My Emotional Shield
(Part 5 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
My ketamine session had been wildly successful at helping me understand the origins of my sense of shame and the underlying trauma. Just a minute or so after the ketamine had started flowing into my bloodstream, I had become cognitively aware of patterns of events that had eluded me during several months of therapy. But nearly a third of the ketamine session had involved another issue entirely, one which was completely unexpected and which I had never addressed in therapy with David.
As I explained in the last chapter, remembering an event while under Ketamine involved (at least for me) a lot more than mere recollection. I “re-lived” the event, inhabiting the mind of my younger self. I saw and heard exactly what my younger self saw and heard. Importantly, I felt the same emotions that my younger self felt at the time of the event.
All the while, my adult brain was observing, interpreting and understanding all of this in the context of my current knowledge. However, I found that when I was “inhabiting” a memory of my younger self and wanted to speak aloud to explain to David what was happening, I didn’t have my adult vocabulary. I was confined to the vocabulary that I possessed at the age I was inhabiting, and more sophisticated words were unavailable to me.
During the session, I spent more time inhabiting one memory than any other. It was when I was eight years old, and my family had just adopted its first dog. It was a full grown Irish setter that another family had to give up because their child was allergic to the dog.
The dog was bigger and stronger than I was. I was small and slight for an eight year-old, and the dog was bigger, rambunctious, and full of energy. So it was not a wise idea when I declared that I would take the dog outside for a walk, nor when my parents let me do so.
I know why I volunteered because I could “feel” my motivations as my ketamine-infused brain inhabited my younger self. I wanted to please my father. I knew that he often emphasized the need for me to be “responsible.” He had explained on more than one occasion that adopting a pet wasn’t just fun and enjoyment. It involved being responsible for feeding and cleaning and walking the dog.
So my eight year-old self was determined to demonstrate his responsibility by being the first to walk the dog. I re-lived myself taking the dog’s leather leash and clicking it onto his collar. With my left hand in the end loop of the leash and my right hand holding the middle of the leash, we set off outside.
We lived on a fairly busy street, and the dog was well behaved as we walked on the sidewalk about a hundred feet to the corner and then turned down a low-trafficked, dead-ended side street. After walking calmly beside me past several houses, the dog suddenly yanked himself away from me and started running toward the far end of the side street.
There was nothing I could have done. The dog yanked so hard on the leash that I had to let go of it or else I would have been dragged down the street on my stomach. But I didn’t know that at the time. Only one thought dominated my eight year-old mind over and over again in abject panic: My father’s certain reaction of profound disappointment at my failure to perform this task.
I tried to voice my eight year-old thinking out loud so that David could follow what was happening in my mind. Interestingly, the words that I spoke over and over were, “I screwed up.” That’s not how my adult brain wanted to describe my younger self’s thoughts, but that is all that came out because I only had access to my eight year-old panicky thoughts and vocabulary while I was re-living the memory.
I ran down the street after the dog, but I was never going to catch him. The street dead-ended after about a block at some rarely used railroad tracks. I saw the dog run onto the tracks and then turn right and take off at top speed right down the middle of the tracks.
I re-lived myself standing on the tracks watching the dog disappear down their length. No train was anywhere in sight, and it seemed like the dog had run a mile down the tracks. Then suddenly the dog stopped, looked around, and came running back to me, still at full speed until he reached my legs. Then he calmly sat down on the tracks in front of me.
I grabbed his leash, wrapped it multiple times around my stronger right hand, and started to walk the dog home back the way we had come. I felt a huge sense of relief, not that the dog was safe or that no trains had come, but at the fact that I wouldn’t have to tell my father what had happened, so he wouldn’t be disappointed in me. My eight year-old mind focused anxiously on what my father would think.
We got most of the way home without incident. When we were just a house or two away from the busier cross-street on we lived, the dog again yanked himself away from me. Stronger right hand or not, I just wasn’t strong or heavy enough to stop him. The leash unwound from my hand and out of my grip despite my best efforts to hold on. This time the dog ran into the busy cross-street with me a dozen steps or so behind.
My adult self knew what was coming, and I cringed on the reclining chair in the ketamine clinic. Through my eight year-old eyes, I watched the grill of a large white pick-up truck smash into the dog’s side, lift him up into the air and deposit him several feet away on his side. My eight year-old ears heard the squeal of the truck’s brakes and saw the dog’s legs twitch several times and then stop. My younger self’s first thought wasn’t for the dog. It was that my father would be heartbroken by what I had allowed to happen.
A heavy-set man in blue jean overalls with a long white beard got out of the truck and walked to where the dog lay motionless. Oddly, my younger self’s impression of him at the time was that the man looked like Santa Claus except for the overalls. He picked up the dog in his arms, walked over to where I stood transfixed, and asked me where I lived.
I don’t remember whether or what I answered because something happened to me at that moment that would change the rest of my life. I was overwhelmed by horror, fear and panic. I was desperate to stop feeling these painful emotions. I knew that I had to “throw up a shield” to block them out.
Still inhabiting my eight year-old brain, I knew what that shield was modeled on. I had been an avid reader of several DC comic book series, including “Legion of Superheroes.” My adult self hadn’t thought about them in more than fifty years, but my young mind remembered an episode featuring a character known as Ultra-Boy, who could assume any one superpower at a time, but only one. In that episode, Ultra-Boy had been flying but fell to the ground, where it turns out that he was not injured because while falling he had raised his shield of invulnerability.
My young self used that shield of invulnerability as a template for his dissociation from the world of emotion. I re-lived my eight year-old self hastily raising that metaphorical shield and blocking off all of his emotions, especially the horror, fear and panic. I had even considered the question at the time: “What will happen if I don’t know how to take the shield down in the future?” But my panicked eight year-old brain answered: “I don’t care. I need it now.” So up went my “emotional shield.” And that is the end of the memory; the rest of the day was inaccessible, even with the ketamine.
As my 65 year-old brain was processing all of this, I was trying to describe to David across the room what was happening and what I was seeing and feeling. It was difficult because I only had my eight year-old vocabulary available. As the memory ended and I tried to describe the aftermath, I returned to my adult self and regained my full adult vocabulary and viewpoint.
My adult self gasped with shock and horror as the full impact of what had happened became clear: My “shield of invulnerability” had never come down. At age 65, it was still in place, blocking — or at least filtering — all of my emotions. I had lived my entire life if not emotionless, then with greatly dampened emotions. And until that moment, I had been completely unaware.
I had clues, but I had never put the pattern of those clues together until I went under the ketamine. I have always known that my personality has been extremely logical and rational with few visible emotions and always tended toward endeavors that prize logical patterns and calculation rather than sentimentality. I’d never really understood how to empathize with other people, and I was confounded by people who couldn’t keep their emotions under control.
It’s not that I had never remembered the accident with the dog. If asked, I could have recited the basic outline of what happened, although I couldn’t have vividly recalled the details or the significance of the event. It required the pattern-spotting benefits of ketamine infusion and my re-living the emotional memory of the event for me to understand the impact of the accident on my mental health.
So do I consider my ketamine “trip” to have been successful? Yes, wildly so. It gave me a handle on the origins of my shame, which was the problem I was trying to solve, and suggested that the shame had been “lifted.” It also identified an entirely new mental health deficiency of which I had been unaware despite it dominating my life. After the ketamine session concluded, I felt very hopeful. Anticipating that the issue of my shame was on the path to being resolved, I now knew what else I needed to work on in my ongoing therapy.
