Listening to Ayahuasca. Rachel Harris, PhD
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rel="nofollow" href="http://www.contemplation.com">www.contemplation.com). I had to explain to him what “spiritual bypass” meant, and he understood the concept immediately. He said he “believed that sometimes the spiritual experience of feeling loved changed everything for a person,” and then he paused. I waited. He spoke again: “And sometimes it didn’t.” We sat together in silent agreement.
Relationships
The old saw that you have to love yourself before you can truly love another fits perfectly with attachment theory. People who feel loved, people with secure attachment, assume the best from their loved ones. In fact, they select for those capacities, quickly eliminating someone who crosses lines of good behavior. A securely attached young woman refused to go on a second date with a presumably very eligible bachelor. When I asked her why, she replied, “He told me I had too much makeup on.” That simple. The guy was critical on the first date. No point making a second date. Since then, she’s been married for thirty-five years to a very kind, serious medical researcher who wouldn’t dream of criticizing his wife’s appearance.
People with secure attachment know how to be married. This doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. They hurt each other’s feelings, but they listen to their partner with empathy and then apologize. They forgive and let go of the hurt feelings, which means that they don’t bring up the kitchen sink when they fight. They celebrate each other’s successes and are happy to make the other person happy. In short, they “get” each other, and they’re there for each other.
In this study, people reported feeling more accepting, loving, and compassionate toward themselves after drinking ayahuasca. Many also said they felt the same way toward those closest to them. For those who reported an improvement in their relationships, there was a clear trend toward more honest, direct, and open communication with deeper connections. One college professor succinctly described his changes: “Better marriage. Better relationships with students and colleagues.” We don’t know if one thing led to the other, if feeling better about themselves allowed them to feel better about their relationships. We don’t know if there’s a causal relationship, even though it would make clinical sense.
How relationships change as a result of an ayahuasca experience is qualitatively different from reporting on internal states — feelings and attitudes toward oneself. Changes in relationships depend not only on how the person feels but on how that person behaves. Relationships raise the issue of integration. A more specific way to phrase this question is “How does the ayahuasca experience change how you behave on a daily basis in your relationships?” It’s one thing to be flooded with love during a ceremony and another thing altogether to behave in loving ways upon the return home.
A fifty-two-year-old businessman described his personal evolution regarding sex and relationships after two dozen experiences with ayahuasca over a fifteen-year period. He wrote that he “broke a powerful sexual addiction. Now I’m drawn to looking for relationships. Sex for sex’s sake doesn’t do it for me.”
People’s responses showed a trend toward having more patience and tolerance in family relationships. Many of the younger respondents said their relationships with their parents had improved. One early-twenties college student, happily in his fifth year of undergraduate study, asked his mother to answer the question, “Did anyone close to you notice any changes in you (since drinking ayahuasca)?” She responded, “Now he has control over his behavior and has become very spiritual.” It’s interesting to note that this young man’s mother identified two very important themes that others mentioned about post-ayahuasca changes: better behavior and spiritual awakening. Again, the latter is more than psychotherapy intends to accomplish or claims to do.
A number of people reported reconciliations in ruptured relationships. One woman wrote, “I made peace with my ex-husband, and it made a huge difference for us and our two children.” I also experienced a changed attitude toward my ex-husband after taking ayahuasca. I’m able to see once again the spiritual being I fell in love with underneath his personality. However, whether, and how, you act on an inner shift in perspective is a therapeutic decision. Inner experiences, whether resulting from ayahuasca ceremonies or something else, do not necessarily translate into specific behaviors or a face-to-face reconciliation. This is another reason I recommend talking with a therapist after an ayahuasca healing, since this can help differentiate what insights to act on and what insights to hold privately.
The question about relationships is complex. Some people answered, “No change,” but we don’t know if that lack of change is positive or negative. Were their relationships already accepting and loving, or were their relationships unsatisfactory and remained so? Alas, the limits of a questionnaire.
A number of people reported ending “unhealthy relationships” with both romantic partners and friends. This news was presented as an accomplishment, something they should’ve done long ago. It seems there’s a reevaluation of relationships after the ayahuasca experience. For example, one woman explained that she “was better at setting limits without guilt” in her relationships. Another said, “I’ve stopped anything that was toxic.” One man reported, “Some people do not fit anymore.”
Other factors also complicate the relationship question. There can be an in-group/out-group dynamic: Those drinking ayahuasca share a very intense experience that is by its very nature ineffable and difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced the medicine. This is a particularly delicate issue for couples when one partner drinks and the other doesn’t. I experienced this dynamic with a married friend of mine. After a weekend ceremony, we returned to her house, chattering away about our experiences, and her husband, rightfully so, felt left out of our conversation. My friend and I agreed to debrief elsewhere in deference to his feelings.
A variant on this theme was expressed by a woman who joined her husband in a ceremony but repeatedly received the same message from Grandmother Ayahuasca: You don’t really need to be here. You’re already doing your job as a partner and helpmate to your husband. This ceremony is for him. Eventually, she decided to continue joining him in ceremony but to drink only a very small amount of the medicine. This was an interesting compromise elegantly designed to stay connected to her husband’s experience even though ayahuasca was not her personal path.
As if all these relationship issues aren’t complex enough to navigate and understand, the illicit nature of the situation cannot be forgotten. We don’t live in an indigenous village where ayahuasca ceremonies are part of the fabric of the culture, where friends and family respect the medicine. A Westerner can hardly walk into work Monday morning and say, “Guess what I did this weekend?”
Depression and Anxiety
“Depression is GONE. I now have a feeling of self-worth. I’m slower to anger and quicker to smile,” wrote Ben, a thirty-one-year-old man. He said he’d been on antidepressants since his teens and had undergone five years of psychotherapy. Before the study, he’d been drinking ayahuasca every two months or so for about a year.
This is the miracle cure we all want, but the reason it’s called a miracle is precisely because it doesn’t always happen. There are no guarantees. When this kind of relief from depression or anxiety does happen, we need to know: How often is the person drinking ayahuasca? How long does the relief last? What percentage of people enjoy such a miraculous cure? We need long-term studies to follow up on people like Ben and to explore the most therapeutic use of ayahuasca in terms of frequency and dose.
In my study, two-thirds of the people reported improvement in mood after drinking ayahuasca. Only a few described a miraculous cure like Ben’s. The fact that an instantaneous lifting of major depression doesn’t happen for everyone doesn’t minimize the self-reports describing a range of relief from both depression and anxiety. Most people noted a general improvement in mood: more feelings of love and compassion, increased optimism, greater serenity, increased confidence, and more joy. As a result of drinking ayahuasca, respondents said they felt more easygoing, safer, and lighter; they had more fun and felt more stable. They also reported feeling less anxious, angry, agitated, or upset. One person wrote, “Less darkness, more light.”
We do have a few clues about the frequency of drinking ayahuasca. One research study with