🧠 "Psychedelics Offer New Solutions"

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[4:38] “There is a lot of defensiveness and fear built in to good psychotherapy. Because it is sort of like surgery, where you are trying to dig down and get to these malignant things that are causing problems that need to be removed and examined. But it’s like surgery without anesthesia. […] I think of MDMA as […] adding the anesthesia or adding the secret sauce that allows the therapy to go deeper and to be more efficient and more effective and also more comfortable.”

[5:19] “[Taking MDMA makes you] not as fearful and increases serotonin, so you are not as anxious and very importantly [it] increases oxytocin, so you feel more trusting and connected and more bonded with the person who is doing the therapy […]. It enhances the therapeutic alliance - that sense that the therapist and the client are working together towards something.”

[6:25] “With MDMA you really remember the session, you remember the processing of the trauma and you also get to remember the trauma a bit differently, because while you process the trauma, you were feeling at ease and comfortable and courteous.”

[7:09] “MDMA will be really a disruptive technology to the field of psychiatry and potentially even fields outside of psychiatry.”

[8:14] “What we need in psychiatry is something that […] creates a more fluid sense of self, that isn’t so rigid, that maybe opens things up. And that’s […] not only MDMA, but [also] psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, psychedelics - where you really have […] a different way of thinking about things.”

[12:59] “I feel like you couldn’t design a better molecule to assist in the process of psychotherapy (than MDMA).”

[41:16] “Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy […] gives people a chance to really process and rework some of that very early trauma. And maybe create a little bit of a different foundation. Because […] childhood trauma is fueling a lot of the pathology that we are seeing today.”

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