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Chart
In case you read this, I thought about you when watching another PSIP vid. Saj mentioned the difference between humans and (other ) animals with regards to dissociation at around one hour and 7-9 minutes into this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nn_qyBxlKw

dollyvee
Great! Thank you! All roads lead to Saj, lol. It's both wonderful and painful to read the articles (and to go over other PSIP material). I'm so happy Saj has connected the dots and found a bottom up approach to erode dissociation gently and rather fast. I'm tempted to call the selective inhibition part guided mindfulness on psychedelics. So many therapists I worked with assumed you can will yourself to access difficult material. One outright blamed me for "not getting there". Those endless encounters have been incredibly painful, lonely and even re-traumatizing. I hope you had better luck finding qualified help. It sounds like you have. If I may ask, have you been able to go where you needed to go with NARM/IFS/other modalities? Or is there a point which they can't take you beyond, that you feel needs visiting?

I never linked PSIP to the Psychedelic Society, but I knew there were trainings over here somewhere. I reached out to the PSI two years ago and they couldn't help me. I think those sessions in Amsterdam were only for therapists in training.

What you describe about connection as such being so painful sounds utterly lonely. Social interactions aren't quite connection if it's not possible to be really present, is it? I know what that's like. It can feel more lonely than being physically alone. And I relate to the difficulty of having to deal with other people's ego states. I acknowledge that there can be projection involved, but people dumping their stuff on others is very common, unfortunately. It's more difficult to deal with when boundaries have been violated so profoundly in your FOO. Since cPTSD folks are prone to seek fault in themselves, I'd say it's probably helpful to assume it's the other way around when in doubt.

It's been a while since I looked into NARM, so forgive me if I'm missing the mark. It sounds sophisticated, hyper-mindful. Would you say this approach is helping you to form your own internal world, so to say? Or perhaps making it more robust by holding it in a space of great attention and acceptance, and validating how you felt with that in relation to the environment you grew up in? That would be a beautiful and also painful process, I imagine. Writing this, I realize that I've been doing something like this for many years in isolation. I couldn't in connection. Mostly not. If I was a tiny fire in a storm, I have been guarding it from the wind and taking great care to add extra twigs carefully, so it won't extinguish but grow. It seems to me your flame has also been bordering on being extinguished, but you've found a way to rekindle your fire. That's great!

Your point about shame and annihilation is spot on. After reading Bradshaw's book, I dove into interpersonal neurobiology and found those two meeting in Patricia DeYoung's book. Her definition of shame: "Shame is an experience of one's felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other." In this context, shame is an "attempt" to not exist in order to survive. It's an existential paradox, in the middle of the split of authenticity and inauthenticity. The developing self is faced with the threat of annihilation, and the only way to escape that is to not be, and to present something else, which won't be annihilated. At the heart of it, authenticity has come to mean death. And connection without authenticity is not possible. I feel this play out in most social interactions. The charge around it can be through the roof. I've developed around hiding what's going on inside me. Including this pressure cooker, which turns up the fire even more.

Over time, and exponentially more so after some high dose psychedelic interventions, opening up around friends has become much more natural. The default really changed. Also on a visceral level. The protection mechanism of shame runs deep though. It shows up in many interactions and this is the realm I feel I need to explore (with PSIP). Feeling the terror of annihilation while committing to connection with someone who can be trusted is where there's big healing potential, I think. What my system needs is experiences proving it's fundamental predictions about itself and the world around it wrong. It will continue to project this early life terror onto situations until there have been experiences in that vulnerable state with a different outcome. This is my beef with many modalities, which never could help me inhibit my (involuntary) defenses and land me in an age regressed state. Psychedelics could. When that first hurdle isn't taken, it doesn't land in a deep place, in my experience. So therapy remained basically bla bla for me.

I don't actually know to what extent my issues have preverbal roots, do you? I have a strong suspicion based on hints from inside and literature, that's pretty much it. My M's personality was most likely not any different before I learned language. In a way you could derive the impact of your caregiver on your preverbal development from the personality you later got to understand. I remember being obsessed by Allan Schore and what he had to say about the first 1000 days of development (including in utero), but I must confess that I forgot most of it. I do believe that a fetus is influenced by the emotional state of it's mother. This would also make sense in the light of evolution and epigenetics.

Learning to regulate our nervous system in later life is a very big part of the challenge, I think. I've found a meditation practice to be helpful, but I clearly remain vulnerable to overwhelming stress responses. What I've come to see as also an important challenge, is to connect when this is happening. Connecting is not only a goal, but also a tool, which made that a sort of check mate for the majority of my life. Co-regulation is a bit of an alien concept in therapy land, but I think this is more natural and in line with our biology than our hyper individualized culture suggests.

Yes my M was of the covert variety. She did a lot of damage, primarily below my radar. I have allowed myself to go all the way with feeling resentment and hate, which I think was very healing for me. The full picture just isn't black and white. I would almost invalidate my experience of the confusing ambivalence I grew up with by reducing my M to an evil narc of sorts. I once described her as genuinely caring and relentless. Both come from my own experience and acknowledging however it was, is important to me. I'm aware that I don't know what I don't know, so my view may change if I become aware of blind spots. I'm not happy with the paradigm of personality disorders anyway. It may have it's use, but what has helped me more is to see that both my parents were emotionally immature and needy and how that affected my trajectory.

I understand the following is a delicate subject in a space where people gather who have been treated so badly. Perhaps it's a bit too much for this forum, but after working through a lot, I eventually could see my parents as two human beings who perpetuated suffering because they were largely unaware of their shadow. They were/are very human. Letting go of a victim identity is deeply healing and this perspective has been helpful for me in that regard. I find myself going in and out. A huge part of my bitterness and resentment has gone since my aya experiences and that is awesome. From time to time some more shows up. That's alright. It ain't over until it's over.

OK, this is a long entry. I'll better round it up. Thank you for the links, the excellent excavations from the NARM literature, and your input overall.  

TW/spirituality

Secondchance
Your experiences sound wonderful. Shyness is very painful and it must have been an immense relief to have this lifted from your shoulders. You have it in you to speak in front of a crowd with ease, that's great to know, isn't it!? I can't know if I understand where you're at right now, but I can relate to undergoing an big shift and navigating a lot of confusion in the wake of that. I'm talking about a process of many years, which never really finished. cPTSD symptoms did disappear to a significant degree for a while. What this means and how to continue from there is a highly personal quest. From what I gather from your writing, it seems to me that you're looking for spiritual support rather than psychological support, am I right? I came to the conclusion that for me, the way out is through. So dealing with complex trauma on a psychological level and prioritizing connection with others.

The main reason the earlier quote is used in the PSIP context, is to make it clear the modality does not aim to operate on the level of spirituality, in contrast to other interventions with psychedelics. PSIP deals with cPTSD type challenges on a psychological and somatic level. This does not deny the importance spirituality can have in people's lives. It may even remove barriers in that sense. But the focus in this modality is on dealing with psychological issues. In particular the kind people on this forum are dealing with. That's why I think it deserves to be mentioned here, under the "Therapy" label.

Yesterday I watched the first part of a conversation between PSIP practitioners, in which they discussed the three tiers of transformation, in which the third is the realm of the mystical, transpersonal, unity, etc. that is not worked with in PSIP. The reason for not aiming for that in this modality is that people sometimes end up "forgetting" to do the difficult work in the other tiers and the material keeps showing up until it's dealt with. Working with high dose psychedelics is inherently destabilizing, yet they have immense healing potential. So I'm really happy there are people who have developed an approach which incorporates low/moderate dose psychedelics in a psychotherapeutic modality.

rainydiary
Thank you for your support!

Dalloway
Wow. The whole thread. I'm honored. Thank you. I'm so happy to hear it made you feel really connected and at peace! The feeling is mutual Dalloway. I'm so happy to meet you and others here. It touches my heart to interact with you. OOTS is such a beautiful place. It's rare to find a place where people connect from such vulnerability and are so supportive of each other. Thank you for being here.

Chart
I'm happy to hear it didn't stop you from getting value out of the talk. Please do share about those correlations if you feel comfortable to do so. A lot came together in discovering PSIP for me too. I think the most important thing Saj said in the talk is that it's not about the medicine. It's us. We are the magic. In the end, it's all about connection, about love. Complex trauma developed in it's absence, and crumbles in it's presence. Love is the medicine. My T is in Poland.

dollyvee
Gosh, you read it all too!? Thank you so much for that and for sharing your thoughts and experiences. This forum sure helps to relieve isolation. And it further erodes the obstacles for connection IRL.

It's great microdosing helped you to uncover and deal with some things. From my own experience with it, and with "mini dosing" I'd say the therapeutic potential is there, but also has it's limitations. Especially in isolation. I understand you were/are looking for ways to go beyond that. I'm ALL EARS with regards to the group and the info you found about the use of MDMA. I understand why you'd consider hopping over for something like this. If I would have known, I think I would have joined that group somewhere in the past two years. Just before I found my PSIP T, I was considering to ask if an aya facilitator I met during a ceremony would be up for a PSIP type session with me. It's crazy the therapeutic use of these compounds is still not incorporated into the health care system and people like us have to resort to the gray area. But health is not a luxury, so whatever it takes!

The need to explain myself clearly is absolutely connected to developmental trauma. Thanks so much for sharing your insights. For me it needs to be so clear so the chance of being dismissed is the smallest. This is what I've come to expect and fear every time I have something to say. So in essence, I'm still reacting to my M. Would you say you feel like you only have one chance and you better hit the mark because you won't be permitted another? Or rather, you don't feel you have that one chance to begin with? Would you say your truth remains intact as long as you don't articulate it, and when you do it can be destroyed by not being received? So expressing yourself feels like it equals the destruction of (a part of) you, because that would happen to you as a kid? I'm risking derailing the conversation, but I wonder to what degree introversion can be an adaptation to an unsafe social environment. In the sense that it may be a fawn response woven into ones personality at the time it developed in interaction with the environment.

If I'm not mistaken it was Beverly Engel who talked about caregivers as mirrors in which a child sees who she/he is. They need to hear and see you and communicate that what they hear and see is worthy and lovable. Whatever we get as feedback in our formative years, we absorb as part of who we are. I think what you said about the NARM connection survival strategy relates to this. How does a helpless child develop when it's met with rejection or when it's not met at all? I'm sorry your M didn't have space for your needs and this vital process got warped. I can relate.

Being treated like this from a young age does tell you that you don't have the right to exist indeed. I suspect implicit messages land even deeper than explicit messages, because the violence in it can be hard to detect. In fact, this is an important reason why I'm having trouble stating outright that I suffer from cPTSD or developmental trauma and not fearing it'll be dismissed or worse. I have not so much to point to in terms of "classic" traumatic experiences. A few of these little "t" incidents don't get you there, but growing up in such an environment does. It's complicated for me, because I do see narcissistic traits in my M, but it was mixed with genuine love and care. My F who had more outright NPD issues nowhere near affected me as much as my M did. The clarity of him not caring about me was so obvious there was some peace in that, if that makes sense.

Thanks for your support dollyvee. I appreciate having this conversation.

[meditation]

Welcome to I Love You Keep Going the Podcast with George Haas (formerly Meditation x Attachment). Each episode will explore the connections between ancient Buddhist meditation techniques and modern psychological attachment theory. Learn more at mettagroup.org

https://www.mettagroup.org/podcast
https://creators.spotify.com/pod/show/mxa-with-george-haas

Hi Tipsu, welcome here! I'm sorry you went through so much and it has affected you so deeply. There are many people here who can relate to your struggles. I arrived here not long ago and it definitively is a lovely bunch  

Dalloway
I'm sorry you're in such a dark place at the moment. Thank you for sharing from this vulnerability and committing to authenticity. I have no way of knowing for sure what you describe is the same or similar, but it looks very familiar to me. For many years I was in such a state. It was clear to me that a very deep process was going on, and that something incredibly dark and heavy inside me was infinitely more powerful than any therapy, book, or support. Omnipresent is exactly the word that describes that. But what it was exactly I could not articulate. I just knew it made life impossible. Everything about it. The pressure from CBT type therapists to cognitively re-frame it made it even worse. I experienced it as an invalidation of an ongoing overwhelming experience of existential emptiness. Something completely untouched by a narrative sauce poured over it.

I would have done anything to deal with the root cause, but to my great frustration and despair, I could not get there, whatever I tried. When I finally did get there (with psychedelics), it was clear why I had not been able to "get there". What was then undefended was so awful, I could never have willed myself there. Temporarily ending up in the middle of that brought a lot of insight into my defenses and what healing is. I saw that I had built a highly sophisticated defense structure around a heart that was hurt very badly. A great part of it was so subtle I had no idea it was there. No bla bla or my sincere wish to deal with the dark stuff inside could get though it. The defense structure was almost the entire way I was. My behaviors, my convictions, my isolation, and so forth. I had carefully constructed all of this to survive. And in order to survive this survival, the I that I thought I was had to be deconstructed. It kind of started to crumple on it's own after that. But that's a different part of the story. My point is that what needed to happen was as profound as I had felt all this time. I've heard that when you're suicidal, something about you needs to die. I can confirm this was the case for me.

What had essentially led me to take this step, was that I took my inner voice seriously. Just like you, I somehow knew in all the overwhelm, confusion, despair, and frustration, that what was inside was made of the darkness and all the pain I ever felt. There was no living around that possible. No making it bearable with more bla bla or insight. If anything were to happen, it had to happen at a deep level. Looking back, the sense that something very seriously needed to change in order for me to feel better had always been true. I now see it as my unconscious signaling to the conscious. Like a big, red, blinking light on the dashboard. I am still alive because I did not take the red light for the problem, but for the signal that it always was. It never was my enemy. It were younger versions of me desperately asking for my attention. Something started to change at a deep level only when I felt their pain. When I found a way to remove what kept it from entering my awareness.

It's hard for me to assess whether I could have eventually ended up breaking through my defenses via another route. I'm tempted to say no, but I can't be sure. In theory a lot of modalities are aiming for this too, in much gentler ways. That would be preferred if it works, I think.

Obviously my issues weren't solved after this breakthrough. But the omnipotence you mentioned never came back. A fundamental shift was initiated and it never stopped developing. In some ways I feel like I've only had six years of life without "the omnipresence", which is the time that has passed since this happened.

I hope what is currently happening to you is part of a deep transformation for the better. Everything you have put into healing could be starting to pay off, even though it feels awful now.

Much love. 

I'm happy for you that you're mostly out of your survival state again!
Genealogy is an interesting tool for making sense of your own trauma. I never thought of that. I do suspect that a lot of trauma goes back generations. It's nice you also see something positive about your grandma. Have you ever looked into epigenetics? Good luck with the research.

I can say "Of course it's worth it!" again   

That's great! 

Awesome! It's nice to see how much your decision has brought you right away.
We're all still in this social experiment, having to decide how to interact online, on what platform, when, for how long, etc. It can be a really toxic environment, amping up reactivity. For socially isolated people it can be a great opportunity too. It's complicated. Digital hygiene has become vital for mental health, I think. A friend once told me he checks his whats-app messages once a day, at a time he decided upon beforehand. That's a very good balance, I think. Enjoy your regained freedom 

Yesterday I had the second online consultation with my PSIP T. Since the last one, I had noted some things I thought would be important to add and expand on. One of those was having a panic attack in a vipassana retreat. The issue there was having my eyes closed and being visible to the teacher. Since sustained eye gazing can be part of PSIP, that scares me quite a bit. T insured me that the eye gazing happens in an advanced stage of the therapy, definitively not right away. But wearing eyeshades is part of the usual ketamine assisted sessions. I'm close to certain this would bring up the same thing for me, which would be very soon in the start of the treatment. T is flexible though. I also mentioned that I'm scared for what's coming with PSIP in general.

It feels good to bring up these things. Even though my T is basically still a stranger. Thinking about it, I realize it has helped me to feel safe a lot more to communicate things like these and personal stuff. Simply bringing it up helps. There's a bit of empowerment in there too. And trust in relating as a source of safety. I noticed that I don't have much reservations, which is a good sign to me. My T feels safe.

I'm going to need to arrange some blood tests and an ECG with regards to safety and the ketamine part of the treatment. I have developed a bit of a needle phobia, so I'm not looking forward to that. And I just got a message from my T saying a consultation with the psychiatrist at the ketamine clinic she works with will be scheduled next week. These guys are fast! I wonder if my family doc is going to help me out, because I'm paying for PSIP out of pocket and nobody referred me. I'm thinking about just telling him I've been looking for a suitable treatment for complex trauma for 27 years and just can't find it within the current Dutch health care system. So I've become a therapy snob and am going for a private solution in a foreign country. I'm already dreading having to explain myself. By now more out of frustration than anything else. There is a backup plan if he refuses though.

TW/spirituality

Secondchance
Excuse me if I'm too direct, but doesn't this illustrate the point? I too had an experience as was eluded too and in my daily life I still deal with developmental trauma afterwards. The experience, however profound and life changing, did not erase this. Some people use psychedelics to keep going back, effectively trying to escape the difficult "life on earth", so to say. I don't think it's constructive to attempt to spiritually bypass trauma, which I think the quote eludes to. The relationship mentioned here refers to relating to other people, which continues to be troublesome for those who had a peak experience and still deal with complex trauma.

That said, I do think I understand your longing to get the connection back you experienced. In my case it never went away entirely, which I consider the greatest gift in my life. Nowadays I try to live life at the relative level, while also honoring the absolute. For me, trauma is dealt with on the relative level. This ties in with the PSIP approach. I hope this makes sense.

Chart
Thanks again!
Did Saj address your point further along the talk?
Yeah, a lot of PSIP vids are very intense. I didn't expect anyone to watch more than the oxytocin part, to be honest. To me the vids I relate to are a bit like watching a miracle though. Especially when the client's system is playing out attachment ambivalence and finally goes for connection. I've experienced a bit of that with ayahusca, before I knew there was a modality centered around this healing potential.

Armee
Amazing. I'm happy for you that you have those moments in the midst of all this. Thinking about this, it makes sense that this plays out in the repair of attachment in PSIP sessions too.

Armee
I'm watching a talk by Saj Razvi (PSIP pioneer) and stumbled on something that might be intersting to you with regards to MDMA treatment and a potential legal workaround with oxytocin. Two hours and 4 min in, he talks about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N20vPGFCg7M

Chart
Thank you. Is the link referring to @Dina's experiences? It's not working here... I can't find that with a search.

TW/Spirituality

For me, this is not about death. It is about life.