One of the core tenets of psilocybin therapy is working with past traumas. Traumas – regardless their source, timeframe or type – are responsible for much human suffering, including symptoms of that suffering such as depression, anxiety, and addiction.

What is Trauma?
Trauma is not a universal event, in the sense that events are not intrinsically traumatic, but our responses to those events, can be. Trauma is an event that happens to you (once, over a period of time, or just a set of circumstances) which is so upsetting that it overwhelms your ability to cope. For many who experience an intensely traumatic event or time period, it has such a catastrophic effect that we separate our life timelines into “before” the trauma and “after”. We may also fragment our life timelines by removing the traumatic memory, storing it in a separate place in the brain and thereby rejecting and repressing its presence in our day to day identity and memory constructs.

Examples of trauma include, but are not limited to:
– Experiencing or observing physical, sexual, and emotional abuse
– Childhood neglect
– Having a family member with a mental health or substance use disorder
– Experiencing or witnessing violence in the community or while serving in the military
– Poverty or systemic discrimination

Working with and healing/releasing trauma involves working with the limbic system to release this stored/imprinted memory and association. You can’t think or journal your way out of healing from trauma (though those things help to understand and mentally process it). The trauma will be stored in the limbic system until it can be processed and released from there.

For some, this can be a frustrating experience. It can feel like the trauma or ‘demons’ exist inside a hidden room in our brains with no doors or windows through which to access it. Many recipients of psilocybin therapy have stated that while on psilocybin, it felt like a door to this room was created and opened, thereby allowing access and the ability to finally process and release the emotions stored there.

If you have trauma, or suspect you have trauma (sometimes trauma can happen before we are of an age to remember, or our minds can actually ‘black out’ the memories), working with a trauma-informed Facilitator will be crucial.

A trauma-informed clinic, facilitator, or any other mental health provider will never ask “what’s wrong with you?” That is the purview of traditional western medicine – something must be ‘wrong’, and medicines and surgeries can ‘fix or cure it’. Such approaches take the healing out of your hands, leaving you helpless and at the mercy of a ‘system’.

A trauma-informed approach instead recognizes the innate wholeness of each human being – you are not ‘broken’ – and it empathetically asks instead, “What happened to you? And how can we help you return to balance?”

A non trauma informed system tends to punish, or blame adult actions. A trauma informed provider will still hold clients accountable for their adult actions, but will give them time and space to process what happened without adding extra guilt and shame. 

Core Elements of a Trauma-Informed Approach
(Fractal Soul implements all of these)
– Patient empowerment: We utilize individuals’ strengths to empower them in their healing
– Choice: We inform clients regarding treatment options so they can choose the options they prefer (healing is always client-led, not led by us)
– Collaboration: We maximize collaboration between our staff, clients, their families (if applicable and appropriate) and other healthcare providers on their team
– Safety: We develop an environment and activities that ensure clients’ physical and emotional safety; and 
– Trustworthiness: We create clear expectations with clients about what proposed therapy/sessions/health coaching or other approaches entail, who will provide the services, and how program participation will play out

A trauma-informed psilocybin service center will be well-versed in creating a trusting, non-threatening environment. Feeling physically, socially, or emotionally unsafe may cause extreme anxiety in a person who has experienced trauma. Therefore, creating a safe environment is fundamental to successfully engaging clients.

Clients also need a voice in their own treatment planning and an active role in the decision-making process. In traditional medical/psychiatric care, clinicians often dictate the course of action without much opportunity for patient feedback or dialogue. In a trauma-informed holistic healing approach, clients are not only actively engaged in their care, they actually lead and own the process, with the medicine and the staff as supportive guides.

Traditional Trauma Treatment Approaches have included:
– Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE Therapy) 
– Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
– Seeking Safety
– Attachment, Self-Regulation and Competency (ARC)
– Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

How Psychedelic Therapy Addresses Trauma
– Establishing baseline safety in ‘Setting’ – you are safe in this experience (this environment, these people, this medicine). Getting settled into the community, taking a small microdose to start, and building trust and confidence in your Facilitator are all steps to establish this safety.
– Honoring the emotions and experience from that place of safety
– Being able to finally process and release the overwhelming emotions from the altered state of consciousness that makes the trauma seem less overwhelming (often like you are looking at what happened as a bystander or different person, a witness)
– Deep acknowledgment that what happened to you is not your fault and should not be associated with self blame, guilt, shame, or self hatred
– Reinforcing messages of love and worthiness, of sacredness (human life, consciousness)
– Bringing the traumatic memories and emotions back into the integrated holistic timeline of one’s life (we often splinter them off as a fragment in an attempt to keep them separate from the rest of our life and memories, which represses them and often strengthens negative symptoms)

The end goal is o accept that the trauma is something that happened to you, without the associated overwhelming emotions attached to them. We don’t want to forget or erase the memory, but rather to see the trauma from a neutral point of view and apply any potential lessons, learnings or insights from what happened. Psychedelic medicine helps you do this.

Back in the normal world, clients work on integrating their healing by learning loving self-discipline and loving reparenting of themselves, which builds feelings of safety, competence and underscores the message ‘I am worth effort’ and ‘I am worth showing up for’.

Psychedelic sessions also Increase feelings of connection vs disconnection – to family (partner, kids), to community, to friends, to workplace/coworkers, to nature and earth. It allows the brain to spend more time in Active Consciousness, and less time in Programmed/Autopilot Subconsciousness. And finally, it gives you the empowerment via ‘having a choice’ of what to think, believe and feel, vs feeling stuck or helpless – a victim.

A Final Note: Trauma-Informed Psilocybin Facilitators – Must do their own Work

Psilocybin facilitators – just like health coaches, counselors, psychologists, etc – are human beings too. Many in the “helping professions” may have their own personal trauma histories – in fact, these experiences may have been what inspired them to help others. This makes them uniquely suited to understand and empathize with clients who are suffering with post-traumatic stress, depression, anxiety and addiction. But it also has the potential to be exacerbated by working with others who have experienced trauma. This is why it is crucial for psilocybin facilitators and other healers to have done their own trauma release and Shadow work before assisting others. Awareness and conscious boundaries are also essential to being able to provide high quality, compassionate care.