However, the beings’ primary effect was to make her feel loved and happy, and the mystical resolution to her conflicts came only after a painful psychological process. Cassandra’s sessions were, like many of the ones I will present, hybrids of more than one type.
In addition, it felt as if I were doing psychotherapy with Cassandra, rather than spiritual counseling or interpreting “transdimensional” phenomena. So placement into the feeling-thinking, personal category of experiences relates to the type of response her session evoked in me as much as in her.
She had few stated expectations of her participation in our studies: “I want to see what DMT feels like.” Also, she requested we not ask her a lot of questions, “so I could simply enjoy the effects.”
We were not so offhanded in considering Cassandra’s ability to managehigh doses of DMT. We knew she could be volatile, and that it was important to be especially careful to avoid making her feel we were forcing anything on her. We didn’t want to replay any rape themes in Room 531.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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After this, she developed symptoms of a post-traumatic stress disorder, experiencing flashbacks of the rape during sexual relations in her first long-term relationship. When she was twenty, she decided that she never wanted to have children and had a tubal ligation.
Cassandra had been in and out of many short-term therapeutic and romantic relationships. At first she would idealize and romanticize the therapist or lover. Then she experienced disappointment and contempt in his or her inability to provide the empathy she needed so badly. She was friends with one of our male volunteers, and they became sexually involved after they completed the tolerance study. Soon after that she left the country, leaving no forwarding address.
I include Cassandra’s story here although it could also belong in the entity contact or mystical experience chapters. Her sessions did include interactions with the “clowns” and led to a deep serene peace she had never previously known.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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Cassandra was twenty-two years old, the next-to-youngest volunteer, when she signed on for the DMT project. Her manner and appearance brought out conflicting feelings in most people she met, and I was no exception. She dressed and carried herself in a somewhat masculine way, and she was bisexual. Both men and women found her pleasing face and lithe, androgynous body type attractive. Her studiously casual attitude toward appearance and self-care made her seem somewhat waiflike, and it was easy to feel caring and maternal toward her—the older nurses on the research ward wanted to feed her and give her a bath. She also possessed sharp intelligence, laconic humor, and a direct manner. Cassandra was a complicated young woman, and it took some effort to see with whom you were really dealing.
Cassandra suffered in relationships. Her parents divorced before she was a year old, and her mother raised her neglectfully. This came to a head at the age of sixteen, when her mother left her alone with her stepfather for a week. He raped her repeatedly during that time, and this cemented her stark ambivalence toward men and women: distrusting and hating them on one hand, but needing their love and protection at the same time.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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If we are to move past the consequences of trauma, it is necessary to confront them head-on. Usually this requires a voluntary reexperiencing of the feelings caused by the trauma in a safe and supportive environment. The problem is how to access those feelings in the first place.
In many ways, a high dose of DMT is traumatic, bringing about a loss of control and annihilation of personal identity. “Shock” is a word we heard many times during the DMT studies. I even began using the term when I prepared people for their first 0.4 mg/kg session. Several volunteers recommended we print t-shirts with the words “I Survived 0.4″ to hand out to those who successfully negotiated that morning’s events.
I am certain that many of our volunteers were at some level attracted to the DMT project because it promised an overwhelming but structured voluntary traumatic experience. By experiencing absolute loss of control in a safe and supportive situation, it might be possible to more fully contact, and thereby own and let go of, certain painful emotions. Cassandra was one such volunteer whose incompletely expressed and felt emotions from past trauma hindered her current life.
Taken from : DMT The Spirit Molecule - Rick Strassman MD.
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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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