Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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less depression and anxiety, healthier lifestyle, and relief from addictions. These are also the central themes in psychotherapy, regardless of theoretical model or practical technique. What therapist doesn’t want to hear that his or her clients feel better and have more positive thoughts and moods? That their inner critic is less harsh, and they feel more accepting and loving toward themselves and their close relationships? Or that clients are taking better care of themselves, eating healthier, exercising more, and stopping addictive behaviors? These central themes are the bedrock of personal well-being and the hallmarks of a meaningful life. Accordingly, each merits greater consideration.
Self-Acceptance and Love
The questionnaire asked participants to describe any changes in attitude toward themselves as a result of their ayahuasca experiences. The most common responses were, to paraphrase: “I’m more accepting of myself, more loving, kind, and patient. I have more self-confidence, take better care of myself, and have greater understanding. I’m less critical.” This last statement is clinically important, since a harsh inner critic can be constantly demoralizing in daily life. The therapeutic approaches most commonly used to treat negative self-tapes include disputing them (“I’m not always wrong”) and using positive affirmations (“I make good decisions”). That’s not what’s happening here. The effects of ayahuasca are completely radical.
“I was caught in a hell realm, stuck in my self-hatred loops,” said Steve, a seventy-year-old somatic therapist in private practice. He quoted this loop as saying, You’re not good enough, not smart enough, not successful enough, not anything enough. We all know these inner-critic tapes and how hard it is to escape their destructive messages. Can you imagine having to listen to such a toxic rant while under the influence of a medicine that amplifies everything? Steve was stuck, and this was not a new experience. He’d been there and done that throughout his lifetime.
During his ayahuasca experience, Steve heard a voice asking, Who is doing this to you? Steve was sure the voice was Grandmother Ayahuasca, who can be therapeutic in astonishingly surprising ways. Steve told me, “She taught me a big lesson — how to stop my inner critic.” Steve realized that these critical messages were remnants from his childhood that no longer held sway over him as an adult. Did the tapes come back? He said they didn’t during the ceremony, but they could reemerge afterward, albeit with less intensity. The difference was that Steve now had the power to silence these destructive messages.
One of the most powerful barriers to self-acceptance, these demeaning messages are relentless and reinforce criticisms we heard during our vulnerable growing-up years. I had a strikingly beautiful client who heard, You’re not pretty enough. I didn’t understand the origin of this message until she explained, “I have an older sister who’s the pretty one. That role was taken. I had to be the smart one, the popular one, or the athletic one. Things were worse for my younger sister — she had fewer options.” Somehow this was the rule in that family, never explicitly stated but powerful nonetheless, or perhaps even more powerful for being unspoken.
In my psychotherapy practice, I divided clients into two categories: those who did or did not feel loved as a child. This is not the same as, “Did your parents love you?” It’s whether you felt loved. I could pretty much divide my clients into yes or no categories. While I had a boutique private practice in which everyone was well-educated and professional, so that I didn’t face a wide array of psychiatric diagnoses, this one question was pivotal. It determined the client’s sense of self and his or her capacity for intimate relationships.
As research from brain development and attachment theory was applied to psychotherapy, I realized that I was distinguishing whether or not the client had a secure attachment. This develops during early childhood when we learn that we can count on our parents to meet our needs in kind, caring ways. It’s estimated that about 55 percent of people have a secure attachment.1 The other 45 percent experience three other categories of attachment: anxious attachment, which develops when our caretakers sometimes meet our needs and sometimes don’t, so we never know what to expect; avoidant attachment, in which we give up on getting our needs met; and, worst of all, disorganized attachment, in which our caretakers are cruel or abusive.
The issue of whether or not someone has a secure attachment or felt loved as a child is not the same as self-esteem, which the California legislature attempted to “fix” with a self-esteem initiative telling parents and teachers to heap praise on children.2 That program was not based on psychological research. We know that empty praise does nothing for a child’s sense of self except inflate their ego and distort expectations about how the world will greet them. Better to encourage old-fashioned hard work and perseverance: “You really kept at that problem until you got it solved!”
The pervasive problem of feeling unlovable was the issue a group of American psychologists and meditation teachers presented to the Dalai Lama during the third Mind and Life Institute conference in Dharamsala, India, in 1991. When Sharon Salzberg asked His Holiness, “So when we teach loving-kindness and compassion, should we talk very specifically about loving yourself?” The Dalai Lama entered into a long exchange with his Tibetan translator, who eventually explained that the concept was alien to His Holiness. The Westerners described how people suffer with their inner critics. The Dalai Lama admitted, “I thought I had a very good acquaintance with the mind, but now I feel quite ignorant. I find this very, very strange and I wonder where it comes from.”3 Evidently, in Tibetan culture, children are responded to quickly and kindly, and I imagine they have a higher percentage of securely attached adults than we do.
One of the most common healing experiences during ayahuasca ceremonies is a sense of being flooded with love. This sensation ranges from the comfort of a warm bath to ecstatic heights of feeling loved as a child of the universe. Greater compassion for oneself and self-acceptance are mentioned the most frequently. One man said, “You can hear something one thousand times and still not get it. With ayahuasca, the message [of being loved] drops down into the cellular level, and all of a sudden you know it in your bones.” Some people attributed the source of love to Grandmother Ayahuasca. One wrote, “I am more and more seeing how I am supported and loved by her.”
Years ago, as a slightly cynical psychotherapist, I would’ve said this sounds like a spiritual bypass. Feeling cosmic love is a way to avoid dealing with parents who weren’t kind and loving. Get thee to a therapist and work on family-of-origin issues, I would think. Now I’m not so sure.
In the sharing circle one morning after a ceremony I attended, a thirty-something guy exclaimed with all the emotional enthusiasm of a religious epiphany how he now felt loved — “truly loved!” Then he reflected, “I wonder why I didn’t feel loved before.” I sat nearby using all my energy to keep my mouth shut. I had met his mother, knew his family story. It was all I could do not to say to him, and by that I mean shout at him, “You didn’t feel loved because your mother is a narcissist and your father abandoned you!” Perhaps this impatience is why I’ve retired from private practice.
Sitting in the circle, I wondered if maybe it didn’t matter that this guy didn’t understand why he didn’t feel loved before. Maybe the only thing that mattered was that he felt so well-loved now. I know how intense that feeling of being loved can be under the full sway of the medicine. Perhaps that works as a “corrective experience,” which is therapy jargon for one of those spontaneous healing moments that happen in therapy between client and therapist when they look directly into each other’s eyes and something powerful and unspoken happens.4 The current theory of interpersonal neurobiology says that the therapist’s brain connects with the client’s in a way that rewrites the client’s life narrative.5 This opens the possibility of learning something new, as in, “I’m lovable!”
The ceremonial situation is different — everyone sits in the dark, and there’s no direct interaction or eye-to-eye contact. Possibly the reprogramming of the brain happens in a biochemical way with the medicine lowering one’s usual pattern of filters and defenses, allowing the brain to experience something new — “I’m lovable!” — just as the man exclaimed in the sharing circle the morning after.6
A few weeks after this ceremony, I was sitting