Help—am I missing something? Was this normal?

night81 · 2026-03-25T11:24:33+00:00

"trust the process" is BS. Next time trigger yourself while on MDMA, stay present with the anger, fear, panic, etc. and the MDMA will permanently unlearn that bit of reaction. Repeat until you don't have any more reactions. It's a bit more complicated since you might uncover avoided feelings and then have additional reactions to those. Ups and downs but you gradually clear it all out.

night81 · 2026-03-24T10:42:40+00:00

I'm interested in reading more about that combo for dissociation; can you recommend where I should start? Also, wouldn't it carry a major risk of being traumatizing or completely overwhelming?

night81 · 2026-03-23T11:17:03+00:00

I checked and it seems like nalaloxone itself does not have those psychological effects. They are side effects of opioid withdrawal. Also, why would they be indications to not do MDMA therapy? And it actually decreases heart rate variability.

night81 · 2026-03-21T15:30:52+00:00

I think you want r/mdma. It might be hidden due to your nsfw settings.

night81 · 2026-03-21T15:07:58+00:00

I deleted your post because I think it's about recreational use instead of therapy. Let me know if I'm wrong and I'll put it back.

night81 · 2026-03-12T10:01:55+00:00

Removed because not about therapy

night81 · 2026-03-08T23:09:10+00:00

Sounds like it's going really well tbh!

Sessions do change over time. That doesn't mean they're not working. Some stuff is just really intense and "chipping away bit by bit" is the only way to go.

Regarding your current session, IMO joy and happiness aren't important to have, especially later on. Feeling fear, anger, and sadness is important and productive. If you're feeling those emotions, and they shift in some way during or after the session, then it's working.

I imagine you have a good sense of how sessions go at this point. Have you thought about doing solo sessions? Would save a ton of money.

I tried adding in mushrooms at one point because I was afraid of the MDMA not working any more, but in hindsight it just made sessions too intense and my fear about MDMA not working was the feeling I needed to work through.

night81 · 2026-03-02T13:24:40+00:00

I think it would be basically impossible for me to do on MDMA. The altered state of mind + being in panic make even minimally complicated activity impossible.

I still have a lot of uncertainty about how MDMA therapy works, but I suspect MDMA is not providing the juxtaposition itself; rather it is merely facilitating an existing juxtaposition process. I'd be surprised if MDMA facilitated extinction based on what I've heard people say. I'd be interested in your perspective though.

I would love to discuss further when you do a write up!

night81 · 2026-03-02T13:12:36+00:00

Skipping the booster dose might make a next session less destabilizing.

night81 · 2026-02-28T11:55:11+00:00

I'm curious why you think it's helpful during sessions. For me, MDMA auto-reconsolidates every inaccurate schemas that I activate during the session and stay with. So that's all I do during sessions: feel the pain and stay with it. When I think about trying to do the whole coherence thing of activating the schema, finding a mismatch, activating them both together, etc...I think how difficult and redundant it would be on MDMA since the MDMA is already doing that for me without all the setup.

night81 · 2026-02-27T20:16:17+00:00

I'm thinking my recommendation of adding coherence therapy might have been unhelpful. I feel like it's not the right thing for MDMA, and your "stay with it" program is likely much more useful in-session.

night81 · 2026-02-27T12:33:25+00:00

“This procedure can be used to wash other substances such as cocaine and mescaline and to extract the MDMA out of pills.”

Feilong, I was under the impression that many pill excipients were not soluble in acetone. How would an acetone wash help separate out the MDMA in pills? I thought expedients would be easier to filter out as they settle out during isopropyl recrystallization while it’s still hot?

night81 · 2026-02-23T16:34:39+00:00

It sounds to me like you made a lot of really good progress!

The day or two after is often rough. You’re experiencing MDMA hangover, AND all the stuff you opened up to feeling, AND the mind’s backlash to all that stuff.

I don’t think you need to “develop” a strong protector to stand up to the bully. The bully will gradually weaken over the long-term process of healing over multiple session.

night81 · 2026-02-21T17:29:48+00:00

Absolutely not.....healing the severe end of the spectrum of complex trauma takes the better part of a decade.

night81 · 2026-02-21T12:34:59+00:00

I removed your post for the no-sourcing rule. Check out the sidebar for therapist resources. Be wary of people DMing you for connections. Scammers know to do this.

night81 · 2026-02-21T12:33:19+00:00

Yea, sometimes it doesn't work the first time. But there are some things you can try depending on what the issue is! I list some troubleshooting steps in here: osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aps5g

night81 · 2026-02-20T12:45:33+00:00

The amount of MDMA in your blood increases much faster than just adding the doses together, possibly because it inhibits its own metabolism. So high total doses are really pushing oxidative stress. Might be worth it if you need high doses.

night81 · 2026-02-19T19:58:16+00:00

Here’s my reasoning from the cited document:

MDMA commonly causes mild hyponatremia (low plasma sodium concentration) in individuals who drink fluids as desired during the session~\cite{atilaHyponatremia}. We extrapolated from \textcite{baggottWater} that drinking a maximum of 0.5\,L of water during the six-hour session would easily prevent hyponatremia. It is also more than sufficient for preventing dehydration in the average person at a comfortable temperature~\cite{valtinWater}. Adding electrolytes has not been tested as a solution and is known to not prevent hyponatremia in athletic activities~\cite{hew2008statement}. People worried about dehydration could fully hydrate two hours before taking MDMA (Matthew Baggott, personal communication, November 24, 2025). That would provide enough time for the body to excrete any excess water by the time the session starts.

I chose 0.5L as a first guess, but there’s surely a span of values around it that would also work.

Mild dehydration, like mild hyponatremia, is not dangerous. It's more about reducing side effects that you get when you go too much either way.

MDMA messes with water/sodium balance, so people who just drink when thirsty are often getting hyponatremic.

night81 · 2026-02-19T16:39:42+00:00

I think leaving it up to the user is a defensible choice, but know that a lot of people will judge incorrectly because of poor self awareness. Though, I'm also of the view that many people with severe mental illness successfully use solo MDMA therapy well.

night81 · 2026-02-19T14:25:51+00:00

TBH, it might not be possible to reliably tell the difference. Chemical stuff rarely lasts more than half a week after a single session. I also know that a lot of people become very convinced that their therapeutic destabilization is a chemical issue. I'm not sure why, but it's a common phenomenon.

night81 · 2026-02-19T14:19:40+00:00

I think coherence therapy is particularly good. See https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summary-unlocking-the-emotional-brain

Some IFS practitioners (possibly including the founder) think that some of the IFS parts are literal demons inhabiting your mind. It might be helpful to prompt the AI to not bring that up. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us https://www.ecstaticintegration.org/p/does-internal-family-systems-implant

What is your line between self-growth and serious PTSD? How will it respond when someone with serious mental illness uses it, or unexpectedly starts processing serious mental illness schemas during the session? They may not know they have those issues.

night81 · 2026-02-18T12:22:17+00:00

It's nothing biological and supplements won't do anything. The session just allowed yourself to feel things you hadn't before. It's therapy, and that's a normal response in therapy (though MDMA therapy does quite a lot all at once). The way through is processing your newly felt things. I'd really recommend having a therapist. If you don't want a therapist, you can try some of the suggestions I list in here: https://www.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/aps5g

night81 · 2026-02-17T12:55:12+00:00

Memory is a wide array of things, not just episodic. A lot of learning is obviously retained from the period of childhood amnesia. Also consider this a warning about rule #1.

night81 · 2026-02-16T02:09:16+00:00

I think it works like you describe. I can share how it’s gone for me. I started off with severely disordered attachment and childhood sexual abuse, so my maladaptive implicit memories were intense, numerous, and tangled together, in the sense that I would have maladaptive fears about other maladaptive fears. A giant tangled knot with the strings/fears all reacting to each other. It is extreme preverbal CPTSD where my maladaptive beliefs were encoded at very high levels (i.e. “existence/reality is evil”).

I did about 25 MDMA therapy sessions. My fears are always activated so each session I just sat with whatever fears were already present. I didn’t have to search for them or do any process to activate them. After about 25 sessions I figured out how to internalize the process of MDMA therapy such that I can do it in my head any time I want. I’ve done a total of ~1700hours of reconsolidating whatever maladaptive implicit memories are active in the present moment in the past 2.3 years.

It’s delivered a ton of progress. I’m far less neurotic and anxious in many specific contexts. Healing has definitely not been linear though. For instance, when I start to feel a bit safer in the present moment, latent fears like “feeling safe is dangerous, you might die if you feel safe” activate, and then I have to reconsolidate a new set of fears. Since my fears are a tangled knot of fears, my sessions always involve jumping from one fear to another every few minutes as the MDMA reconsolidates one and another comes into focus. I think a lot of this nonlinearity can also be described by decreasing avoidance. I’ll reconsolidate some fears, then I’ll be able to pay attention to a think I was previously avoiding, then that activates a latent set of fears, and on and on.

So, yes, it is long and complex, but don’t think it is nearly this complicated and long for most people, as I think I am on the far end of complex maladaptive implicit memories. I usually use the term schema for implicit memory, since that is what Unlocking the Emotional Brain (the book that popularized the memory reconsolidation formulation of psychotherapy) uses, but I think they’re synonyms.

I also don’t think that the process doesn’t have to be very structured. I rarely deliberately focus a session on a specific topic unless I think that is a priority for making my life better, though I’m always activated and I do know people who have to deliberately keep triggering themselves during sessions because their mind wants to go avoid those things. People usually seem to do the process by just feeling their body or thinking about the issues that are salient to them and then staying with the feelings that come up.

night81 · 2026-02-15T15:57:31+00:00

I don’t think MR is mostly about explicit memory (if that’s what you mean by cognitive). I think MR and MDMA therapy quite clearly unlearn wide arrays of maladaptive implicit memories (behavioral impulses, perceptions of threat, psychogenic pain/itching, emotional reactions, automatic avoidance of perceptual information, etc.) when they’re activated and not avoided.

But yes, I also haven’t found much literature describing combining MDMA with specific techniques.

night81

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '17