form of love – it’s a transient artificial drug induced experience’.”

The Bristol, UK-based psychiatrist remembered his MAPS training met his patient halfway though.

“I thought to myself, ‘Hang on… she feels safe, warm and empathic. She feels held, contained. She’s in a trusting relationship with me.’ So I replied, ‘You know what? Yes. This is what love feels like,” he beams at Vital students in his triumphant lecture during our therapy-focussed module.

The rapport held: “That’s amazing,” replied the recovering alcoholic from behind her Awakn-branded blindfold, “My whole life. I've never felt this, I've only ever felt scared, I've only ever felt frightened and threatened. But now I know what love feels like. And I have a platform on which to build.”

‘Loved up’ is raver slang for the narcotic-induced tenderness and sensitivity MDMA generates by increasing the flow of bonding hormone oxytocin.

“Love will be the only religion, a religion of life for the children of the future”

That rush contributes to the healing process by giving PTSD sufferers a glance of what may be. “The positively felt mood from MDMA is very important indeed,” says Sessa.

Sigmund Freud wrote extensively about libido, ‘the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word… love.’

Opposite this positive, manifesting life energy that Freud dubbed eros though was thanatos – the ‘death drive’ towards addiction, aggression and rumination, derived from a desire to return to the simplicity of the womb. ‘The purpose of life is death’ wrote Freud in 1920. His flying monkey Jacques Lacan postulated that all other drives are ‘partial’ to the death drive. Freudians call it simply ‘the drive.’ 

Freud’s star pupil Wilhelm Reich was pro-science and anti-mystic. He was nonetheless appalled by this one-sided development. “Love will be the only religion, a religion of life for the children of the future,” Reich wrote in his diaries during 1942, “it will transform man in such a way that the questions of passport and race will never arise.”

Reich started well by coining the term ‘Sexual Revolution’ in 1948. But besmirched his reputation for rigour with the invention of implausible Orgone Generators, machines of various sizes and capacity to harness ‘orgasmic energy’ comparable to the eastern concept of chi.

“Compassion has a natural partner in forgiveness”

Beat generation authors JD Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer were all devotees. ‘Mailer kept a small collection of orgone accumulators in his barn in Connecticut; they were beautifully finished, and there was a big one that opened like an Easter egg’ writes Recih’s biographer Christopher Turner, ‘He climbed inside and closed the top.’

This all ended rather horribly with Reich dying in prison and his books burned by the authorities. We certainly haven’t heard the last of Reich; for a start celebs like the Kardashians have been catalysing an Orgone Generator revival for years. No, it’s not a trickster prank. You can buy Reich tat on Etsy.

The empathic compassion and awareness are part of this thing called love too. Reich’s predecessors in the field of bodywork are more careful to stress those elements in their own therapies. “Compassion has a natural partner in forgiveness,” says polyvagal theory icon Deb Dana, “awareness brings choice, the second element necessary for a regulated nervous system.”

Polyvagal theory, endorsed by Dr Sessa, considers not only overactive fight or flight responses but ‘freeze’ too, the stultifying effect occurring when neither fight not freeze is not an option, seen for example in domestic abuse situations. Trauma victims have ‘the handbrake and the accelerator on at the same time’ in polyvagal terms. “With choice it’s possible to be still or move, approach or avoid, connect or protect,” writes Deb Dana.

Forthcoming data reports from Awakn’ BIMA tests will examine compassion and empathy’s detailed role in the process.