Types of Medicines in Psychedelic Therapy | 21min snip from Adventures Through The Mind

Speaker 2
So I want
Speaker 1
to, I
Speaker 2
want to take a few steps back as a way of sort of like perhaps shifting the trajectory a little bit. When we were talking about the other medicines or the medicines and like seeing it as a full spectrum personality, etc. You know, we mentioned ayahuasca, psilcybin, I could think of some other sort of like plant, like early plant derived, you know, sources of medicine that would be easy to describe in that way because the experience is pretty commonly has that feel to it. But with regards to utilizing IFS with psychedelic therapy, psychedelic therapy is generally happening with a reasonably set collection of molecules thus far, and some of them are purely chemical, such as, I mean, MDMA does ultimately derive from an organic source saffron, I think. But then we have ketamine as well. So I'm wondering, you know, in the landscape of therapy, and then maybe in the relationship to the medicine, how is MDMA and ketamine showing up differently than something like psilocybin or ayahuasca?
Speaker 1
Well, I think they all have personalities to use the personal phrase. MDMA seems to most increase compassion so that people are able to befriend parts of themselves. They have not tolerated that they've kept locked in those psychic basements. And this is, I think, you know, here in Northern California, the underground slang is MDMA is book one, and psilocybin is book two, because that's usually the path people take, and I think it's very appropriate, you know. And ketamine has its own, you know, quirky characteristics. I think they all do. I don't worry so much about whether or not they're, you know, chemically synthesized or not. There's a new underground designer jug that's from what I hear, because I have a lot of clients who are underground providers are deeply involved in this world, 3MMC, which evidently is very much like MDMA, but a lot clearer. So that sounds wonderful. And I'm not concerned that somebody cooked this up in a lab, you know, to try and change some characteristics of other LSD is a lab drug. And I, you know, my, what I've heard is that there are a lot of people trying to develop a form of LSD that's shorter acting, because nobody wants to sit, you know, for 12, be a therapist for 12 hours straight. So I'm not so concerned about that. So
Speaker 2
where does, where do you see ketamine, like the sort of specific profile of ketamine? Because ketamine is like, I mean, okay, ayahuasca, short, it's not too difficult to access ayahuasca at this time. For all its goods and ills, um, psilocybin, the same MDMA, you know, but ketamine, like access to ketamine right now as a, as a therapeutic modality is exploding, because it wasn't already illegal. And, you know, again, for all its goods and ills, but what kind of, where is IFS sit in with the specific experience of ketamine, which is very different in my, in my personal experience than MDMA, psilocybin, etc. Yeah,
Speaker 1
I agree. There's a guy named Dr. Bob Grant, who has founded a group called Healing Realms, which is IFS, or ketamine assisted IFS therapy. And I think it can work with that. His belief is that ketamine works more with this clarity issue rather than with the compassion issue. I'm, I'm not so sure that's correct. I think what ketamine definitely does is it's a big new snowfall on that ski slope. You know, all the, the interconnections of that, uh, the person's system are loosened and made more flexible for a while. So again, I would, you know, and again, I think it needs, uh, maybe even more than others needs some kind of therapeutic interaction to go along with it, because I've gotten reports of several people who've gone to these ketamine clinics where they just stick them in a hospital room and give them an IV and they've had some bad results. Because, you know, I think people really need therapeutic support going in and coming out because their system will be loosened and they, it's really good to have help or at least compassionate witness as they're seeing how they can reassemble that system in a more flexible and hopefully less warlike way in the inner world. I mean,
Speaker 2
to add on to that, you know, ketamine is a huge experience. Like if you're subanesthetic, but you're like in the, you know, K hole, which understandably has negative connotations, but like is the peak psychedelic effects you can get with ketamine, you know, like, pardon me, but that's some weird shit. So if you're just like somebody who's coming in because you've heard that it's good for depression and so on and so forth and you're just getting, you know, like injected and made sure that your body doesn't hit the floor and that's about it coming out of that. And that can be, I, my proposition is that it's likely could be very disorienting and quite harmful to a person, especially if, and I've heard this spoken to by, can't remember where, but it was, I think it was Mitchell was his last name, he Mitchell, he was talking about this was many years ago, and he was talking about being an emergency medicine doctor and administering ketamine, especially with patients that had opiate dependence, because you could give them lots of morphine and it doesn't actually help with their pain, but ketamine would, but that when they would come out of it, there, it would be very scary, because the things that would start emerging would be very dark things because of the proposition as trauma, etc. Whereas compared to giving it to kids, they come out and they're like, seeing Spiderman and, you know, whatever, whatever else, right? So I can imagine too, if someone's going in and they have deep trauma, you know, not having someone there to hold you, not necessarily physically, when difficult things might be emerging on the reintegration phase, I think would be essential to prevent harm. Yeah,
Speaker 1
and again, getting, doing the preparation, getting permission from the protectors and trying to say, this is going to, you know, you'll probably won't be able to control your body for a little while, and these other things are probably going to happen, and here's what we think we can do with that. And there are some really good results with ketamine, especially with depression, major depression, and people typically don't use MDMA with major depression, because there's often that reactive depression a couple days after the session that some people attribute to serotonin. And I've, you know, trained quite a few providers, and what I've, I have a theory or a hypothesis. If the preparation work is done really well, and all the protectors have really given their permission, there is little or no reactive depression afterwards. Most of that reactive depression is protectors coming back on board and kick and ask, because they're not happy with being shoved out of the way, you know, that's that would be like a tentative hypothesis from a very limited and prejudiced sample. But I think there's a lot of
Speaker 2
truth in it. I have also heard you speak previously, I think in reference to Frank Anderson's work, that parts could get in the way of the psychedelics having any effect at all. And I know there's, there are outliers, but of course outliers in taking psychedelics with a huge subsection of people, you know, that don't have any or a huge amount in a small subject subsection of larger amount of people that don't have any effects at all. You need five, six, seven, eight grams. And there's no, it's not because of antidepressants or whatever else that might be, you know, like changing the effects. And your proposition is that the parts might be able to shut off the psychedelic effects as well. Could you speak more to that?
Speaker 1
Definitely. There's absolutely no doubt that can happen. And you mentioned Frank, Frank's a psychiatrist. And when he prescribes traditional psychiatric medicines, he will do an IFS interview with the patient first and get permission from all the parts to take the medicine because he believes they can wipe out the effects even of major antipsychotics. So yeah, I definitely think that's true. And I remember this one, these people reporting to me that they were given this guy who was naive, drug naive, massive doses of MDMA and nothing happened. And I think that's exactly why he had very, very, very powerful managers who just clamped down, shut everything down. So I think that's a normal human capacity.
Speaker 2
You know, it's interesting because, and I, this, I think this word is often misunderstood and misused in a bit of it as almost like a pejorative or something. But the placebo effect is very real and very strong being that the mind can create very real physical responses such as positive effects, placebo, negative effects, no, SIBO. And that, that matters. And if, if your mind can, can take a, receive a sugar pill and like heal some crazy disease better than a drug, who's to say that your mind can't also shut off whatever sort of like chemical or hormonal cascade that would result in an effect of a drug.
Speaker 1
No problem. My wife's Korean and I've studied Korean shamanism a lot. It's fascinating. It's almost all with one of the things they do is they have these incredibly sharp knives and they'll take a silk scarf and go like this and it just slits the scarf and they fix those vertically. And then they get up on the knives and stand there and sort of dance. And that's where they prophesy barefoot and nothing happens to their feet. And some of them have these ladders made out of these knife blades and they will walk up the knife blades in bare feet and get to the top and that's where they'll channel their spirits. So this, if you start looking at spirit possession worldwide, there are all sorts of physical effects that are way beyond what modern medical science can explain in any way. There's just dozens of them, you know, so
Speaker 2
yeah. As a totally personal anecdote that is very sort of like a tangent step, I once almost had the opportunity to do like a fire walk at an intimacy festival several years ago in England called togetherness. But that person, I think they were like sick or something or for some reason they didn't show up. So I did not get that opportunity. But I really was interested to see if I could I could do it. But that's very me focused. I just got excited. I was just like, it's such a wild story. But in my frame of mind, believable, or I have an inclination to be like, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1
Well, you're way more courageous than I am because I wouldn't do that myself. But I've, you know, there are all these evidence of people doing it and all these different cultures all over the world. It happens. I
Speaker 2
don't
Speaker 1
want to risk my pink little toes in it, but it happens.
Speaker 2
I mean, it would have made the rest of my, I was on tour at the time back when that was still a thing both from up here, brain perspective, but also, you know, that thing happened in 2020. Made travel kind of weird. But yeah, it would have made the rest of that tour very difficult if my, my soul was burned. So last sort of question before the where can people find out more and support your work question is people listening. Okay, I think it's fair to say that there are a lot of people that are interested in psychedelic therapy, psychedelic work for whatever. A lot of those people are already doing that work, both above and underground and with or without a therapist. And they're going to make their decision either way. Generally, my inclination is to strongly caution anyone to before starting any kind of psychedelic work, especially to try to do some healing unless they're working with a skilled professional or have done quite a bit of tailoring the context to ensure that they're held in a safe and effective way, because it can go poorly. But that said, people are going to do what they're going to do. And wondering if there is any sort of like DIY ways, like do it yourself ways that people who are choosing to journey can safely and effectively integrate an INF framework into their personal practice, into their personal journey work.
Speaker 1
That's a good question. Depends on what kind of outside support they've got. You know, Roland Griffiths, who I think I said before is a big hero to me. He, his therapists don't use IFS, but they do meet, I think it's a minimum of eight hours with the people before they do a session. So there's a strong personal rapport with the sitter. That's something everybody can do. Have somebody sit with you, you have a strong personal rapport with. Now, I want to say something from the other end of the world. When I was my first experience with psychedelics was in 1967. And I was coming out of a terrible, violent, abusive family, and I was already drinking ridiculously heavily. And I started doing psychedelics, and I lost all desire for alcohol and quit drinking and haven't been, haven't had a bad relationship without alcohol since then. I had no therapeutic support in that process. I had friends around, but they wouldn't, they weren't sitting with me. We'd just all trip together. Somehow the experience of lots of acid over a couple of years derailed what was a sure fire trip to severe alcoholism in a life in a dumpster. So that kind of thing happens even with no support.
Speaker 2
I mean, yeah, totally myself as well in a way. I think my strong caution is especially for people who are like, Oh, mushrooms can reset my brain and heal my depression. So I'll take mushrooms with the intention of healing my depression. Because I have, as a someone who helps with integration coaching, I have seen many people who have reached out because they're like, I read this and I saw this and I read how to change your mind and yada yada yada. And I tried it and now I'm worse. So just just a strong caution there recognizing that I too have also just jumped in and had some really profound positive impact without a therapist present.
Speaker 1
For people who are, you know, that's what they're going to do. That's what start with MDMA. And then the safest thing to do is start with a fairly good dose of MDMA. And then if you're comfortable with that after a time or two, add a little bit of mushrooms and lower the dose of MDMA, a little add mushrooms, and then more mushrooms less MDMA, more mushrooms less MDMA. And then you sort of titrate over to where it's all mushrooms. Or it's mostly mushrooms with a little bit of MDMA. That makes it much more difficult to have a bad experience. I mean, you
Speaker 2
can still do it. It makes it hard. Get parts of your mind to really put their mind to it. It can get tough. Okay, so one, I want to really clarify this last question. Maybe I missed it. So you might have to just double down because I missed it. But for the people listening, if they want to explicitly, you know, try to safely and effectively integrate IFS framework into their personal practice, what suggestions would you make for them? It could be, you know, listen to this audiobook or read, you know, so on and so forth, or like, try this practice or anything in particular that if you could leave the listeners to be like, if there's this one or two things that you can do that could, you know, like smoothly weave their way in, what would they be?
Speaker 1
There's a book called Introduction to Internal Family Systems by Richard Schwartz. It's short, it's user friendly. It was written to be non-academic and it's an easy read that that would probably be the best sort of intellectual introduction. There's a little IFS practice called parts mapping, which almost everybody can do and is very helpful and is very good as a tool in preparation. I encourage people to use it whenever they prepare for an experience. And you basically, you sit down and you can, it's better to do it with somebody. You just say, well, what am I feeling about this experience coming up? Oh, there's some anxiety in my stomach. Well, figure out a way to make some little mark on that sheet of paper that represents that anxiety in your stomach. Okay, back up from that, wait for a shift to happen in your body. And now what's coming up in relationship to that thing. Typically, when people do this, they'll get six or eight different parts and these little squiggles represent parts of their system. And then you can start asking other questions like, are these parts, are some of them allies? Do some of them have problems and fight each other? How do you feel about them one after another? Because if the person's hating them, that's another part that's not on the table yet. And then, oh, if to work with this system, let me just say, most psychotherapy has a vegetable. The onion, you know, oh, we peel the onions and we get down to the core. Right. IFS, it's not an onion. Our vegetable is garlic. It's all these different cloves. So when you do that parts map, you've got a clove of the garlic. So you do that and then you see how they're interrelated. And then there are a bunch of questions you can ask, you know, and a real key one is to understand this clove of garlic, which one of these parts should we focus on first? So if you do that, all the parts involved with the upcoming trip will probably make themselves visible on that sheet of paper. And you'll be told, what's the doorway in to start working with this system to really prepare the person for the session?
Speaker 2
That's great. Thank you. Yeah,
Speaker 1
that's usually people can do that on their own.
Speaker 2
Great.

Integrating Internal Family Systems and Psychedelic Therapy | Robert Falconer

Adventures Through The Mind

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