I have a longstanding interest in the use of DMT, LSD, and other psychedelics as tools for psychological integration.
Obviously this is not a new idea. In fact LSD was used extensively by in the treatment of psychiatric conditions and alcohol recovery for almost 20 years before the explosion of interest in psychedelics in the 60's triggered a mindless and repressive backlash with consequences that have shaped the legal status and public image of these divine gifts to this day.
Trauma has been part of my life, and the challenge of walking a healing path through the snake filled jungle of trauma has been a huge part of my life. I would not call myself a "trauma survivor" or "trauma victim" any more than I would say that I "suffer from gray hair". Some things just happen, and you ultimately choose how to respond to what life hands you. Over the years I have turned to many strategies and tried may techniques to support my healing, and made many mistakes as well. The choice to use psychedelics was certainly not one of them.
My original attraction to psychedelics was to be honest more recreational, and had more elements of a desire to escape or anaesthetize the pain of my trauma memories than to work through them. My first LSD experience happened when I was 15, and even though I would say the experience was both life transoformative and profoundly freeing in some ways, in other ways I would say that I had not yet learned to use psychedelics optimally to support my own healing.
When LSD became much less available to me in college and graduate school, I thought that door was closed to me and I pursued other tools for healing over the years. I did years of psychotherapy; looking back I put a ridiculous amount of faith in the idea that yakking about painful memories would somehow heal them. It did help me cope, it gave me something to talk about at parties, but ultimately I had to move beyond talking to really heal. I made a little more progress when I moved out of the conventional tools and began to explore alternative modes of healing: breathwork, body work, energy work, serious and committed work with spiritual teachers. I tried dozens of alternative healing techniques, and learned something from each of them.
Then a little over a year ago I became aware of that many people were extracting DMT from various available materials, and that the technological knowhow to produce a pharmacologically safe pschoactive product was available, primarily on this god given and blessed website.
I must say that my first forays into the use of DMT to support my healing went a little overboard. I primarily took pharmahuasca for my first few explorations, ultimately taking 100 mg of harmaline followed half an hour later by 390 mg of DMT fumarate! The result was predictably a vivid, immersive tour of all my unresolved issues in symbolic form (surprise surprise), followed by some residual low grade psychotic delusions that lasted for over a week. I still had enough of a grip not to do anything grossly stupid or self destructive, but I did make enough errors at work that I ultimately lost that job (a blessing in it's own way: I really needed to move on)
I also experimented with using the GVG to vaporize DMT. Again, profoundly immersive glimpses into the hidden closet of my mind. However over and over again I would feel during the experience that I had completely moved beyond the tangle of old thoughts, feelings and constrictive beliefs that make up my trauma residue, only to have the noose tighten once again as the visions waned.
So once again I stepped away from pschedelics for a while. I remained psychedelic celibate over the winter. But something I read on one of the posts on this website stuck in my head: someone made a comment about dosage, and the suggestion that lower doses of DMT might be more useful for emotional exploration, processing, and psychological integration.
So that is my current "experiment". I made the commitment to do a pharmahuasca exploration once a month, starting with 50 mg of harmaline followed by 130 mg of DMT citrate (free base dissolved in lemon juice), with the plan to slowly increase the dose up to whatever turns out to be optimal for emotional processing. I am on my 3rd month now. Last month I increased to 150 mg of citrate.
What I find is that at the lower dose the experience is less "thrilling" but the information is delivered more slowly, it is more digestible, there is more time to take it in, and more of what I learn sticks with me after the session.
My other observation is that DMT derived from acacia is "softer" and more psychologically gentle. DMT from mimosa is amazing, but in some ways less humane. So while I admire people who can dive headlong into the "god blender', those experiences are less supportive of my own healing than the gentler DMT experiences I have been working with lately.
So, DMT is like a woman. She is all your desires, all your fantasies, all your ambitions, all your ideas, all your hopes and all your fears. And, as with women, it helps to be clear about what you're looking for. I have been looking for healing, for many years, and to me DMT is a supreme, though possibly slightly risky, shamanic medicine.