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Hey, dear Sugar listeners.
This is Anne Marie Severson, host of WBUR's Beyond All Repair and cohost of Endless Thread.
And I'm here to share something special with you this week.
It's an episode of Other People's Problems from our friends at the CBC.
Now, normally therapy sessions are totally confidential, but this podcast opens the doors.
On this season, the host, Dr. Hilary McBride explores the transformative power of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting.
With her psychological expertise, Dr. Hilary leads clients through drug -assisted therapy, guiding them to new heights on their healing journeys.
In this episode, you'll hear from Donovan, who has lived in fear and anger ever since he told the truth about being abused by his mother's boyfriend and then felt betrayed by social workers who were supposed to help.
Now after several ketamine therapy sessions, Donovan can finally look back upon his child self with care and calm.
And he works to be the kind of adult he needed for his own children.
I hope you enjoy the episode, and if you do, you can find the full season of CBC's Other People's Problems wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi everyone, Hillary here.
This season of Other People's Problems is about therapy using psychedelics and other psychoactive drugs.
Research on psychedelics for mental health is compelling and promising but there is still so much more we need to know about how well it works, why it works, and how it should best be done.
I'm a registered psychologist in my home province of British Columbia, and everything we've included is legal and I am licensed to do.
We think it's one of the first chances for you to listen in on real therapy sessions using drugs.
But please listen with care.
These sessions, including the one you're about to hear, which deals with childhood sexual abuse, can be very intense.
Am I putting this stuff on first?
We'll get you to roll over first input.
Okay. Yeah, I wore my chucks for good luck Yeah Yeah, I think so.
And we'll sort of see what happens here.
Yeah, with you all the way All the way.
Okay I'm Dr. Hilary McBride.
This is a special season of Other People's Problems. We're letting you hear sessions with my clients who are using psychoactive drugs to go deeper into their healing.
This is a session with Donovan and he is using ketamine.
About two years ago, Donovan was referred to me by a therapist who knew that he needed some extra support.
I mean he was not functioning at home, at his work, the relationships were falling apart.
There was just so much that was happening for him, which when he explained his trauma history to me made perfect sense.
I'm Donovan. I'm an engineer and I'm in my mid 40s.
and I have a young family with a two and four year old.
I started seeing Hillary specifically inside of an anxiety attacks I was having and not feeling the function day to day.
We started doing ketamine -assisted therapy, One of the very first sessions we had, almost as soon as the ketamine hit his body, he became completely overwhelmed with terror.
I mean, I don't think I've seen terror quite like this in an adult maybe ever.
And I knew he was showing me exactly what it felt like when he was a kid.
I was trying to support his system to orient to the present, to realize that the fear again might be a memory from the past, but in the here and now, he wasn't being abused.
I was getting him to look around the room and notice things that might support his system to feel in the present, grounded and safe.
And of all the things in the room, his eyes landed on my white Converse All Stars.
So as we're heading into this session, I'm mentioning that my Chuck's for good luck, just right off the top because I want him to know that I know exactly where we've been together and I'm also wanting to signal to his nervous system whether it's through playfulness or the memory of that tiny little pocket of safety that no matter what we face in this session today that he will be okay.
If you were in the room with us what you would have seen is Donovan reclining on He's got a blanket and pillow and some good luck charms. And in the background, you're hearing the nurse practitioner, Leanne, who's getting ready to administer the injection.
We're also making use of music and eye shades and some of the traditional elements that you hear in more of the the sitter approach to psychedelic psychotherapy.
therapy. Right here.
Right here. Yeah, right here.
I'm right with you.
I'm with you. I'm right here.
Here's my hand if you need it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to tell me what's happening for you?
Ugh, I don't think I'm supposed to be here.
Hm, just notice where you are.
You have the sense you're not supposed to be here, notice.
Go inside. The monkeys are rewiring the brain.
Do you have a sense of what they're rewiring right now?
I don't know. No. Not really.
Okay. You might also think about what you want them to rewire.
What I want them to rewire.
Okay. Yeah. Let me talk to them and I'll say, hey, what do we want to rewire?
Yeah. Yeah. Good thinking.
Yeah. Good thinking.
When you're listening to this audio and you can hear Donovan, a couple things that are important to know are one.
Donovan's neurodivergent.
So that's definitely a play and what's happening for him in his mind.
The second thing is that when people are on high doses of psychedelics, they sometimes say and conjure all sorts of unusual imagery and might say funny things and use funny examples and things that might seem a little abstract or strange.
But because this is not just meant to be a recreational drug trip and we're doing work to process his trauma, I'm wanting to see if I can actually make use of what he's offering me as a point of agency.
So when he's saying, the monkeys are rewiring my brain, my thought is, OK, great, let's with it is there something that we can do to join with the monkeys and see if we can rewire something inside that's been stuck.
This was quite a few ketamine sessions in and some of the initial ketamine sessions were quite scary and it was actually that particular session with rewiring the brain was actually quite It was fun, it was enjoyable.
So, for me to hear it again it makes me smile and feel good inside and go it was a fun experience.
It wasn't a scary experience like I've had in the past with ketamine.
Hey monkeys, what are you wearing?
I don't know let's rewire some things huh what should we rewire ha ha ha ha Happy Childhood done.
Rewire. Twohundru. Right with you.
Right with you. Huh.
when I was a kid, it was just a lot of moving.
So I was moving every year pretty much. When I was six years old, I was sexually abused by the man that my mom was living with at the time, and then going through the court process, you know, with him and them to get him prosecuted.
And then, you know, working through family services after that was challenging.
And then, yeah, moving out at 16, still in high school, living on your own and working full -time and still going to school.
Just no sense of stability, no sense of love, no sense of family support whatsoever.
Would now be an okay time for me to give you a prompt, something to think about?
I thought we had been.
I mean we've been doing wonderful work.
I've been doing a lot of thinking.
Yeah. Do you want to tell us about it?
We can do that later if that's too hard. Yeah, you've been doing a lot of thinking already.
A lot's happened already.
Except for me putting words out.
Yeah. So we can leave words for another time.
Okay. Right now I'm wondering if you might want to take us, Lee and me and Adel you, back into one of those places you, you flash back to sometimes.
Ha, ha, ha, ha. Whew.
It started going dark.
Yeah. Okay, pull us into the dark if you can.
The reason why we decided to do this particular academic session is because leading up to it he'd been having a series of flashbacks.
They were happening in session, in his day -to -day life, in couples therapy, in interactions with his wife.
Flashbacks are one of the core features of trauma, they can happen in a bunch of different ways and we characterize them as intrusions.
So sometimes they happen as nightmares or they can happen in other ways, but it means that a person is all of a sudden taken back, back to a moment that has been horrific for them.
And instead of just remembering it as if it to happen a long time ago, they're all of a sudden experiencing themselves as being inside the memory again.
Yeah, I think the flashback there was around this experience at the family services or something after the court case.
It was quite shocking to have the flashback like that.
Like, I had forgotten, I think, a lot of that portion.
I remembered a lot of the legal stuff and the actual sexual abuse, but that portion was completely blanked out.
The court case, and all the legal lawyers and judges were all amazing, but this experience at family services was horrific.
They were making themselves out to be people of trust, and that they were there to help me, when, in fact, it was felt like an interrogation.
So they were making me out to be the monster.
They were making me out to be the bad person.
So at this point in the session, the ketamine is definitely in his system, but it's settled a little bit, and I can start directing him back to those particular places.
And what happens as I do that is he starts to have it go black.
And I think that black for him means that it's hard to access.
there isn't vividness, there isn't, you know, narrative richness.
And the beauty of flashbacks is really that they're our brains way of trying to bring something to the surface to say it needs to be healed.
That doesn't seem scary right this minute, and I mean— Yeah, that might make it easier to talk about then.
That doesn't make it easier to talk about, and again, it's not like it's hard to talk about, because it's challenging, it's hard to talk about because there's not much memory.
Yeah. That's the challenge, not the...
Not the details? I don't know.
It's like a... A room of counselors, a room of...
It's a room with a whole bunch of people.
It's like everybody's asking me questions and I can't answer them.
Mm -hmm. And they come from all different angles and places.
And I don't know. It's more, I guess, I don't even have like a vision.
If you asked me to color a wall, or if you asked me to do this, nothing.
It's, there's nothing there.
It's just sort of like a, it's more like interrogation, or.
I guess I'm struggling, because I don't understand.
I -I -It occurs to me this is all after the court case.
Yeah. I guess like, I wanna say family services or something or...
They're trying to figure things out and they're asking a lot of questions you don't know how to answer.
Well, I don't know how to answer, but they're leading questions that are like pointing at me that I'm to blame for everything.
Do you feel like you're in the younger you who's experiencing that or are you adult you remembering it right now?
Mmm -hmm, a bit of both I guess.
Yeah. I'm asking Donovan to tell me about if he feels like his adult self or his child self because it helps me figure out which move I'm going to make next clinically.
And this is such a beautiful moment in clinical work when a person can get access to both and then we can actually start to integrate and build together these two neural networks.
This is a really key feature of reprocessing trauma memories.
It's the ability to feel enough of the charge of what was without getting completely sucked into it and enough of the present moment where we know that we survived and we're safe and we're all grown up and we can actually offer back to younger us everything that they needed at that time.
I guess I thought it was over.
But it wasn't. And then it wasn't.
Yeah. Yeah, then it wasn't.
Yeah it was. Yeah. Yeah.
It got worse. Feel our hands.
Bring us right into this.
You still have contact with the adult you, I was remembering?
Yeah. Yeah. When I'm thinking about adult you as being a really loving, protective, wise dad.
Someone who knows what kids need.
I'm wondering if adult you has any sense of what younger you would need.
Yeah. Yeah. It was bad.
It was bad. Yeah. Yeah.
You can say that again if you want.
It was bad. And as you remember how bad it was, see if you can be aware that we're with you as you're remembering.
As I am, like you said.
Good. Good. You can feel both.
It's dull. It's kind of like...
Yesterday it was a day.
Today it's dull. If it's hard to hear him, hear Donovan's saying that yesterday his pain was an ache and today it's dull.
He's got my hand and Leanne's hands and he's holding us tight and realizing how the pain is changing.
It's hard not to sort of become numb to it though.
Yeah. Let's see if we can actually bring ring something into that memory Really cool really cool.
Did you need a blanket?
I got you. I got you.
You're all grown up and you're remembering how bad it was Yeah, yeah They were mean, but that wasn't okay.
You needed something different.
I'm speculating that maybe that's actually the younger Donovan that's saying that to us.
But what's so cool about it, in the midst of it being so painful for him, is if you I remember him talking about what was happening at that time.
He was made to feel like he was the bad guy and all of a sudden, his interpretation has shifted.
Instead of him being made to feel like the bad boy, he's able to see that these people were mean and that is everything for him.
I mean, what a profound shift in perspective to realize that he didn't do anything wrong, that he wasn't to blame after all, but that he was actually just being treated poorly by the grownups around him.
Yeah, bring us in. Agh!
That's it, just like that, that's the way.
I'm curious if you might wanna pull that younger you out of that room.
I don't know if you want to send one of us in to talk to those adults and smarten them up.
If you want to do that.
I was wondering what younger you need?
Or what adult you want to do?
I don't do. Mmhmm. It's all fucked up.
It's like... Yeah. Every piece of it was fucked up.
Like, it was like. It was additive.
I'm not like, for so much. Yeah, yeah.
Notice the feeling.
Notice what it's doing to you.
You get to have that.
That's the right feeling for that situation.
Nobody ever said enough.
Like, yeah. Yeah. That's enough.
That's what you needed.
Someone should have said, that's enough.
I didn't mean to say that's enough.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that would have been the exact right thing.
Can you imagine saying that to them?
On behalf of your little boy self, And you say to them, it's enough, it's enough.
You stop it. Yeah. Okay.
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Priceline! Feels like I'm getting far away.
From? A hell you guys.
Yeah, okay. If as you go wherever you're going, you bring us with you or if you try to stay connected to us here, you can go far away.
Just bring us along if you can.
Things were feeling uncomfortable and I sort of felt like I had dissociating, disappearing.
all of a sudden Hilaria's like hundreds of feet away.
LS When he says that he thinks he's going away at first, I'm trying to figure out like, oh, is he getting out?
Is he getting out of the memory and going away from that?
But as he starts talking, it becomes more clear that this is his way of dissociating from the memory.
That he's kind of making it foggy and there's bit of space between his felt experience and where his conscious awareness is.
We'll come with you wherever you go.
You already survived it.
You already survived.
The moment, it's never gonna happen again.
You had to go really far away then.
But you made it through and you're here.
You have a beautiful life that you've built.
A life that's okay to be in.
A life that's safe for you to be in.
If you need to go, we'll come with you and I want you to know.
It's okay to be here.
It wasn't then but it is now.
It's so fxcked up. Yeah, it was so fxcked up.
I wonder if the little boy you can hear adult you saying that to him too.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's it, that's it.
That's right, that's right.
that's right yeah you know his story and you see it so clearly it was so fucked up every bit of it i have no i mean the visual is like you know imagine crossing a fish in the fish line of a race and then Mm -hmm Be beaten by baseball bats Yeah Yeah Enough Enough No more You leave him alone now no more Can't you see what he's been through this is enough What the fuck?
The fucked up part is, the lawyers and judges remind us, it's the fucking counselors and family services people that fucked it up.
Yeah. They did. Aw!
Yeah. They fucked it up.
Yeah, when she said that's enough, I mean it was triggering for me in that it felt angry and that wasn't what my younger self needed.
My younger self actually needed somebody just calmly, confidently coming in and just removing young yourself from that situation, not adding some intensity to the situation that, from my perspective, needed to be deescalated.
And so there's some sort of reaction around that.
I love what Donovan's saying here for a few reasons.
The first is that me saying, enough, enough, enough, was me doing I think what I actually wanted to do.
But in doing so, I was replicating the pattern of the entire experience for him, I was an adult doing what I wanted to do when really there was a kid in the room who needed nurturing.
He actually knew exactly what he needed in that situation.
it was that no one was giving it to him that was the problem.
And I unknowingly participated in that as I got into what I thought would have felt really good for him.
I don't in any way want to posture the clinician as the expert.
I mean this entire memory of his is people who were clinicians who were completely missing him in a way that was creating a traumatic experience.
So I really think that it's important to hear people, have people hear me say, I got it wrong.
But that doesn't mean I'm unskilled or don't care about him or that this wasn't a therapeutic experience.
In fact, it's us being able to negotiate that that makes it so therapeutic.
So much anger. Good, good.
Every bit of that deserves to be here.
Can your little boy self feel how much anger you have because of what happened to him?
Can you feel your protectiveness?
Or is it his anger?
I guess anger has to be like, his anger has been kinda out for years.
I wish I could breathe through my nose.
I thought you were going to say something else but I also wish you could breathe through your nose.
Could I give you, like a story that you could just kind of play out in your mind like a is to consider for now, something to think about.
Is this to replace my story or what are we...?
Well yeah, I was thinking I wonder if there's a way that we can really honor the statement of this being enough.
And if we can go get your little boy self out of that room wherever it is.
I know you don't have the visual.
I sort of do. You do?
Oh, okay. I sort of have like this...
Yeah, I have somewhat of a visual, like an office building or whatever.
It was sterile. Of course.
Yeah. I'm wondering if Adil, you can walk in those doors.
Right into that room.
You get to have the full power of all your anger.
Or you get to say, enough.
And you grab your little boy and you pull up so close to you.
You hold him the way you hold your baby boys.
And you get to say it's over.
It's over and it's never happening again.
And you're coming home with me.
And I'm never ever, ever gonna let any of this happen.
None of it. When you walk in the front door is of your home, your beautiful home.
Yeah, I don't know if I'm ready for that one yet.
Yeah, which part? We'll take any of that that you feel ready for and we'll come back for the rest later.
But I can do it though, yeah.
Oh, okay. Yeah. Where do you want me to pick back up?
I don't know, I don't...
I don't need more anger.
Can you feel or imagine holding your little boy stuff in your arms?
Yes, I guess my little boy doesn't want more anger right.
Yeah, what does he want?
Yeah, yeah I guess just like you felt a little too angry and I don't I've had enough anger, yeah, yeah just just comfort and love.
That's right, yeah so let's give him that and see if you can can access in your adult, grown -up body the confident love that he's been looking for?
I guess as a piece with your anger that you're diminishing somebody else versus just being do the right thing for the little boy and show me what confident love is, not anger.
Mm -hmm. Yeah. I don't think the world needs more anger.
But He needs love. He needs your love.
Calm, confident love.
That's right. That's it.
Hillary was asking me what that boy needed and that's what sort of that's what came out in the moment was that calm, confident, loving.
You know I have to, I want to do and I want to be the loving dad and you know I've got do a lot of work on myself for me to end that cycle.
That is not an easy thing to be a dad when you've got your own trauma and you don't really have good models, role models either.
I wanted them to have a stable household, a household where they weren't moving.
A household where you know there was love and connection and support for them and safety.
Yeah, definitely safety.
LS This is one of our last little things we'll do here, and we're gonna come back to this over and over and over again in our work.
But can you find a way to extend that to him, Like if there's a word or a color or a emotion or a sound, like something that could come from adult you.
Yeah. Nice. I guess I can visualize it so.
Yeah, okay. Let's go for it then.
You just get that visual going and you ride it all the way.
I got it. and I'm obsessed with how easy that was for you.
It just came so quickly.
That's amazing. Well, I'd already sort of done it, right?
So it's like - Yeah, and look at that.
It's, it counts. It's in you.
Yeah, so we'll just stay with that for a few minutes.
You sending that to him, that calm, confident love.
Let's see what it does to him as he takes that in from you.
and I guess I sort of, I guess I'll share the news for you, I guess I sort of vision that, yeah, out on the walks into the room, I'm calm, I'm confident, I'm loving and I just pick him up and take him out.
That's right, that's right.
That's right. That's the idea.
That's all I need, that's perfect.
That's perfect. That's perfect.
I'm seeing it, too.
That's exactly what he needed.
He didn't need to be interrogated.
No. He's in such good hands with you.
And that gets to be over now.
He doesn't have to ever go back to that room again.
it felt like relief I think would be the right word I mean it was even prior to the Academy I think we were sort of working on connecting with the younger self and I couldn't really so I made a sense of the relief that I could actually do it and proud that I did it relief and pride I'd done this work ten or fifteen years ago where I was trying to connect with my younger self and it was like not happening, so the fact that, fast forward 10 or 15 years, and I can actually connect with myself, see what he needs, and then actually provide what he needs, is a huge breakthrough.
Can you feel us with you as you are doing this work with him?
Can you feel us here?
somebody's hand is cold, somebody's hand is warm.
Who's guess? Who's guess?
Ah, oo, I'm gonna guess Katie's hand, and I'm gonna guess Hillary's hand.
We're busted, we're busted.
Oh my gosh. You're on top of it, yeah, not only do you know we're here, you know who specifically is here, and that's what you do.
I mean, you know us, I'm feeling so proud of you.
Yeah. To understand how big of a deal this is, it's helpful to understand how memory works.
Often when we think about memory, we think memory is it's the thing that happened, but actually the way that memory works in our brains is that memory is not only the thing that happened, but all the times we remembered it after it.
So here what's happening is we're actually fundamentally changing how this story lives in his body because now he has the memory not only of feeling trapped in that room with all of those those support workers and clinicians, but he has the memory of caring for himself, intervening, and being in his wise grounded adult body while remembering.
That's all getting packaged together in a way that's gonna change what this feels like moving forward for him.
And what I know happens – spoiler alert – is that when he looks back on this memory in the future after this session that it feels radically different than what it was like leading into the session where he was having flashbacks and overwhelmed and stuck and feeling terrorized.
It's almost like it's gone to bed.
It really happened, but his body knows that it's over.
Part of the reason we looked at doing ketamine or psychedelic assisted therapy, I guess, as an option was I think I had done a bunch of therapy work leading into this and I could actually there was a point where I could feel myself mentally and physically build up like walls and you know when I got to the sessions we wouldn't end up accomplishing anything so I think the with the ketamine that it really broke down a lot of my ability to to set up physical and mental barriers.
I couldn't do that with the ketamine.
I mean, if you saw me whatever before that session, my wife walked into the room I would be like startled or scared or, you know, there's constant hyper -vigilance right around the house even.
And it's gone, like there's zero hyper -vigilance now.
I don't want, like, I don't get startled.
I don't get scared.
I go, okay, there's somebody here.
It's just, there's no, none of that has is there anymore at all.
Right? So that's been probably the biggest, the biggest breakthrough is just not having that hyper vigilance.
Every second of every day.
other people's problems is produced by Jody Martinson, mixed by Julian Euzieli and Lee Roseveare.
Jeff Turner is our senior producer.
Emily Kinel is our coordinating producer.
The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Och. Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and Aaraf Nurani is the director of CBC Podcasts.
For more sessions, there are five seasons of other people's problems available right now in our feed.
I'm Dr. Hillary McBride.
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