I recently watch a movie called Manchester by the Sea. The acting is amazing and the overall quality is very high. But I don’t recommend the movie. At all. I think the movie in its confusion and ignorance promotes a very dangerous story. It portrays deeply, deeply traumatized people stumbling around causing harm to themselves and others without any recognition that it doesn’t have to be like that. It is caught in the harmful story that there is nothing you can do to heal trauma. It is as if the actors portrayed burn victims just making do with their festering wounds and just accepting that it had to be that way. Hospitals?!? Pffft. As if. Real people just suffer. This is dangerous, ignorant nonsense. But it is understandable. Up to now that is all we knew. We have only recently rediscovered what Purple knew all along — we can heal trauma. But we have to first accept that this is even possible.
I keep on coming back to The Body Keeps the Score (you are going to read this book right? 😉) because it is so foundational. Bessel van der Kolk does such a good job of showing how pervasive and damaging trauma is, but then gives us such hope! The second half lists many, many different promising approaches to trauma. Pretty much all of them have you reconnect to your body. A number of them involve coordinated group work (eg. theatre, dancing together, singing in a choir). And they are helping! I personally have seen how just one of the listed therapies, MDMA, can dramatically help. Probably the biggest work we have to do here is to simply get the word out. If I could rewrite Manchester by the Sea I would show the main character going into MDMA treatment and follow them as they go up and down through the difficult healing process. It would be cathartic to watch — lots of crying involved — and I promise you very compelling. People need to know this healing is possible. To stop telling ourselves that awful, false story that there is nothing you can do. There is an urgent need to scale up these treatments and make them much cheaper. They need to be available to everyone — cost should not be a blocker. This has to be our priority. But how we do it is important too.
Once MDMA becomes fully legal again there will undoubtedly be a huge number of commercial MDMA clinics opening up. Plans for this are already well under way. The need for healing trauma is so huge that maybe this is OK — we need as many people treated as soon as possible. But we would also lose something very important. Currently Medicine work is usually carried out as a Shamanic healing. The healers are taught to respect the indigenous lineage of this work. And much of this healing work is done in groups. This is how it used to be done way back — this work connects us to our Purple heritage. And you don’t have to take a (currently) illegal substance to do this work. HAI also is a kind of Medicine work. HAI gets you to much the same space as taking MDMA only HAI does it naturally by increasing oxytocin and the like. When I first started doing MDMA work it felt very familiar. It was kind of like I had already done a lot of that work. It turns out I had — I just had done it at HAI workshops. But most people don’t even know how powerful healing in a group can be. How do we spread the word? Include it as part of general education. That is a pretty big topic — I will come back to that later, but basically we need to really expand the scope of what we teach our children to include things like healing and group work.
I get so caught up in the hard parts of change but I don’t want you to miss out on the joyous parts too. There is one more super important aspect of Change that I haven’t talked about yet. Creativity. Creativity is the heart and soul of the Change principle. It is something to cultivate in ourselves. It is what sparks that joyous realization of Wait! I have an idea! What about…And then a new world of possibility opens up. Remember how good it feels to dive into a new project that you are excited about? How you were buzzing with all these ideas of what you could do? Creativity lights us up. This also is a vital part of Change. Besides being a wonderful and necessary thing all by itself it also turns out to be an important tool for healing. The The Body Keeps the Score recognizes things like expressive art and writing as trauma healing methods. We need to encourage our children’s natural creativity all through their years of schooling not just in kindergarten. And we should not just teach individual creativity but we should teach group creativity as well. For when all voices are heard and valued a group can become much bigger than its parts. And a group as a whole can have a joyous creativity of its own — have you ever felt that? Let’s go to that next.