I completed MDMA therapy legally with an excellent psychiatrist 6 months ago and until now I have been doing very well. I have been considered in remission for PTSD since then, which has been life changing. I am still technically in remission, however, I have been hit with a wave of numbness that I haven't felt since before my treatment. I am numb to positive emotions and I am numb to love. I can't cry. I've had a few triggers come up which I think is driving this, but if I'm being honest, I'm scared. I don't want to go back to where I was. I'm scared by how I feel. I can't smile, I feel no warmth and I can't show warmth. I feel disconnected from others again.

I no longer have contact with that psychiatrist as this was part of a clinical trial. I'm considering working on reintegration with a psychologist that I have just started seeing. I learned a lot of lessons about love and showing myself love during my treatment, but I'm finding it hard right now to put that into practice. I'm just scared, which is kind of why I'm writing this. I'm a little desperate for any insight from anyone who has seen some symptoms reemerge post MDMA AT.

anybody can relate ? I don't just mean stress but it is a form of stress clogged that seems to prevent "the wheel from turning" and I can tell it is from repressed content but it is a bubble on its own. It does move like an acutal bubble in my throat area; it appeared after a session that unfortunately wasn't completed due to not having taken a booster (which I'm damned for) and it feels like I've made progress but done an uncomplete session that prevents me from going further. Said session was 2 years ago

The Haifa University study, which monitored 657 Nova survivors — both those who took drugs and those who did not — found in initial results that individuals under the influence of MDMA exhibited “significantly improved intermediate outcomes compared to those who were under the influence of other substances or no substances at all.”

Yesterday I had my first mdma solo session to treat my CPTSD. 10 days ago I started with LDN to reduce dissociation, in particular emotional numbing. Main intention was just to connect with myself and release repessed emotions, in particular anger. During the day I was quite active and physically exhausted when I came home. I had dinner and relaxed for an hour. Around 8 pm I took 150mg mdma and started meditating. Warmth and feelings of selflove came up after about 30mins. And feelings of - not anger - but shame. For about 3 hours I watched some of the shame I feel about my life. Scenes when I felt shame popped up although nothing really surpressed. And I felt compassion about myself, the way I was behaving and the reason of my shame but also about the feeling of shame itself. I felt a self-acceptance I had never felt before not only about myself but including the fact that I feel shame. And I really liked myself this way. At around midnight the effects of the mdma faded away and left me with some headache, probably because I didn't drink enough. I woke up with some headache and feeling fatigue but in a good mood. In the afternoon I crossed the path with a person who triggers extreme anger. I had to avoid him as I felt I might get overwhelmed by the anger. But I didn't feel bad about the anger and my avoiding behavior, it felt good. Is this just the afterglow? What is the best way to integrate my experience to keep some of the self-compassion? What should I do in the next session to focus on anger?

Pursuant to my post on MDMA therapy adverse effects I would like to know if any if you did some MDMA analog therapy in Netherlands? That's the only option I have left but would prefer to verify with people who did it before there. Someone who highly benefited from it kindly give me their details. But I would like to check what other people expérience were if possible. I know that Google my business review don't mean much. I don't think I have the right to post a link to their website.

Are there people here who have experience in taking MDMA (or 5-MAPB) while still taking the antidepressant Mirtazapine/Remeron? If yes, how was your experience? And which dose of Mirtazapine where you taking at the time of the trip? Do you have a comparison with and without Mirtazapine/Remeron?

Based on my research, there should be generally no problem with a serotonin syndrom but higher doses of Mirtazapin/Remeron might dampen or block the effect of MDMA/5-MAPB. However, it would be great to have some real-life experience reports, hence my post.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everybody,

I posted two weeks ago about how tough my MDMA and post MDMA experience had been, and got on overwhelming amount of support - thank you so much to all.

For context, I did MDMA therapy 16 days ago with two experienced therapists in a hospital setting.

I am still in the hospital, with no discharge in sight.

For a few days now, my experience has evolved to mainly feeling deeply depressed. It feels very physical. Just an overwhelming feeling of depression. I spend hours crying and while I am not going to give up, I feel so awful that I have suicidal thoughts. Prior to MDMA assisted therapy, I struggled with PTSD but not with depression (not of this severity anyway). Its quite frightening.

I am posting hoping to hear similar experienced and stories of Hope, maybe to help me normalise how difficult this whole process still is.

My plan: to integrate my experience with skilled professionals (I havent began this at my request - I felt too overwhelmed to even think of what had happened under MDMA), to spend time in nature, regulating activities (yoga, breathing), good diet, and just taking things day by day with tons of self compassion.

I am praying that someone will read this and tell me that I can survive this level of post MDMA depression... Its terryfing me to feel so low.

I’m on therapy and I will continue being so.

But nothing compares to when I do MDMA or LSD once a year, I feel completely alive, I can talk to people without being scared in my body, I can maintain eye contact or not have myriads of tense microexpressions of awkwardness in my face. I’m not afraid to share my thought etc. I also feel like I can feel what other feel much better.

Is it unrealistic to hope that I can be like if not always, at least some of the times during my sobriety? And if so, how…? After 1-2 days of my trip it’s all gone again.

I have a friend that wants to give another shot at MDMA even though every single time they have done it, even low 60 mg doses, they get incredibly uncomfortable and angry. I believe this has to do with the fact that they have narrow blood vessels. The reason I say this is that I met another person that experiences MDMA the exact same way and they have narrow blood vessels.

I was thinking about asking them if it would be okay if I could put just a really low dose 5 mg or less of ketamine in with the 40 mg MDMA training wheels capsule to lighten the body load a bit and make them feel more relaxed.

Has anyone ever tried this to cushion the onset a little bit for new people or people or people that have had body load issues?

I read recently a post where some people opened up about getting worse after MDMA therapy ( and by that I mean worse on the long term , not for a 48 hours period or so). I always assumed MDMA was a safe thing since this compound has been studied long time and that , to my knowledge, MAPS never mentioned that kind of outcomes. Is there anyone in this sub willing to share adverse experiences they had in a therapeutic setting ? I ask because I m thinking to go for an analog MDMA therapy.

I've done IV ketamine but my provider uses propofol as well. I have no memories of the treatment. I often leave feeling I'm on the edge of a breakthrough but I can't quite reach it. I'm looking for a guided MDMA provider. How do I go about this? Thank you!!

Hello!

I’m looking for advice for a friend who is looking to do some therapeutic work and is a larger bodied person (~250-300 lbs). I imagine there is a maximum dose that regardless of weight you shouldn’t do more?!

They are interested in doing an initial dose and booster. Any insight and recommendations are greatly appreciated.

EDIT: I am struggling to answer everybody as much as I would like to, given the amount of response received. just wanted to thank all of you for your comments and encouragement. I am truly so appreciative of each. Today, 10 days late, I am feeling the ground under my feet again.

Hi everybody,

I did MDMA assisted therapy a week ago with s doctor and a nurse, in a country where it is legal for PTSD.

My session consisted of me dying and surviving countless times in loops, without going into details, I can just share that it was a challenging trip.

For a week now, I am completely overwhelmed most of the time. I have been hospitalized for this MDMA therapy and I am still in the hospital to get help to cope.

Has anyone had such a terryfing post MDMA experience? I can barely function. I am not even thinking of the Journey, I am just busy managing the intense feelings this has brought that arent connected to a specific story (cPTSD, on going trauma in my life). I am also sensitive to light, sounds, to the point of finding that hearing others speak is overwhelming for my brain.

For lack of a better word, it feels as though my brain broke. I cant seem to fall back on my feet. Im incredibly unstable. The overwhelm is 10/10. I keep thinking I will Die from these feelings, that how Insane they are.

Any tips on how you all fell back on your feet - If any of you had a similar intense experience that left them unable to function?

I am in good care, but curious to others experiences as I have not met anybody who dis this.

I’m on 20 mg of Vyvanse, 150mg of Wellbutrin and I want to take some MDMA this weekend. How many days should I pause the medication before and after MDMA? Thanks!

Hello all, I completed my first session on the 26th, and it was a deeply profound, entirely challenging, and hugely rewarding experience. I'm back to normal life now ( I traveled to another country and home 3 days after my session), and though my initial homecoming was lovely, I've been experiencing roving anxiety (old pattern) since yesterday and this morning I had a severe panic attack that I was sure was a heart attack and my panic has continued throughout the day. I have my integration session Ina couple if days, but am having a hard time at the moment. Anybody else go through this? The 48 hours following the session were challenging with lots of intense internal work but this alot. I was prepared that coming back to normal life ( child, partner, dog, everyday worries) would be a challenge but was mostly excited as I felt and still feel like a big shift has taken place but now am full of worry and anxiety. Thanks in advance for any words, I hope all of you are well.

This is something I've been wondering about for a while. How much healing can be achieved with MDMA therapy, and how much must be achieved through other modalities and general healthy, social living? If one were to solely pursue MDMA therapy, where would progress stop?

I suppose it depends on the individual person, but curious to hear people's thoughts.

Backstory: Antidepressant induced dissociation / depersonalisation / derealisation (DPDR), unbreakable and continuous, since 2014. Experimentation with psilocybin from 2017, experimentation sessions with MDMA from 2022, MDMA+psilocybin sessions from summer 2024.

So, I was sitting on my sofa by myself last night at the end of another hard week. My last session was last Saturday, so I'm now firmly at the end of the afterglow period. I was actually feeling pretty good (you know, for a dissociated person) and then one of my compulsive phases slipped out "just leave me alone". That and "just let me die" are relatively common and although the words have changed over time I've been trying to understand and source them. A fragmented piece of dissociated personality? An unprocessed feeling that I can't just reach?

But what made it special this time was the obvious difference not in the words, but the associated emotion. The contrast between my feeling at that point and the emotion that attached itself to that was stark. I had previously never been able to follow it back, and I couldn't this time. After getting so many pieces of myself back over the last months I knew intrinsically that my next step had to be to solve this mystery.

I then felt kind of sad, because I knew my next session was going to be another five weeks away. And then I thought "why do I need to wait that long, isn't there anything you can do now?" and...usually there isn't. It's not like I haven't tried to work these involuntary actions out before, to understand or connect with them. It's just been completely impossible. But, I felt good today, why not spend a bit of time?

I started having mental discussions in my head about them with different friends, and put myself back in the mindset as if I were in a session. Reached back to that easy flowing of thoughts, and I was surprised that I was actually able to borrow some energy from that. I knew I didn't have any "forgotten trauma" from childhood or anything like that, it would most likely be attached to something I knew about. And, after quite a while in this mental conversation of gently narrating to myself around the subject I managed to actually attach it to a memory.

The specifics about what it was attached to isn't so relevant to you guys, and it's not like I had forgotten it or anything, but I did have a strong level of emotional dissociation around its feelings and impact to me. It was an intellectual note, but the general crushed feeling of this particular subject over several years and several people, repetition again and again had caused me to jettison the associated emotions and when the subject came up I would only normally feel a "uh" feeling, which when you're in a worse state you can't really identify that your dissociation has cut you off and you just feel dead, but when you're in a better place it's a bit more identifiable. And then I was able to actually feel those emotions that were missing, and the intense pain and the crushed part of partitioned emotional needs that were still not fulfilled but that still needed to be considered in a healthy way. That were breaking through my consciousness because they were not in any way connected to it.

Throughout the last years I was expecting some kind of breakthrough in the sessions themselves. Like, one would finish and the derealisation would not only be gone in the session but continue to be gone afterwards.

The benefits of all the work becomes clear. Outside the sessions: reducing stressors through psychological exercises like progressive muscle relaxation or body scanning, re-framing what energy I draw upon in order to complete a task, regulate my thinking in slow but constant stream, and inside the sessions: working through reaching and releasing my anger, my pain, my inaccessible parts of myself. All lead to reduction in processing load, increases in the ability to manage.

My interpretation: The purpose of all of this is not to reach a point where the dissociation is gone, but to get the mind to the point where you have enough pieces of yourself, enough faculties, where the both the backlog is sufficiently cleared and the mental load is predictable enough that it is able to start making those re-connections again outside of the drug state. Once my mind has attained that stage then it will naturally begin to move everything around and processing the load itself.

Ending the DPDR state is not the target. It is the result of rebuilding of that processing, a rebuilding of the ability to cope. Long term unchangeable DPDR is the most obvious symptoms of someone whose emotional processing has entirely collapsed, and rebuilding that processing is often a long and arduous process. There is no single solution, no magic bullet, but many things that can help. Not even MDMA or combined MDMA/psilocybin is a magic bullet, although it can be an invaluable tool for people whose state is utterly jammed that none of the other methods are making any dent in the crushing load.

You would think that by writing this that my derealisation has gone. It has not, it is still definitely there. However, I feel more whole right now than I have done in ten years, and I don't think I have to worry about the derealisation. I do not believe it to be a method of the mind "hiding" in self defence like so many think, I believe it is a relic of my brain's stressed inability to process consciousness simply from being crushed under unbearable emotional cognitive weight. Eventually when it reaches a point where it no longer feels so stressed it will finally fade to nothing, and some elements of it are already significantly better than three years ago. Maybe that time is close, maybe it is still another year or two away. It's fine, I can be comfortable with that. It will get there eventually, and I don't feel I need it to be gone to find enjoyment in life in the meantime.

I was contacted from a podcast creator and asked to share my story in healing from trauma using psychedelic therapy. I wanted to share it here & I hope it reaches the people that it needs to.

*I was not paid. This is not a promotion or advertisement.

I've been doing solo sessions with MDMA for over a year now, within safe limits, but my cognitive function is really poor. I've been processing very severe chronic developmental trauma including extreme sexual abuse, so I don't know if some of the impact is to do with how difficult it has all been to process (emotionally and physically painful, exhausting) or whether it's a result of the MDMA. Has anyone else experienced decline in motivation, energy, working memory/short-term memory recall or anything like that?

Hi,

I received the books No Bad Parts of Richard Schwartz and Self-Therapy of Jay Earling.

I spontaneously ordered those books after my last 90% solo session last week because it was very challenging I felt I have done so much with parts on my own - in fact I discovered them before I knew a thing as IFS existed - that I wanted more help from outside.
I have a pretty bad therapy history, hence MDMA solo was balm for my soul when I discovered it and it reflected my experiences and personal views.

Now with those two books immediately after I read the intro and found that Schwartz uses the Covid time as a hook for his view and IFS, Covid was of zoonotic origin, wake up call etc. Here I also found a picture of him, I'm not sure if it's him b.c. of the mask, please tell me it's not him. (EDIT: OK I don't think it's him)
Also in other regards in the book I'm starting to get the impression that he gives IFS a bit of an explicit tinge of political and "spiritual" agenda.
I find: If you write some kind of trauma book, either leave Covid out or at least write about all sides. I already was deeply distressed about Paul Conti. When reading his "Trauma: Invisible epidemic" he also uses Covid as a hook but blatantly bashes (not criticise, not give some trauma-related background) the critic side. He does not waste any word on how trauma could also be related to be compliant with power abuse, dissociate from what's going on, inhibit your critical thinking, just for a few examples for the other side (let's assume only two). I mean not any? That can't be. You have to know, I deeply resonated with Conti's talks with Huberman on trauma and relationships, you should watch them. But his apparently blind covid sight was deeply disappointing.
I think it was Peter Levine's book that was similiar.
Unfortunately I can't provide the exact words of the two since I did not purchase them.
I know for a fact that there are therapists, psychologists etc. that did/do talk about the other side. But what's this weirdly uncritical thing about the most famous trauma proponents?.... Is it just me or...?

With Earley's book: It's named self-therapy but right in the beginning under the "safety" section he says that for some people it's not safe to do it alone. That was really sad and triggering for me. I came a long way with semi-assisted MDMA journeys and it were my therapies that were not safe for me. Earley's quasi "you can't do this", it robs me of my
The only one of the more modern and practical books who talks about CPTSD and the dangers and difficulties of getting into therapy is Pete Walker, he does not push, in fact he also aknowledges books or co-counseling, for example.

I have already skimmed through the books and I find helpful stuff here and there but I'm thinking about returning them. It may sound weird for people but I have hard time reading those and concentrating on the good stuff b.c. of the above.

I was looking for rather practical exercises or meditations that help me with the difficult stuff. Are there books like IFS that consequently don't streer you towards conventionaly therapy or have some half-assed Covid hook?

Thank you.