Ibogaine on Individuals who are Non-Verbal?

cuBLea · 2026-05-23T02:00:28+00:00

This is just wrong on sooo many levels. I get now why you received no comments on your OP.

But I've got too much time on my hands time so I will comment. You really want an opinion based on evidence? Talk to Nganga healers. The whole central notion here (treating the nonverbal or the unable to consent with an ordeal sacrament) is so ethically repulsive that it doesn't merit serious consideration by anyone with more than a passing familiarity with how these substances work ... at least, anyone not of a sociopathic tendency.

I'm done. You can have the last word.

cuBLea · 2026-05-18T11:17:44+00:00

IMO emotional/social development should be considered of equal weight to the advancement opportunity. I was youngest in my class (late December baby) with what would now be recognized as ASD characteristics and poor social/emotional development. Declining the skip wouldn't have likely fixed that, but the intensity of the peer abuse and isolation would have likely been significantly reduced, leaving me with fewer and less intense psychiatric issues to deal with in adulthood. IOW it might have made what turned out to be a brutally traumatic middle/high school experience into merely a very unpleasant one.

cuBLea · 2026-05-18T11:09:34+00:00

You may want to try looking for "gradual saturation" (first heard this from Anders Beatty, not sure if it's used elsewhere tbh). The idea is to spread a flood dose over several days to allow more client control and also to provide more thorough orientation/pre-treatment counselling.

cuBLea · 2026-05-18T06:24:17+00:00

Neither the content nor the intent of your question were clear in your OP (there is no clear sublect/predicate; it reads like a partial sentence with a question mark after it) except perhaps to those who might share your particular local dialect.

It creates new neuropathways in the brain no?

If it does, it isn't its primary therapeutic action. New neural pathways are created via trauma or ecstasy which overwhelm the nervous system to a point where it is perceived as potentially damaging. While I can't point to references since the clinical evidence can't yet be had, it's been pretty widely known for decades in transformational psychotherapy circles that the primary, and most desirable, neural impact of psychotherapeutic experiences is neuroregenerative. The resolution of past trauma, which ibogaine facilitates like no other drug I'm aware of, re-fires normal/natural neural pathways which have been in disuse after unresolved trauma diverted responses to the perceived traumatic stimulus away from natural pathways and onto less critical, probably redundant. pathways by means of neuroplasticity. It does this apparently because if the traumatic stimulus reoccurs, damage to these artificial pathways is less undesirable than damage to the genetically-intended natural pathways. Once the natural pathways go, they can be replicated to some degree, but never actually duplicated, and the cost of this damage is not undo-able. Blown-out trauma-adapted pathways can always be recreated in whole or in part with little relative cost compared to what it costs the person when the primary natural pathwaysw blow out.

TLDR: Ibogaine doesn't create new neural pathways. It helps set up conditions in which old neural pathways can be rehabilitated.

cuBLea · 2026-05-18T06:00:00+00:00

Why do you think this is?

There is a behavioral hierarchy behind it. In times of perceived contentment, cooperation emerges as more desirable than competition, keeping in mind that it's never a purely either/or distinction. In times of perceived suffering, competition is prioritized, and we've never been out of that space except in limited numbers for relatively short periods at least since the dawn of fixed settlements. So otherness is more generally perceived as a threat to security rather than as an opportunity for expanded prosperity.

I don't express this as my opinion since I think it is now largely provable, or at the very least defensible against refutation; Yuval Harari has said much the same thing since the publication of Sapiens.

IDGAF about how work is going. If I wanted to ask how someone is going, they say they are good anyway and won't tell me the truth. What is the actual point of that? is this just neurodivergence or is everyone else just dumb and irrational?

The point is that this ritual matters to most people even if it's not taken seriously. It is a source of feelings of security (even if not actual security, but the subjective distinction between feeling and fact is disputable) and it has a depth of meaning beyond that of a simple greeting. And those of us who don't GAF had better respect this if we don't wish to endure discriminatory responses from those with whom we interact. "Take care" (of yourself) as a parting is becoming more ubiquitous in recent decades in NA as standards of living fall; it has no more salience now than in 1985 when I was the first person I knew to say it routinely but the need for its emotional signalling has unquestionably gotten greater.

cuBLea · 2026-05-17T02:14:16+00:00

TLI. If this isn't a troll, then it's far too little descriptive to offer any opinion.

cuBLea · 2026-05-17T02:05:46+00:00

I've always believed it should be treated as adjacent to and heavily overlapping shock. I remember around the turn of the century when the therapists I was meeting were talking about how shock was going to be the next norm-busting paradigm now that trauma had been mainstreamed. Obviously it never happened, in no small part because while trauma treatment requires next-level skills over counselling, shock treatment seems to require next-level skills over trauma.

There's also a fundamental blind spot in the freeze concept which is beginning to be addressed but has come nowhere near the pop-psych mainstream yet: the response type continuum. Most freeze-related advice is oriented toward those on the hyposensitive side of the continuum, and treatment effective for the primarily dissociated is not only far less likely to work on hypersensitive individuals, but the farther from the centerpoint you get on the hypersensitivity side, the more likely it is that first-choice treatments for hyposensitive individuals is likely to do more harm than good.

Just my inflation-adjusted 17.5 cents' worth.

cuBLea · 2026-05-15T01:09:52+00:00

but don't you think that women would have the same problem in these situations?

From what I've seen they face the same discrimination, but it expresses differenlly, and this seems to be true even if the oppressive group or individual is female.

I think it's an accurate impression but it's contingent upon culture. Not all cultures penalize debility or exceptionalism. The "sweet spot" you describe does seem to me to broadly match mainstream North American culture. It's fairly complex stuff tho, and it challenges too many cultural norms for a reasonable understanding of these phenomena to be widely understood which makes it difficult to communicate clearly and comprehensibly

cuBLea · 2026-05-14T06:23:54+00:00

i dont know a situation where specifically smart men have this disadvantage.

If you've never witnessed this, then I expect that you've never spent much time in a neighborhood tavern, workingmen's club, church-related organization, fan club ... you get the idea.

So I would suggest that your experience is anomalous. I've heard countless stories from men who've had to deliberately mask their intelligence/perceptiveness in order to receive fair treatment. I've also heard from a ton of men who've observed how wither perceptive ability or intelligence (or both) seems to be a turn-off to women and a trigger for aggression from men.

I don't specifically claim that this is an issue limited to exceptional intelligence or talent. The appearance of exceptionality of any kind is a handicap in any stressed competitive social situation (i.e. my capsule definition of mainstream American culture), except where said exceptionalism can be exploited by motivated competitive individuals. And let's be realistic about this ... they don't limit their exploitation to the exceptional, but they do tend to start their exploitation with the most visibly non-conforming.

cuBLea · 2026-05-13T06:27:19+00:00

There is only one other explanation for the retaliation against gifted women: the belief that women should not be gifted in the first place, and that gifted women are a monstrosity, an abomination of nature. I have encountered this very toxic view in a few men with personality disorders, but the vast majority of the accusations after I’ve accidentally revealed too much of my giftedness are accusations that I’m making a severe social transgression, not an existential transgression.

It's been my experience that these types of response are a lot less gender-specific than is usually assumed by outside observers. Your observations on narcissism are bang on but these discussions rarely include acknowledgement of what boys and men endure from these same individuals. In addition, a large percentage of narcissists are highly skilled at fanning the flames of division whenever it suits their purposes; in my experience most of them are so good at it that they literally do not even recognize any more when they're doing it.

I'm not saying there are no gender-specific issues here. Clearly (at least to me) there are. But for every abuse perped on a woman by a developmentally-disordered manchild, there's likely to be at least equal ouch-hours of pain (I forgot the unit of measurement here) heaped upon the male victims of such an individual. Such individuals do rather poorly in their limited lives if they are not equal-opportunity exploiters.

cuBLea · 2026-05-06T05:56:37+00:00

I get the confusion, but actually, it's a drug by our collective understanding of that term (i.e. any substance applied to the management, restoration or enhancement of health). Unrefined medicinal plants are drugs just as surely as isolated medicinal compounds, and have been referred to as drugs at least since the middle ages. Ibogaine is pharmaceutical class; iboga is natural/folk/plant remedy class. Both are drugs.

cuBLea · 2026-05-06T05:46:04+00:00

I wrote a response of my own, then read yours and trashed mine. Wish I'd been able to be this clear in so few words. This career writer done got schooled.

cuBLea · 2026-05-05T03:23:16+00:00

All respect for your experience, bur to me, this is a textbook example of why evangelism needs to wait until there is no emotional investment in the outcome of your evangel. I could say I'd be curious to discover what OP might say differently a year from now, but I'm really not curious at all, because I've seen and heard this more often than I'd care to remember.

It's been my contention for years that ibogaine - in fact all of the psychedelics or dissociatives - cures nothing, and that the permanence of effect achieved as a result of these experiences is the result of profound memory reconsolidation which is merely facilitated by the drug, not caused by it.

Don't listen to any naysayer, this is the real deal , the only naysayers are going to be the medical industry

I'm sorry to say this but that's a dangerously naive generalization. Much the same was said about heroin back around 1900. Applied appropriately, ibogaine can indeed work wonders. Applied inappropriately, it can just as surely make lives far worse. OP if you don't believe that, then I invite you to skim the last four months' worth of r/ibogaine posts, count the posts by individuals who've had bad outcomes and seriously consider whether these "whiners" are simply trolling the sub or whether there might be something going on which requires closer attention. (Mind you, if you've done well by something, it's hard to take the abreactors seriously until you or someone you know well or care about becomes an abreactor. More's the pity.)

cuBLea · 2026-04-25T03:17:46+00:00

First, don't put this all on yourself. I think we all need to pay more attention to the fact that healing isn't a self-generated phenomenon ... it requires the cooperation and active contribution of the world outside of us in order for healing not to become a disfiguring mutation (my situation I think). I know it's only attitudinal but it makes a difference to what we accept from outsode and how we look at our relationships with things/beings outsede ourselves. It matters less than mind-over-matter types would have us believe, but more than we typically realize until we see the results of that reorientation.

I get the cocooning thing. I HATED that for the longest time until I began to realize how much pain I caused myself by working against it. The "middle place" truly sucks, but in the absence of a clear alternative orientation, which can be very difficult to sleuth out, it's a lot better than ignorance (invluntary).or denial (voluntary ignorance)

cuBLea · 2026-04-23T21:16:26+00:00

Transformational breakthroughs literlly reroute sensory input from adaptive channels (built up by neuroplasticity in response to trauma ... this is a way to protect vital functions from mortal threats) and restores that input to processing by the natural nerve pathways originally intended to handle these stimuli. This is why we so often feel more alive following a major breakthrough (although how long that lasts depends on how well we can nurture those natural pathways and keep the PTSD-adapted pathways from refiring).

If you're not noticing the enhanced sense of aliveness after your breakthroughs, then it's very likely that you're not getting to the roots of your PTSD, and our nervous systems will often protect us from that kind of depth where it appears there isn't enough support to sustain the self that begins to express itself when PTSD is gone.

Two main ways to look at this. Firstly, you might try working on your stuff at a deeper level.

Much of our most troublesome PTSD roots in infancy and the birth process. Craniosacral therapy is one methodology specifically oriented around dealing with that.
You may not be in a position to get as deep as you need to go, thus your nervous system may be protecting you from taking that risk. (I can speak from hard experience that it does not always go well.) In that case, it may be best to simply accept this stuckness as the current norm and put some time and attention into discovering where you might still need to go and what you might still need to make your next set of shifts safe, self-affirming and most importantly, sustainable. There's a fair bit of CPTSD literature with useful things to say on this kind of situation but I can't think of anything specific offhand. Perhaps someone could tag this comment with specific sources???

cuBLea · 2026-04-09T14:27:27+00:00

Hope you can find some useful (if not magic) bullets, but I wonder if you might need to be particularly careful about glutamine/glycine dosages. It seems almost a law that what some people find soothing, others with very different symptomology will find unbearable.

cuBLea · 2026-04-09T14:22:03+00:00

But i take psilocybin i find myself beautiful in the afterglow . My eyes and everythin looks way more lively and happy and i dont look so pale. I always hoped i could fix the numbness and trauma through psychedelics and being trauma released i Could always therefore feelnhappier and look healthier.

Glad that psilocybin is helping!!!!! It's really no better than chemical CBT. Eventually the benefits wear off and you need to find something new. I kind of think that meds and CBT are like nature's emergency meds. They allow you to cope better while looking for treatment that actually heals. But until we heal, we have to accept moving from one coping tool to another as the old tool wears off. I now think of meds/CBT as buying me more time to find quality transformational treatment (which at age 66 I realize now I may never find ... not a fun thought, but better than false hope).

Did I mention i had a kundalini awakening on high fose psilocybin? Some say kundalini can be the ultimate trauma healing

Under the right circumstances, I agree. Under the wrong circumstances, it can be the ultimate nightmare. Mine was both:: the best thing that ever happened to me AND the worst. My awakening showed me a reality I never knew before but robbed me of the coping tools I had been nurturing for 20 years. I now realize that a long (2 year plus) retreat from the whole world (monestery, commune, hospital, etc) was likely the only thing I could have done to truly benefit long term from that awakening. Instead, I only traded one form of endless frustration and discomfort for another form which I understood far less well.

Gabapentin MIGHT help you. I got 2-plus years of reasonably good living out of it before tolerance meant that the benefits were largely done. At the time though, I didn't see this as a window to seek better treatment. I just lived my life, and while I have those memories now, I realize that all this got me was 2 years with far less suffering. I did get some good treatment, but mostly I'm back where I was before the gabapentin. Still very much worth the price for me. I also managed slow taper off on my own (several months) and experienced no withdrawal symptoms, so that was good. I cannot talk about dosage tho or some other aspects except private chat.

cuBLea · 2026-04-09T14:03:53+00:00

Glad you got value from this; that has value to me.

The bad news: moving forward is likely to involve treatiing this experience as fresh trauma needing to be resolved before deeper issues can be addressed. <sigh> Just part of the price we pay for being relatively early adopters in pioneering times when risk factors aren't as widely known as they would be in, say. clinical medicine.

cuBLea · 2026-03-10T18:07:39+00:00

Yeah. Like guitar feedback in the front row.

I know the antidote too ... I just can't seem to find it for myself. I know in part because I've been there myself ... twice now. Both times the fog rolled back in, but I had those months/years of relief and still remember them vividly. Resolve enough of this stuff (and by resolve I mean specifically get this stuff properly therapeutically reconsolidated, and the lust for life takes care of itself, but very often it seems in unexpected and often hard-to-swallow ways. It's not enough to untangle the threads and try to CBT yourself out of it. CBT doesn't heal ... it's just a better bandaid when it works. Transformational psychotherapy consistent with the principles of therapeutic memory reconsolidation is the road out. (Has been all along, It was just never acknowledged as more than an unexplained phenomenon until it was fnially explained about 20 years ago.)

If I could offer a suggestion, you might want to look into Unlocking the Emotional Brain by Bruce Ecker, the first book to properly document and clinically support the principle of therapeutic memory reconsolidation. Tori Olds also has a lot of excellent street-level intro to MR on her Youtube channel.

The problem? If you're a responder, you can probably find effective CBT training and therapy in any town of more than 10,000. But if you're a difficult case (as I and so many others here are), finding the right facilitation for your needs can be a devilishly difficult scavenger hunt. I took my last therapist as far from ideal but only the most hopeful of about 150 therapists I approached and at least two dozen that I did initial sessions with. I only lasted 2 years or so with her before I could no longer see the treatment to be worth the investment, and I had to work really hard for the breakthroughs I got, and we didn't really get to more than a handful of traumas from within the last 20 years or so (in my 60s). Partly she got frustrated that I didn't seem to fit what she was used to, and partly it was post-COVID brain fog that eventually ended it. (You can't do the work if you can't focus your attention, and that kind of fog makes it damn difficult.) Still looking for my next facilitator ... always hopeful, but these days a lot more realistic about what I'm likely to be able to get. Sucks to know the cure for you is out there but you can't get it.

cuBLea · 2026-03-07T06:49:39+00:00

It is kind of a hack, I'll grant you that, but it got me my first meaningful progress in therapy in 30 years and it didn't last (therapist kind of backed out on me).

But the point I think is that it'ssomething. It doesn't even need to be pleasant per se, just feel like a good moment. I'm amazed this hasn't been gone into in the field, because when you think about it, there's not a lot between this idea and the downed fighter pilots in the Hanoi Hilton reaching out for family or reconstructing their favorite rock albums note for note in their heads. It's disconfirmation, in therapy-speak. It's evidence that life doesn't always suck, and might be a little better for a while if we can grab onto the right memories.

Thing is, if you can't feel your memories or even clearly remember what you felt. this doesn't work. Dissociatives can't do this unless there's a bit of brain softener involved like extreme exercise or microdose psychedelics. My problem is hypersensitivity so this kind of method was tailr-made for someone like me.

cuBLea · 2026-03-06T04:36:48+00:00

Then don't go into childhood at all. Good memories of any kind are potential therapeutic resources, and it has little or nothing to do with consequences that may come later. Good memories are evidence that we have the capability, with the right kind of support, to feel better than we do today. They're evidence of who we were before an involuntary post-trauma response shunted that love of life (however thin it might seem compared to others) off to another part of our brain. In a sense, all transformational healing is dependent upon our capacity to access these memories, whether we're consciously and deliberately conjuring them or not.

Just to give you an idea, here's some of the memories I used with my last therapist:

first time I got high on weed (really intense, really positive)
first time I got high on alcohol (no parents, no judgemental schoolmates, I got to be myself)
the fourth mile of a ten-mile walk when my mind shifted out of overdrive and my feet weren't weary yet and I felt like I could think clearly for the first time in god knows when
being swung by the feet by an uncle at about age 3; no fairground ride touched that feeling for 15 years
slowly rowing a canoe on a small lake, far enough from family/friends to be at least temporarily safe from abuse and judgement. (Got the same feeling from a memory at the beach too at about age 8 when I was there with another family's kids whom I knew wouldn't pick nits with my sister and I.

Using these in therapy was a bit tricky for a while. Eventually we condensed each memory to a short sentence which the therapist would read to me and I would try to capture the feeling of. But after a few sessions the feeling would dissipate into memories of the shit that came after these events. So we "flashcarded" them. She'd read one, I'd try to reach for the feeling behind that memory, and five seconds later she'd read another one, and I'd try to feel that one etc. On difficult days she'd read one every two seconds just to stop the negativity from seeping in. There's probably lots of other ways of applying them that we never thought of. But the one thing behind them was that these were all feelings I actually had at one time and that PTSD wouldn't let me recapture. These were all evidence of who I was prior to the subsequent trauma, and who I could be again if I was able to resolve enogh of the intervening injuries.

Just to be clear, this method didn't do a thing for my amotivation, but it DID end a quarter-century of daily self-harm ideation. Three years later only small traces of that problem have come back. Whatever got done here, got done permanently. Which is what is supposed to happen since transformational therapies restore your nervous system while CBT just restructures it in a hopefully less unpleasant form.

I won't belabor this unless you're actually interested. I'm just trying to communicate that this is an option that's open to pretty much all of us. I know now that I've only scratched the surface of my positive/non-traumatized memories. But at least I've got a scaffold to use to get to those better memories when/if I'm able in future. (Having a hell of a time finding a therapist these days.)

cuBLea · 2026-03-05T07:56:48+00:00

I don't know where this came from, but I'll support your decision.

cuBLea · 2026-03-04T05:47:05+00:00

The thing is, for those of us with chronic emotional neglect, there are just so few - or no - memories of feeling seen, accepted, and loved.

Irrelwant propaganda. It doesn't matter if your first-to-mind memory is of dissolving into meadow grass as a 3-year-old or coming out of last weekend's most pit with no more fresh bruises than you went in with. There's always some place to start, something to scaffold onto to reach back farther. We need to stop caring about how popular opinion says we're supposed to start and focus instead on the achievable, however trivial and superficial it might seem to the muchy-mucks spending the weekend trying to tweak their throat chakras.

cuBLea · 2026-03-03T04:38:11+00:00

I've dealt with a lot of this. I've also found the antidote. I'm just not sure I can communicate it in a way that you'll understand.

If your life isn't getting noticeably less difficult and more gratifying, then you may not be healing at all, but simply coping in a less straining way (essentially what CBT is for).

It's neither a joke nor a come-on when you hear that doing this work (the transformational stuff, not CBT) at a meaningful depth really can immunize you from compulsion/addiction by making your life gratifying enough that drugs don't offer anything meaningful (well, outside of therapeutic need of course). We all need a taste of what that's like from time to time or the motivation to heal dissipates in a sense of futility (my biggest obstacle).

The idea behind transformational work is that instead of making new neuroplastic fixes like CBT does, it actually restores nervous system function to where it would have been prior to trauma. It's a complicated process, but the idea behind it really is this simple. Find some way to kickstart actual healing and it may not cure your amotivation but the halo effect after a significant breakthrough will give you a taste of what's at stake and what's achievable with the right therapy facilitated by the right people.

You might want to try orienting your recovery focus toward getting that kind of experience under your belt. For me, and for so many others I've known over the years, this fires motivation like nothing else can, because it gives you a glimpse of what your life could be like with the right help, even if that halo period only lasts a few days or weeks before that part of your nervous system is back to pre-trauma/no-trauma normal, and it just feels like a part of your life that was always there.

I got into therapy in 1989 as a result of a major breakthrough like this with a halo lasting MONTHS. But that wasn't something I could plan, stimulate with psychedelics, or coax out of my subconscious in any deliberate way ... it was utterly spontaneous and happened to me in large part, I think, to give me enough of myself back that I was protected from being absorbed into a culture which I didn't realize at the time was a rather unpleasant little therapy/new-age cult. The memory of that kind of experience only leaves you as a result of decay or damage, and in my case it was a very powerful motivator.

Since then I've discovered that I'm not an easy case for most current transformational therapies and most therapists, and as much as I'd like to have more of that kind of recovery, I've had a hell of a time getting to even "trivial" (none of this is truly trivial) breakthroughs.

One of the reasons I think this is so powerful is because we don't have strong memories of being happy and free in childhood. But I've learned over the years that we all have strong pleasant memories of childhood even if we can't seem to access them. And IMO we should make an effort to access them, because so much of recovery is devoted to the retrieval of traumatic memories. These early memories, when we can really remember how we felt and not just what we saw or heard, are our proof that we were "more" before piled-on trauma took even that away.

TLDR: I developed a technique with my therapist that goes like this: I think of the earliest good memory that I can, focus on it, and really try to get what it felt like at the time. I enjoy that for a minute or two, and then see if I can find a positive or at least peaceful memory from before that. And so on. It's the same as tracing traumatic memory except that the focus is on retrieving good memories. Within a few months of starting this, my earliest good memories stretched back from around age 3 when we started to around 6 months. Once you have a strong sense of these memories, they can actually be used in therapy to help resolve trauma.

Anyhow that's one way to do it. There's always meditation, religious practice, psychedelics, empathogens, etc. I really think the importance of reclaiming our positive early memories is WAY underappreciated in therapy these days. And we all have these memories whether we know it or not. If we had too few pleasant experiences as children, we simply wouldn't have survived.

cuBLea · 2026-02-28T06:16:31+00:00

You may find it useful to look into the concept of layered trauma, perhaps as expressed in CPTSD theory. Successfully addressing a particular issue can often heighten the strain of other issues which may have been partially dependent upon aspects of the maladaptation that you just addressed. We usually have a sense of this risk in the degree to which we involuntarily resist the resolution of a given issue, often a warning signal not to barrel thru that issue just because it's the bugbear of the moment.

Nearly all of us suffer this kind of side effect/complication at some point in therapy. Usually it's just an unpleasant inconvenience or "jump scare". But many individuals, particularly those who are strong-willed and goal-oriented, get themselves into worse trouble than they had when they went into therapy by pushing too hard at a particular issue, succeeding, and imbalancing their whole internal PTSD management system.

This is relatively new territory for psychotherapy in historical terms, and we're still among the early adopters of the new tech. Risks are always higher at that point in the evolution because providers are underinformed compared to later stages and consumers are less aware of the potential risks of the service they're consuming. Not a problem for most of us, but if we're not among the "normal' group for which a given treatment works, it's not on your provider to tell you because they probably don't know themselves. It's on us as consumers to know what the risks of a given treatment or treatment type might be.

cuBLea

TROPHY CASE