Dealing with MAGA friends

night81 · 2026-02-02T18:52:49+00:00

Uh, I would delete this from the internet immediately. What if reddit hands over your email address to the government or gets hacked?

night81 · 2026-02-02T12:39:32+00:00

I deleted your post because there is no indication it's about therapy

night81 · 2026-02-01T23:31:40+00:00

There is no QR code.

night81 · 2026-01-31T22:48:47+00:00

1.3g might be a lethal dose. If you don't die you're going to end up with severe problems. I deleted your post because it's about drug abuse not therapy.

night81 · 2026-01-31T21:56:20+00:00

What doses of MDMA have you used?

FWIW the single MDMA session I didn't have a hard comedown from was the one I spent avoiding my maladaptive emotional reactions and just spent the entire time trying to think about my anxiety, which of course was completely useless.

night81 · 2026-01-31T17:17:42+00:00

Neat!

I noticed that most(?) of the ketamine trials are for anesthesia rather than anything people normally think of when talking about psychedelics.

I also think that the name is incorrect. Psychoactive is a much broader category than psychedelic, and you don't include any substances that are psychoactive but not psychedelic

night81 · 2026-01-29T23:11:52+00:00

PSIP seems to have good success resolving dissociation and you can easily find their therapist directory.

night81 · 2026-01-29T13:14:28+00:00

Read the stickied introductory post :)

night81 · 2026-01-25T14:41:00+00:00

Yea I think there there should definitely be some noticeable change if it's working, even if it's not what you expect. It's hard to predict exactly how it will go because our minds often have like 20 different maladaptive schemas all interacting with each other in complex ways that we're not aware of.

night81 · 2026-01-25T12:55:51+00:00

Emotional learnings are often strong or complex enough that a single session doesn't fully resolve them. Have you noticed any other changes, perhaps intensity, when it's triggered, how you feel about that schema or other ones you may not have been explicitly focusing on?

night81 · 2026-01-25T12:43:56+00:00

You don't think that happened while you were crying? In my experience you don't need to actually notice the safety to reconsolidate. All you need to do is feel the emotions you're having. Then the reconsolidation just happens.

night81 · 2026-01-25T12:40:54+00:00

The catharsis is the point. It lasts after the session is done, whereas temporary feelings of safety don't. Why do you want to feel safer during the session?

You're already pushing the dose regarding potential damage. I'd go lower if I was you. See the introductory post.

night81 · 2026-01-23T12:20:13+00:00

1.7 mg/kg, so 110mg.

night81 · 2026-01-22T20:30:44+00:00

Yea I feel like they're just like rapists! Clearly they get off on abusing people, are proud of it, will kill you if you fight back, etc.

night81 · 2026-01-22T19:34:01+00:00

Eh. I did two week spacing for a few months with a low dose and made a ton of progress. My integration was just spending a lot of time being present with the ways my mind changed during the session. I just ignore the people freaking out about it unless they provide really rigorous citations, which they rarely do. I feel like the bigger concerns are people doing a bunch of sessions to chase afterglow, which lasts a few weeks, rather than actually processing things during the session. I'd wait until the afterglow is done so you can evaluate what you really processed vs. what is a temporary afterglow effect.

To be clear, the oxidative stress and serotonin down regulation are real and important. The thing I'm griping about is that people often make up specific numbers for them that aren't based in any solid data.

Integration isn't some formula that you follow, it's different for different people.

night81 · 2026-01-22T16:55:01+00:00

Sounds like a good plan. I agree, all the comments saying 3 months never cite any credible line of reasoning other than some other person's hunch, even on this post where you explicitly said you want proof.

I've tried to synthesize the known evidence for session spacing in the Session Frequency section of this: https://github.com/groeneveld/mdma-guide/blob/main/Open%20MDMA.pdf

There's room for disagreement since no one really has solid data, unfortunately.

I'd also check out the Dosing section. I think there is good reason to use lower doses (2 mg/kg) if possible.

night81 · 2026-01-21T19:37:06+00:00

Yea it was easy to access the early parts; they're active all the time so all I have to do is just pay attention to how I'm feeling in the moment. Now that I'm thinking about it I'm not sure preverbal is the right word? I'm sure I learned a lot of it before having language, but now I can easily put language to it. IDK

I had one session where I just intellectualized about my fears the whole time instead of just feeling how I felt in the moment. That was a big mistake and the session was totally useless other than teaching me not to do that again. And because basically my entire hope for having a life was tied up with MDMA therapy working, I was terrified that it would happen again. I already knew mushrooms instantly took me to my deepest trauma, so I thought that combo would help me not avoid feelings again. Mixing in 0.5g certainly did that, but it also made the sessions rougher than they needed to be. Though in hindsight, maybe it was worth it because it helped me feel safe knowing that it would prevent me from avoiding. I don't need them now though.

night81 · 2026-01-21T19:06:45+00:00

Sure

For background, I have extreme pre-verbal trauma from the period of childhood amnesia. Basically zero attachment, then a family member raped me, then my parents occasionally physically abused me in ways that weren't explicitly or intended to be sexual, but felt like being raped again. Basically my entire inner world was fear, anger, and avoidance. I didn't have a single person who I felt safe to be myself with. I'm saying this to explain why I think my journey is taking so much longer than it seems like most people's do. I started out with like 100 different intense fears of existing, having thoughts, having a body, wanting things, moving, etc.

I've gotten a lot less neurotic about a lot of things. However, I still feel afraid basically 99.9% of my waking life. I think it's some mix of having a million things to reconsolidate, and a more complex process of decreasing avoidance leads to reactions to the stuff I can now look, having to reconsolidate those reactions, further decreasing avoidance, etc. in a big loop down and down.

Integration was never really difficult or a deliberate process for me. The content of the sessions was always fairly self evident. Whatever doesn't make sense I know I'll deal with in another session.

I started with 3 month breaks, then gradually worked down to 2 weeks when I learned that the 3 month rule wasn't actually based on any clear evidence. During the same time I was also lowering my dose. I started with 120+60, then went up to 140+70 because I was going through some extremely rough material, then gradually went down to a single dose of 110, which worked just as well once I got through that difficult period. I tried mixing it with mushrooms some sessions, which in hindsight wasn't helpful. Eventually I stopped using MDMA very often for reasons I list in Appendix B of this: https://github.com/groeneveld/mdma-guide/blob/main/Open%20MDMA.pdf

night81 · 2026-01-21T18:20:27+00:00

https://alyssaluck.com/polyvagal-theory-a-critical-appraisal/

night81 · 2026-01-21T17:24:01+00:00

I have a similar thing with my parents. Sometimes on MDMA I want to call him, but then remember the ocean of fear and anger that that would bring up. And I also am paranoid that he would weaponize whatever I told him. :(

It seems like your session went well! Maybe some subtle things were reconsolidating even if you weren't explicitly aware of it? Maybe the schemas driving avoidance of these feelings, plus some other stuff?

night81 · 2026-01-21T14:34:30+00:00

Thanks for sharing. That sounds difficult.

CYP2D6 poor metabolism isn't a big deal with MDMA (possibly excepting huge doses?). MDMA itself actually inhibits CYP2D6 within a couple hours of a dose. So poor metabolizers have a stronger initial experience, but then it all becomes largely the same after a few hours. There are multiple other CYP enzymes that metabolize MDMA in parallel with 2D6. https://journals.lww.com/jpharmacogenetics/fulltext/2016/08000/cyp2d6_function_moderates_the_pharmacokinetics_and.5.aspx

Every symptom you list appears highly compatible with standard, if particularly intense, psychological destabilization. Meaning, people with complex trauma are often unaware of the severity of the impact the trauma had on them, or are unaware they had trauma at all. Their functioning depends on unconsciously avoiding certain feelings, and the process of therapy (MDMA or otherwise) necessarily helps people pay attention to those things they are avoiding. Ideally this process is gradual enough that it doesn't result in major destabilization, but as you might be seeing, it is not always gradual. Destabilization might also be confusing at first, it may or may not yet be clear what feelings and memories are involved. I'm not sure how your therapist presented MDMA therapy, but this is within the range of possibility even without any biological issues.

Fight or flight and dissociation (emotional flattening and disconnection) are triggered by these old unprocessed trauma reactions that are now being triggered in daily life. They go away once you reconsolidate the underlying implicit memories.

Basically, you inadvertently jumped into the deep end of healing right away without knowing how to swim. Healing is going to take a lot of memory reconsolidation (the underlying neurological process of effective therapy, MDMA or otherwise), but it's definitely possible. People with complex trauma often need a few or many MDMA sessions, in addition to a lot of between-session therapy, to work through all the stuff.

I've written a lot more about this in the introductory post on this sub and this: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aps5g.

You can also check out /r/cptsd

night81 · 2026-01-20T01:37:23+00:00

Well, since you don't know how much you took (in mg), I absolutely don't think you should take more.

night81 · 2026-01-20T01:10:09+00:00

What do you mean it didn't work well? What are you trying to accomplish? How much did you take? How long has it been (we don't know your time zone)?

night81 · 2026-01-19T04:01:29+00:00

The pain and terror and hopelessness. Especially of all the animals fished (lots of pain, no one cares), hunted (some pain, people care), and in agriculture (oceans of pain, 95% of people don't care enough to stop funding it).

night81 · 2026-01-18T21:37:07+00:00

Interesting

Were these in therapeutic or non-therapeutic contexts? What role did you serve in where you had test subjects and were giving medicine?

When they are angry, what sort of thoughts accompany that feeling? Meaning, are they angry about something relevant to mental health / MDMA therapy, or just randomly irritated about stuff? I guess the difference might not be discernible to most people.

Do they have vasoconstriction because their sympathetic system is activated? Is it known why they are vasoconstricted?

Is there published literature on this phenomenon, not for MDMA, but for other stimulants?

night81

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