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Psychedelics Gave Her the Breakthrough Traditional Therapy Couldn’t
After the operation, all signs pointed to a full recovery. Doctors kept saying the scar mended perfectly; scans revealed no issues with the fixed ruptured disk. She followed every step: the regular sessions with the physical therapist, a slow build-up in her exercises, and plenty of patience. Yet that nagging ache lingered.
Nothing stabbing or sudden about it, just a steady throb pulsing outward, always present, always nagging. From deep within, she sensed the scar tissue stirring, swollen and restless, refusing to quiet down. Sure, her body mended as expected, but no real sense of security settled in.
Seven months dragged on in physical therapy before her specialist suggested something that sounded unusual:
“You might want to consider alternatives … more natural healing modalities,” he mentioned, pausing as if weighing each syllable. Something unspoken hung in the air, a quiet nudge toward options he wouldn’t spell out directly, steering her past the usual fixes.
Years of Therapy, But Something Was Missing
Verde knew therapy inside out, having navigated it most of her life. Foster care pulled her in young, and by thirteen, therapy sessions became routine. She mastered trauma‘s vocabulary over the years, naming her attachment patterns, describing her defense mechanisms, and tracing her symptoms with cognitive clarity.
Counselors often commended her grasp. Records suggested real progress.
Nobody she knew dug deeper, more inwardly, but a core piece refused to budge.
“I understood everything,” she told me. “But my body didn’t register it. It felt like it was slowly shutting down.”
Decades of conversation-based talk therapy work left her boxed-in by labels. The very therapy sessions that kept her going somehow tightened that slim zone of comfort. Intimacy, openness, specific emotions: they loomed as threats well before she could label them.
Psychiatrist and researcher in psychedelics, Sergio Pérez Rosal, MD, puts it this way: “Being stuck is often the nervous system doing its job: protecting against states that were once too overwhelming to feel safely.”
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Ketamine-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant mental health and addiction
When Knowing Isn’t Enough
Early wounds from childhood may block progress more through bodily habits than through lack of awareness.
Way before the words can form, the nervous system sorts the world into “safe” and “risky.” For people who grew up with chaos, disregard, or peril at a young age, things like warmth and raw feelings can connect to harm. Protection kicks in: constant watchfulness or total withdrawal, there’s also spacing out (dissociation), avoidance, or rigid control.
These habits embed in automatic, unspoken recall. Someone might narrate their history smoothly, but if they slip outside that tolerance zone often, sessions turn into chats about pain rather than opportunities to feel and process it. This is a smart survival tactic that once warded off risk, but may also pose an obstacle to healing.
This is where standard approaches can hit a wall here. Discussing wounds with a tensed nervous system can loop into eloquent repetition — smart, yet confined. Awareness piles up, deeper shifts in feeling don’t happen while the body’s tension holds.
For Verde, escape from that cycle came from somewhere unexpected.
Processing Our Stories in an Altered State
Roughly a month after that veiled advice from her specialist, she joined an MDMA-supported clinical session under the MAPS psychedelic-assisted therapy protocols (MDMA therapy sessions are still legally restricted in most countries, so access to legal MDMA therapy is generally through clinical trials or other similar programs, for now).
The shift in experience compared to traditional therapy caught her off guard.
No bliss or flight from reality; if anything, it grounded her solidly. Dread eased off. Walls crumbled. Her emotional span stretched without tipping into overwhelming.
Then her body took over on its own, twisting and shaking for hours, not a fit but a kind of resolution unfolding. Held firmly, rooted to the ground below, it all seemed guided rather than chaotic.
Almost immediately afterwards, a change took root.
While it’s not common to have such a dramatically positive result after just one session — her back discomfort began to fade; that endless buzz quieted. She quit the physical therapy sessions, and soon enough, travel resumed. A year later, pain vanished entirely for the first time, even a longstanding hip disorder no longer came with the usual chronic back pain, suggesting a shift in her nervous system’s overall pain processing.
When Internal Wounds Exit the Body
Most startling wasn’t the ease flooding in, but how tangibly physical it all played out.
She shook. She cried. Sensations surged across the torso and belly, as if long-frozen layers thawed and reshaped at last. Release and relief.
Trauma isn’t merely a story we tell ourselves. It shapes as ingrained forecasts in our default settings: breathing patterns, muscle grip, stomach churns, flinches, slumps, dullness, tremors.
In a sufficiently safe environment, defensive responses that were once inhibited can finally play out. This process can feel dramatic, yes, but no magic is involved. The body is just completing something it never had the chance to finish.
Dr. Pérez Rosal explains: “Somatic release isn’t toxins leaving the body. It’s the organism updating the threat and safety signal as it finally becomes believable.”
Value builds, weaving in the new information — we call this integration. That physical surge gets layered with new meaning: it’s over, I made it.
Presence sticks. Anchored by steady guidance and this newly integrated knowledge.
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United Kingdom Francesca Sciandra is an integrative psychotherapeutic counsellor, hypnotherapist and couples therapist providing online and occasional in‑person intensive therapy.
Germany Johannes Nagler is a Gestalt therapist and psychologist based in Munich whose work focuses on helping adults navigate difficult life phases, release inner blockages and develop self‑awareness and resilience.
Learning, Beyond the Limits of Language
Her encounter defied tidy therapy boxes or jargon. Parts seemed symbolic and ineffable, beyond description. A feeling of unity washed over her, ethical sharpness, profound purpose tough to put into words.
She described seeing her life as meaningful for the first time. Not in an inflated or grandiose way but rather with a quiet, embodied sense of worth.
Writer and cultural critic Daniel Pinchbeck observes how Western psychotherapy can struggle with experiences that are mythic, symbolic, or transpersonal. Dr. Pérez Rosal adds, “Our job isn’t to prove the experience true. It’s to help translate it into a life that works.”
Instead of brushing off or treating such states as pure cosmic truth, skilled practitioners stick to bare observation: what actually happened in the session, And the subsequent effects: shifts in relationships, behaviors, values, and signs of distress.
Integration, Structure, and Follow-up
As psychedelic therapies move into more mainstream research and practice, ethical containers are essential. Indigenous cultures managed altered states in community, through ceremony, ritual, lineage, shared cosmology. Today’s versions can’t replicate that but need solid structures: skilled guides, clear boundaries, and aftercare.
Integration proved to be where the real work happened for Verde. The MDMA sessions opened something, but additional non-MDMA therapy sessions helped her translate what she learned to reshape her daily ways. Relationships shifted. Emotional range widened. Her body no longer reacted as if danger were imminent.
From Insight to Embodiment
Reflecting now, what stands out is not the intensity of the experience, but the quality of change.
Verde always knew her inner landscape. What eluded her was bodily trust in safety. Psychedelic-assisted therapy didn’t hand her solutions, it reworked the ground for true absorption.
Studies have shown1 that psychedelic-assisted therapy can temporarily increase psychological flexibility, allowing rigid, fear-based protective patterns to soften so core updates in emotion sink deep.
Or in Dr. Pérez Rosal’s words, “The medicine changes the state; the relationship changes the learning.”
For someone who had spent most of her life surviving inside the constraints of protective mechanisms, that shift didn’t feel like a breakthrough. It felt like a return.
“I didn’t just know myself deeper,” Verde explained. “Being alive felt different.”
Reclaiming completeness. Reclaiming presence in one’s own skin. Reclaiming yourself.
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The link between emotional trauma and chronic pain is well-established in psychiatry, with growing recognition that physical treatment alone often fails when there are underlying psychological factors at play. This article explores how MDMA-assisted psychotherapy helped one patient find lasting relief from chronic back pain by addressing trauma encoded in her body. Her experience of somatic release and integration reflects how psychological safety may help the body adapt its threat signals in ways that talk therapy alone may not.
