Psychedelic Psychotherapy

What you think of as you— your rational mind, your thoughts, beliefs, your story—is actually a very small part of who you are. It is the tip of the iceberg you can see floating above the surface of the water. Your subconscious mind— the part of you that is non-rational, non-verbal, non-cognitive, that is far older, more primal and shares the same nervous system as other mammals—plays a much larger role in your emotions, mood, symptoms, and reactivity. This is the much larger part of the iceberg below the surface of the water. This is where your core programing resides. We see glimpses of the subconscious mind through dreaming, meditation and naturally occurring altered states of consciousness but perhaps the most significant access we have to the subconscious mind is through psychedelic medicines. 

Most of modern psychotherapy has focused on the explicit, visible, conscious, thought based aspects of how we function for the simple reason that cognition and behavior are easy to measure and easier for clinicians to work with. Contrast that to forces that exist deep in your subconscious mind that are non-rational, difficult to see, difficult to measure and difficult to tame. In doing so, the field of psychotherapy has mostly missed the subconscious mind: the part of us where the core programing resides.

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Submerged beneath the surface of our awareness, it contains our autonomic nervous system responses to stress and trauma, as well as non-verbal, pre-verbal and dissociated memories that deeply shape who we are and what we think about our world. The subconscious holds our core beliefs– some of which we might recognize but many of which we would be surprised to learn are actually what we believe to be true. We tend to live in and identify with the tip of the iceberg. We think we are our thoughts, beliefs, values, our story about ourselves but it is the subconscious that runs the show. 

There is clear evidence that symptoms of anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other mental health conditions are actually autonomic nervous system responses. In other words, our mental health symptoms have more to do with our subconscious biological body responses than our thoughts. The fact that these emotional and mood phenomena are fundamentally non-verbal in nature is consistent with the experience most of us have that talk therapy is not very effective at resolving mental health disturbances. We may learn effective coping strategies and tools to manage anxiety, panic, depression and numbing states but we don’t resolve them by understanding them or with better insight. Have you ever known anyone to effectively talk their way out of a panic attack or a depressed state or addiction? Again, we might temporarily distract ourselves but the state returns because it is deeper than thought and language.