Psychedelics and Repressed Memory
The role of the practitioner, the shadow, the quantum field.
“It feels like there is always something haunting me. There is this dark black entity that shows up in my dreams. Sometimes I wake up paralyzed and it feels like there is something in my room”.
I listened to her carefully as she shared her heart in our intake session in preparation for our assisted psychedelic journey with the use of psilocybin. I took note of her history, I attuned to the field of her emotional body. What I could sense I just tucked away knowing that the ceremony itself would reveal the truth of what was needing to be healed. I did not need to project what I thought she might be experiencing, I trust the medicines of the Earth and the wisdom of the body to reveal and heal what is ready to be revealed and healed. I am a witness a mirror and a transmission of what is true in my clients, that they have the wisdom within. I have had practitioners project their suspicions of what they believed my core traumas stemmed from which is a breach of boundaries, it is not healing wisdom.
The day of our ceremony I prayed to the ancestors and guides that would accompany our journey together. She called in her celestial allies. She took the medicine. We did some breath work. Then the immersion began to take her over. For most of the journey she was still, swept under the veil of the other world. About three and half hours in there was a major turn. Just as I sensed she was headed towards a crescendo of expanded awareness and bliss her eyes popped wide open and she began to look around the room in a panic.
“Where did it go? Where is my phone? When did I call him?” I watched her walk around her house confused and panicking for a few minutes. She kept asking me when she got up and called him and I told her that she had not moved in three and a half hours.
I did not try to calm her, I just stayed the calm witness and in the resonant field of trust in the medicine. When she sat back down I invited her to lay down and breathe and kept reassuring her that she had not made a phone call and she had not been up and moving about her house for any reason. She went back inside of herself and then her eyes popped open and…
“I did something wrong. Something bad has happened. What did I do? The bad man is here.” I listened to her, I let her process what she was experiencing in between inviting her to look into my eyes when she slipped into panic.
I asked her, if she felt she could share, to explain what was happening and that I was here to help her and remind her that she is safe.
“I am a little girl, something bad has happened, I did something wrong and the dark man is going to hurt me.” She did not mean dark as in skin color, she meant dark as in veiled in a black shadow. The haunting she had been experiencing all of her life was coming to the forefront of her subconscious.
I knew the signature of repressed memory when she expressed it during our intake session. I knew what was happening when I saw her confused and wandering. It became completely clear when she regressed into her younger self and began to express the fear that has been living in the background of her nervous system for almost 40 years. I have suffered from and healed my own repressed memories, I knew what to do. And my approach might have looked slightly different with another client. Reference point number one is to always stay attuned to the field. My role is to feel into what is alive in the space between us so I can navigate my clients towards learning how to establish safety for themselves as they navigate trauma without retraumatizing or shutting down the momentum of healing. It’s a fine line.
Rather than push her to uncover who was in that room, we focused on the little girl and the felt sense in her body rather than digging into the fuzzy memory banks of the subconscious mind. If the subconscious needs to present a clear memory it will. If it is not coughing up the goods then it is because that is not what is needed for the healing to happen. The body’s memory does not ever lie, but the mind’s perception of a memory can present more damage and confusion and is rarely ever a clear picture. This does not negate the lived reality of what happened, but trying to grasp at details can undermine the emotional intelligence of the body- which is a primary wound, the feminine wound, in society. It is not the accurate account of the details of the past that matter as much as the truth in the body that knows exactly what happened. More often than not our repressed memories if recovered will be under or over exaggerated which can create disbelief in whomever the memory is shared with which can cripple the healing.
“The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with.” Lidia Yuknavitch~ The Chronology of Water, a memoir.
I turned towards her lived experience and validated her body’s sensations. Every time the huge and overwhelming surge of fear and the sense she had done something wrong came up we turned toward her little girl and said, she said, “you have done nothing wrong” and my client was able to go into that room and hold her. Over and over again.
Every time she went into her mind and back into her confusion asking, “who is it? Is it my father, my mother, my uncle?”, I watched. When I could sense that she was pushing herself into a place with no resolution other than perpetuating more mental confusion, I brought her back to her little girl, her body and her breath. When the medicine began to wear off I was able to gently speak with her without overwhelming her mental body. I try to limit any talking in the field as I want to keep my clients in their corporeal wisdom outside of words, stories and mental processing. I told her that what mattered is that she had access to this little girl now and that was an extraordinary healing. And, that if she was meant to remember who it was, she will when the time is right and it might come through a dream or another journey, but it isn’t the important piece to the healing at the moment and could cause further harm to push. What was important was to alchemize the feeling of being haunted, of being bad, of being wrong because that was the outcome of the trauma. The trauma itself often does not matter much because it is the body’s response to it that lives on. We need less mental stories and more somatic awakening, more feeling through the body with present witness.
Let’s say it was her father. I believe wholeheartedly that the medicine, the ancestors and the mysteries that be know what is best for the healing of the individual, the ancestry and the collective. That if she can regain her sense of safety, belonging and her inherent self worth and goodness then the story does not matter, because maybe the relationship she has with her father now actually serves more healing and stability than not. And, if we push for a memory to come forward, overriding its organic emergence, we can hurt families, ourselves and create drama that can then take another lifetime or two to heal.
But what about revenge? What about confrontation? What about accountability for our wounding?
The ancestors have whispered to me repeatedly that the redemption comes within the forgiveness of the story by way of healing myself, ourselves, which requires the memory of true belonging, of God, of the Goddess, of the Womb of creation and all of its beings that love and support our lives unconditionally. In the Quantum field I suspect trauma, whose sole purpose is to seek love, will subject us to families, which we choose, to enact a great healing and create situations that will turn us towards that which truly functions as the inherent and unconditional family of support for our journey here. Healing with entheogens can reveal this expanded consciousness which can heal generations of trauma simply by our remembering of who we truly are, why we are on this unique path, with these unique circumstances, at this unique time on Earth.
As we let go of the story in the mind and turn towards the wisdom of the body, we release the trauma story from the bodies of our ancestors and have more direct access to the medicine that was buried under the trauma. And our abuser, the line of abusers, can begin to heal simply by one brave black sheep in the family line clearing herself of the story and turning towards Truth. This opens the medicine of the family line to come alive and wind through every timeline where it was blocked. Trauma is an overlay onto our blessed lives, something that happened, it is not who we are. Healing isn’t about proving how wrong or bad someone else is, it is about remembering how “right” we are and have always been which releases any need for revenge, which will never ever heal anything. Then the story can become medicine.
There is a, I believe a Toltec saying, forgive me for forgetting the source but it walks with me:
Tell your story around the fire and feel its power, tell it again and you are forgiven, tell it three times and you are no longer welcome around the fire until you have found the new story to tell within you.
It can only be empowering to use our voices with our violators and tell our stories when we are free of needing them to free us, love us and validate us because we have healed our core wound of belonging by remembering our true family of origin. We regain the strength and wisdom that there is a power stronger than any abuse. We can tell them how we feel and maybe hope that it impacts them, but to have an agenda that they change negates our own power. At some point we must turn towards that which loves, regenerates and heals unconditionally and stop fighting for and seeking for solutions in places and people that thrive on and support abuse culture.
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We are at a time when the epigenetic wounding within all of us on Earth has reached its limits. Every child born, if the parents have not done their healing, even a little, will be a walking flesh bag of unprocessed trauma waiting for just the right circumstances to reveal itself, of which there are plenty. There is such an accumulation in all of our DNA that it doesn’t take much more than for one person, on the perfect day, at the perfect age, to say something to us that can erupt a serious addiction or to have every signature of sexual, physical and mental abuse be expressed- even if the person did not fully directly experience it. It all lives in our family lines and is accentuated by living in one big ass Earth house together with the same twisted dysfunctional father figure and silenced mother.
As psychedelics are becoming more mainstream for healing we are going to begin to see deeper layers of how epigenetics express themselves and how memory, suppressed or not, can be inherited in the body-mind. We know very little. But we do know that under the influence of an entheogen or psychedelic certain “inactive” pathways in our brains, aka our subconscious, becomes conscious and our awareness of what was living in those pathways expands. We have great access to dimensions of Universal love and wisdom as well as the full story of what has been living unnoticed in the background of our lives.
In one of my deep dive women’s circles there was a woman who was experiencing a flood of repressed memories surfacing in her dreams and her visionary states. Because she is a medicine woman, had the guidance or proper integration and group support she was able to identify the memories as her mother’s even though her emotional body was responding as though it had happened to her.
So, do we discount her now that she realized her traumas and her nervous system’s wiring were related to events that did not directly happen to her. Nope. Because, as I said, in order for those reactions in her body to come alive there had to be an injustice, a breach of safety, a trauma in her life to bring it to the surface. And if someone’s body, life, emotional well being, or lack thereof, is expressing itself as though there was a trauma, we validate that and go into the body to heal the wound. We don’t dig for why, we don’t dissect her for proof nor do we encourage her to do it. We invite reclaiming the body’s voice as real and wise. The body will always guide her if the reasons and causation are important to remember.
Trauma theorist Bessel Van Der Kolk notes that, “memory loss is most common in childhood sexual abuse, with incidents ranging from 19 to 38 percent” (The Body Keeps the Score 2014, p. 192).
When a repressed memory is recovered it can be highly retraumatizing without the proper integration support because the body- mind can literally feel like it is reliving the trauma. In many entheogen sessions and plant medicine ceremonies there is little to no integration or discussion of how trauma moves through the body-mind. I know without doubt that the medicine does not bring anything to the surface that is not ready to heal. With that knowledge alone, we can lean into the visions and the fear knowing that they are being guided into our awareness by love. And often we need a loving and practiced hand to guide someone to recognize that.
It is a birthright to heal ourselves with plants- meaning each person is able to hold themselves through a medicine journey and become their own healer. Yes I am a plant medicine practitioner and it is a small fraction of my livelihood and I am deeply humbled to have been chosen to tend such an altar, but I am here to help my clients learn how to hold space for themselves and that requires a lot of education about the nervous system, about trauma, about collective energies, about ancestry and the quantum field of energy. My goal is not to maintain repeat clients, for too long anyhow.
However, if someone is dealing with PTSD and lots of trauma, especially sexual abuse, it is imperative to work with someone who specializes in integration an trauma awareness. It can be a tad costly and most ethical practitioners work on a sliding scale and are not 1000s of dollars for a sit, like I have heard a lot of practitioners are now, but the cost of retraumatization is much higher than the monetary investment with the right person.
What is vital for any practitioner working with psychedelics for healing trauma, which is every practitioner, is that they have embodied their own healing, are on the healing journey, have an understanding of ancestral, archetypal and epigenetic systems and how trauma works through the collective and family lines. And that working with what the body is presenting is more important than anyone’s perception, intuitive or not, of why the trauma is there.
It is most important that practitioners don’t project stories or suggestions into their clients even if they sense the presence of sexual violence or any type of abuse.
Personal experience….
“Jamie (my birth name) have you been sexually abused”. I have been asked this by almost every practitioner I have ever entrusted with my healing. It is quite true that I hit every single branch falling out of the sexual abuse tree. My mother, my grandmother, my great grandmother, my father, my father’s mother- all severely sexually abused (not like there is a less severe form of sexual abuse). I was sexually violated but have no crystal clear memory of what happened in my mind, it all lives in my body, it is reflected in my life story and through images that flash behind my eyes, knowings and voices in my heart that tell me the story.
Due to suffering from lifelong PTSD, life threatening addiction and serious suicidal ideation along with a serious case of gaslighting myself constantly, I was eager to have a reason for my struggles, as though what I remember enduring wasn’t enough. That is the great chasm in society that women fall into, we are forced to forget by being told we are hysterical and if we talk we will be made the example of hysteria. It’s in the air we breathe to believe we are making shit up, “well it just happens to women and why do you have to make such a big deal about it because I am living my life and not making a big deal about it and besides that was history and you’re crazy and can’t get your life together so why would we trust what you say”- says a man, a brother, a woman in the family that has hidden it inside of herself, women who have been so sucked into the rat race that it is inconvenient and threatening if another woman claims her voice and her healing because it could disrupt their perfect little life built upon the pedestal of patriarchal violence. A sick and crazy woman in society is a perfect scapegoat for misogyny to survive. I have said this before and I will a million more times until it is no longer ok to rape and violate and disregard the feminine voice- which lives in everyone and the body under our feet. (Yep, I can always find a way to slip it in)
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” Zora Neal Hurston
Repressed memory is a vital, life saving defense for the wounded child so that they can survive. And later in adulthood it can be a self inflicted wound due to the normalizing of abuse culture we live in. So women, it is mostly women, will keep things in the dark and remain haunted by their own fear and confusion. They become the abuser of their own body-mind. I also sense that the repression of memory is not only to protect the child from the overwhelm of the trauma but so that they don’t speak. Because in many abuse scenarios there is nowhere safe, and so if the child speaks out they are likely to be shamed or hurt even further creating a deeper wound than the trauma itself.
Anyhow, my addiction to trauma, my desire to have some clear proof to validate my fucked upness and identify me further as wounded was strong because then I would maybe be seen and my voice made real. Trauma identity is seductive for so many reasons and another essay for another day. So I was seeking.
In 2015 I began to sit with an Ayahuasca group in the area and fell in love with one of the medicine keepers. He was an amazing young man that I know the medicine brought into my life for regular access to the plant healing I needed. The group held a loving container and had very pure intentions. However, they, like many others who wanted to help me, kept suggesting that I had obviously been raped, sexually violated, because of what they saw in the field around me during ceremonies. So I grabbed onto the projection and was determined to remember everything. I pushed myself deep into the story.
It took about 20 ceremonies when it happened. My body had a conscious, visceral memory of violence. A voice in me said “just say it out loud to yourself, free yourself”. The voice lived in my belly where most of my pain and health issues have lived. I allowed my throat to open and out came “I was sexually abused”. A whole cascade of emotions, shaking, revelation, visions came rushing down and through me. There still wasn’t a clear picture, a step by step walkthrough of what happened exactly, but the message was to trust my body, listen and allow the healing. Followed by a very clear voice saying - believe your body, and stop torturing yourself.
But no one was there with the embodied understanding of how repressed memory works and the tendency for visions constructed in the mind to be potentially exaggerated. And so instead of working with the child in the vision, with the feeling itself, I was encouraged to attach to the story. And in standard psyche 101 fashion, the next question is always “will you approach your abuser?”
When practitioners project onto their clients they are living in the shadow of their own unintegrated healing and they need ego validation. Many are eager to claim recognition for being the one who revealed and healed their client’s core wounding. But if that core wounding is forced to the forefront before the medicine in the body is ready to deal with it, there will be a backlash at some point, a regression or an identity attachment to the wounding itself- which only benefits the practitioner, not the client. The unhealed wound keeps the work flowing.
This is not directly malicious. It’s rather unconscious and needs to be made conscious because it can cause damage. It did within me and my family.
I latched onto the story and went to my family and may have done more harm to myself because my family, who wants nothing to do with this, meaning my brothers and my father, could not hold it and so I was left back where I was. Only now the feelings of confusion and the disorienting sense that I had made it all up came rushing back. It caused my father to spiral into the same hate and mental violence towards me that I endured as a child right when he and I were beginning to talk again. So I suffered severe regression on one hand. But on the other hand I know with all of my heart that I was supposed to regain somatic access to my truth when I did. It was very healing for me and I don’t regret approaching my brothers, it gave me a deeper understanding of where to truly seek healing and support- and it wasn’t from the men in my family. I freed myself from needing validation from them. And they are simply, like many people, stuck in their own wounding and unable to be the support I need. They aren’t wrong or unloving, they are wounded. They are good men and we are close. I am grateful for them being willing to hear me and respond in the ways that they are able.
I can understand how vulnerable I was and how my addiction to trauma drove me to seek validation. It is still harder, for most humans here on Earth, to embody love than pain. It’s layered.
Had I been held in a different way I could have worked on my own healing before jumping into engaging with my family. The medicine always takes into account the collective body when healing, and thus the guidance when fully followed will typically wind through the epigenetic history which my family’s story lives and heal the wounds without more wounding. Patience, good integration support and faith is required.
In short…
Repressed memories are hiding for a reason. The body’s wisdom knows the perfect time to reveal them, and it may never happen, even if the person is committed to their healing. The wound attracts the medicine and when the medicine is ready the wound will reveal itself through the intelligence that abides by our necessary paradigm of polarity and duality. Whatever wound reveals itself does so because there is the medicine ready to meet it, soothe it, rub it down with the sweet salve of the person remembering their inviolable wholeness. We never need to go digging for what it is, because if it is not revealing itself then it is for a reason.
The practitioner's main role in these situations is to work with the truth of the body and have enough embodied wisdom about how healing works to simply be a transmission of faith in the wisdom of trauma.
Had my client been guided by someone without experience, had I had an agenda or tried to calm her down because I was panicking about her sudden wide eyed confusion, there could have been retraumatization or re-suppression of the healing that little girl needed to remember her innate goodness. My client has blossomed since then and she is still doing her good work- holding herself now in deeper ways. She trusts the medicine. She is trusting herself more and more. It’s a good little love story.
Maybe it’s obvious to you by now that I guide people through healing journeys, many kinds. I am here, I am learning, I am guiding with love and faith the best I can which is the best any of us can do.
Dearest Jamie-I love the way in which you stand solidly in your truth and path. That integrity has led me back to you over and over again through the years. You have led me to healing in many ways. Whenever I do belly massage (you taught me this), your hand is invisibly guiding me. Much love, Jill