Do you think the psychedelic experience is basically trauma shiels? It's an idea I've played with. It's definitely possible.
This question set me off in a few directions because the psychedelic and the traumatic are fluid and tricky concepts. There’s dissensus around how they’re defined, but trying can lead to interesting places.
Yes would be the short answer if you take a broad definition of trauma as an unexpected and formative experience which forces you to question your idea of self with the world around you. I’d say a few of us here get that an intense trip can do that for a few hours or a few years. There’s also the obvious (but pretty rare) traumatically bad trip.
Trauma might be seen as something terrible that causes a breakdown in a dominant operating system. A violation or disruption in how we organise our self. A collision between the wee story you tell yourself and complete senselessness (and sometimes with religious experience, an excess of meaning). In the case of abuse by other humans, maybe someone you know, there’s a breakdown in trust and authority that makes you feel unsafe in the world.
The word trauma is used a lot now, it’s having a moment. You could suggest there’s a trivialisation or dilution going on, but it’s maybe a bit of an awakening too. It’s interesting to see the understanding bubble up in a narcissistic culture. And through the wellness industry. “My trauma.” If people that have been traumatised have encountered something horrible and unknowable, they have access to some terrible knowledge that the rest of us don’t. So there’s a way in which these people can be revered once they ‘own it’, they’ve seen things we wouldn’t believe… but the issue is that most people are too ashamed, or much of the time aren’t even fully aware of what’s happened to them, and the ongoing unconscious effects.
So the cultural salience of the word is maybe a good thing, as it seems across medicine and psychology and culture we’re only starting to get to grips with the scale and effects of traumatic experience (abuse, neglect, witnessing violence, serious injury etc) in shaping who we are and how we act. Maybe, similar to this shame a traumatised individual experiences, there’s a collective suppression too. Homelessness, mental health issues, addiction, violence… a major commonality is childhood trauma.
A little of my (very limited) understanding comes from working in suicide prevention, but mostly The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, a shockingly good book on all this. Tough to get through, very dense and emotionally taxing in parts but life-affirming too. Informed by 30 years of practice with loads of interesting and grim case studies across victims of war experiences, child rape, a woman going through a hysteroctemy performed by surgeons taking the piss about their infidelities while she was fully aware... ( had to put it down and writhe about my bed before going back in). My friend says reading it made her a better person and I think I agree.
Van Der Kolk talks about it as the body’s response to something very bad that overwhelms the central nervous system “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then, It’s the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside people.”
During an extremely stressful experience, an ancient auto-pilot for survival kicks in.
From an abstract on trauma’s impact on childhood development
Traumatic events disrupt homeostasis in multiple areas of the brain that are recruited to respond to threat. Use-dependent internalization of elements of the traumatic experience can result in the persistence of fear-related neurophysiologic patterns affecting emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and social functioning.
He goes into a lot of detail on the biological processes that occur, but my crude interpretation: with trauma there seems to be a biological imperative, a survival instinct that’s forcing the body and nervous system to remember while the overwhelmed conscious mind is forced to suppress or forget. It’s almost like the rupture from the outside smashes the authority, state control of the ego, and the will to survive erupts through ancient instincts: fight, flight , shit yourself and the lizard brain freeze. It’s interesting to think about the brain evolving as a threat-sensitive “get-out-of-the-way machine”
So the harrowing event has imprinted on your nervous system, you get stuck in a state of hyper-vigilance, and active suppression, hyper-sensitive to environments and situations and people that give your body similar impressions. And the after-effects of the experience have an almost demonic control that animates your behaviour for years, maybe a lifetime after. So.. i’m drinking too much to cope with a pain that I don’t fully comprehend.
Van Der Kolk…
Observing yourself, knowing yourself, being curious about yourself, befriending yourself, taking care of yourself. One of the most striking things that comes out of all the research of trauma is not so much these typical trauma things that people talk about like nightmares and flashbacks. One of the most striking things is the idea of having a hateful relationship to your body: not taking care of your body by abusing alcohol so you don’t feel anything; by smoking dope day and night so you don’t feel anything; by injecting drugs into yourself so you don’t feel anything; by having sex with inappropriate people so you don’t feel anything; by frantically wandering around to make feelings in your body go away. In contrast, the only way to resolve trauma is to get to know yourself and cherish yourself. That is very hard to do as long as your body feels unsafe. Most traumatized people try to get away from their bodies as fast as they can because their bodies stir them up. The body is where the panic is—the fear and the rage. But you need to get to know your rage and your fear and to learn to take care of it
I think when it comes down to it, this is a large part of what our character and behavioural patterns are defined by. Armour against pain. The trauma is the thing which your identity is organised around or in response to. Or, as I said back there, the architecture you build against (in fear of) the spiritual / noumena / real / death / oneness / obliteration
There’s a psychoanalytic view of trauma as destabilisation of the symbolic order, a break in a uniform way of perceiving and setting boundaries in the world, disruption in continuity, in how you model meaning, where gaps in representation are exposed. An encounter with the real. And as far as I understand it trauma is foundational to development, as in an unavoidable part of being human. Birth as the first trauma, the realisation that you are separate from your mother and the breast another, initiation into language another, puberty another? etc
So back to psychedelics as traumatic. Using the broader definition of trauma as a way to break continuity, you could say that it’s the traumatic properties of psychedelics that make them therapeutic. We are somewhat locked in by our egos, and we can be locked in by our past experiences. And the psychedelic experience offers a temporary unlock from that plane. This is what makes them scary and useful.
Some of the experimental solutions Van Der Kolf uses he uses include yoga, theatrical role play, EMDR - Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (Shane Meadows wrote a brilliant article about this in The Guardian). These are ways to unlock the experience from the nervous system and ‘integrate’ into the conscious mind. And practices to allow people to reconnect with their own bodies, and learn to trust others again, and be ok with change and unpredictability.
These are ‘technologies of non-self’, and reading the book I was thinking he should throw psychedelics into the mix. So it was interesting to see a recent job ad for a researcher for a phase 3 trial of MDMA for trauma treatment that he’s leading on in his trauma centre.
MDMA has been very effective at treating PTSD in other trials because (and this is v basic) the euphoria and compassion gives you enough of a boost so that you feel safe to ‘go there’, when trauma will have cause your conscious mind to recoil. So maybe with a guide, you can go back and give the darker bits of your story an unflinching look. Rather than managing symptoms you’re going back to the root, retrieving, observing, recontextualising and integrating the traumatic event.
This is a creative process and that’s why hallucination is useful too. When tripping, you have access to unconscious material in a waking state, psychic material that you can intentionally play with in transmutation. Psychedelics have the potential to heal because they allow us to ‘go outside and play’