Questions to ask for integration

Post trip day 1-2:

• I had a dream, unsure if this was right before the trip or after the trip, but I had a normal family and we were spending time together. I had a couple dreams about my mom before the trip too, such as me telling her "wow I never felt safe around you like this" and she was normal.
• I want to ghost a lot of people in my life, almost all of them except one friend I respect and admire, and my military unit. I was already feeling like this but the MDMA amplifies it more.
• On the other hand, I want to go back to getting more clients that I don't personally know. I think I like the emotional distance in my relationships and not letting someone get to know me too well.
• I want to move back to California again
• I also knew this, but I am reminded of the idea that I am only with my family for money. Otherwise I would've left them again long time ago. I didn't care about money, but now I do after seeing how hard dad worked for it and how much money makes a difference. I want to be able to use that money to make my life better and provide for my future kids.
• A reason why I haven't drawn yet is because I haven't hit rock bottom yet. I am not desperate enough like a cornered animal yet.
• All the strongest men have intentionally bound themselves to something. They put boundaries on their own freedoms.
• I miss sex work and the job gave me something to take care of, and the money was good, but I know it might've been a distraction in my life at expense of other things like art, and a way for me to run from something (my real self).
• Headache from jaw and neck tension, probably the MDMA.

Day 3

• I am tired and done with playing a role for everyone else. I try to be the sibling my sister expects and wants (or needs), but I am tired. What about me? Being the friend that other people in my life sees me as, but I am tired and I don't respect and admire them enough as people to keep putting up with it.
• I realized I can't keep playing this role in others lives without destroying myself in the process, and it's been destroying me this whole time. And since the performance isn't authentic, I am not doing a good job anyway. I am not fully present with people. I have to cut everyone off who expects me to be a certain way. Get myself cornered and desperate enough, hit rock bottom to start taking action and draw and work out and be myself. This doesn't count cutting off my military unit, they don't have social expectations of me anyway and it's more in align with what I am about. But everyone else can be dropped.
• I already knew this before sex work but during sex work it made me realize even more that doing my art and working on my art persona will probably be the best way to find genuine friends and find a partner.
• I am thinking of reaching out to my niece's mom to ask for my niece's info so I can put her as the beneficiary of my assets in case I die in some random bullshit like a car accident or surgery. My next of kins are a bunch of entitled vultures and I don't want them getting my shit. My niece on the other hand can use the resources.
• I realized my ego gets bigger on shrooms and I get more "selfish" on MDMA, when the typical experience is to do the opposite. Maybe that means I am supposed to have a bigger ego and be more selfish, and my sober version has been conditioned to have a lower ego and be "unselfish" by the external world and that it's not good for me. I already knew this but the drug experience just made me think of it more. And this conditioning to be a doormat comes from my family, and this is a reason to continue staying away from them.
• I am starting to think that there is no answer for the GD, and the drugs won't help me find an answer because there is none. But the drugs can help me work on other things, like chronic pain from manifested trauma. But not GD, that I was probably just born with it. There is no answer. There is no "why".
• "Self help" in the way that many people think of it is bullshit. Often there are things that you can only get from other people, and it's fucked up to deny this to ourselves and pretend we don't need anyone and that we can provide everything to ourselves. Would you perform surgery on yourself? Rugged individualism isn't something to admire or a goal, it's a last resort because you were failed by everything else.
• After what I said about one priest during the trip, I realize I need a new priest.
• It occurred to me that I have never had a dream where I was a parent, at least one I remember. I had several dreams where I was told I will have many children, but not dreams of the children themselves.
• The things that were making me anxious, such as spending my savings and not having a job, isn't making me so anxious right now. It feels nice to be disinterested or not be bothered. I know I am suicidal, but I don't feel the urgency to kill myself or the stinging pain of living with myself. MDMA is almost like an anaesthetic.

Day 4

• I had a lot of dreams last night, and was still tired in the morning. I had a dream about my friend who I respect, just watching her in her daily life.
• I've been taking my time and pretty slow when it comes to working towards my goals. I used to beat myself over it for procrastinating. But maybe it's not procrastinating, my body and mind resisted and took it slow for a reason - and that's ok. More time to heal.
• I think the reason why my sister's relationship and marriage choice, and her general worldview, concerns me unlike the rest of my family is because I am deciding whether to let my sister into my life and how close I will let her get. If we're closely involved, I don't want to deal with her bullshit because it will spill over to me. That's why it bothers me.
• Today is when I start feeling more affectionate towards some of the people in my life. I am very appreciative of my military leadership and the chaplains. I spoke to a chaplain yesterday. I feel bad for my dad and sister.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/mdmatherapy/comments/14a10er/how_many_sessions_did_it_take_to_break_through/jo8dz3m/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/mdmatherapy/comments/kfdc16/how_many_sessions_did_it_take_for_cptsd/ggy0f4d/
• Did pelvic floor exam today, and PT said my muscles were a lot more relaxed than when we first started and the last exam. I am sure it's the shrooms/MDMA.

Day 5

• Vivid dreams every night since MDMA.
• I've been staying inside and lazy the past several days since MDMA. I would not have been able to handle a job the past several days.

Day 6

• Vivid dream last night, and feel tired and can sleep more the past several days.
• I think it will take a while until I have any memories pop up or any new insights. Right now most of the work is just somatic work being done. It's somatic healing that's happening.
• Perhaps 5-10 sessions including psilo trips. I am looking at Amanitas because I realized low dosing of them helps with pain relief as well, and they might be doing somatic work as well.
• I was about to get endoscopy because I struggled with swallowing pills. I kept pushing it off. I realized it's easier to swallow pills after doing MDMA. I am guessing I was choked up due to tension in my esophagus, same reason I can't breath deeply.

Day 8

• Did 0.18g APEs, tired for rest of the day
• I realized that the recruiting office people are actually pretty happy to see me. I was perhaps imagining their disdain this whole time, for whatever reason.
• Maybe there is no answer. The only answer is "keep doing what you're doing"
• I will have to accept that I may not ever really have genuine friends nor can get close to people, at least anytime soon. It's like a paraplegic accepting that he will be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and that others will isolate him. Except I am not a paraplegic.
• I like friendships with a bit of distance.
• I will have to accept that I will be alone for a while.

Day 8

• Working as a fitness instructor and the idea of showing up to the studio makes me want to just kill myself. There is nothing wrong with the studio, the community has been supportive and have nice people. But it's not the place where I feel I belong.
• I need to quit teaching, it's just a distraction getting in the way of my own fitness and art.
• I am thinking of an old lady who took me in one time, and how even though she gave me a lot of advice and wisdom, she was also mean and troubled in her own way. I already knew that and didn't take it personally, but it just dawned on me some of the things she said was possibly her trying to cut me down when I didn't read it that way in the past. I've been thinking of some ways of how people mistreated me in the past.
• I was thinking about my NCOs in the past and what they did right, what they did wrong, what I will do, what I will NOT do. A lot of people carry their traumas into the military and make it other people's problems. I remember some NCOs crossing boundaries and airing their dirty laundry to their troops, or others who brought their childhood traumas with them into the workplace.
• You cannot heal in the same environment that make you sick
• How do you think your situation will look like in 20 years?

Day 11

• Thinking of dropping all the "friends" in my life. Just leave everyone. Also, cis people are fucking stupid and they only care about their own immediate problems. So many people lack empathy.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/asktransgender/comments/32nytu/maybe_im_not_trans_maybe_im_just_lonely_and_the/cqdntmw/
• I feel like I don't have much longer to live, so I am not concerned about retirement, getting a "good job that will help me have enough in the future". There's no point working in an empty job just to be able to live longer, just to live longer.
• Been thinking that its either go back to military, or commit suicide. And suicide seems like a legitimate option for me, a way out. I was thinking of what to do with all my shit. I was thinking of leaving it to this one friend, the one I dreamed about a while ago.

Day 12

• Whenever I bring up personal issues and struggles and my sister coats it with "well its not so bad, other people have it worse, our life is relatively good" and the toxic gratitude and toxic positivity is one of the reasons why I know I can't be fully open with her. This is probably how she deals with her own struggles and reality too, by coping and gaslighting herself. That exact logic fucks up your life up for years. The whole "well I can function" and "well life is hard" and "I'll feel better after x" - except x never comes and even though you know you're not yourself, you think "we'll it's not so bad". Except even a low level pain over years erodes you, and while you do grow accustomed to it that's not the same thing as it not being there - and eventually you get to a place where you are your depression and then you never get help. You deserve to thrive - survival is fine, but thriving is achievable.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/therapists/comments/15gjb3p/cbt_is_gaslighty/
• The general thought process about it is that there comes a point where you're encouraging the client to "reframe" fact into fiction. It's my perspective that this is done when CBT would be inappropriate as a treatment modality - such as with childhood trauma, or with poverty or racism. We cannot "reframe" a person out of a very harmful experience, and to attempt to do so is invalidating and can perpetuate the harm.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/TalkTherapy/comments/mb1rto/cbt_feels_like_gaslighting_myself/
• https://old.reddit.com/r/PsychedelicTherapy/comments/qviab1/psychedelic_best_suited_for_somatic_release/hurw8i1/
• PSIP therapy (Psychedelic Somatic Interactive Psychotherapy)
• PSIP is suitable for any trauma, but it's uniquely suited for pre-verbal childhood trauma and attachment wounding.. deep brain stuff. Psilocybin/MDMA accomplished a lot my first couple years, mostly processing material from my adult life. When the old, lower-brain stuff became front and center, psilocybin became hellish. It was asking me to go somewhere my psyche just couldn't afford to go, and I'd go into a sort of miserable loop. Or, in PSIP they talk about people in that situation becoming outright sober no matter how much they took, b/c they're dissociating while on the medicine. PSIP has strategies for working with that dissociation.
  
  
• Asking people to use preferred pronouns in undignifying. You shouldn't have to ask for basic shit like this or ask people to view and treat you a certain way.
• CBT is predicated on the idea that the way you think things are determines your behavior. You want to behave well so you need to think about things in a positive way. There is no room for normal lows in a person's life in CBT. When your circumstances are such that a normal response would require grief, pain, depression, sadness or time, you are to reframe them. There are some circumstances that cannot be reframed in a positive way. Not until you work through them and accept them and all the normal "negative" feelings that go along with it. I mean really, CBT is useless for dealing with losses, major life changes, death, rape, abuse, trauma, PTSD... that bullshit is really for breaking bad habits, circular thinking, beating pessimism, not major real life events.
  
  
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychotherapyLeftists/comments/17yis51/the_oppressive_harms_of_cbt_cognitivebehavioral/kaj309b/
• What most practitioners don't understand, is that a "delusion" is an attempted solution, it's meant to be a fix for something, and regardless of how unusual it might be, it is serving some function. It has helped something. A good practitioner will dive into this aspect deeply, and encourage exploration of this "delusion", so that it may get reconnected with its causal trauma underlying it. That way the person may finally confront & encounter their full suffering, which will then allow for their resolution & healing to finally take place.
• The belief didn't come from nowhere. It's contextually situated within (and caused by) a lived history of social-material & cultural-historical phenomena, and now serves a function. So before trying to get rid of anything, it's important to first understand what purpose that thing serves, and to listen to what it's trying to tell people. Then traversing is always better then coping. Coping is merely a form of normative avoidance for the purpose of daily functioning. Traversing is going through the obscured thing that sits at the root of the person's suffering. So traversing involves diving deeper into the painful thing, and immersing oneself in it to a greater extent. It's about encountering & confronting. CBT as a protocol wouldn't allow for this.
  
  
• My biological disposition and disorders may be originating from environmental trauma while in my mother's womb. If I can target the prenatal trauma that I may still carry, then my body might be able to normal, and maybe this might fix my dysphoria. I do believe I was born with it.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychedelicTherapy/comments/12yt62g/is_there_a_psip_diy_protocol/jhq0s7z/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychedelicTherapy/comments/ufxbna/after_trying_the_psip_model_cannabis_somatic/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/PsychedelicTherapy/comments/18uo092/can_cannabis_assisted_somatic_therapy_psip_really/
• Oh yeah, I was hypersexual as a child. As a 4 year old even. Teachers thought I got molested. Hmmmm. I used to masturbate and have sexual ideas. I wonder where a little kid would learn that from.
• Today is July 4th. I stayed home all day and just relaxed with shrooms, muscaria, and marathoning through Dr Katz. I heard fireworks outside but was indifferent to it being a holiday. I could've gone up to the sky lounge to watch fireworks, didn't want to be around people though.

Day 13

• One of the first things I think of after waking up and laying in bed is whether to keep my sister in my life or not. I don't think she brings the best out of me and I get passive aggressive and condescending towards her because she says some things I can't hide my disdain for. The way she says things and the way she thinks. I also might be biased and less patient with her due to our sour history compared to how I might tolerate someone else. I also can tell she doesn't think very highly of me and makes it obvious in how she talks to me and treats me, and she is so judgmental towards people (it could be coming from pain and insecurity on her end). She has this need to assume the worst in people. Do I really want to stay with her 3 months and be around her? No. The way she talks about our "sister in law" and our cousins give me in the impression that she will blame me for any struggles I have instead of being there for me, and that this isn't a woman I can trust to feel safe around. Also she is creepy as shit.
• Often times, "therapy" is harmful for children because it's often used as a means to control the child's behavior to fit the parents' expectations, and the parents are the ones paying so the therapists and the system has to accomodate the parents' desires and not the child's needs. I noticed that people who had therapy since children were more troubled, and their home environments weren't healthy in the first place and I wonder if the "therapy" actually did more harm. Especially CBT. It gaslights children to doubt their own reality and instincts that were designed to protect them.
  
  
• “It has been said that if child abuse and neglect were to disappear today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual would shrink to the size of a pamphlet in two generations, and the prisons would empty. Or, as Bernie Siegel, MD, puts it, quite simply, after half a century of practicing medicine, ‘I have become convinced that our number-one public health problem is our childhood’.” (Childhood Disrupted, pg.228).
• https://www.pacesconnection.com/blog/mitigating-intergenerational-dysfunction-legacy-through-knowledge-and-awareness
  
  
• CBT is not for trauma or people who have real problems. CBT is for situational anxiety (caused by cognitive errors, not trauma), some amount of self control, and building a set of self-awareness tools.
• https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/l6jwm6/cbt_is_fucking_stupid_and_is_in_no_way_helpful/gl30l0u/
• Fuck CBT. You can't seriously sit there and tell someone that feeling loneliness and feeling hated is a cognitive distortion when said person is autistic, just aged out of the system where help could be given to be placed with a family, literally has no family members either because they are dead, or are one of the abusers in hospice. I grew up with no parents. One absent, one dead. I genuinely only have two relatives that I can contact and one of them is my kid sibling who isn't old enough to have these discussions. Some people are treated badly by society and instead of telling them its their fault, maybe have some empathy and realize it isn't "wrong think" that makes some people be alone or sad. I'm disgusted with the state of current "therapies"
• https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/15gshaj/most_therapists_are_crazy_and_not_emotionally/
• Only wear the masks you're comfortable wearing

Post journal

• https://old.reddit.com/r/CPTSD_NSCommunity/comments/ungaew/tretrauma_releasing_exercises_ruined_my_life_i/i88md1o/