Can Psychedelics Get Us "Unstuck” From Trauma?

In 2002, when Rose Cartwright was 15, she started having the hallmark symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She’d recently read about two schoolgirls who'd been abducted and murdered. She wondered if she was capable of doing something so unspeakably terrible. She wondered if she had done something terrible.

Stranger thoughts soon followed: What if my ankles break as I walk? What if that building falls on me? What if I lose control of my limbs and assault someone? What if I strip off my clothes in public?

She had no label for this disturbing new state of mind. By 18, she was bulimic and regularly cutting herself. By 21, she was actively suicidal.

She went to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told her that her obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions were symptoms of a brain disease, like low blood sugar is a symptom of diabetes. Though there are no biomarkers for OCD, she felt relief. Finally, someone could explain her strange thoughts, and maybe treat them. Many OCD sufferers feel similar relief when diagnosed.

A combination of antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) helped the intrusive thoughts. She wrote a memoir about her journey, Pure. It was made into a successful TV series in England.

But even as production began, the obsessive thoughts returned. They were more ferocious than before. Psychiatry’s medical paradigm had failed her and she didn't know where to turn.

OCD-as-villain to OCD-as-protector

Cartwright began to think about things in a different way. For so long she’d thought of OCD as a villain to be fought, a brain disease to be pummeled with medications. But what if her OCD was trying to protect her? What if the intrusive thoughts were helping her to avoid something even worse—a trauma that she was not ready to face?

What if her problems weren’t “self-annihilating symptoms of disease” but “self-protective strategies of survival"?

These questions gave rise to new ones. Trauma, by nature, likes to hide. Our brains are designed to push away terrible experiences, to shove them into a little corner of our psyche so we can get about the business of survival. As Cartwright puts it, “My OCD, by preoccupying me with unsolvable riddles, had tried to keep me from opening the portal.” So how do you open it?

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place. What if psychedelics like psilocybin, mescaline, and MDMA are keys that push the mind out of its habitual ruts? What if they have the unique ability to tear down the inner walls we’ve so laboriously constructed? What if they can do this far better than talk therapy?

What if they can get us “unstuck?”

Source: The Borough Press

A new journey

Cartwright's delightful book, The Maps We Carry: Psychedelics, Trauma, and our New Path to Mental Health, is her story of waking up to a new paradigm of suffering. It’s her journey of using psychedelics to confront her demons.

The book rejects conventional narrative structure. Rather, it’s a series of stories, interviews, journal entries, and philosophical reflections on the limits of medical psychiatry.

There's a lot of humor in the book: Her discovering that it’s a bad idea to have psychedelics shipped to her work address. Her well-meaning trip-sitters in an Amsterdam apartment who dance around while she is nauseous and disoriented. Her scoring bad MDMA from a car park late at night.

Cartwright also delves into the painful experiences that psychedelics allowed her to revisit: The trauma of growing up with a mother diagnosed with bipolar disorder who was repeatedly institutionalized for long stretches of time. The stress of growing up with a father who, because of failed economic policies, found himself repeatedly out of work.

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A key theme of the book is that, as a society, we need to double down on addressing the social and economic roots of psychological distress. Even if psychedelics help us move past trauma, they should never be used to obscure the largely social origins of our problems.

She also leads us through valuable philosophical and historical reflections on how psychiatry became hijacked by a limiting medical paradigm – a paradigm that only sees mental disorders as diseases to be fought.

The book contains short interviews with thinkers and theorists like Michael Pollan, Amanda Feilding, and Gabor Maté, who help us understand how psychiatry’s medical view became so entrenched in our collective consciousness that it's almost impossible to see outside of it.

Limitations of the medical paradigm

Of course, the question many would ask is: Is she healed?

From one perspective, the question carries a false assumption that healing is a destination—a final resting spot free of turbulence, anxiety, or destructive habits. But the short answer is yes: At the time of writing, she’d been out of therapy for two years and the intrusive thoughts, which once numbered in the thousands per day, are almost completely silenced.

There are a lot of morals one might take from the book. The most compelling, which I’ve written about here, here, and here is that, as a rule, it does not help us to isolate bits of ourselves, and treat them like disorders, diseases, or pathologies to be fought.

Rather, what we’ve repeatedly learned is that treating the various parts of our selves—even the disturbing and destructive parts—as having meaning, as having purpose, and as being worth listening to, can make a major difference in healing.

This does not mean being complacent regarding one’s depression, anxiety, intrusive thoughts, or malicious voices. It means saying: I believe this part of me is trying to help me, protect me, or talk to me, and I want to know what it’s trying to say, so that I can have a better, happier, and more authentic life.

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