Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

 

 

Show Notes

Website: thejourneysage.com

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheJourneySage

The Book: Rescuing Jill: How MDMA with a Dash of Mushrooms Healed My Childhood Trauma-Induced PTSD

Workbook: Rescuing Jill Companion Workbook: Intention Setting Prompts for Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy

 

Transcript

 

My guest today is Jill Sitnick.

She's the author of Rescuing Jill, How MDMA, with a Dash of Mushrooms, Healed My Childhood Trauma-Induced PTSD, that's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

In her book, Jill describes how MDMA, which is a drug we're gonna talk about, let her view her father's beatings and her mother's suicide attempts during medically supervised sessions, therapy sessions, and how through what is called psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, these treatments healed her trauma and transformed her life.

She's an unaffiliated voice with experience who's able to explain how this type of therapy works and dispel some of the mythical stigmas associated with using psychedelics in the care of a professional in therapy.

She has a Bachelor of Science in Education, a Master of Science in Instructional Technology, and using that skill set in her training, she wrote a workbook that accompanies her book that includes instructions on how to create and use personal intentions during the treatment sessions.

She also has a YouTube channel that explains what psychedelic-assisted therapy is, and how it can help those with mental health challenges.

Learn more.

Before we start, I want to add that this podcast is for entertainment purposes only.

No medical advice is being given.

And if you have a medical question, ask your doctor.

If you're in crisis or you're feeling suicidal, or in need of medical attention, or someone to talk to about it, call 988.

That's the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

You can also text 988 if you want to, if you don't want to call and get help.

Welcome to my show, Jill.

Thank you.

That was a beautiful introduction.

Can I take you on all of my podcasts?

Well, it's a good backstory.

Real quick, for those not familiar with the acronym, that was me, MDMA.

Jill, you explain it.

What does MDMA, this drug you use doing therapy, what does it stand for?

Well, it stands for a big, long, giant name that has multiple syllables and a whole bunch of letters that I can't pronounce.

Most people, though, will be familiar with MDMA if I reference the street names of Ecstasy or Molly.

It was in the early 1900s.

It is a chemical or a drug that is known to increase your interest in being social, your empathy, your compassion.

It's one of the reasons why on weekends, far younger people than I enjoy taking it to go have a lovely time at a rave or a party and things of that sort.

I think that usually helps people put in perspective what MDMA is.

And what was your life like before this therapy?

And what is it like now?

And tell me your story, what you did in therapy, how it transformed you.

So the first question, how is life different?

First of all, I didn't know that most of my behavior before this treatment was trauma-based.

I just thought my high-anxiety, A-plus work ethic, got to get everything done.

I just thought that was my personality.

I did not understand the hypervigilance that I was living with.

And I was luckily in a very loving relationship for over 20 years.

And that relationship also helped kind of regulate my nervous system a bit.

So I never really felt like I was out of control.

I just knew that I really had to work hard.

I really needed to be safe.

I needed to be creating plans A, B, C, D, E.

I didn't exactly know why.

Again, I thought it was my personality.

After this treatment, I'm no longer hypervigilant.

I know that there is a future.

I know that the universe is not just waiting around every corner to kind of smack me down.

But unexpected things can happen and they won't destroy your life.

It's a major mental frame about how life can be lived.

And I think the easiest way to talk about the therapy before we kind of dive into specifics is that the way that the MDMA medicine allowed that transformation was through the ability to reframe childhood beliefs through an adult perspective without my body feeling the fear that it felt for basically 47, 48 years by that point.

I was diagnosed with PTSD in my late 40s.

And we can talk about the mechanism by which MDMA allows a trauma patient to kind of face some of those really tough memories and those perceptions that were created by an abused child's mind that as an adult you look at and say, hey, wait, is that really the way it is?

I think that's a good way to summarize it.

And me anyhow, when I hear the word trauma, I have to think for a moment, like, have I experienced trauma, like what is trauma?

Do you have to get shot in the face to be traumatic?

Trauma, it's not just trauma that it's treating.

If you have anxiety or depression or other mental health issues, it can be used to treat that too, right?

Well, I'm hesitant to kind of become medicine blind and say MDMA can do everything.

I tend to kind of stick to what the clinical trials say right now.

And MDMA is absolutely beautiful for PTSD because it calms the body down.

And to extrapolate from that, I think any sort of internal crisis where your body is in a very dysregulated state, you maybe can't sleep, you maybe can't eat well, you're constantly on edge.

My shoulders were up to my ears, my back was always hurting.

If you've got some physical symptoms of your trauma and trauma kind of lives in the tissues, we can address the trauma.

So tell me about the process.

It's a drug you take, you go into a clinic where there's somebody trained, you don't take it on your own at home, that's illegal.

You go into a facility where there's a therapist that you're in bed and you take, or you're laying down and you take this drug and it's like you're going on a trip.

And while you're doing that, you're still talking to your therapist or talk to them afterwards, so it's a controlled bedding, right?

So walk me through that, like if I was to do have this treatment, what I would be experiencing.

And so to be candid, my therapy was underground, quote unquote underground.

But my therapist and guide, who was a medical doctor at the time, so I had two people working with me, a male and a female, they followed the MAPS protocol.

M-A-P-S dot org, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Those are the folks who have been doing the clinical trials and have submitted through their parent company, Lycos submitted the FDA application that hopefully August 11th will have approval for.

They're doing this all over the world, right?

In other countries, they're doing these studies.

That's where you got this from, right?

I can't speak to that.

MAPS started in the US.

Oh, okay.

So tell me, tell me how it works, like, yeah.

So if you think of MDMA therapy as a medical procedure, it makes it so much easier to understand.

There's prep time beforehand, basically talk therapy.

In my case, there was about four months of talk therapy involved after I agreed to this therapy.

So it's the thing you jump into.

And then the day of the medicine, and think of that as your medical procedure, like a surgery or something of that sort.

It was a whole day.

It could be five to eight hours.

And that is going to a place that hopefully has multiple areas.

My particular journey room had seating areas, a mattress, and the mattress is there basically because sometimes on the medicine, if you're dealing with a really traumatic issue, you might want to move around, and you don't want to be in a situation where you could fall out of something.

The room was beautiful.

It had lots of artwork.

It had lots of blankets.

I'm a cuddler.

It was the first thing I noticed.

It's important because it's not LSD, but it's a psychedelic drug.

You want to be in a comfortable, controlled environment.

That's why you're going to a place like this.

A beautiful environment, not an antiseptic hospital.

You want to be in a very warm, comfortable place.

And I say warm emotionally.

And that's what this place was for me.

The actual day was sitting, talking to my therapist and guide about my intentions, taking the medication, a prescribed dose, an appropriate dose.

So what do you intend to share that or?

No, I don't talk about dosing.

The intention was fear, get rid of the fear.

Okay.

What would somebody else's intention?

What I guess this is what they help you with for four months before is, is right.

Why figuring out why you're there, why you're there and how you want life to look differently.

What your problem is that you're looking for the solution for.

Okay.

And in your case, it was?

Fear.

So you have your intention.

Okay.

So you go in and you have your intention.

Yes.

I think there were like two or three, but they were all about fear.

Why is the universe out to get me?

That kind of stuff.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

So MDMA in a therapeutic dose allows you to be very aware.

And my therapist actually voice recorded my sessions.

There's a little glitch with the second one, but we voice recorded.

And when I can, when I replay that back, I wasn't, I didn't slur my words.

The only thing I didn't do was I didn't lie.

I didn't tell any white lie about my childhood like I had done for most of my life.

Is that because it's not a truth serum, but because you felt the drug makes you open up and feel more comfortable sharing stuff with your therapist?

Yeah.

And it's also, you know, your subconscious is kind of wide open a little bit.

And the first journey is usually about safety.

People with trauma, especially adults like me, who had lived with it for such a long time, we've got a lot of protections in place.

And stigmatism, because we'll get to that, but I would be afraid I'm taking a hallucinogenic drug, right?

I would be scared just, I haven't done that before.

What if I have a bad trip?

What's it like?

What does the medicine feel like?

Are these two people safe?

My inner children, my subconscious being wide open, didn't really trust adults as a child, because adults never help.

So here I am opening up my subconscious to these two people.

So that first journey, again, five to eight hours, it's a long process for a day.

How long does the drug itself, the dosage stay in effect?

And how much of that eight hours is other time that you're at the facility?

I've had MDMA be making, putting me in an enhanced state for a solid seven hours.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a long day.

It's a long day for the practitioners.

Right.

First, under the MDMA, we think 45 minutes have gone by.

And if I was a practitioner, I'd be concerned, can I go to the bathroom?

Can I get coffee?

Do I go to lunch?

What happens when I'm not here?

Something happens.

I guess that's why you're there and they're there, and they're not probably leaving the building.

It's all in control, like a surgery, like surgery, right?

Like surgery.

No, everyone is there for the time period.

Of course, potty breaks.

Absolutely.

I was not incapacitated.

I could get up.

So you get comfortable, and then it's a pill that you take, and then you're there for seven hours.

Approximately.

So what happens after you take the pill?

Well, as a trauma patient, my body relaxed.

I don't even know if I was aware of it, but I became aware of it as we moved through it.

I was able to have conversations about how scared I was of my father.

For the very first time, I actually heard my inner voice.

There are some people out there that will be like, what are you talking about?

You never heard your inner voice before?

Then there's other people like me, who was living her life in a trauma response that fear overtook everything.

I had no concept of my own inner intuition.

What's inner voice?

By inner voice, what do you mean by you never heard your inner voice?

I never paid attention.

Every single one of my decisions in life, well, I would say 90% of my decisions in life were based on safety and not based on what I would have wanted to do.

That little internal voice that says, oh, that's really cool, that's really exciting.

Survival.

I didn't even listen to her.

She was, because what was on top was, is that safe?

Can I get hurt?

What are the ramifications?

By inner voice, you really mean your true voice.

Your intuition, your energy, you are.

Got it.

Okay.

So now, so you took the pill and now your inner voice is coming out more clear.

So you don't lie, you'd be honest with your therapist.

You're being honest with your therapist, that's there, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And if I didn't want to, if they, I mean, it was basically, think of it as a talk therapy session with your therapist, dialed down to like a three out of a 10.

And what I mean by that is that the person who's in that enhanced state gets to really run the session.

And the two people who are with that person, you'll very often hear the term holding space.

They are empathetic witnesses that I am actively working through my fears of my father with these two people for the first time of my life.

Two people just simply listening and not being like, but he's your father or he wouldn't do that or just kind of looking like.

Oh, therapist, they gave their own opinion on it.

They project themselves into your problems.

Yeah.

And that's exactly why training is so necessary for this particular modality, because with a patient's subconscious wide open, the two people who are holding space should really only push back or I hasn't to say push back.

I had said some really horrible things about myself.

I didn't deserve to be born.

I didn't deserve to be around.

I wasn't wanted.

And they would occasionally kind of, is that true?

Where does that come from?

That kind of gentle pushing back.

But the majority of the time, they simply allowed the conversation to happen.

Which trauma can come, to go back to your earlier question, trauma can come from anything if the emotions that you have are not handled, are not massaged, are not healed.

So that's one of the reasons why some people can go through a traumatic experience and be fine, because they may have had an empathetic witness, they had someone to help them through it, but somebody else goes through it, they had to go through it alone, that can become trauma.

So there's no hierarchy on like, well this causes trauma and this doesn't, which honestly I didn't understand, I just kind of thought I was had a crappy child.

There's also thick skinned people and thin skinned people, like even Arnold Schwarzenegger was talking about his brother, who I think passed, and Arnold's like, he just wasn't as tough as me, and it's not being condescending, it's just some of us, you know, water off a duck's back and others, not so much.

It's not one's good, one's bad, it's just people are different.

Yeah, a lot of it comes from, you know, there's a bit of nature and there's a bit of nurture in there.

So anybody who might be saying, well, I didn't go through enough to really be traumatized, just pay attention to your body because your body is the signal.

The actual event is not the signal.

All right, so back to the day.

You know, after that first journey for me, I kind of cut it short at five hours.

My inner children had had kind of had enough and I instantly kind of came awake.

You just kind of gather yourself, you have a little bit of snack, you hydrate a little bit.

And within an hour, I was actually able to drive.

I didn't, but I would have been able to.

And it was on the way home.

I was in the car with my boyfriend at the time.

And I started crying because I felt like such an inconvenience.

I didn't really feel that anything had been done.

I only remembered bits and pieces.

And I thought I wasted everybody's time.

I was inconvenienced and it didn't work.

And oh my gosh, I just suck at everything.

I can't do anything right.

And I'm crying and I'm looking at the window.

And I had three childhood memories come up of me being neglected by my parents.

And as I looked at these memories, it was almost like they were on a TV screen.

I just kind of looked at these memories and I realized, wait a minute, I wasn't an inconvenience.

My parents didn't have the capacity to take care of me.

My mother had just died with a gun.

My mother had been healing.

My father was abusive.

That perspective shift, that's the healing right there.

It's like you, it's the same memory came to you, but you didn't react to it and feel the same way as before.

The same exact memory, you had your memory still.

You just, instead of when you had that memory, reliving trauma, you had a different perspective on it.

Yeah, instead of me remembering when I was like six, being moved around to relative to relative and feeling like I don't deserve a home, everybody else gets a family, I don't, there's something wrong with me.

Instead, I looked as an adult at Jill being moved around and realized, hey, wait a minute, that was just because my parents didn't have their stuff together.

So, this sounds like a useful practical therapy and a drug.

So, why is it not legal for doctors or therapists to use it?

Is it legal right now?

Not yet.

Not yet.

And they want to shut it down.

And there's those commercials, I remember them, that this is what drugs do to your brain.

And I recall specifically in the day when ecstasy, you know, in the 90s, 2000s, first started becoming real popular that I was aware of.

You would hear how bad ecstasy is.

Especially ecstasy.

Don't do that one.

That's bad.

That's not really true, right?

It's taken out of context.

And is that just because it's like any drug people know nothing about?

They start thinking the worst of it?

Well, there's always a couple of things.

If you hear something about a psychedelic, you have to pay attention to dose.

The same way you would not take ten painkillers when you're only supposed to take two is the same way you should not take grams and grams of MDMA when you're supposed to take milligram.

So that's number one.

Or a bottle of penicillin.

Because the way I look at it is, it's just another drug.

There's plenty of them in the pharmacy.

Let a doctor decide what's good for the patient.

You would not tell your mechanic what part they should fix your car with.

And yes, if it gives you a prescription of anything, you take too many, it's not gonna work.

So how is it that this drug gets stereotypically portrayed as being terrible and it's gonna harm you?

And that's illegal in the end, right?

Yeah, Michael Pollan in How to Change Your Mind does a beautiful job laying out all the history.

I mean, the short story is that there was research about MDMA in the 50s and 60s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and the drug wars kind of, for political reasons, drugs were a great thing to attack.

And so all of the research basically stopped.

And luckily, Rick Doblin said, Rick Doblin, who runs MAPS, he basically said, look, this is a healing modality for PTSD.

Our veterans are a population that have a high occurrence of PTSD.

Let me go through the government regulation route to at least focus on this population to get this legal.

And that's basically what he's done.

That's why the clinical trials are where they are, and that's why August 11th, hopefully, the FDA does approve the therapy.

There's been a little bit of static, not unanticipated.

A couple of days from now.

A couple of days.

Wow.

So by the time this podcast even is, we will know if it's legal or not.

Yeah.

So if it's legal, your story's been great.

It will help people understand what it's going to be like.

What if it's not legal?

What's the next thing that you and the people that believe we have to do this for the veterans and the people suffering?

It's a great treatment option.

They should be legally allowed to do.

What would be your next step if that happened?

Well, so first of all, I'm pretty optimistic.

The FDA has been working with MAPS since 2017.

They labeled this therapy Breakthrough Designation, which means there's nothing else on the market that has the result that this does.

And so a lot of the questions and concerns that are coming up right now, the FDA actually knew about, you can't unblind, you can't run a blind trial with psychedelics.

The group that gets the psychedelics know they got the psychedelics.

So like that was one major complaint.

So let's just put this in perspective that the people right now who are raising complaints are, have not been involved from the start, the way that the FDA has.

So that's one of the reasons why I'm optimistic.

Secondly, if it doesn't happen now, what most people are saying is that all that will happen is that the FDA will say, okay, wait a minute, we see some of these other concerns.

Let's go back for another trial.

So in essence, it could just be delayed.

I don't know the timeline for that.

It's the mystic, at least in my lifetime, it'll become available.

And that doesn't, don't freak out everybody.

I'm in my 50s.

I'm not saying it'll take another 40 years or something, but I do think it's going to happen.

It won't be a ban.

They won't be introducing a new law that supersedes an old law and even makes it more illegal or something sneaky like that.

Okay.

So what about mushrooms?

Because your book title says with a Dash of Mushrooms.

And why, why is there a Dash of Mushrooms in there?

That's like part of the recipe for all of this.

So one of the benefits of not being part of the clinical trial and working with experts with whom I was working, was that when I came up, my first journey was September.

My second journey was December.

My third journey was not until May.

We really took our time in between.

And I had a major nightmare, March.

Basically, I had a nightmare of myself in the childhood home where my mother had attempted to kill herself multiple times.

The last time with a shotgun, she survived.

But I was trapped in that childhood home.

And through visualization and talk therapy, the door to that home wouldn't appear.

By the way, I'm big on using imagination and visualization in therapy.

I think it's a really underrated tool.

And that's one of the things we were doing.

And in the conversations leading up to the third journey, my guide and therapist said, look, whatever trauma is there, it's pretty big.

If we are in the MDMA session and we still can't get you out of that house, would you be willing to have a little bit of psilocybin, magic mushrooms?

And I said, I trust you folks.

Absolutely.

And that's what happened.

About two-ish hours into the journey, I introduced my therapist and guide to this little girl that was trapped in that childhood home, terrified.

And they basically gave me a very low dose of psilocybin.

And that part of the journey allowed me to bust my childhood home open and be free of it.

It's called a hippie flip in the recreational circles, but my therapist used it therapeutically for me.

So what's the chemical?

How would they work chemically?

Because my question is, and I'm an engineer, so bear with me, this is my analytical mind.

How come just a higher dosage of the MDMA wouldn't give the same effect or why wouldn't just mushrooms give the same effect?

You know what?

I can't wait for the research to actually be able to answer your question.

I can only answer it from a patient perspective.

Okay, that's fine.

Yeah.

I'm so looking forward to when we understand the mechanisms more.

Which is a hard thing to do.

The whole neuroscience is, because you can't experiment on people.

You can let them watch you and you can give them feedback.

Sure, you guys are the experts.

I'll take a little more mushroom next time, except that you're getting well again.

There's that factor that can be added too.

Right.

You're not really staying at that start line.

The start line.

Right.

In terms of mushrooms, tell listeners who don't know mushrooms or just, oh, yeah, I've heard of mushrooms, the leucigenics.

There's a lot of misinformation about that.

They cause you to be leucigenic or have good or bad trips or no, they just make you giggle super high like you're on marijuana and you have a lower chance of a bad trip than LSD, which I tend to believe because LSD sounds like the big guns, right?

If you were just to take mushrooms, that's probably not as effective, it doesn't seem.

Otherwise, people will be doing more of that than MDMA.

Have you ever, do you know enough about mushrooms?

Have you just taken mushrooms to compare that to ecstasy?

Yes.

Yes.

So let's be super, super clear.

There's a key for every lock.

And MAPS has been doing the research about MDMA for PTSD, while Johns Hopkins is doing a ton of research on psilocybin, magic mushrooms, for anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, end of life, anxiety and fear, smoking sensation, cessation.

I'm sorry, I said that wrong.

There's a ton of research going on around psilocybin over at Johns Hopkins.

So people are interested in that.

The major difference is that the experience of MDMA is fantastic for somebody who's in a really dysregulated nervous system state, and when you go into a psychedelic-assisted session, or you're taking a psychedelic, everyone talks about set and setting, your mindset and where you are.

So if you are in a super dysregulated, scared of everything, about to jump out of your seat, a mushroom journey that can get very visual, and if I was not familiar with drugs, I had never done mushrooms before, that would have been incredibly scary, that would have been disruptive.

Whereas MDMA, you almost aren't even aware that you have anything in your system.

Your system is just calmer.

And so it's very appropriate for different diagnoses.

So the mushrooms are more hallucinogenic than that.

Okay, I see.

So what about LSD, which I'm going to guess is super hallucinogenic?

What's the difference between the three?

Or what's the difference between LSD and mushrooms?

So I have only microdosed LSD, so I can't tell you the difference in the different journeys.

But I've heard it's a very long journey.

But I've also done, I just haven't come across LSD yet.

I've worked with psilocybin, bufo, MDMA.

Iboga, cambo.

But ayahuasca and LSD are still on the list at some point.

Would you guess that, see, before speaking to you, I thought, I didn't understand the difference in one, why some are more legal than others.

Would you guess?

We're talking schedule on drug.

Everything I just said is schedule on drug.

Okay.

Or the reason why anyhow, like, you know, which one's harmful, which one's not, or none of them are, it's just the war on drugs.

It's the war on drugs.

Would I be correct in thinking then, it's not the hallucinogenic effect you're after when you say psychedelic assisted therapy.

It's just technically it affects the brain.

That's why it is a psychedelic.

You don't need to hallucinate.

It's just helping you with your ecstasy is going into a state where you can talk to your inner voice, get more comfortable work with your therapist.

You don't need to hallucinate.

Would that be kind of on the right track?

So I'd be super careful with that because that's actually a community.

There's some people out there that because this is a personal opinion, because of the war on drug, we can't make healing mental health enjoyable.

And being...

Sorry, I'm trying to process that.

I got because of the war on drugs, we can't make what?

The stigma around psychedelic, you have these visuals, you have this amazing experience.

There are groups out there that want to take away the actual psychedelic experience and narrow the experience down to just get the healing, which, honestly, I don't care.

I just want people to get healed.

But I do think that there's a stigma of, well, going on a journey and having a psychedelic journey and seeing these beautiful visuals, that's actually something that can be enjoyable.

And that's not what medicine is.

I've kind of heard that kind of, if it's medicine, it can't be enjoyable.

So I just want to be super, super clear that that's actually a debate out there in the world.

But let's also be really clear that different psychedelics impact the brain in different ways.

MDMA, a lot of people will actually argue that MDMA isn't even a psychedelic because it doesn't give you those visuals.

That's what I was getting at.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was my point is why is it called a psychedelic?

Because really it doesn't sound like it's really that much of a psychedelic compared to other psychedelics.

So back to the nothing comes without a risk.

And is it possible if you were predisposed to some mental condition like schizophrenia and some schizophrenia, they believe they're another person or they kind of talk crazy.

You need to have someone diagnose you to make sure you're not that type of that risk before you have this kind of treatment, right?

Not only do you, yes.

I was only diagnosed with PTSD.

Not only should you be screened for schizophrenia, if it even runs in your family and you don't have it, that would actually be a red flag for any sort of psychedelic work because it could show up without you expecting it.

Any sort of phobias right now, there are a lot of people that aren't comfortable with psychedelics with a bipolar disorder.

For a lot of psychedelics, MDMA included, it's a stimulant.

If you have any sort of heart issues, it's something to clear with your doctor before you had undertaken.

But the great thing about the FDA being involved in this for how long has the FDA been actually working with the MAPS group to study this stuff and learn things like this?

Since 2017.

So they know and they're not going to make it legal, right Jill, without them making doctors know what we're talking about, how to screen people at risk and not let them do this if they, which would be more beneficial because otherwise right now you have the potential for someone hearing about MDA and go MDMA and going, I'm going to do it even though it's illegal.

They shouldn't be doing it because they haven't been screened.

It's not a professional.

It's their friends or their buddies are taking it with, right?

Then you have problems which probably leads us back to why it gets the stigmatisms.

Well, I think you also have to remember that millions of kids every weekend are taking MDMA to go party.

Oh, good point.

We're not dealing with a...

If you have an unforeseen condition, just...

One of my questions is, what's the dosage difference between what those people are doing for recreation and what you do?

Yeah, I don't know what people recreationally are taking, and a therapeutic dose never go over 200 milligrams in a session.

I don't know if that's a lot or a little.

It sounds like a first dose or something like that.

I don't have a preference.

I just know a therapeutic use.

You never go over that number.

Because you're not looking to blow out somebody's serotonin.

You want to speak therapeutic.

You don't want to be dangerous.

Which maybe that's why the experts you're with, facilitating your treatment, your sessions.

Maybe that's why they suggested the mushrooms, because they didn't want to go over that dosage.

No, no, more MDMA, more MDMA would not have let that little girl escape her childhood home.

A little doesn't, a little, like there's no more, do a little, it doesn't give you more benefit kind of thing.

No, not therapeutically, no.

On the same side of the coin, is it possible, it's not a placebo effect, that if you just do MDMA, say I go in there and I'm really excited to get post-traumatic stress disorder, nothing's been able to help me, I'm real excited.

Is it possible you do take the drug and nothing happens?

The drug doesn't affect you because of your body chemistry?

Absolutely.

Just like any drug, the same way that five to 10 percent of people who take a pain reliever don't get relief or all those little red, all those little fine print on all those television commercials about drugs.

Absolutely.

You've also had people who didn't feel the effect of the drug at all, and yet will come back to me three days after a journey and say, when I'm starting to reframe things, like I'm starting to see how it's working.

Especially people who are super used to a lot of psychedelic work, sometimes they'll take MDMA and be like, this is nothing.

What are you talking about?

Because again, the real healing doesn't really happen until a couple of days later.

Good point.

Is the change temporary or long lasting?

How your experience, have you had to go back for what we call tune-ups at your chiropractor?

That's great.

So no, and then I'm going to put a little asterisk.

The three journeys over that course of the year, at the end of that third journey's integration, so that third journey was in May, by the summer, by August.

I was no longer afraid of the universe.

I was no longer suicidal.

I wasn't hypervigilant.

I knew I had a future.

Technically, at that point, I no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis.

Now.

Okay, yes.

So what I say to people is that that experience, and I know some people hate this terminology, but I think it's easier to understand, that year-long treatment healed the capital T traumas, the traumas that were causing the PTSD.

I had lived with 19 years with my parents with neglect and abuse.

I continued to work with my therapist.

I had two additional psilocybin journeys because I wasn't in a PTSD cycle.

I didn't need MDMA at that point.

I've continued to unpack all the craziness that my father did with psychedelic tourism.

To answer your question, it's a yes with a little bit of an asterisk.

I healed my PTSD and I wanted to continue to heal those little T traumas.

Well, you have a lot of memories.

There was a lot of years and you probably can only go through so many memories in one eight-hour session or a few sessions and things come up.

But the nice thing is, you'd be kind of interested.

It sounds like it's fascinating, like you'd be looking at all these memories, come back and you'd go, wait a minute, normally I'm really afraid.

Processing this, I seem to be okay with it.

I hear my inner child or whatever speaking, kind of interesting, is that kind of thing?

I don't know if I necessarily heard her all the time per se.

I was definitely more aware of my intuition.

It was much more of going back to opening up that folder we all have in our brain of childhood memories that we don't really pay attention to very often, kind of opening those up and seeing them from my adult perspective.

And then your question is, how permanent is it?

One of the things I talk about is that it's really important with this therapy to understand that it's not turnkey.

It's not like, oh, I saw that memory.

I shifted my perspective.

I do like this because I got to see the change in perspective.

But you do need to kind of think about some of the tougher memories a few times.

The same way that you need flashcards to learn something new, you need repetition.

It's the same way that you need repetition when healing trauma.

And so I always encourage people, if you're really into meditation, I was really into walking my dog and without my headphones, and just kind of like letting my mind think and review.

And then I would go home and I would journal.

Like whatever you need to reinforce what you're learning, it'll help you heal faster.

And in that way, it becomes permanent.

I just thought of an analogy as my hip, I broke my hip rock climbing in half on a walker for six months.

I had to do physical therapy for a year.

You know what I mean?

I had to retrain my balance.

One leg they claim was a couple of millimeters or half an inch.

I'm exaggerating.

Shorter, yeah.

And you're not gonna be able, I feel okay, I felt okay till you told me that.

But yes, I have to work on my balance, so that kind of thing.

Right.

After surgery.

Yep.

Same way.

That's a great example.

Physical therapy is a really good analogy for what this is.

You have to work at it.

And you'll always get better.

More memories come up and your life gets better as you work through them.

Yep.

So, hopefully it gets legalized and by the time people are listening to this, they're able to go.

I am wondering if, if someone were to go, a friend or family member, like a lot of things for surgery, like you asked the doctor's questions, what would I ask them?

Well, for this, because it seems like the drug is a paramount thing, and it was legal for a while, I would wonder where are they getting the drugs from?

And if they had to have mushrooms, where are they getting the mushrooms from?

So tell me how we make sure we're getting high quality.

Is it legal to manufacture right now in the United States?

So if this happens, this gets a little complicated, and I understand it at like a 10% level.

If this gets, if MDMA gets, so if the FDA approves, that's only the first step.

The DEA then has to go in and reschedule MDMA so that clinicians can use it.

So that's an additional three-ish months.

So we're not going to see clinics being able to offer this therapy at least until 2025.

And at that point, I think there's gonna be a lot of conversation about, you know, licensure guidelines.

What can you do in a therapy session?

What can't you do?

The psilocybin experience that I had, again, I had my therapy underground, you know, I don't know if that's going to be an offering at these clinics.

That's the mushrooms, by the way, listeners.

How do you say it?

Psilocybin.

That's the magic mushroom drug, the mycotoxin in the mushroom.

Right, right.

So I can't say that clinics are going to be doing that.

The actual quality of the medication, the Lycos corp, so MAPS was the non-profit, to get to their third clinical trial funding goal, they actually had to become for-profit with the Lycos organization.

So Lycos would be the organization that would be manufacturing the MDMA for a certain period of time to guarantee your nest.

It'll also kind of build, they'll actually then decide which clinics qualify to do this work.

It's going to be, in the very beginning, my guess, my guess, because I have no inside information.

My guess is going to be very tightly controlled in the very beginning.

That sounds like they will have a monopoly on the drug.

For a period of time, right.

Which is okay, because one step at a time, first get some data.

Let's make sure we have the proper thing.

We all know street drugs are laced with way too many things.

I'm okay with a 15 year padding, sure that's good quality medication.

Well, also, as an engineer, one thing that comes to mind, if you just have one manufacturer, and the purpose is not to make money off the sale, it's purity.

If the doctors and the patients come back and go, hey, like the penicillin.

Yeah, that's really good, works really good.

But you know, a few side effects from a significant statistically significant part of the population that took it.

Can you work with the drug?

Is there a side effect you can get rid of?

Or make the drug better, more effective this way?

And if you have different manufacturers all trying to compete, it'd be like the COVID vaccine, where why can't we just have one vaccine that works better?

Why we have three different people developing in three different ways, not working together, right?

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I had thought that, yeah.

Because we'll come out with a better drug.

And when you have three different people working on it, people are competitive between them, not sharing information.

And then the doctors don't know who to trust, which one to go with or not.

And you just go in a circle of confusion, not make as good of innovation and progress.

So that's probably a great idea.

It sounds like they've thought of this.

They have a good plan.

I think so.

I mean, as a novice to all of this, at some point, pharmaceuticals, somebody, clinical trials cost millions and millions of dollars.

At some point, people have to recoup investments.

So there's a lot of people there.

Hate what I just said, but a lot of millions have been put up front to get this done.

At some point, there needs to be a little bit put back into the coffers.

Well, it reminds me of also an engineering where, when we'd have blackboards hovered around the room with math and in the end, my aerospace engineering professor would go, it's just math.

Meaning, I think one of the troubles we run into with a lot of this stuff is, we're trying to protect people's health, the medical association.

But at some point, people are dying, people are suffering, people are killing themselves, committing suicide, because there's, and hey, you know what?

It's not perfect.

Airplanes aren't perfect.

It's a miracle they fly sometimes, but they do.

Once in a while, they crash.

Got to let go.

I thought of that because the money could spend forever, billions and trillions of dollars and never get anything perfect.

Fortunately, we have other people to, sometimes fortunately not, sometimes they can't see the trees through the forest.

What about the mushroom though?

So I know this is a guess.

It's your opinion, but you've been through it.

This is why you can talk about it.

And you can't really probably guess if we only have the MDMA and not the option to give the mushroom, how many people won't feel better and they could have.

But let's pretend we do want the mushroom.

What's the legal state of that?

Are they going to become legal too or not?

I think it depends on the state right now.

Places like Oregon, places like Colorado.

If you go to a clinic in one of those states, having access to magic mushrooms along with your treatment will probably not be a problem just because of the laws in those states.

Additionally, there's other states, I believe it's like Massachusetts is one of them.

I get confused sometimes because I'm paying attention.

I get a lot of state legislature coming through my email.

A lot of people are working to decriminalize basic amounts and I'm making this up.

Less than one gram of magic mushrooms, which will make a lovely time when you're out in nature, less than a gram kind of thing.

But therapeutically, less than a gram and MDMA can be a beautiful combination.

A lot of states are working towards decriminalizing personal amounts.

I think we're going to see, I think you and I could probably guess the states that will be on board with this.

There will be a lot of states.

Just because something is FDA approved does not mean the states have to allow it.

There'll be a number of states that would absolutely never allow psychedelic work.

It's going to be, in my opinion, right now for the next couple of years, it's going to go state by state.

Is there only one species?

When we say magic mushroom, I have to wonder are the different kinds of magic mushrooms.

Is there only one species of mushroom that-

No?

No.

There's a whole bunch of different kinds.

Psychonauts can talk for hours about which ones they like better and things of that sort.

I've definitely experienced kind of different types of journeys with different mushrooms and different stony old styles.

So that's also part of the issue.

Like how do you put a baseline to a psychedelic substance so that it has a predictable outcome every time?

Well, that's easy.

It looks like a mushroom and it's classified as a fungi.

So you allow it.

But the question would be pros and cons to this.

The downside is then you have to, the MDA or the FDA, the Medical Association has to approve maybe every species.

But maybe it's easier if they just say, you know, you can use mushrooms.

And then it would be up to the practitioners and the patients to go, oh yeah, you know, but it would be like any drug then, which would be good because there are a lot of different species of mushrooms that make that.

Just like there's different types of antibiotics.

Antibiotics come from a fungi.

They're a mycotoxin to kill bacteria.

And for different types of bacteria, you get different types of mycotoxins and fungi.

This is a good thing because it opens infinite possibilities for treatment options.

You have the base of the MDMA.

You know that, you need that.

That's the kind of, you're baking cookies, right?

And that's the flour, the main ingredient.

And then the mushroom, you have different options, right?

So let me also be super clear.

Okay.

The folks who were in the clinical trials, three quarters of the people, on average, three quarters of the people in the clinical trials, some of whom had treatment resistant PTSD for like more than 15 years.

They found success with only an MDMA experience.

I, to be truthful in my journey, my experience, and that's why I shared about the mushroom use, but I would never say that that is a requirement for this kind of therapy.

Oh, I see.

In clinical trials, it wasn't.

Yours was really intense, the door you couldn't open.

I remember your story now.

It was pretty dark, big, heavy door.

Yeah.

Okay.

So for most clinics, most of the time, especially getting started, are going to stick with MDMA as they learn more.

I just happened to be with two very experienced people.

They knew me.

I had been working for a year.

I had been well prepared.

So I don't want to give anybody the impression that this is the normal way, quote unquote normal, the standard way of this therapy.

It just happened to be for me.

But it's hopeful because if you back to our placebo effect or you think it's placebo, but it's not, you go for this type of treatment, you don't get the wham, you know, like, wow, that work kind of effect.

You also go, I don't know, maybe it could work.

Maybe I'm in like, I mean, this happens with Prozac too, right?

You go back to your doctor and go, that didn't work.

Can I try Zoloft or something different?

Why does one work versus the other?

Who knows?

But it's like...

Personal chemistry.

Personal chemistry.

Thank you.

Back to different drugs with different people.

Yeah.

It still makes it hopeful if you go and have a treatment and it doesn't give you what you wanted, that you could not close that door, right?

And I think it's also super helpful to understand that we're specifically talking about MDMA.

There are other psychedelics.

Veterans can use magic mushrooms.

They can go on a retreat, do two or three magic mushroom journeys.

And because the trauma was concentrated to battle time, they'll be a lot more successful.

They're with other veterans.

They're in a very safe place.

Everyone's dealing with this stuff.

And they came into this battle experience relatively whole.

I was not whole.

I needed the calmness of the MDMA.

Bufo is also another psychedelic that veterans who have a very specific memory and trauma from the battlefield can use.

But there's absolutely different kinds of psychedelics.

There's a key for every lock.

We're talking very specifically about a population of folks with PTSD who their nervous system is dysregulated.

They might be suicidal.

It could be like me.

They had like a history of abuse.

They need the calming effect of MDMA.

Let's go back to again, picturing a friend, a family member who, okay, try this treatment.

And also in some of the pushback in some of its common sense.

And that would be the negative long-term side effects or side effects, which any drug can have.

You could have an allergic reaction to penicillin and it could really harm you.

Is it just a myth, or is there any truth to the idea that the drug psychedelics, which MDMA is not a huge psychedelic, as we've established, is there any risk of long-term damage taking the drug?

Well, remember, in a therapeutic use, you're only using the drug once, twice, three times.

I used the drug three times over the course of the year.

There's no addiction potential in that particular situation.

You don't hear people addicted to MDMA out in this, like it's just not a story that's out there.

You don't hear people-

It even says that if you look up the drug that is non-addictive.

No, it's not that kind of thing.

Right.

Yeah.

Can you have people overheat?

There was unfortunately a young lady in Australia.

She got a lot of press.

She was at a festival.

She took a little too much MDMA.

She got dehydrated.

She wound up having a physical problem and unfortunately passed away.

So yeah, you have to pay attention.

It is a stimulant.

You can get dehydrated.

It all comes down to set and setting.

Your mindset, I want to use this therapeutically versus to party, so I'm going to be safe.

And where you are, being at a film festival.

That's how old I am, film festival.

A music festival where people aren't paying attention to dosage and are just rolling, blowing out their serotonin.

That's a very, very different experience than therapeutic.

And unfortunately, because this therapy isn't really around yet, we don't hear those stories.

We only hear the recreational stories.

And for how much being used recreationally, there really are not a lot of stories.

Well, it reminds me of the commercial on television long years, a long time ago, the war on drugs.

They would be, here's a frying pan on the stove, and they would crack an egg and let the egg go onto the frying pan.

You'd hear it sizzle and fry and they go, this is your brain on drugs.

I think, thank you, Nancy Reagan.

Yeah, and I mean, even myself, knowing that it's made up, it's an infomercial made to make you feel that way intentionally.

It's not going to be based on necessarily fact of trying to make you scare the drugs, which might be legitimate if you don't want your 10-year-old smoke.

I don't want my 10-year-old smoking cigarettes, let alone marijuana.

But I think we're dealing with that still, right?

Well, the same way you wouldn't want your 10-year-old to go into your medicine cabinet and take five of anything you'll find in the medicine cabinet.

Yeah, you know, we have been given a media diet, telling us what these things are, and the reality, I think it's over 200 clinical trials at govtrials.com, showing psychedelic trials.

There's millions of dollars with private companies working on, does somebody actually have to eat a mushroom if we give them a patch and their stomach doesn't get upset?

Is that something we can patent and can be much better?

Like, if you're not in the psychedelic space, you don't really know how much clinical research and millions of dollars are going in to help people.

And you're on the Nancy Reagan, this is your brain on drug.

To summarize, the truth is that if you go to your doctor and you're screened, like are you allergic to penicillin?

Are you on blood thinners?

The same questions you had to get asked for any other type of treatment or surgery.

And all the answers are no.

Your doctor, it's your personal doctor that knows you, feels this is a safe treatment.

You do not have to worry about, oh my gosh, I had this bad hallucinogenic trip and my brain is fried and wherever I go, I see weird colors from now on and rainbows and I'm like, I'm a vegetable.

Not gonna happen.

I would find that very unlikely in a therapeutic process.

Yeah, thank you.

How did you get diagnosed specifically with the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder so you could focus on the MDMA versus go look for a drug or treatment to treat depression and PSDD and everything under the sun?

How did you get diagnosed properly?

Well, so my partner of over 20 years, Carl had passed away and I had treated myself therapy and that's really the way I looked at it.

I didn't have a strong opinion about therapy because my mother was clinically depressed her whole life.

Father was a jerk.

I didn't really think that therapy worked.

So I went to a therapist to kind of help me with the grief.

And she let me ebb and flow.

And about 18 months after Carl's passing, everything looked like it was going well.

I was in a new relationship.

My work was good.

Like everything looked good.

And what was actually happening was that the widow's fog was starting to really dissipate.

Widow's fog is a real thing.

And my nervous system was getting more and more kind of upset, kind of going back to the way it was when Carl was alive.

I got a work email on a level of stress.

It was a one, but I internally flipped out.

I was 1000% sure I was going to lose my job, lose my house, living in my car.

Like I went to, you know, massive fear immediately.

And I couldn't get rid of it no matter like up here knew that this wasn't going to happen.

But my body, my stomach is upset.

I wasn't sleeping.

I wasn't eating while I was shaking.

My neck was on fire.

I went to my therapist.

For the first time, we started talking about some of my childhood stuff because she was someone who said, let's take a look at the body.

She was trauma-informed.

And what's your body saying?

And I would just kind of sit and I would focus on one symptom, something my body was doing, and it would bring up a childhood memory.

And so I would start talking about childhood stuff, which I had never shared before.

And after a few months of that talk therapy process, I still wasn't better.

I still wasn't making progress.

And that's when she diagnosed me with PTSD.

And she was in a program to become a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

She brought the therapy to me.

She said, go look at the clinical trial information at MAPS because I initially said no.

I was a corporate girl.

I don't do drugs.

Have you met me?

What's going on?

Right?

Yeah.

I looked at the clinical trial.

But more importantly, I was not getting better with the talk therapy.

And I had been getting better with the grief work.

Like it definitely was not a therapist quality issue.

It wasn't an intellectual issue.

This was something that a lot of PTSD people will say like, they just can't.

You just can't.

Talk therapy doesn't help them.

Yeah.

Talk therapy just wasn't enough.

And so that's what actually led me to it.

Nice.

As far as we know, it works better for the post-traumatic stress disorder than depression.

When your body is dysregulated, like you know how you're about to climb a mountain or you're at the top of the mountain or your foot slips and like your heart rate skyrockets and you're really, you get scared.

I'm assuming you get scared at some point.

I would be terrified.

Yeah, I do.

But I learned a long time ago.

It's something I will never forget.

It's worked well for me in climbing.

Speed is safety, meaning you have a choice in the moment.

Either go for it, lose your fear or you'll die or accept it.

You can't get over this fear and just take the fall.

There's no in between.

The reason is when you're climbing and you're hanging on, the longer you stay there, the reason it's speed is safety is not because you want to be reckless.

You're using your energy to hang on.

You will fall if you just hang on long enough.

And worse, you won't have a choice to lose the choice because every second you're wasting your strength, now is a little bit less strength you have to make the move.

So speed is safety, make up your mind.

And if you don't know, then come down.

That's means come down.

I don't know.

That's come down.

Or the switch flicks.

And that's magical Zen state, by the way.

It's like you don't need drugs.

You almost have an out of body experience where you watch your body do its thing.

You don't think about it like a guitar player, just going off on a conch, like he's not actually thinking this string, that string, that string, like a piano.

They're just doing it.

How does it do it?

It just does.

Let your body do its thing.

Which is why some people say dance is good for learning how to just go with the flow and let your body do its thing.

So to which, if you get terrified, it's usually time to come down.

You've lost control of the situation.

You need to come down.

That's not a safe place to be.

In fact, in leadership, when I talk about leadership, there's corporations like, we're going to lead you.

Yeah, they're going to be like pulling a dog on a leash.

That's their idea of leading.

The dog wants to bite, he's resisting.

That's not leading.

No.

To lead means if the dog doesn't want to go, maybe there's a reason for it.

There's a reason.

Usually, we don't reach terrification, being terrified, no.

Where was I?

Okay.

You were explaining though, that which was good because I have no idea in statistics.

How many people you think are suffering more from general depression?

I would think a lot more than serious, the kind of trauma, traumatic syndrome that you're speaking of.

I think so.

I don't know the statistics on it, but considering the Prozac and Zoloft prescriptions out there, I think a whole bunch.

The nice thing about this conversation, it seems to me the MDMA is a clear target for those.

Normally, you can't figure out, what should I do?

What should I go to chiropractic or a yoga instructor or my doctor?

Do I need hip surgery to fix me?

The nice thing, sounds like, is you get a good therapist or a psychiatrist to diagnose you properly.

And it is traumatic stress disorder.

This is something you almost should try.

Like I won't tell, I'm not going to tell you to try it.

If I was your doctor, I could, not on this show, could, if I was your doctor, go, this is easy, easy one to easy one, right?

Easier?

I think if you have, if you have a trusted relationship with some doctors, it's not something like you don't go to your GP and your GP says, okay, go do MDMA, and like the next day you're scheduled for MDMA.

There is a significant portion of this relational with the people with whom you're working.

Because if you really are in a PTSD spiral, you are terrified at some level, and so you need to trust the people you're working with.

Well, I have no idea.

I'm trying to picture how that would be, and because I haven't had your experience.

It's like me trying to picture someone who has asthma and all of a sudden they can't breathe, because of a pollen or a bee sting.

That's a beautiful example.

You're terrified.

You really, if you've never had the experience of not being able to breathe, try holding your breath and just hold it and hold it and hold it, and then hold it and think what if you couldn't breathe?

That's terror.

That's true terror, right?

Think of how your body reacts in, think of how your body tenses up and you're ready to fight.

Imagine feeling that all the time.

That's what some PTSD patients feel like all the time.

And it amazes me, there's people on the street walking around in the grocery store and the mall are just where you work, they're at your work, they're probably feeling this way, right?

Have no idea.

It's one of the reasons you see people come home from battle and, you know, they implode their lives because they just, they're just living in a state, their body is living in a state of fear.

So Jill, is there anything else I haven't covered from the experience of what you think people should know about this treatment?

No, I think your questions were right on par with what most people have questions about.

And hopefully by the time this, hopefully, it'll be old news that the FDA approved by the time this comes out.

But regardless, what I always say to folks is, go ahead, do a simple Google search about psychedelics, start learning about some of the research, because every single one of us knows someone who's dealing with a mental health challenge.

And you know, the answers could be in this clinical research is out there right now.

So thank you for letting me be able to share that.

I have this question, where can people go?

We don't know that yet.

It might be everywhere or it might be certain states to start with.

We don't know yet.

There's articles, resources and more questions that are answered on Jill's website, which is the journey.sage.

The journey sage.com.

The journey sage.com.

It'll be in the show notes.

As well as the book, Rescuing Jill, How MDMA Healed My Childhood Trauma Induced PTSD on Amazon.

Also in the show notes and everybody listening, remember, we are not doctors.

We are not giving medical advice.

If you have a question, ask your doctor.

Also because they know you personally.

They know your body.

And if you need immediate help, you feel like you might harm yourself, call the Crisis Hotline 988.

Thanks Jill for being on the show.

Wish you the best on the mission.

And as you said, hope by the time people are watching or hearing this, they're able to take the next step and go to their doctor, of course, or whoever facility is facilitating the treatment sessions and ask for more information and see if they want to, if that might be right for them, right?

Yeah, let's hope.

I think things will start to pick up in 2025.

There's still some more red tape that has to, but let's be optimistic.

Great.

All right.

Have a great day, Jill.