MDMA Therapy Changed My Life

After years of putting it off, I finally tried MDMA therapy. It wasn’t entirely what I expected. But it still changed my life.

I’ve done two sessions and plan on doing more for at least a couple of years to come. At the time of this writing, I’m in a period of what’s called integration. That means I’m taking the lessons I learned during my last session and finding ways to apply them to my daily life.

I’ll get to that later.

Before I tell you about my experience, I must preface this entire piece with a few disclaimers.

I’m writing this to add to the stories that those who are curious about learning more can read. I believe MDMA therapy — and psychedelic therapy as a whole — can bring healing to many. If my story can move the needle for at least one person, I consider that a success.

I’m not writing this with an agenda in mind. I don’t believe this kind of therapy is for everyone. There are many risks to consider before doing it. For starters, it’s illegal in most of the country. For a comprehensive understanding of the other risks, it’s best that I redirect you to what I consider the best resource on the topic: Dr. Dan Engle’s book, A Dose of Hope: A Story of MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy .

Dr. Dan is an actual professional who knows the science behind these treatments and has decades of experience and understanding in this space. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old man with a lot of trauma and a burning desire to heal it. I’ve done a lot of work in that regard. But I’m not a doctor, I’m not a psychologist, and I’m not by any standard definition of the word a professional in this space. In fact, I didn’t even finish college.

Perhaps I’m more like you, an ordinary person with an unordinary life story that has brought me to be curious about less traditional healing modalities, like MDMA therapy.

In this piece, I’ll explain why I did it, what it was like, and how it impacted me.

I’m not here to persuade you. I’m simply here to tell my story in the hope that it can bring healing to others who are experiencing the pain that I have. There are hundreds of tools to heal wounds with. MDMA is just another one.

One more thing before you read on — before I decided to use these medicines therapeutically, I used them recreationally. After the first therapeutic use, I completely stopped my recreational use. It’s important to understand that the two experiences — therapeutic and recreational — are very different. I would go as far as to say that they are not even in the same category. That is not to say one is better or worse. They simply serve different purposes.

1. How and Why I Decided to Do MDMA

I first learned about MDMA therapy from Tucker Max. He wrote a long piece about it much like this one, detailing his own experience.

That was back in 2018.

It took two years after that for me to finally jump into this space. But I didn’t start with MDMA. I started with Ketamine and then psilocybin mushrooms, but I didn’t have a professionally trained guide for those. I wrote a whole piece about my experience with Ketamine that you can read here . I also made a video about my psilocybin experience that you can watch here .

That was in 2020.

Then, as I entered into 2021 and a new romantic relationship, a bunch of my wounds resurfaced. I reached a new depth of rock bottom and felt that everything I had been doing to heal had helped, but only so much. I convinced myself that the only way out of this new mess I was in was to revisit medicine work. But if I was to truly dive deep into my core wounds, I would need the help of a professional.

I reached out to someone I knew that had done this before and asked them how I could get started. Here’s the important thing to know about the “how”.

Before I reached out, I spent a lot of time complaining about how “hard” it was to find someone to work with in this space. It was and still is illegal (at the time of this writing) and I used that as my excuse, even though I had a contact I could reach out to.

For me, it was never about “how” to start or where to find a guide. It was about being ready to. I sat on that contact for upwards of a year before I mustered up the courage to reach out. From there, setting up a session was easy.

I had to suffer long enough for my fear of staying the same to outweigh my fear of change.

2. How I Prepared For My First Session

The week before my first session was one of the most stressful weeks of 2021 for me. I wasn’t in the right headspace to properly prepare for an MDMA session. Life was asking a lot from me, and I didn’t know how best to create the time and space to also focus on my upcoming session.

So, in all honesty, I did very little to prepare.

I read Dr. Dan Engle’s aforementioned book. Years earlier, I also read another MDMA book, Trust Surrender Receive . So I was very educated on what an MDMA session was like, and in that sense, very prepared. I took the recommended vitamins and supplements and ate the recommended foods. I stayed away from violent media and pornography. I got eight to nine hours of sleep.

But that was about it.

3. The First Session

I took the first dose (125mg) with orange juice, put the eye shade on, and lied down on a bed. My guide sat in the room with me and put on some music. I meditated like this for a while and then took the second dose (75mg).

Two hours went by, most of which felt peaceful. There were none of the usual distractions I experience with meditation. I didn’t feel a desire to know how long it had been or any sort of physical discomfort distracting me from my thoughts.

Until I did.

My resistance started gradually in the form of skepticism. I asked myself if the experience I was having was worth the money I had paid. It was a lot of money for me. I could’ve done this for free at home, I thought.

I spent thirty minutes with these thoughts in my head, wondering why I wasn’t feeling any of the physiological effects of MDMA. Then I heard that same voice in my head offer a suggestion: “Ask your guide if this is normal. Bring her into the experience.”

Another voice in my head made a different suggestion: “Stop resisting. Let this experience be whatever it needs to be. If this is all you get to today, that’s OK.”

I listened to the first voice and said out loud: “So…uh…I’m not feeling much of the MDMA. Is that normal?”

My guide said: “It’s been a few hours. You should be cooking by now.”

I took off the blindfold and talked to my guide for what felt like an hour. He touched my chest and belly and encouraged me to feel the tightness in those areas. Tightness manifested by suppressed emotions. Then, he put his hands under my back and held me for a few minutes, cooing as he did.

After that I reluctantly agreed to return to myself for the last couple of hours. I felt strong love for my then girlfriend and deep gratitude and joy that she was in my life. I recalled some memories from childhood when my mom left me crying alone in public places.

Then I remembered times when I did that to ex-girlfriends. Times when I was so worried about what strangers would think that I abandoned my partners. I realized this must have been what my mom felt back then, when I needed her most.

Toward the end of the session I spoke to my guide about the experience. I wanted a better understanding of why I hadn’t felt the stuff I read about in the books. He introduced me to the concept of a gatekeeper, that voice in my head that judges my experiences to keep me safe. I learned that my gatekeeper tends to want to be “right”, often to protect me from feeling hopeless, and instead keep me feeling in control. As we talked, I recalled an incident that occurred a week prior.

My girlfriend had come over to spend the night. We were about to go to bed when I logged into my amazon author page to check if I had sold any more books. Ten copies of my memoir had been purchased one night ago. There was no information about the buyer, but I was worried it was my girlfriend’s mom, and that was reason for concern (another story for another time).

I sat there for a minute and debated whether or not to tell my girlfriend about it. I felt scared not knowing who had purchased them. Scenarios ran through my mind of all the different people that would buy my memoir in an attempt to hurt me. I felt powerless.

My gatekeeper jumped in and together, we picked a fight with my girlfriend. I brought her into my internal drama because I didn’t want to feel my uncomfortable emotions and instead, wanted to gain a sense of power over the situation. The exact same thing happened during my MDMA session. I brought my guide into my internal drama as a way of resisting whatever difficult emotions the MDMA brought up for me.

But my guide encouraged me when he said that, even this experience was an indicator that the MDMA had worked. What it did was show me this side of myself that I allow to rule over my life, and it helped me understand how deeply it affects my ability to experience people, places, and things, for what they are, and not for what they have been in my past.

I went home feeling torn because on one hand, I knew my guide was right that the MDMA had worked. But on the other hand, accepting that she was right meant taking responsibility for this gatekeeper and seeing how a lot of times I’m the one that creates conflict where there isn’t a need for it and then I blame the external world for my internal world.

One thing had proven true from the books I’d read — MDMA is not a magic pill; the important work comes afterward.

4. Integrating the First Session

Integration work boils down to one core statement: Make a healthier choice.

During an MDMA session, trauma comes to the surface. If I surrender to it, it provides me with important lessons I have yet to learn — or, integrate. It doesn’t do the integration work for me. It just shows me the work I have ahead. This is why you’ll often hear that integration work is more important than the medicine session itself.

If I want to integrate a lesson, that means I have to make a healthier choice in the face of that lesson.

Going back to the example with my amazon author page and the fight I picked with my girlfriend. There was a brief moment before I picked the fight with her when I felt my emotions bubble up. In that moment, I weighed my options. Option A was to pick a fight with her to avoid feeling powerless. Option B was to not involve her in my drama because it had nothing to do with her.

Pre-MDMA, most of the time I was faced with these situations, I chose option A, the gatekeeper. Post-MDMA, my integration work is to recognize when my gatekeeper starts to take over and learn to listen to what feels right in my gut, not in my mind. One way my guide suggested that I do this was by speaking to my gatekeeper.

Yes, out loud!

He suggested that when I notice him come in, I say, “Thanks for your input but if you want me to listen to you I need you to say that in a nicer way.”

After that first session, I was flooded with moments like these. They weren’t new and there weren’t more than usual, it was just that my perspective of them had shifted. For example, one night my girlfriend and I had a conversation that I felt triggered my fears of abandonment. Toward the end of it, she asked me if there was anything she could do, if there was anything I needed.

My gatekeeper said, “We can do this alone. Don’t burden her. You don’t actually need to express your needs right now. They’re not that important.”

My integrated self said, “Is there something you need? And can you express that to her?”

I realized I did have a need, I expressed it to her, and she met it instantly. Then I felt my whole body relax, almost like it gave out a big sigh, and thanked me for acknowledging it. I felt more connected to my girlfriend and more capable of showing up for her and for me moving forward.

It felt incredible to watch how different my life could be if only I made healthier choices, if only I had that five second pause before reacting, to respond, instead.

In a way, MDMA gave me a window of time to notice how much of life I was missing out on.

5. How I Prepared For My Second Session

My life looked very different three months after my first session, which is when I did my second one.

My relationship had ended, my best friend had moved away, and doctors had found a cancerous tumor in my dad’s brain. I felt a ton of grief. I reconnected with my support network and also with myself. I read a lot of books about trauma, journaled every day, went on at least four nature walks per week, cried almost daily, and rediscovered the art of being creative for the sake of being creative, without an agenda. I avoided consuming too much media and tried to create as much empty space in my days to sit with myself.

The goal of preparation, I learned this time, is to make room for myself to just be, because being allows me to go into my subconscious and not get distracted by the external world.

6. The Second Session

I combined MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms. I started with the first dose of MDMA and sat with it for thirty minutes. Then I took the second dose and sat with that for over an hour.

This time I felt it — everything I expected to feel the first time around: joy, love, warm vibrations in my body, connection to myself and the world, peace. I was just starting to get on the wave when I stopped to take the psilocybin — five grams of it.

For an hour after that, I rode that wave of positivity. It was like all of the fodder I create to sever my connections to people went away. I connected to the purest form of love that I believe exists, the highest resonance of it — the kind of love that we don’t decide to give or take, but rather, just are.

I sorted through different memories with a new perspective — one of gratitude. I remembered my gatekeeper, the one I now had a name for: Hank. I remembered how afraid Hank was the first time around and how, because of that fear, he felt it best to protect (deprive) me of this experience.

I held Hank in mind and thanked him for trusting me this time, for allowing both of us to feel such overwhelming positive emotion. I let him know that we were safe and that I was going to take care of us now.

From there, I experienced what I imagine high self-esteem feels like. I went over my relationship to my ex and rather than recalling all of the ways that I wasn’t there for her, all of the ways that I am responsible for the relationship ending, and all of the times that were sad or difficult for us, I recalled and connected with the positives.

How I made us home-cooked meals often; how I showed her that I cared about her and treated her with love; how genuine I was; how stable and supportive I was to her; how safe and predictable I showed up in our relationship; and how nurturing it could feel to be around me.

It was like all of my positive traits made themselves known at once, like someone pressed the pause button on my self-hatred and said, “Here, you deserve to also think about all of the ways that you do show up for yourself.” And not even just to think about them, but to actually feel them, too.

This must be what it feels like to fully accept myself.

Slowly but surely, once my ego felt safe in its cocoon of love, the trauma started to surface.

At first it was confusing and all over the place. It was like my mind was sorting through different images, trying to identify which were mine. Through this filtering process, I started to feel physical and emotional discomfort. The images were graphic and violent. I got that icky feeling one gets when they read a story or watch a movie that involves sexual abuse of children.

My body braced itself for something it didn’t want to feel. I saw my parents and my childhood home and felt an undertone of darkness emanating from them, like being followed by someone late at night on an unlit sidewalk. I stayed with the feeling and didn’t resist it. I surrendered to the medicine and trusted that it was trying to show me something important. It took a while for that to happen, but eventually it did.

My legs started to shake and my body clammed up. My arms tensed and my hands contracted. On its own, my body tightened. Have you ever been taking a dump and pushing so hard that your face turns red? That was what my whole body looked and felt like! And it lasted for about an hour.

My guide noticed my energy shift and approached me. He asked if I was OK.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m seeing some images of sexual trauma come up. But I’m OK. There’s a layer of separation between me and what I’m seeing.”

“Can I hold your hand?” he asked.

I nodded and held his hand as best I could with how tight my fingers were. Then he put one hand on my chest and one hand on my belly. When he did this, I felt a surge of energy coursing through me, like a current of electricity. It bounced around between neck, shoulders, chest, belly, and groin. Each time the energy stopped at one of those points, I felt physical pain in that area.

I know that sounds crazy. It still feels that way to me as I write it. I’ve never felt anything like it in my life.

As he was doing this, he said, “There’s a lot of blocked energy that’s trying to get out. Let’s give it a place to go. Take some deep breaths. You’re OK now. You’re safe.”

I breathed into the pain. The images I was being shown started to crystallize. It wasn’t one specific memory, but rather an aggregate of all the different times I experienced the same event.

I was thirteen again, lying sideways on my couch, naked. It was late at night. My dad and older brother were asleep in their bedrooms and I was in the open living room area. In front of me was my laptop and webcam. I could hear an older man’s voice through my headphones, commanding me to follow his instructions, which varied from hurting to pleasuring myself.

I remembered how stressed I would feel, worried about when the next time would be that one of the men I spoke to regularly would get upset at me for not being available all of the time. I worried that their threats might not be empty and that one day a video of me doing these sexual acts would appear on the internet for all of my community to see. I remembered how nobody in my life knew that I was doing this, and I felt the deep sadness of leading a double life as a teen.

These memories weren’t new to me. I wrote a whole book where I talk about a bunch of them. But I’d never experienced them like this — filled with pain.

Intellectually I knew these events had happened. I just hadn’t caught up emotionally.

After a couple more hours of this, my body gave out. I felt drained and shook. My brain was still running full-speed ahead with its desire to process and understand what had just happened and what it all meant, but it was failing to make any of its theories stick. I talked to my guide about it and found some comfort there. He hugged me and explained what might be going on for me as best he could.

But the combination of my traumatic memory having come up and my drained serotonin made it hard for me to really take in what he said.

When I got home I had another strong emotional release. I couldn’t run away from the events of my past anymore. And I sure as hell couldn’t run away from the emotions, either.

I felt sad and alienated and I cried as a thought repeated itself in my head.

I was sexually abused as a child.

7. Integrating The Second Session

It took two days for my body to feel “normal” again — that is, to stop vomiting and getting headaches. My muscles remained sore for over a week, especially the ones in my forearm.

Not only was I out of sync physically, my mental and emotional states were also off. I was experiencing a reckoning with myself, bringing to awareness a part of me that I had buried.

I didn’t do much the first two days. My stomach was still upset so I ate very little and drank lots of green juice. Thinking of my session made me nauseous, so I could only journal for short amounts of time. I sat in silence for extended periods and let my thoughts breathe. I listened to music and I cried when emotions would surface.

I spoke to a therapist the very next day and released some more sadness with her. Other than that, I tried not to talk about my experience. It was recommended to me that I don’t talk about it for at least a week after the fact, and that as best I can, I try to avoid assigning meaning to it for the same amount of time.

On day three I brought out the paint markers and canvases I had recently purchased and explored a new area of my creativity. The long hours and single focus felt soothing. They gave my mind relief from so much thinking about the same thing.

On day three I also did contrast therapy (ice bath and sauna) to heal some of the physical pain.

On days four and five I was able to go on nature walks again, which helped me get back to processing my experience in an environment that felt nurturing and free, not the small confines of my apartment.

On day six I got body work done. When it was over, my body was vibrating and emanating warmth up to and out of my cheeks.

Part of integration is finding ways to say thank you to my body for going through what it did. The body work really accomplished that. During it, I found myself asking: “Why the hell don’t I do stuff like this more often? Why do I dedicate so much time and energy to draining myself, but very little to restoration?”

I realized I have a limiting belief around self-care, almost a stigma about it. Yes it’s nice and all, but do too much of it and you’re weak!

On day six was also when I had my integration session with my guide. It was ninety minutes over zoom. It’s basically talk therapy but honed in on the stuff that came up during the session. A lot of what we talked about this time around was shadow — all of the parts of me that I keep hidden from myself and project outward unto those around me.

When I was a teenager, I made the decision to seek out connection with older men; I allowed them to do the things they did to me; I did know how I felt about it and I was the one who rejected my voice of reason. That voice of reason never got to see the light of day. It became a part of my shadow.

And how did it manifest?

In anyone who rejected my story.

When I rejected the idea that I didn’t respect myself when I engaged in these behaviors, I got angry at people who implied that that was what I did.

“Eventually,” my guide said. “If you get to a place of acceptance around this, your psyche will no longer need to project it. It projects because it wants to be seen. When you bring this into awareness and recognize it in yourself, you give it the space it needs.”

It’s important to note that taking responsibility here did NOT mean blaming myself. Blame is a very different thing, and frankly, it’s not very useful.

Blame implies that it’s my fault.

Taking responsibility means I understand why I did the things I did, I forgive myself for doing them, and I move forward with this awareness in mind.

When I take responsibility for the role I played in my abuse, I gain agency over the role it will play in my present.

There were healthier choices available to me at that time, and recognizing that allows me to choose them now. Which is basically what integration is all about.

But I first had to go back to that moment and feel all of the emotions I thought I could bypass. Otherwise I wouldn’t have felt the impact of my decisions and, therefore, wouldn’t have the desire to change the way they show up in my present.

Here are some more unedited notes from my integration session:

• When I suppress emotions, they manifest in others around me as triggers.
• There WAS a part of me that knew what I was doing back then, but I compartmentalized it so that I COULD feel the love and connection from older men.
• Feel the sadness from wounds of abandonment but don’t get stuck there (victim mindset).
• Don’t create a set of rules (good, bad, do, don’t). Instead, develop an awareness and you’ll make new decisions that way.
• Shame comes from two places: perpetrators and from knowing I didn’t respect myself back then.
• Re-parenting can look like giving myself the things I feel I was lacking as a child.

8. Where To Go From Here?

Everyone has their own approach to this kind of work. Some say start with MDMA and gently move to the more intense medicines. Others go straight to Ayahuasca. Some make it their life’s journey while others do it a few times and then move on.

I started doing it with the belief that it had to be done a certain way or else it wouldn’t work. But I’m beginning to learn that everyone approaches this work differently, and at different stages in life. Personally, trusting my intuition is the best way for me to do this. I don’t have a set amount of sessions I want to do before I stop. I haven’t even decided whether or not I will stop. I have a general idea of the core issues I want to work on and openness to discovering more along the way.

I do find each session incredibly draining, so I space them out at least a few months apart. Basically, I see each session as the start of a new project. I don’t want to start a new project until I feel done with the previous one, or at least the first iteration of it.

But I do plan on doing more of these. On my own time.

P.S. My new memoir, You Get Back Up: How I Healed from Rock Bottom , is now available. It details my road to rock bottom and what I did to pull myself out of it. This article was repurposed from there. If you liked it, and want to read more, you can buy it by clicking here.