Spinning Wheels and Backtracking
(Part 6 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
In the days following my ketamine session, I felt triumphant and euphoric. Not only had I gotten past my “mental block” and discovered the source of my trauma, but I had reason to believe that I may have conquered the resulting shame — although I didn’t remember lifting my arms to the sky and saying, “It is lifted,” as David told me I had.
And I had a new self-improvement target. I now knew why I had been so logical and unemotional my entire life: my “shield of invulnerability” was blocking my emotions and hadn’t come down since I had hastily erected it at age eight. I wanted it gone! I wanted to experience a normal life filled with normal emotions.
The next few therapy sessions with David were fascinating, but I can’t really say that we made any progress toward my goals. We mostly dissected the ketamine session and shared our perspectives and understandings of what had happened.
Upon my questioning, David reassured me that about two-thirds of the way or so through the ketamine infusion, after I had re-lived and described the details of my various interactions with my father, but before I started to re-live the details of the accident with my dog, I had indeed slowly raised my arms over my head and announced, “It is lifted.” He wanted to know what I remembered of the incident, and I explained that I was totally unaware of it except for what he had told me. But I knew what I must have meant by “it is lifted.” I was referring to my sense of shame and was hoping that it meant that the shame was gone. He cautioned me not to expect too much.
David was curious about my thought process that led me to recognize my trauma and the pattern of events with my father so quickly, just a minute or two after the ketamine infusion began. I couldn’t explain it. It just seemed like an obvious pattern that would always have been clear to me if I had ever tried to think about it.
Of course, that was the magic of the drug. I had been racking my brain looking for patterns in my early childhood that might constitute the trauma we were searching for. My mind hadn’t been able on its own to identify the key memories or assemble them into the pattern I was looking for. The ketamine seemed to have created new neural connections in response to my quest.
I had some serious doubts about whether my reaction to my father’s disappointment really qualified as a trauma. It seemed almost trivial compared to some of the horrors that other children in the world have endured. But David explained that trauma isn’t defined by the magnitude or suddenness of an incident as much as by the reaction of the recipient. Whether it was a single momentous event or a series of smaller events, my reaction of assuming that I was unworthy, shameful and unmasculine and incorporating that axiom into the core of my personality was what rendered it traumatic.
While we spent several weeks of sessions dissecting the ketamine session, I was busy experimenting with what I hoped was my new, shame-free personality. And I really did feel different. After a lifetime of preferring to be by myself and feeling awkward in social situation, what I wanted more than anything was to be social and connect with other people. For what seemed like the first time in my life, I felt calm and at peace, with no obvious anxieties. There was a part of me that remained mindful, observing my “social experiment” and noting all of the differences between my former and current desires and behavior. And the changes were significant.
After the ketamine, I experienced a significant change in the substance of my dreams at night. I used to dream frequently that I had missed an important deadline, or overslept a final exam in college, or similar kinds of dreams from which I would wake up feeling anxious and guilty. No longer. After the ketamine session, I never again had a dream of that kind. It gave me hope that those dreams had been motivated by a sense of shame that I no longer possessed.
One of my most obvious changes involved dancing. I had always been a classic curmudgeon, hating (and feeling intimidated by) the dancing at weddings and similar parties. I had a reputation for leaving early once the loud music and dancing started and letting Andrea hitch a ride home with friends or neighbors.
For Andrea’s birthday, a few months after the ketamine, I gave her a series of couple’s dance lessons at a nearby studio. She loved to dance, and I hoped to overcome the intimidation that I had always felt by learning some of the moves. Before the ketamine session, the idea that I would voluntarily participate in dance lessons was laughable.
It turned out that I liked dancing. I was terrible at it at first since I had nearly 60 years of suppressing the emotional right side of my brain and using just the logical left side to move my body. But without being triggered by a sense of shame, I wasn’t embarrassed by my lack of skill or talent. And I found that I liked the emotional connection with Andrea that dancing let me feel.
A similar post-ketamine difference that I noticed in myself was a strong desire to connect with other people, which I had rarely shown interest in before. A good illustration of the change in me occurred at a lunch that my wife and I had with the parents of my son’s fiancée, who had been acquaintances of ours for many years. I had started running in the mornings around my neighborhood for exercise as part of my weight loss program, and my son’s future father-in-law, who was in much better shape than I was, was also a runner.
Out of desire to connect socially with him, I asked him what his average mile time was, hoping that it would be close enough to mine that we could run together. He told me his time, and he was much faster than I was, so I didn’t suggest running together because he might feel obligated to agree but would be frustrated at having to keep my slower pace.
But the mindful, observing part of my brain noted a major difference between why I inquired about his time, and why the “old me” might have done so. My pre-ketamine personality thought of other people as objects of potential competition and might have asked about his running time to compare my performance to his. The “new me” had no interest in any kind of competitive comparison and was just looking for an opportunity to connect socially while exercising.
It is hard to describe how different I felt after the ketamine session. Without the shame, I felt lighter, as if the proverbial weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I think that is why during the ketamine infusion I slowly raised my arms and used the word “lifted.” It really felt as if my sense of shame was gone.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t. After a few months, the sense of euphoria had largely dissipated. I could feel my sense of shame returning — not with the same power as before, but still with a presence that felt “heavy” and constraining. As the months passed, the influence of the shame gradually got stronger and intruded more on my thoughts and behavior. It felt like old patterns trying to reestablish themselves.
I was better at preventing the shame from overly impacting me. I had a coping mechanism now: the mindful, observing part of my brain that evaluated everything I considered or did intervened when it felt the presence of shame. I was usually able to identify how the shame made me feel and what it wanted me to do — and then to defy it. But it was like living with fetters on or exercising while wearing heavy weights: having to work harder than I should to avoid shame-driven thoughts and actions.
In my therapy sessions with David, I was doubly discouraged. I was dismayed by the return of my shame and by the possibility that the ketamine infusion only granted me a temporary reprieve. I didn’t want to have to repeat the ketamine session frequently to remain shame-free.
I was also discouraged by the intransigence of my emotional shield, which my eight year-old self had called his “shield of invulnerability.” It was still there, and we hadn’t made any progress in lowering it. David and I couldn’t even come up with an approach that seemed likely to pierce it. I had learned a tremendous amount about what was wrong with my mental health, but there didn’t seem to be an obvious path toward fixing it.
The last time we had reached an obstacle in my therapy, a psychedelic drug seemed to offer the best path forward. This seemed like a similar obstacle, and I remembered my research. So I did some more research and reading on various psychedelic drugs.
One well known psychedelic substance seemed to be perfect for what I needed: psilocybin, often known as “magic mushrooms.” In both controlled studies and significant anecdotal evidence, psilocybin had, at least temporarily, increased the user’s neuroplasticity, which means the ability to change your brain.
That is what I wanted — what I needed. I wanted to eradicate whatever neural networks were the basis of my sense of shame. I also wanted to lower my emotional shield so that I could feel normal emotions. Both of those, I thought, amounted to changing my brain.
But there was an additional obstacle: psilocybin, unlike ketamine, is illegal in the United States. It is a “Schedule 1 Drug,” which means that it is against federal law to possess it. When I suggested it to David, who did some research on it as well and was otherwise intrigued by its possibilities, he told me that he couldn’t participate in any psilocybin-enhanced therapy because he could lose his license. I thought I might have to wait, possibly for several years, until the FDA legalized it.
That was probably the lowest point in my therapy. I didn’t know how to move forward. But there are still several more chapters left in this story, so as you will see, I figured out a way.
