Step One
The autonomic nervous system is practically unknown to most people, but to me, it's one of the most fascinating parts of our anatomy. A lot of experts believe (with good reason) that this is The Mind-Body Connection...it is the structure that unites mind and body.Many addictions are based on the desire to escape from the pain that your body feels when your mind has been traumatized. This fact is only meaningful or important though, if there’s a cure for addiction and treatments for trauma. Otherwise, it’s like I’m just throwing out meaningless abstractions. Who cares if addictions are caused by trauma if you can’t avoid withdrawals and if there’s no reliable treatment for trauma?
When things are bad enough that there are no longer any words to describe the pain you’re feeling or the reasons why you’re feeling pain, this…is trauma. Or at least, it’s due to trauma. Trauma, as a rule, comes with a strong sense of shame and embarrassment and it tends to create more shame and embarrassment when it reaches critical mass. So while you sit there, muted, in pain, and unable to even find words to talk about your pain, a part of you looks down its nose, in judgment, to make sure that you feel bad about feeling bad.
I have resisted studying trauma as a focal point for many years. I have a master’s in psychology. I’m certified in a number of other disciplines too like biomagnetism, hypnotherapy, and Reiki, to name a few. Most of my work days I spend doing nothing but reading or writing about scientifically proven cures for diseases and whatever ails us or I’m educating someone who’s been sent home by their doctor to die (because there are no more treatments left for them to consider in conventional medicine) about the hope that still exists for them in other models of medicine. Lydi and I do this work together and it’s amazing–a very fulfilling type of work. But as I said above, I’ve resisted studying trauma as studying trauma involves reading about things that can be traumatic.
Normally, I don’t avoid other people’s trauma the way that I’ve been avoiding it lately. The change from being someone who could shoulder other people’s difficulties to someone who is overburdened myself has happened slowly, I suppose, over the course of time–but maybe not slowly enough. The past 5 years have been excruciating–no, wait…the past 7 years have been excruciating as well as just plain difficult.
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Before the COVID pandemic, I wrote about our travels at BruisedBanana.Travel. I loved writing about our travels. It helped me document our lives and process our experiences. But when Lydian met Naing Naing in Myanmar, something new took shape in our lives. It was remarkably positive and remarkably negative all at the same time. I have come to look at “It” as something that has changed me from a person who has fear about pain to someone who has so much pain that my fear no longer matters (just put me out of my misery, please).And so it was, that when Naing Naing (who has been traumatized, as it turns out, beyond our wildest imaginings) left Lydian suddenly when she was sick at 30 weeks gestation, I lost my words. There was no way to describe the terror, horror, and pain that Lydian was feeling—that John and I felt. And we had another trauma ahead of us yet as Lydian would give birth within just a few short weeks. Birth, with rare exception, is a traumatic experience, after all.
I have so much gratitude for the fact that baby Maya is happy and healthy. It’s true that she chokes throughout the day. Lydi and I stay close to each other and when it happens, whoever is not holding her gets up quickly, we turn her upside down and the other person gently slaps Maya’s back. These choking events last less than one minute, but they terrify us. Yet, the experience of dealing with this problem has faded into a background of trauma, so I haven’t really mentioned it to loved ones or friends. I’ve only recently realized that this problem makes me feel fear. One of us is always holding Maya 24 hours a day. John, Lydi, and I have never discussed why we hold her all the time, but one of us is sitting next to her or holding her all the time for this reason (I unfold the thought slowly as I write this).
The choking is associated with Lydian’s “higher stress days”. It’s hard to measure her stress as it is so high that I almost can’t comprehend it anymore. I have taken to ignoring my own pain in favor of trying to manage hers as much of my pain comes from the fact that I know she’s hurting. John has taken up “creative building” in an effort to work through his daily stress. Daily he spends hours building things as he is often alone. Lydi and I go for long walks to try to quell the hurt. Are you sick of listening to me talk about it? I don’t blame you. I haven’t told you the story of any of it yet because I can’t. I just can’t. I don’t want to.
Lydian looks okay though. She seems quite stable and put together. She rarely cries because she doesn’t want the baby to “see her crying all the time”. Shortly after Maya was born, some time after Naing Naing left, she joked once (aptly) about how everyone here in Villa del Carbon where we live will know her as “the white girl on the corner crying”.
Let me just say that dealing with multiple immigration experiences with Lydi and Naing Naing, some of which have been harrowing, has crushed us. Living like refugees without any country that would accept Lydi and Naing Naing as a couple added to that burden of stress. Top that with a relocation within the country of Mexico due to cartel violence that erupted as a result of the pandemic—and then the coup in Myanmar that happened shortly after that. We built our own houses when we moved to our farm which was not necessarily traumatic until Naing Naing left and John and I were the only people left to fix the leaks and build the remaining structures. Lydian’s pregnancy was painful for her and she was sick with a low-grade kidney infection for months. She wanted to do a home birth which turned out to be a wise decision–she made it through 36 hours of labor though, in the end she gave birth in the hospital. Her labor was long and difficult, which wasn’t surprising given that Naing Naing had left her just 2 months earlier. Maya was born healthy though, thankfully, but Lydian ended up giving birth under conditions that were less than ideal. Thank God the hospital here has some skilled and compassionate doctors.
Naing Naing is mentally ill. He has Complex PTSD which means that he seems to have multiple personalities. He forgets who Lydian is. He forgets who John and I are. He confuses us for perpetrators from his past. While some of his “parts” want to be with Lydian, other parts of him hate her and hate John and I. He won’t listen when she tries to explain the problem to him via video calls because, with Complex PTSD, the whole goal of the patient is to avoid, at all costs, thinking about anything that might produce a powerful emotion or that might act as a trigger. He left one day when the birth of his child and the stress of Lydian’s pregnancy became too much for him. Since that time, he’s been indicating that he would come back home to Mexico.
I’ve had 6 months since Naing Naing left to seek out and find a solution to the problem of trauma. I started simply with the question, “Is there a solution to the problem of trauma?” I was not aware that there was one so I began this search with some fear in my heart that the prognosis would be grim. I looked mostly for solutions for Naing Naing because he loves Lydian and Lydian loves him, but he isn’t mentally well. This seems like a frightening mix with a newborn baby in the house. An Inner Judge steps up inside my mind around 3:00 PM to proclaim that Love is the Most Important Thing and that it would sure be nice if Maya could be raised by her biological father. At 3:00 AM, I wake on cue in the middle of the night to the voice of a Different Inner Judge that reminds me of things like “Shaken Baby Syndrome” and other terrifying whatnots that make my entire body clench into knots and spasms.
At this point, it’s likely that Naing Naing will never come back to Mexico and rather he’ll get stuck in a loop repeating and reliving his original traumas over and over again. (Myanmar isn’t exactly the kind of place where you’d ever think to go for “therapy”, after all). To Naing Naing, Myanmar is like the Veteran’s Association where he goes to feel resonance with other broken, traumatized people. In Myanmar, everyone is traumatized and addicted to drugs so while he feels terrible most days, at least he doesn’t feel weird. Everyone around him has Complex PTSD, so there’s a certain sense of solidarity. But it’s unlikely that this environment will help him escape from the things he’s running from. He runs from the thoughts that he has inside of his mind and he runs from anything that reminds him of those thoughts in real life. I love Naing Naing, so this makes me sad and I feel pain about it. In some ways, he’s closer now to being healthy and okay than he was when he first met Lydian, though at that time, he seemed a lot more “normal” and mentally healthy than he does now. Paradoxically, I know that because he’s lost to these delusions that he’s having, it’s because he’s been loved. I know he could find his way back to earth first and to Mexico second with the right tools, but at this point, it’s time for me to take action for Lydian, John, and Maya. We need to heal before I can really speak with confidence about Naing Naing.
Lydian is breastfeeding right now and she intends to continue with that for a while. This creates a special challenge in finding ways to help her release the trauma of the past 5 years of her life. While John and I take Mucuna pruriens every day and sometimes smoke Sapito when it feels like our hearts are going to implode from the pain, Lydian can’t partake in either of those things. Rather, we’ve been scheduling appointments with a craniosacral therapist every week and that’s saved us, but—it doesn’t change the fact that often, Lydian and I are on this weird feedback loop in terms of how we talk to each other. Every time we try to escape from it, one of us is crushed under the weight of an unseen force. Sometimes the force has a voice that’s incredibly judgmental and cruel. Sometimes it’s just the feeling of being sick or weighted down. In any case, despite all we know about trauma now, there’s no way to talk ourselves through it, out of it, or out from underneath it.
So at first I sought a solution for Naing Naing’s Complex PTSD, but now, as John and me and Lydian stand at this crossroads in our lives, with baby Maya along for the ride, it has come to our attention that we all need to work the list of solutions that I’ve been researching to the problem of trauma. We’re broken. Crushed. Hurting? Sick…not okay, etc. Our minds have talked the problems through and considered the problems (there are many) from different angles. But despite all the thought and all the talk, what I’ve learned now from the library of books I’ve been studying for the past few months is that trauma lives in the body. Talk doesn’t help and in fact can make things worse.
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Trauma is not a full thought, thus the problem with trying to use words to talk it away. It’s a fragment that can come to life and take on a personality, in fact. When we’re overwhelmed in any way and cannot complete an action to save ourselves from pain, we are traumatized. Last night, I was reading the book Waking the Tiger by Dr. Peter Levine, for example, and he talked about a group of 14 young kids of varying ages who had been kidnapped and held hostage underground for 30 hours. The only child who didn’t develop severe behavioral problems in response to this experience was the child who accidentally pushed on a beam that collapsed. That child then dug through the dirt that spilled into this underground space to rescue himself and the other children. He completed the action that saved himself. So this particular child didn’t feel traumatized by what happened.
Dr. Levine talks about how animals shake off trauma. He talks about the how trauma can make us go into a state of “playing dead” combined with “fight or flight”. I know the feeling very well. It feels like I’m carrying 30 large stones on my back and walking uphill at high altitude. My heart pounds and my breathing is labored even if I’m sitting at a table, but I also feel weary for no reason. It’s like I’ve got the pedal to the floor, going at full speed and at the same time, I’m slamming on the brake. It’s a waste of energy that I expend daily on something that I have no words to even describe. It’s a situation where it feels like I can’t escape, like I’m trapped, but also like I need to run for my life. And it isn’t real right now. It’s a feeling that comes from a moment or a few moments in time where I was trapped or scared, but pretend to not be trapped or scared. My body has taken these moments and they’re like frozen Jennifer-cicles in my autonomic nervous system that poke into my present-tense mind to pretend to be “me”.
Often, we can’t complete the action that would save us for one reason or another. Medical procedures and surgeries are a great example of this kind of problem. People enter willingly into medical procedures in an effort to save themselves from something, but often the procedures are painful and traumatizing in some way. This is a paradox that’s really familiar to me.
When we first moved to Mexico, I had some dental work done. I got all my filling removed and replaced with amalgam fillings. Some of the fillings were really deep, so the work was painful. I chose to have all the fillings removed at once and replaced at once to get through the process more quickly. I also chose to not be sedated. I had never had a rubber dam in my mouth before, so that was a new (and terrifying) experience for me where I couldn’t breathe through my mouth or speak. The dentists spoke only Spanish so I couldn’t understand very well at that time. And then, they numbed my entire face on both sides. It was a painful procedure in the deeper parts even with the numbing agents so I hypnotized myself to get through it. In other words, I dissociated.
When the dental work was done I was relieved. I went home and didn’t think about it again. Some months later, John, Lydian, and I went to go do Sapito with a curandera. It was our first Sapito trip.
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Normally, a Sapito experience lasts about 15 minutes, but my trip lasted 45 minutes. I disappeared completely into tiny pixels of nothingness. I could see through the rocks on the ground around me in the outdoor space where the gathering of people doing Sapito was located. I didn’t know a lot about Sapito at that time, but I trusted Karolina, the curandera. Now I realize that Sapito can bring trauma to the surface for release. Thus, it can actually worsen symptoms of PTSD, for example, at first.I went home. John, Lydi and I all had amazing experiences taking Sapito. It changed us. For at least a week afterward, whenever I was falling asleep, I’d have one of those “jolt awake” kind of nightmares where my tongue was cut out of my mouth and then my body was flung off a bridge. Eventually, the nightmares stopped and I didn’t think about them anymore.
A few weeks later, the three of us went up to the U.S. to sell all our personal belongings, put on a giant Halloween event, and officially get our temporary residency for Mexico. As we rounded a corner, on our way up north to do these things, just outside of Guanajuato, I had my very first panic attack. I tried not to think about it. I grabbed John’s hand and just held it without telling him why or what was wrong. Holding hands was normal for us so he didn’t question me. I worried that “my spirit might leave my body” or kind of…get out of phase with my body. That sounded crazy. What was I thinking? I suddenly felt all kinds of compassion for everyone I’d ever known or worked with who had had panic attacks. This…was a nightmare.
I knew, luckily, at the time, that breathing into one’s own hand can quell a panic attack by merely alkalizing the body. This kept me sane. I worried about having a panic attack during our Halloween event, but even as I was trying to chase down a patron who had flashed a gun at our scare actors, I never experienced any sense of panic.
It’s hard to not think about something that is undefined and looming, but that’s the game with trauma. You keep a secret from yourself about whether you’re avoiding thinking about “it” (which is undefined and thus without limits in terms of its size) as much as possible. You avoid people that might talk about “it”. You avoid places where you might be reminded of “it”. But all the while you do not admit that you’re doing this to yourself.
And then, while you avoid yourself and keep secrets from yourself, you also move, like a moth toward a flame, toward the very thing that lies at the core of your pain. But you do this effort at “reliving” without your own conscious awareness or acknowledgement ever. If you admit to yourself that this is what you’re doing, you suddenly belong to another class of people who has an opportunity to find help and healing. Essentially, until that moment, your body starts to take you places you never wanted to go. It takes your mind along with it. It does things with your body that make no sense. And it all feels somehow like its your fault.
The shame of your existence becomes unbearable and you try to avoid that too. Usually, no one knows that these impoverished conditions exist inside your mind and you do everything you can to cover up the yuck.
The panic attacks did not return until John, Lydi, and I reached Laredo, Texas on our way back home from the Halloween event and the sales of our things. It made no sense to me. We had gotten through this big event where John and I were responsible for the safety of thousands of people, many of whom were drunk or high or angry or whatever. And then, we’d managed to sell our things and pack the remaining items which were strapped to our truck. I should’ve felt relief and calm. But as we neared Laredo, I could feel the panic looming again. I’d hold John’s hand without saying a word about why (to him or to myself). He knew about the panic by then though. I was downplaying it. I was like, “I’m sure it’s nothing…I’ll figure it out and stuff.” I believed that if I could hold onto someone like John maybe “my spirit wouldn’t leave my body”. Again, this was crazy talk. It was almost non-verbal and wordless how it felt. Nonetheless, I’m a wordy person so I put words to it as best I could. Meanwhile, I also judged myself harshly for the feeling and for the panic. What the hell was wrong with me?
In Laredo, I battled with the attacks as we worked through the immigration material. In reality, this particular immigration experience was easy and smooth. But I was in a constant state of restraint thinking that I was going to lose my mind, hyperventilate, and then maybe die.
I did not, at this time, realize what this panic was made of.
I didn’t put it together and really understand my panic attacks (though I was able to resolve them by treating myself for systemic Candida– which makes sense to me now too, though I’ll have to expand on this part of things later) until after Naing Naing left and I started studying trauma.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a master’s in psychology, but trauma was only a “small” topic back when I did my degree. Back when I was in graduate school, I took several grief and bereavement courses out of a personal interest, but they weren’t required and they only briefly touched on the topic of trauma as a cause of mental health issues. I suppose to some extent this was because Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and all of the other breakthrough treatments for trauma didn’t really exist back then. So there wasn’t really a way to release trauma. People spent years talking about their trauma without making any real progress in terms of feeling better or having a better life.
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Today, there are many treatments for trauma. I had no idea really how many there are and how well they work, apparently. Some of these therapies are among the gentlest treatments I’ve ever encountered in any system of medicine. Mindfulness is a good example. These treatments, by themselves, take longer to work than say, Sapito or Ayahuasca, but I’ve noted them nonetheless. Other treatments are extremely powerful like Iboga / Ibogaine. Ibogaine allows people to spend 1 day rewiring their brain and emerge as a changed human being. And there are many treatments in the middle too.I have this academic knowledge of trauma now. And as I sit here writing this, I know that John, Lydi, and I need to start working on that list of treatments. Naing Naing, or actually his “Myo Naing” alter-ego told Lydian three days ago that he is “never coming home to Mexico”. She was afraid that this would happen though other “parts” of Naing Naing are committed to coming back to her. “Myo Naing” is a Protector Self that protects Naing Naing from being loved (because if you aren’t loved, you can’t be hurt by someone who loves you).
She’s taken notes on their conversations over the past few months to find the patterns and identify, finally, after all these years, these various personalities that protect him from himself. Often right now, he doesn’t remember what he / one of his parts has said to her in the conversations that had days prior. According to the literature, Naing Naing is currently “flooding”. It’s like he’s enveloped by traumatic experiences that happened when he was a kid, but he’s trying to avoid the experience and keep a secret from himself about how awful it is by switching into different personalities. He can’t see the present moment or anyone standing in front of him. He sees or rather experiences these people only as other people who traumatized him in the past. His body is constantly reliving these moments and I know it’s painful. I know from my own experience now, how painful it can be.
So, as far as Lydian is concerned, it’s like Naing Naing is gone. His body still exists and is still alive. He is animated. He can walk and talk and take action. But the person she knew as Naing Naing (his “Apparently Normal Self” according to Internal Family Systems Therapy) has been hijacked by Emotional Selves that aren’t really fully alive, but rather dissociations of himself. I visualize it like a water balloon that represents a person’s actual personality. If you squeeze the water balloon, you can contort that balloon into what looks almost like two balloons or three or more “balloons”, each filled with some water that are all connected by these twisted parts in the balloon-rubber. All the water in that balloon belongs to the original, Primary Personality (known as the Apparently Normal Self or Core Self), but it can be separated from itself. As humans, we all do some amount of dissociation in our lives to create distance between ourselves and what has traumatized us. We do it naturally. Always, the balloon separates into two parts in response to trauma: a part that feels the pain of that moment (The Exile) and another part that judges and hates on the part that feels that pain (The Protector). The Protector exists to make sure that, “we never do THAT again”.
In Lydian’s notes she can tell who she’s talking to because each one of Naing Naing’s personalities is really repetitive. Some of them have names for themselves. Most are children. But Naing Naing himself, though she’s had one conversation with his Apparently Normal Self about this problem, has not been available for her to talk to for at least two months.
The others selves that exist inside us exist to protect the Original, Apparently Normal Self. I learned about the idea of “sub-selves” about 10 years ago when I was working to get certified as a hypnotherapist. That theory changed my life. Multiple personality disorder which is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder was always taught to be something that was really rare though sub-selves are considered to be universal. Everyone has sub-selves. That’s why we talk to ourselves inside our own minds. But in reality, what psychiatrists and psychologists are finding today is that “dissociation” is extremely common if not ubiquitous, where some selves refuse to talk to other selves. Where there are secrets that we keep from each our "selves" through this dissociation which can be severe or not so severe depending on the situation. And our bodies store the trauma. We dissociate to varying degrees into other “selves” to deal with trauma. These “selves” are represented as postures that our bodies take or pain that our bodies feel. Sometimes, trauma looks like a physical disease (cancer and diabetes are excellent examples). Indeed, if you had a severe disease, and a doctor told you that you were going to die soon, your body may seem to get better and then, as you round the corner to fully restored health, a part of you may step forward that is “still sick”. These “selves” essentially animate us through the autonomic nervous system, which is made up of nerves that are so extensive and so minute throughout the entire body that if you dissolved every other structure in the body, to leave the autonomic nervous system intact and still in its natural positioning , every organ would be represented and what was left of the person would still look somewhat recognizable.
Different personalities, whether they’re fully dissociated or partially integrated into the larger pool of water in our psychic balloon, work through the autonomic nervous system. Trauma is stored in this system. This is a fascinating topic, but again, I’ll save it for later. These different selves inside of us step forward through this system and they have a way of relating to the world based on a moment in time that’s frozen around us due to trauma. They imprison us, in a sense, in this frozen world from the past and then, we feel what we did in that moment that traumatized us, but we feel it in the present moment, even at times when it doesn’t make any sense (like when John, Lydi, and I were crossing the border into Mexico through Laredo). Internal Family Systems therapy talks about how these selves “blend” with the Apparently Normal Self. Then we feel what they felt–these parts that we sent away and dissociated from our True Essence in order to survive the trauma.
Trauma today, as an object of study, is literally transforming psychology, though most people who are out there trying to solve their major mental health issues are not that aware of trauma as the cutting edge (no pun intended). Again, back in my grad school days, I was always rather against the labels that were being used to delineate which mental illness was which. Those labels are just there to help insurance companies save money on patients. But now I see that in reality, all mental illnesses stem from trauma. So now, after having spent all that time and money studying the different mental illnesses, essentially I see that, with rare exception, all mental illnesses are a manifestation of trauma.
Again though, trauma is not always just something that happens that other people would view as traumatic. Sometimes, trauma is about the sins of omission. A child who is neglected, for example, can be traumatized by what was NOT done to him or her. The definition of trauma is very situation-dependent and dependent on the constituency of each individual.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder look really similar to Complex PTSD, for example. There are certain biological weaknesses that might predispose a given person to developing an experience of mental illness versus another (again, I’ll save this topic and expand more on it later), but ultimately, it’s all the same problem. Trauma can happen inadvertently, for example, to a child who must go to the dentist or visit the doctor and receive some important treatment. The trauma can sit like a toad in the autonomic nervous system to cause illness or behavioral problems depending on a person’s biological makeup. The trauma can cause us to quietly avoid certain things or even hurt ourselves repeatedly, all the while keeping a secret from ourselves that the core problem even exists.
Going back to my panic attacks, I now realize that the Sapito helped my body release trauma, but not all the way. It brought trauma to the surface and I became aware of the trauma consciously for the first time since the dental appointment when I’d had nightmares of having my tongue cut out of my head and then being thrown off a bridge. Recently, I realized that, in fact, the bridge was a dam…in fact, a heavily encoded symbolic representation of the rubber dam. And in these nightmares, my tongue was cut from my mouth because without a tongue, I couldn’t speak. I fell into the water and drowned which was my body’s way of telling me about or remembering how it felt when I couldn’t speak or breathe through my mouth while lying upside down in the dental chair with both sides of my face numbed.
It was just recently that I realized the genius of this nightmare and what my body and the part that I sent away to get through that dental appointment had been trying to tell me. Once I opened this box of traumatic stuff and started unpacking it, I also realized that the panic attacks did NOT happen when I was under the most stress on our trip back to the United States. Rather, the panic attacks were triggered by crossing the border back to Mexico which was related, in my mind, to the year prior when we’d crossed the border and had the dental work done before driving down to Guanajuato to make a new home there.
If I had told a psychologist at that time, that I was afraid that my spirit would leave my body as the main reason why I was having a panic attack, that psychologist could’ve diagnosed me with any number of mental disorders at that time, many of which would have stigmatized me for the rest of my life. But the problem that I had that caused the panic attacks was due to trauma and trauma can be released from the body. Indeed, my panic attacks went away permanently, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write about them in such detail now. I’d have to avoid the thought of them. Now, I have new traumas to deal with that are unspeakable and that I try to forget and avoid on any given day.
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So here I am at my desk in this pleasant place where we live here in the mountains of central Mexico. I’m with John and Lydian, and baby Maya and there’s really nothing wrong. We’re sad that Naing Naing isn’t here, but my mind knows that we have to let him choose his own path. He’s been gone for a long time now, so the grief that I feel should be ebbing away somewhat, but it’s not. There’s nothing that we can do for him at this moment and I know that, yet I ruminate over him and how to solve his problems. And that feels fine to me now. It seems like I’m at peace, but actually, I’m just “numbing out”. Thirty minutes ago, I felt like throwing up. And 30 minutes before that, I felt paralyzed and “tranced out”. And then 30 minutes before that, Lydi and I were walking together and talking in circles as we do every day right now, without making any progress really—except that John, Lydi, and I have decided to go do ketamine treatments in Mexico City as soon as possible.Ketamine is a “dissociative” anesthetic that works a bit like a reset for the autonomic nervous system, the part of the body that causes people to get stuck in a moment due to trauma. The release is short, only 45 minutes usually, but it’s enough to bring the autonomic nervous system back to “center”.
This morning, after a short dream where Robert Irvine (the Restaurant Impossible guy) walked into my mind and stood there looking at me, I woke up with a headache, feeling sick to my stomach. Earlier in the night, I had a dream where I was talking to a lawyer with a distinctively phallic-shaped head (a real Dick). My body is grieving. My mind is frustrated with it all. It chatters endlessly about ways to escape from this pain. My heart feels like it’s going to puke at least once a day. I judge myself harshly for feeling sad, mad, or even sometimes just “okay”. I’ve felt like it wouldn’t be fair for John and me to do any major trauma treatments that I’ve found and that I know about without Lydian as our pain definitely emanates to a great extent from her pain. She’s breastfeeding so she can’t work with very many sacred indigenous medicines, but Ketamine seems relatively safe if she can bottle-feed Maya for a few hours after the treatment. It’s fast so she doesn’t have to be separated from Maya for more than a couple of hours.
So first, we have to make an appointment and then a psychiatrist will need to determine whether or not we are indeed “traumatized” or “depressed”. After this evaluation which will hopefully take place in English since my Spanish-speaking self is currently in hiding and rocking back and forth in a dark corner of my mind, we’ll take Ketamine. This is scary to me, but right at the moment, having calmed my Self down enough to think (using a red light that I wrap around my neck to stimulate the Stellate Ganglion for 30-45 minutes every few days), I feel confident that it’s the right decision. I’ve worked with a lot of different entheogens over the years, but I’ve never worked with Ketamine.
After this Ketamine treatment, my plan is to continue pursuing trauma treatments and sample as many of them as possible. I have some portable neurofeedback machines up in the states that we’ll go and get soon to test out, but right now, I feel like Lydian especially needs something more powerful to get started recovering from everything she’s been through. She and I discussed it, I’d write an introduction and then we’d begin this process. We’ll write about our experiences and results so that other people can benefit from it and so that we don’t forget where we started and where we’ll (hopefully) end up.
To be continued…
UPDATE: Before we were able to start working with entheogens and sacred medicines, we did Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR and craniosacral therapy. These things work, but they work much more slowly than the sacred medicines like psilocybin. Nonetheless, for children or pregnant women or people who simply can't gain access to the sacred medicines (to take full doses or microdoses), EMDR and craniosacral therapy work very well to release trauma. They're good treatments to start with if you're new to the idea of trauma-informed therapy. Click here to learn more about how to get rid of PTSD, release trauma, and overcome Complex PTSD.
Click here to do a free trial of EMDR online.
UPDATE (2 months later): Ketamine proved to be difficult for us to access, however, we were able to get psilocybin mushrooms and work with them at home. This changed our lives and helped us feel like normal people again. All of us took psilocybin mushrooms in full doses and we also did microdosing with psilocybin over the course of 6 months (in total at the time of this writing). We regarded it as a psilocybin dieta. We each took full doses about every 3-7 days with microdosing between trips. For each dose, we established a clear INTENTION (this was extremely important) and we committed to the idea of NOT RUNNING AWAY from whatever was presented to us on our trips. We took the mushrooms separately from each other and we usually sat outside in the trees near our home (a safe, fenced-in area) although sometimes we did our trips indoors in a quiet place. Sometimes the trips made us feel worse for a day or two as our minds processed the material and then, with each trip, we'd feel lighter and lighter. It became easier and easier to think and solve problems. We started laughing again. It was like coming back from the dead.
Click here to buy psilocybin microdosing capsules here.
UPDATE 3: Naing Naing returned 9 months after he left Mexico and he began working with psilocybin to release trauma just a few days after he got here. Four months later, he is now high-functioning, back at work as a computer programmer, his paranoia is gone, and he is doing his best to be an excellent father and husband. Life isn't perfect, but his psychosis is gone. However, he still manifests symptoms of attachment disorder.
For more information about psilocybin for trauma, click here. UPDATE 4: Naing Naing and John decided, after 9 months of working intensively with psilocybin (doing full trips every 3-4 days and microdosing in between trips), and after confronting past experiences involving sexual abuse, to go together to a retreat center and work with iboga and ibogaine both as a male rite-of-passage and to access some of the unconscious traumatic material that has been harder for them to integrate. Iboga / ibogaine has the ability to treat attachment disorder in adults by rewiring the underlying circuitry that causes us to have treatment-resistant- patterns of behavior. They went to a facility called Awakening in the Dream. UPDATE 5: Psilocybin therapy was really amazing for both John and Naing Naing. Over the course of several months of intensive and intentional work with psilocybin, they both became less reactive and more open, in general to change and growth. But after they'd completed this course with psilocybin, Naing Naing still had intense anxiety that had to do with his family of origin. He couldn't quite get to the core issue. John, in contrast, had remembered a series of events involving sexual abuse at the hands of several men and like Naing Naing, he couldn't get to the core issue. After the iboga trip, it became easier to discuss the problem of an attachment disorder with Naing Naing and within a couple of weeks of not-interacting with his family-of-origin (in order to hijack old patterns and create new ones) Naing Naing started being able to see and understand the communication patterns that were causing him distress. Namely, that his family-of-origin, especially his mom didn't want to hear about his life in Mexico. As a rule, he had to say that everything here is perfect or else she would encourage him to leave his wife and daughter to return to Myanmar. This set up a situation where he couldn't be honest about the goings-on in his life. He wasn't consciously aware of this pattern until after the iboga trip though. On the trip itself he watched his mother taking things from him. He kept trying to look away from it, but the iboga plant told him that, "You need to look at this and feel how it feels...you can't forgive her until after you've acknowledged that she's taken everything from you." On John's iboga trip, he experienced 12 or more hours of vignettes wherein a normal situation would take shape and then end tragically. This was the underlying "code" that guided his daily life. His goal was to avoid the tragic ending which was always inevitable in his unconscious mind. He was always trying to control everything as a result. The core issue had to do with sexual abuse when he was a baby. After that happened, John was vulnerable and other men sexually abused him later too. But iboga helped him rewire this doomsday code. After essentially living for 50+ years with a nightmare constantly running in the background of his mind, John finally has been free of these looping thoughts. Iboga / ibogaine creates an opportunity to rewire the brain by producing an extreme form of plasticity that lasts for months, if not years after the iboga trip ends. Women actually experience greater brain plasticity than men as a result of ovulation and menstruation -- both produce higher-than-normal states of brain plasticity in women. But men's brains don't become plastic like this each month. There are, perhaps, instances when men's brains become more susceptible to change but science hasn't discovered this yet. Iboga (and also psilocybin and the other sacred medicines) gives men the ability to take control over their brains and produce a state of plasticity that allows them to overcome attachment disorders, PTSD, complex PTSD, or other severe forms of mental illness.
