There are many reasons to take psychedelics. Healing, creativity, spiritual growth, developing group minds, and cooperation, to name a few. One speaker at the recent Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy Summit mentioned how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs believe they “need to be microdosing just to keep pace with the other innovators in tech”. My interest is in more efficient healing.
After 50 years of trauma work, I continue to investigate how we heal, and how we can heal more efficiently for better personal relationships and cultural sustainability. Of all the new approaches that have come down the pike, the use of low-dose psychedelics is yielding the most encouraging results I have seen in working with PTSD, particularly childhood PTSD.
Two main approaches to using psychedelics interest me because they are so important and effective for healing trauma.
- Low-dose psychedelics for healing dissociation and relational challenges can accelerate the basic work of psychotherapy
- The higher dose psychedelics can give people access to transcendent and nondual experiences. These can provide essential hope and perspective that is vital to people who have been stuck and lost hope.
The danger with high-dose, transcendent experiences is that they offer an escape from the more mundane but important work of making our relationships go better. Overfocusing on transcendent experiences risks spiritual bypass of real issues, and avoids the work of rewiring the NS for healthy embodied relationships.
Embodied experience (like BCR) directly before taking medicine has been shown to drastically reduce the need for high dosages to get therapeutic effects. BCR goes deep and makes a difference. Psychedelics can add to that. In addition, BCR exercises and the attunement they cultivate make an excellent complement to psychedelic work.
Our relationships with others, and our relationship with ourselves and our bodies are fundamental to a healthy life. We are seeing that low-dose psychedelics can be an effective aid to shortening therapy, reducing pain, and rewiring our nervous systems for coregulation and a better shot at survival for our species. What a game-changer!