MDMA Therapy: My One-Year Anniversary
Since I was a little kid I have suffered. I have suffered from feelings of inadequacy, suffered from Imposter Syndrome, and suffered from feelings that I don’t belong. In 2010, I became aware that depression had taken hold of me. I did not know I was depressed until the day I was sitting at my desk and I physically felt the cloud move away from me. I must have been living with mild depression for a long time and did not even know it. I wouldn’t get serious about treatment for this depression until nine months into my wife Janet’s cancer diagnosis in 2013 when I started taking a small dose (25mg) of Zoloft. After a month on the medicine, I started to feel normal.
This mild depression became much worse when I became a single father after my she passed away from kidney cancer in 2015 and my business failed, leaving me millions of dollars in debt. By September of 2019 I was up to 200 mg of Zoloft per day (the highest dose possible), was drinking excessively every night, taking anti-anxiety medicine (with the alcohol), and smoking a lot of weed. I was doing all of this while trying to help my children heal from the loss of their mother while I was the CEO of a 300-employee company that I had been hired to turn around. I was a mess and approaching a tipping point. As a friend said to me, I was in a real shit-show.
I was in a constant state of anger at work and withdrawn at home. In the late summer of 2019, my new wife Holly and I were having dinner outside and across the street from the Pennsylvania state capitol and I told her I had the urge to run across the street and tackle one of the policemen patrolling the capital so that I would be thrown in jail. I just wanted all of this to end.
Nine months earlier, by chance, or by destiny, I learned about psychedelic therapy on an episode of The Tim Ferris Show and its potential for healing people with depression and PTSD. I knew that I needed to try something drastic because my life was spiraling out of control.
One year ago today and five months after wanting to tackle that policeman, I spent a Friday afternoon on the sofa of an experienced psychedelic guide in New York City with MDMA running through my brain. Little did I know, it would be a day that changed my life forever. The day following my session was a very hard day for me. As I rode the train home from New York I kept reliving memories from my past that the session had allowed me to revisit. These were memories that I didn’t even know were stored in my brain until that day. I was tired, and even more depressed. I didn’t think anyone would ever believe my story and worse, didn’t think I’d be able to stay off of the Zoloft before my next session. MDMA and Zoloft are contra-indicated, as in, you could become severely ill from the combination of the two and even die.
I arrived home late Saturday evening, totally exhausted and my mind running 1,000 mph. I really didn’t want to speak to my wife in-depth about the experience because I was afraid I would just vomit out the whole experience to her, which of course, is exactly what happened. I went to bed feeling horrible and regretting that I did the therapy in the first place.
Our master bedroom was on the corner of our house and it faced east toward the rising sun. I slept in that Sunday and slowly awoke as the sunlight filled the room. When I sat up in bed it was clear that something was different. I felt a lightness in my being. Starting that week things were different. The depression: gone. The anxiety: gone. The self-destructive tendencies would also be…gone. Later that week when I looked upon the Zoloft and Ativan in my medicine cabinet, I thought: “I don’t need these anymore” and tossed them down the toilet. My brain had somehow been re-wired.
Twelve months later and I am still good, actually, better than ever. I am not only cured of depression and anxiety but just as my brain was re-wired that day, I have completely re-wired my approach to life.
That first session and the subsequent two I underwent allowed me to relive hidden memories from my childhood that gave me the insight into my life that I needed to heal. I spent the previous fifty-three years of my life feeling inadequate, needing to prove myself, wanting to be loved, and feeling alone. Because of MDMA and my experienced guide, Emily, who sat with me in my sessions, I was finally able to get to the root cause of these feelings and begin to live my life unchained from my past.
When you go through something like this, something that changed your life, you want the whole world to know about it and while I am hardly the first person to write about this here, I am the next. Mine is the latest story of the many who have been healed through this therapy.
I did extensive journaling before and after that first session. What follows is an excerpt from that journaling that brings you into my mind as the MDMA was opening my heart and allowing me to heal and finally begin to love myself.
Friday, February 21, 2020: Day 0
Today is the day. The day of discovering, the day of letting go of that which does not serve me and letting in what does. I have always felt that there is something more or something I am missing. I am looking east from the 23rd floor of my hotel room, over the construction of a Manhattan building and the sunrise is beautiful. At 11:30 this morning I hope to begin to find some answers.
For this session I was to come prepared with the following:
1. What do I want to resolve, understand, and learn? Answer: I want to know what it is I already know, but do not know that I know. I want to know what the primary cause of my suffering is. There is no guarantee that I will find out. I may be left with more questions than answers.
2. What will I let in? I used to half-jokingly call myself a “walking fuck-up”. That was my way of telling people that I would eventually fail or disappoint. My daughter got me off that kick thank god, but the Imposter Syndrome persisted until I read the words somewhere, “I am good enough”, which helped me. Wow. What do I want to let in? Not that I am good enough, but that I am perfect.
3. What will I let go of? The reasons for my suffering, my armor.
Time to go.
The Session
As I walked out of the front door of my hotel, the sun hit my face and the crisp February air filled my lungs. It was a beautiful day. As I walk, I am having second thoughts about not taking an Uber because it is really cold but also am glad that I am walking off my nervous energy. As I walk, my ego is in high gear. While not overtly trying to talk me out of doing it, it is throwing thoughts my way, the accumulation of which, it hopes may deter me so that its place in my life as the naysayer, will be left intact. As I get closer to Emily’s neighborhood I start to settle in, comforted by the sunshine and the beautiful Upper West Side neighborhood that is beginning to unfold under my feet. I pass by old brownstones and think about how much I love this part of the city and would love to live here someday. Emily’s place is coming up on my right. I walk up the three steps to the front door of the building, open the door, and ring her buzzer. I find it odd that she just lets me in, not verifying that it is me. There is a certain comfort in that, that she is waiting for me, expecting me. The buzzing sound of the door unlocking says to me, “It’s time”.
About twenty minutes after taking the first of two doses, I laid down on her sofa, covered myself up, and waited for what was to come while Emily and I talked. After about ten more minutes I put on the eyeshades and she put on a beautiful playlist that is comforting and intoxicating.
Nervousness has begun to set in. Am I going to be okay? Will I have a medical reaction to this? Emily asks me if I would like her to text my wife Holly to tell her all is okay. She is home in Harrisburg, no doubt worrying about me. Holly replies, thanking her, telling me she loves me. She also sends a text to my daughter Grace, who lives in Brooklyn and knows where I am and why I am there. Grace responds that she is really happy that I am doing this.
As I am laying there, I am increasingly nervous about what is to come but I know that once the medicine kicks in I will be okay. I think about how this nervousness and waiting is a lot like when I played baseball in high school as a kid. I was skinny at 125 lbs and terrified of fastballs but I always hung in there as they came at me. Once I connected with a pitch, I knew that I was out of danger of being hit with a hard object coming my way at 70 plus mph. True safety came once I rounded first base. Being known for my base-stealing ability, the field was now mine.
Rounding first came out of nowhere when I suddenly thought to myself, “This is the most important thing I have ever done.” In the very next instant, images of my children appeared in my mind’s eye. As I looked at their faces, a warmth enveloped me as I have never felt before. It was the feeling of love, a feeling that I will come to know well in this, and my upcoming sessions.
It isn’t the medicine making me feel the love, but the breaking down of all other emotions so that only love is present. I knew then that love is always present. I then think to myself, “No, this is the second most important thing I have ever done.” Raising them was clearly the first.
Next, thoughts of my late wife Janet came to mind and her fifteen-month battle to beat the cancer that ultimately took her. I think about being there for her, not just in life, but for some reason, more importantly in death. I then say to myself, “No, this is the third most important thing I have ever done.” If this is all I took from this, it would have been enough.
Then I go to work inquiring about my lifelong feelings of inadequacy, quickly getting answers to questions I have agonized about over the years that I thought contributed to these feelings. As I examined them, I flicked each of them away like I was flicking a dead stink bug off of a coffee table, one by one. Flick, flick, flick. Wow.
I then went farther down the rabbit hole to a place I did not expect to go. In prepping for this the past few months, I considered that perhaps my lifelong feelings of inadequacy stemmed from the fact that my mother had two more children after me. Maybe as a young toddler, that made me feel like I wasn’t enough for her? As an adult, I know that was not the case but as a toddler who had been her only child for almost two years?
Flicked that away too. Now I was about to be shown how much she loved me.
I remembered being in her womb. It felt amazing. Crazy? Consider that your amygdala, that part of your brain that stores emotional memories is fully developed by the time you are born. I could feel her motherly love surrounding me, protecting me, and nurturing me. But it wasn’t just her love, it was the love of God and the Universe. I was being shown just how much I am loved by all three. Not just in utero but now and forever. No matter what. It is a love that is always there and more resilient and strong than anything it will ever encounter. A love that wins out above all else in the end and is always there for you. Remembering being in utero, I was surrounded by the warmth and energy of this love in its most concentrated form.
I remembered my mother singing to me, and comforting me by rubbing the outside of her belly and somehow preparing me for the physical impact and risk of being born while looking forward to being able to hold me. When thinking about this again a few days later, I remembered her in church, dressed up, wearing a pretty hat (I think it has white in it and a blue ribbon) kneeling on the burgundy padded wooden kneeler at Saint Vitus church, praying for me, her unborn son.
In the next instant, I saw myself in my mother’s lap, she was nursing me on her left side as we sat on the middle cushion or our white couch with a red paisley pattern. The paisley print was raised from the fabric, embroidered with loose loops that you could run your fingers across, with each piece of yarn flipping tightly to the next as you ran your finger across it. Hovering over her left side was my grandmother Annie, my father’s mother. She was telling my mother how she should be doing it. Like there was a right and wrong way, not something that has come naturally to mothers for millions of years. She was doing so in a calm but berating way. Evidence to her of something she already knew, that this woman, my mother, was not good enough for her son. It was making my mother feel so inadequate. I was sucking on the teat of that inadequacy. I was drinking mother’s milk laced with the chemicals that the feelings she was having produced.
Not only did I feel her inadequacy, I knew what was being done to her by my grandmother was wrong, and I was helpless to help. As I lay there, I was angry and scared of this woman hovering over my mother with her big head of hair-sprayed hair, almost wanting to grab hold of me and reposition me. I would go on to think more about my grandmother and how the rough life she lived as a child informed her as an adult, I forgave her for the way she treated my mother. Now I knew where my lifelong feelings of inadequacy stemmed from. I knew they were not the fault of my mother and they were not my fault. I also knew that I had no reason to ever feel that way again.
