Searching for Trauma
(Part 3 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
Andrea and I had mutually decided to switch to a different couples counselor, but we had no one in particular in mind. After some internet research, we contacted a therapist named David, and he arranged an “intake call” with us to check each other out.
The call lasted maybe fifteen minutes, and we both liked David immediately — for different reasons. Andrea liked his well-organized interview, his explanation of the three-therapist approach, and that her individual therapist would be a woman. I liked how intelligent and articulate he was, that he liked the idea of me “journaling” via e-mails to him, but even more importantly, I felt safe being vulnerable with him, particularly when he expressed surprise at our prior therapist’s approach of one-therapist-for-all and her use of shame to manipulate me.
The clincher was when he explained his firm’s tele-health video procedure, where we would use a program called “doxy.me” to establish a secure teleconference. The world had just closed down for COVID, so all therapy was going to be remote anyway. That overcame the obstacle that his office wasn’t particularly close.
So we scheduled regular sessions: me with David, Andrea with a female therapist, and the two of us jointly with a couples therapist. But after a few months, the goal of our therapy changed.
We found that we both enjoyed and benefited from the individual therapy sessions, but the couples therapy started to seem unnecessary. It was mostly about communication, and we were doing that regularly now. We regularly “debriefed” each other after our individual sessions, and sharing the content of our individual therapy sessions helped us to open up to each other and let ourselves be vulnerable. COVID ensured that we were both at home nearly all the time, and the therapy was a common focus and direction. The “separate lives” feeling that had prompted the counseling in the first place had disappeared, so we discontinued the couples counseling but gave even more attention to our individual therapies.
I enjoyed my sessions with David. We had similar beliefs and world-views and a lot of respect for each other’s thoughts and opinions. He never shamed me, and I felt totally safe sharing even my ugliest thoughts and actions with him. Without ever crossing therapist/patient boundaries, he made me feel that if he lived next door, we’d be best friends.
One of my major goals was to get rid of my sense of shame. To have a chance of doing that, we both thought that we would need to understand where it came from. David explained and referred me to the psychological literature that said that shame and an obsessive personality like mine almost always resulted from some childhood trauma, so a lot of our sessions were devoted to his prompting me to remember any childhood traumas.
But I couldn’t remember any trauma. My childhood was a comfortable suburban upbringing with two loving parents and no traumatic incidents that I could recall. David explained that trauma could be more in the nature of steady erosion rather than sudden explosion, but I couldn’t identify any trauma even of that more gradual type.
When I was a child, my mother was the dominant parent. Almost all of my parental interactions were with her. My father worked long hours, and he would often drink quietly by himself when he came home. I struggled to recall any significant interactions with him at all.
There hadn’t been any other major influences on me, and certainly none that were traumatic. So any trauma that I experienced would almost certainly have had to involve my mother, but as I tried to describe to David the history of my early interactions with my mother, there was nothing of a traumatic nature.
I was able to remember several incidents with my mother that reinforced my sense of shame. The clearest memory was of an incident when I was in elementary school, and the principal called my mother to tell her that I had misbehaved by opening the rear door of the school bus while it was in motion. That was true, and I had done it to show off for a classmate of mine who was sitting in the back seat.
My mother’s reaction was not what I had expected. Instead of getting angry with me, she conspired with me not to tell my father. She explained that she had done some bad things too when she was a child, and that “we won’t tell Daddy because he might not understand.” I was grateful to have gotten away without being punished, but I didn’t realize at the time that she was reinforcing my existing assumption that I was a bad and shameful person.
But this incident wasn’t traumatic, and in any event, it was too late to be the origin of my shame. I already had well established feelings of shame at that point, so the trauma — if there was one — must have happened earlier.
These and similar recollections weren’t getting me any closer to my presumed trauma, and my therapy seemed to have stalled. To avoid discouraging me, David told me stories about people who required years in therapy before they could recall important events in their childhood. I was too impatient for that and asked for quicker solutions. We tried meditation, hypnosis, trying to equate emotions with feelings in various of my body parts, and what I thought of as various “distraction tricks” that David knew in an effort to break through my “mental block.”
None of this helped me to remember my trauma. The above few paragraphs are a quick read and don’t begin to convey the frustration I felt at my stalled progress. Although really just several months, the weekly therapy sessions that were consumed by the fruitless search for my forgotten trauma seemed endless to me. I began to doubt whether I had really experienced childhood trauma in the first place.
Throughout this time, I was doing what research I could to figure out a way forward. Part of that research was reading Michael Pollan’s book, “How to Change Your Mind,” which describes the history and use of psychedelic drugs in stimulating the brain. The book suggests that various psychedelic drugs might be useful in stimulating key memories, and a great deal of current research appears to support that. So during a session, I suggested to David that I try one of those drugs, but although he appreciated my initiative, he was concerned that they were illegal and he couldn’t participate in that.
“They’re not all illegal,” I replied. “Ketamine is legal, and ketamine clinics are opening up all over.” There was a ketamine clinic right in my suburb, and another in a suburb close to David’s office. “And,” I reported to David, “the doctors who run the clinics say that the drug excels at helping the patient to recall memories and recognize patterns that defy conscious recall.”
One of the reasons that I liked working with David is that he was open-minded to new ideas. Ketamine’s potential intrigued both of us, and we agreed to spend some time during the week interval between appointments researching its potential. When we talked again in our next session, David withdrew his objections to my trying ketamine — but he was clearly hesitant to “lead” the experiment.
I didn’t need persuading and knew that I would have to take the lead. So I made an appointment at a ketamine clinic that was close to David’s office where the anesthesiologist who ran the office would allow David to sit in the room with me while I was under the influence of the drug. (Some of the ketamine clinics that I had contacted wanted me to use their own psychiatrist, which would have meant starting over from scratch).
This was probably the most out-of-character decision I had ever made. I had never before even tried any kind of recreational drug, not even marijuana. Anyone who knows me well would say that I am the last person who would ever take a “psychedelic trip.” Many of my friends — and probably my children as well — would probably have described me as the most “straight and narrow” person they know. Even Andrea was flabbergasted that I would “really go through with it.”
But the ketamine trip turned out to be an amazing experience and provided the initial keys to restoring my mental health….
