Another way in which DMT affects the mind and body in potentially useful ways is through creating a controlled and supported traumatic experience. Trauma derives from a Greek word meaning “wound.” My dictionary defines trauma as “a severe emotional shock having a deep, often lasting effect upon the personality.”
Traumatic experiences usually are out of our control. For example, we do not choose our abusive childhoods, exposure to natural or manmade disasters, or real threats to our life. Once we have experienced such events, the mind’s natural tendency is to wall off the feelings of fear, helplessness, and anxiety that threatened to overwhelm us at the time.
Nevertheless, unprocessed trauma seeps out into our lives. We may find ourselves in situations that produce ghosts or shadows of those traumabasedfeelings over and over again. It is as if we feel forced to repeat certain types of relationships that bring out feelings we couldn’t master or control the first time, usually when we were powerless children. For example, an abusive spouse recreates the feelings brought on by an abusive parent. We may notice it’s difficult to make deep emotional attachments because being close means being dangerously vulnerable.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Marsha’s husband excused himself to use the bathroom. Upon returning, he seemed to sense Marsha’s need to talk about these things without him in the room, and he returned to work. She and I continued this discussion for a while longer, and then drifted onto other topics.
I usually was not as directive with volunteers as I was with Marsha that day. However, her DMT vision seemed so perfectly related to her current conflicts that I could not ignore the message the spirit molecule was giving us. Marsha’s Anglo husband was comparing her with his image of the ideal woman, and she was lacking. Her figure was not “right.” However, the “mannequin” Anglo women and men were lifeless, painted images, going round and round aimlessly. Marsha remembered the pride with which her family greeted the full figure of womanhood, and tried owning that herself. She felt her inherent sexuality was good enough. She wanted to have sex with her husband, to reconnect at that basic level. Surprised and nonplussed, it was difficult for him to address her emotional needs at that moment. It was a miniature version of their ongoing problems.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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“Were the mannequins white? Were they Anglo?”
Yes, they all were. There were no colored people in any of the things I’ve ever seen from the gay ’90s.
“It’s interesting. DMT seems to have its own agenda. What do you make of this?”
I just can’t figure it out. I’m exhausted and starved.
I ventured, “They sound like an exaggeration or a caricature of Anglo beauty. It’s interesting within the context of what we were talking about—your concerns about your weight.”
It’s true, maybe I should have fun with my figure.
She looked at her husband and said, / told Rick about your thinking I was fat, that that was part of your therapy.
He looked a little embarrassed.
When I was young I was quite thin. When my husband and I met I was 20 pounds less than I am now. I looked like a stick figure. That’s not my culture at all. Rather, the desired form is heavy and full, big breasts and big waists and big rear. Skinny was terrible in my culture. They used a slang word that meant skinny but when they used it, I didn’t know what it meant. It seemed like they were talking about ugly, ill, not well.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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There was a sexual energy of wanting more, of being stimulated, of wanting more. I’ve never felt that way on DMT. I guess the mannequins were so beautiful that it was a turn-on.
She lifted her eyeshades and looked at her husband, blurting out, Let’s fuck! I laughed. “Sorry, you’ll need to wait until you get home.”
Her husband turned to me and said “Do people have sexual experiences during DMT?”
While a reasonable question, it did not quite fit in with the personal and emotional themes that were so active at that moment. I had to answer, but did so briefly and with the hope of regaining direction. “There’s sexual energy, but not usually sexual-intercourse types of feelings.”
I knew I had to act fast if I were to be of any help in interpreting the dreamlike features of Marsha’s session. What was the spirit molecule trying to tell us?
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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We had been talking about “therapeutic” issues before the injection. I decided to put on my therapist’s cap and see what happened. When someone comes into a therapy session recounting a dream, I usually ask, and did this time, “What did it feel like for you?”
That’s the wrong question, try another. At that moment Marsha wasn’t ready to “do work” with the dream, so I responded to the more superficial aspects of her experience, the carnival atmosphere. “Was it fun?” Yes.
Could we go deeper? “Was it really fun?” Yes, but it was no Taj Mahal. I hoped to see my ancestors, a temple, or that I would see tall African people in old clothing. “Instead you were at a carnival at the State Fair.” Big time! I was the only human there. They had these painted-on smiles, there was no change in their expression. I thought, “Hey, what’s going on?” She added,
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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She began talking about 15 minutes after the injection. / never would have imagined it would be like this. There was no transition. There was no universe with stars and a pinpoint of light like last time. You know what happened? I was on a merry-go-round!
There were all these dolls in 1890s outfits, life-sized, men and women. The women were in corsets. They had big breasts and big butts and teeny skinny waists. They were all whirling around me on tiptoes. The men had top hats, riding on two-seater bicycles. One merry-go-round after another after another. The women had red circles painted on their cheeks, and there was calliope music in the background. And there were some clowns, flitting in and out, not really the main characters, but busier, somehow more aware of me than the mannequins.
This sounded like a dream. It also was another encounter with clowns or jesters, something I had been hearing about for quite some time from other volunteers. However, they seemed less important than the merrygo-round and her feelings about it.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Marsha later participated in the cyproheptadine study. When it came time for her fourth double-blind session we were nearly certain, taking into account the effects of her previous sessions, that this final dose ould be an unadulterated 0.4 mg/kg.
She began by saying, “I hope to meet some of my ancestors today, to help me deal with my current life stresses.” She talked about her marriage; her husband had been in therapy and his therapist was telling him to be more honest with her. As a result, he told her he didn’t like that she was getting “fat,” that it was a sexual turnoff. She wondered if I thought she was fat.
I sidestepped her question and suggested, “Maybe there’s more going on that just how much you weigh.”
She nodded, and we began preparing for the injection.
A few minutes before giving Marsha the DMT, her husband entered the room, ready to join us for the session. The atmosphere in the room was slightly sad, but also hopeful.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Marsha had taken psychedelic drugs perhaps thirty times in her life, and she found them “very mind-opening.” She volunteered for our research “to help out my friends,” “to experience this drug out of curiosity and wonder,” “to be challenged,” and “because my husband can’t—therefore he can vicariously share this with me.” Her husband had slightly elevated blood pressure, which disqualified him.
Marsha managed her low screening dose of DMT well. The next day’s high dose took her completely out of her body. She was startled to find herself in a beautiful domed structure, a virtual Taj Mahal.
/ thought I had died, and that I might not ever come back. I don’t know what happened. All of a sudden, BAM!, there I was. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Marsha described in great detail what she saw, and how she was transformed, during her experience. It was an extraordinarily pleasurable morning. We listened to her report and didn’t need to add much. She enjoyed it. There was little conflict and we shared in her happiness.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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The approach we took to supervising DMT sessions was as clinically neutral as possible, but ignoring psychological issues emerging from volunteers’ experiences would have been negligent. Sometimes I had to decide quickly whether or not to take up the personal psychological thread a research subject had begun, whether to push that volunteer forward just enough to see some resolution to his or her confusion or uncertainty. I also had to take into account the risk that such comments or interpretations might cause some destabilizing effects in his or her life. In Marsha’s case, for example, she was struggling with her marriage.
Upon entry into the DMT study, Marsha was forty-five years old, had been divorced twice, and had been with her current husband for six years. She was of African-American descent, while her husband was white. Marsha possessed a delightful sense of humor and frankness. Her mood was significantly better this past year than it had been for some time. She felt a great sense of relief after dropping out of a graduate school program she found dehumanizing and unsupportive of her racial and ethnic background. Continued problems at home, however, revolved around her husband “being more depressed than I was,” and she had been thinking of leaving him.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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The visual images volunteers encountered on DMT sometimes reminded them of dreams. And, as Freud said, dreams are “the royal road to the unconscious.” Looking at, thinking about, and discussing dreams may help us understand hidden emotions known only by the distressing symptoms they cause during ordinary wakefulness.
Let’s imagine that someone develops paralysis in his right hand, and multiple medical examinations reveal no physical problem. He’s sent to a psychiatrist, who asks him to remember his dreams. That night our theoretical patient dreams of beating up his boss at work. The psychiatrist suggests that his paralyzed hand represents deep anger at the boss, rage that he didn’t know he had. Maybe these are emotions he’s afraid to feel because he doesn’t know what might happen if he did so. A light goes on in the patient’s mind, and he regains function of his hand!
While such an example smacks of a Saturday morning cartoon program, it captures the essential process by which dreamwork can be personally helpful. Symptoms are not often as obvious as paralysis; they commonly include anxiety, depression, or relationship problems.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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