I am very excited by the White Paper in the Journal of Psychedelic Psychiatry (PSIP Model) for three reasons.
- One is it offers a more useful model of trauma and trauma healing than I have seen before, even in Somatic Experiencing.
- Two is a useful piece of vocabulary describing primary and secondary consciousness. Here is a shortened excerpt:
Primary consciousness is an evolutionarily early type of cognition. It does not conceive of time or think abstractly. It is based on body sensation, emotion, imagery, nondeclarative memory (i.e., non-verbal and non-conscious memory)… Think of your dog, or cat, or toddler: there is a self, a personality, there that operates and perceives the world very differently than your adult conscious mind does… In contrast, secondary consciousness is a mind operating in an ordinary, everyday, adult manner.
- The third is that it maps different layers of healing via psychedelic medicine, and points to the effectiveness of using cannabis in therapeutic sessions to clear numbing and dissociation.
I am exploring using co-regulation with the therapeutic use of cannabis and finding it very productive!