Ep 63 with Valeria McCarroll

Ailey Jolie: 00:01

Before you start listening to today's episode of In This Body the Podcast, I wanted to let you know that today's episode explicitly references the use of plant medicine, ayahuasca, and psychedelics. It should be noted that plant medicine, ayahuasca, and other psychedelics can have serious risks and should only be undertaken with the appropriate guidance. The legality of these substances varies by location, so ensure that you comply with the legalities that surround you. The podcast In This Body is a love letter to embodiment, a podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body enhance your capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment alter the course of our shared world? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ailey Jolie. Welcome back to How to Me in This Body. I'm your host, Ailey Jolie, and today I'm in conversation with Valeria, counseling psychologist, depth practitioner, and faculty at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she teaches on psychedelics through a humanities and psychological lens. She is also presently writing about the psychedelic guide in her upcoming book. I wanted to have this conversation because I spent years in and around the psychedelic space, as someone who received psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and later someone working on research and training protocols inside it. And I laughed, not because the medicines aren't powerful, but because the containers weren't ready. At that time, no one that I was around had a framework for what happens when the ego suddenly has nowhere to hide, and arrow shows up in the room. And when I looked around as a clinician, I realized that the mainstream conversation about psychedelics was almost entirely about what's possible and almost never about what can go wrong. Valeria is one of the few people I've encountered who holds both with real rigor. We get into the biomedical model and what it strips away, the role of ritual in rites of passage, the consent paradox, what happens in the integration period when no one is watching, and the ways that Western individualism is quietly being reproduced inside what was supposed to be a consciousness revolution. I also brought some of my own story into this one. I hope you can find what I did in this conversation a rarer combination of what intellectual depth and genuine honesty about the shadow side of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Aile Jolie. I'm really excited to have you on today, and I'm gonna start our time together by asking you the question that I open every episode with. I would love to hear from you what being in your body means.

Valeria McCarroll: 03:34

I've had some time to think about this question, knowing that it was coming. To me, being in the body is a kind of awareness. A condition of being we're all we're all born into bodies as humans. And at the same time, to inhabit one's body is something we can develop. It's a capacity we can cultivate in self that at its very base is a form of awareness training or mindfulness training, bodyfulness training.

Ailey Jolie: 04:14

I would love to hear a little bit from you about kind of your process of coming home to your body, because I'm projecting or imagining that that deeply aligns with how you support others today.

Valeria McCarroll: 04:27

Sure. I think my process of coming home to my body began when I discovered yoga. I went to undergraduate in a very small town in Virginia and discovered a hot yoga studio at a moment where I really needed a practice that would help me slow down and get in touch with what was happening inside. And that opened up, I would say, a line of inquiry or personal work that had a lot of challenge to it at that time. I had a lot of unmetabolized sexual trauma. I was leaning into disordered eating as a way to navigate that. And so yoga became a safe space where I could be and I didn't have to be any certain way for anyone. I later went on to do a yoga teacher training and at that time was also applying to grad school in in counseling psychology because I thought the way to do my personal work was to help other people do it and became a therapist and all that to say what really brought me home in a different way beyond the practices of yoga were psychedelic medicines and ceremonial spaces and rites of passage. When I was studying counseling psychology, I found myself frustrated by the limits of talk psychotherapy, where in my own personal process, I felt like I was sort of recapitulating the same story over and over and over without anything actually changing in my life. So found my way into plant medicines that brought these concepts that I'd been talking about. Oh, I know what I need to do, I know how I need to change. They brought them into a really somatic ground. And that for me changed everything. It was as though, you know, I had spent a good chunk of my life not really in touch with a somatic landscape. And then plant medicines opened up that access for me in a different way, which very much put me on a certain path of being in service to other people finding their way home to their bodies and to the plants themselves.

Ailey Jolie: 06:32

One thing that I've really enjoyed in listening to you and getting to know your voice and your perspective through the means of other podcasts and preparing for our time together. But what initially also stood out to me was your very balanced perspective on psychedelics being both very healing, but also that they could also bring a lot of harm. Or when you move that quickly, sometimes there can be unintended things. And I think that's maybe where I would love to start our exploration into the healing benefits of psychedelics, is by also bringing a maybe more nuanced piece into our time together around, okay, they are great. And there's some other stuff here that can be really challenging and really hard that I don't feel like, and this could be my bias in what I am exposed to, of course. I don't feel like that is brought into the conversation often. So I'll maybe just open by inviting you into sharing. What are the maybe some of the harder pieces or the things to be cautious about or some of the potential harms that can happen when we intend to use psychedelics in a healing way, let that be in psychotherapy or ceremony or ritual, whatever kind of container that is.

Valeria McCarroll: 07:44

I um I teach a series of four classes at CIS on psychedelics from a humanities and psychological-based perspective. And one of them is on psychedelics and trauma and ethics at this intersection. You know, my pithy transmission of a semester is psychedelics are powerful tools that can engender as much harm as they can potentiate the healing of. So in that way, I think it's helpful to think about them as really powerful tools of altering consciousness. And when we're working with a powerful tool, we need to understand how to use it well and for what purposes we're using it for. You know, I think so much of psychedelic experience in the mainstream is being potentiated within our really westernized biomedical model that understands symptoms as pathology, right? That and then tends to pathologize symptoms that are really inherently reasonable responses to conditions in the world. So to talk about kind of the shadows or the pitfalls or the dangers of using psychedelics is also to acknowledge the ways in which they've been used to cause harm historically and the ways in which they're currently causing harm. Within that, you know, if I was speaking to someone directly who was looking to have a psychedelic experience and what they should be aware of, and I'm not the be-all-end-all of information about this. There are so many fabulous harm reduction organizations and folks out there, you know, to to really know themselves in terms of their physiology and their chemistry and their what other medicines they're taking and to understand interactions, sort of basic physical safety is a such a big ground of territory to test their medicines, you know, to really know, are you getting what you think you're getting? To know your dose. Okay. The difference between a really challenging experience and a really beautiful one can sometimes come down to the amount of medicine in one's system. And there's so much power in knowing what lines up with your own nervous system and your own being, which might not be what lines up for your neighbor or your best friend who maybe has the same bodybuilds as you, right? That that everyone is individual. Beyond that, I think one of the places that often gets missed or not fully understood is the power of set and setting. And we talk about that as the mindset, what someone is bringing in and the place that an experience happens. But I think once again, often that's potentiated within this kind of Western materialistic reductionism that misses a lot of the unseen and the invisible territory of a psychedelic experience, that a person's intention, you know, matters before, during, and after an experience, but also, you know, where they're doing it, who they're doing it with, what the intention of those other people is. It's one of my, I don't know what I want to call it exactly, but sort of um axes to grind. I don't like that term. Torches to carry, torches to carry in in the field of psychedelics is to really understand that when we're talking about a psychotherapeutic framework, for instance, that the guide or the therapist, their own training and understanding of reality impacts the field. And so to really be curious about and to ask questions and to feel really aligned with the circumstances of a psychedelic experience are gonna support the most beneficial outcomes.

Ailey Jolie: 11:14

I would love to slow you down or maybe pick part a little bit because I really resonate with what you said there about the intentions of the therapist or psychotherapist, but also their frame of reality, their understanding of healing. I can absolutely look back at my own experience of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and go, oh yeah, probably doing those sessions, and I'm this is just my experience, so I'm I'm not you know making it universal. Doing those sessions with a man who had some leaky sexual energy probably is why I picked up X, Y, and Z, or why this was how I responded, because the field, if I call it that, had some other stuff in it. And I know as a client, there was no way for me to really pick that up. And so that's why I want to slow it down because I think you said something so beautiful that is also really empowering for people. And I'm projecting that you maybe have some tips or some pieces of wisdom for people to like, you know, what's a maybe tricky question you can ask someone if you're thinking of doing this to like figure out what is their frame of reference on sexuality or reality or or healing.

Valeria McCarroll: 12:29

I think I have biases and like certain perspectives, and I don't hold that I have the be all end all perspective. I wrote an article a couple of years ago called Incorporating Non-Dualism into the training of psychedelic guides because I I find myself irritable at the ways in which psychedelic guides today are not being equipped with ontological frameworks that really help us make sense of the mystical and the transpersonal and these incredibly powerful experiences that psychedelics can potentiate. And to me, to not equip a guide with an understanding of non-dualism is basically an ethical transgression. It's to set them up for unintentionally causing harm because they're gonna pathologize someone's experiences as psychotic or not real and miss the ways in which those experiences can then potentiate enormous change in a life. So if I was interviewing potential guides, I would be asking them about what their spiritual background is, what their orientation to reality, basically, on a very simple level. You know, how do you understand what is real? How do you understand how the universe came to be and what are its operating roles? Seems like a strange question, maybe to ask a guide, but you know, I personally would want to know. Touching back to what you named about leaky sexual boundaries, yeah, there's a whole conversation there about how do you work with Eros? How do you relate to it when Eros shows up in a journey? You know, what's your own kind of experiential education in how you navigate that energy in yourself? What kind of supervision and support and mentorship and feedback, you know, whose eyes are on you? That to me is a huge question because we all have shadow. We all have blind spots in ourselves. I could go down a whole rabbit hole about the ways in which we pedestalize guides as gurus, right, and make them perfect. And but the missing piece there to me in the field is the need for systems of accountability that go beyond the therapist client diet. So I would want to know that any guide I'm working with has people they seek supervision and support from who are giving them honest feedback about where their blind spots are, where their shadows are, where their unmet stuff is showing up. That's part of how safety happens, I think, in a psychedelic space.

Ailey Jolie: 14:42

I'm curious to hear from you what the present state of merging sexuality into psychedelic assisted psychotherapy trainings or even the conversations of psychedelics is, because that was the reason why I left the psychedelic space. I was working for an organization, putting together trials, research protocols, training protocols. And then I stepped back and I was like, no one here is trained in sexuality. And as I was going through my own analyst work, I was like, this is probably why things got very funky in my personal life. And a lot of shadow came up because I wasn't actually being held by people who understood that you give me, this is just my personal experience, you give me a psychedelic. And one part that's going to come out is a very strong femme fatale part because that's the part that had to survive, you know? Like that's what my child self like she figured out how to adapt. And it's like, and if I'm not in the presence of trained clinicians that know how to work with sexuality, that could go sideways very, very fast and very quickly. And so I would love to hear from you because then when I went and became a registered sex therapist, I had no real interest in psychedelics anymore. I was like, I can sit and meditate, I've done, you know, like I can get this from meditation. I'm good. So, you know, it took me down a different journey, but I would love to hear from you where kind of the space of psychedelics right now, as you experience it and as you take part in it, where it's maybe evolved to in sexuality being brought in, or if there's still room for growth.

Valeria McCarroll: 16:14

There's still room for growth. You know, was it four or five years ago? There was sort of an eruption of allegations of sexual abuse, both above and below ground. And I think what that illuminated was the ways in which power dynamics around Eros have not been metabolized by psychedelic spaces fully. That being said, I am sure there are places in which people are doing impeccable work around sexuality and Eros with medicine. I haven't found anyone who's actually doing that work intentionally. The places where I see it showing up are, you know, in women's groups or in men's groups, not to be gender-binaried about it, but in in places that are contained, maybe for people to do more protected pieces of work around patriarchy, around sexual transgressions, around the ways in which culture has kind of contorted our relationship with a healthy Eros. But I actually don't know that anyone has brought it forward as overtly as you just named it. I mean, to me, there's an enormous missing piece around, I think every guide should have a basic training in consent, you know, and a basic training in somatics. These are like harm reduction practices. But because psychedelics are coming through into the above-ground expression through the biomedical field, we're treating them as pills, right? As answers to a pathology that miss the psychotherapeutic element and all the dynamics of the psychotherapeutic element that happens in a relational field. So it's it's a growing edge, right? It's yeah, uncharted territory in many ways.

Ailey Jolie: 17:54

From your perspective, what do you feel gets lost if you think anything does get lost when it does come through that more biomedical avenue?

Valeria McCarroll: 18:03

I want to be clear that it's not an either-or situation to me, um, because I think it can become easy to kind of bifurcate and be like, it's, you know, it's either this model or it's that one. And and my hope is that we're really learning how to dialogue across difference and across pollinate and share best practices. So, in that, pieces that are missing to me in the Western biomedical lens are the ritual and ceremonial aspects enormously. There are pieces of somatic training that are incorporated, but you know, the bias is towards you have your eye mask on and you're laying down, and and there isn't as much encouragement or maybe room for movement and bodily expression as I would like to see. The other big piece that seems to be missing is if we're doing this in one-on-one sessions with an eye mask on. I'm here I am in my little individualistic canoe. Where's the community? Where's the sitting up with eyes open, praying together? Where are the ways in which these medicines have been used historically to reweave culture and repair relational networks? So I hold some deep concern, actually, that the ways in which we're formalizing psychedelic assisted psychotherapy as a treatment is just going to reinforce this Western individualism that's so problematic in culture.

Ailey Jolie: 19:27

Okay, before I jump on that really golden nugget of more biomedically packaged psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, you said reinforcing individualism. I would go on an edge of maybe saying it reinforces unhealthy narcissism. That's my own language. Before I go there, I want to rewind back and just explore why the presence of ritual and ceremony and prayer are so important in a psychedelic space. I obviously had heard that so many times when I was in, you know, my experience of psychedelic assistant psychotherapy. I had some element of that, but it it was very different than I when I found myself more in that traditional jungle setting with people who didn't speak my language. And I was really immersed in, oh, we we pray for hours. We do we cleanse in this way. There was a different tone, and the medicine was a completely different experience comparatively to what I'd had before. So I would love to just hear you pick this apart a little bit more and give more language here to the listener who's maybe like, uh, like, yeah, there's a difference, but like it's so small, it's irrelevant.

Valeria McCarroll: 20:43

I can put one lens on it, which is anthropologically, we understand that ritual precipitates social change. Historically, ritual has been an essential part of how cultures evolve and stay healthy over time. And as Western medicine has sort of come onto the forefront and become the place in which our major rituals, birthing and dying, happen. Say that we're living in a culture that does not have the rituals it used to. The other thing ritual does, and this is through a rites of passage lens, ritual as form of rites of passage, is that it helps us make developmental transitions between life stages. So to complete kind of untended tasks within the psyche and self as we move between youth to adolescent to adult to elder to ancestor and back again. And so as we've lost those rituals, we've also lost our elders because we've lost the forms that help people become good elders. And we see this in certainly in America where I live. You know, there's a bunch of uninitiated white adolescent men walking around in adult bodies making decisions for everyone. So I that's my like political sort of orientation to ritual being important. You know, but then deeper into the rites of passage. So rites of passage is a term that also comes from anthropology from Arnold Van Genet. And he oriented to rites of passage through this three-part model, right? Departure, liminality, and return, which I think is a fabulous framework for understanding psychedelic experience. Ritual is how we make the transition between those three phases or stages. And so it tells the brain, it tells the psyche, it tells our being that we're moving from one state of consciousness to another. It helps us make a transition that would otherwise be awkward or hard to do. So when we're working with a psychedelic, it actually helps to precipitate and facilitate that expanded state of consciousness, andor also helps us land and ground and integrate. Both super essential. But were we in a traditional culture where there had been rituals passed down over time, we would have learned those rituals from a very young age. And so we would have hold held them with a certain kind of sacredness or understanding of what they would be facilitating psychosymbolically in the psyche. So it would give us a sense of being embedded in lineage and connected to a network of support.

Ailey Jolie: 23:32

What do you think would be different in our collective culture right now? You sprinkled a few things in.

Valeria McCarroll: 23:38

If we did have more initiatory practices, I think we do have initiatory practices. We're just not calling them that. We're not formalizing them. I think rave culture is a fabulous example of um initiatory, you know, we intrinsically seek out initiatory experiences because we some part of us knows we need them. But it were we to formalize them, I think a lot of things could happen. But because ritual precipitates culture change, to embed ritual in culture would facilitate a movement towards a healthier culture and therefore be threatening to the systems of oppression and power over and hierarchy that are arguably already on really unstable ground.

Ailey Jolie: 24:34

Do you feel like this psychedelic movement in its present form is still a threat to the present moment culture, or do you feel like it's been absorbed in some ways?

Valeria McCarroll: 24:46

Oh, psychedelics are kind of like introducing a little dose of chaos into someone's system. And so you never really know what's going to happen. Some of the beauty of it is, you know, I don't I don't hold it as a black and white. If you're in the Western medical system and you pursue psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, you're going to become a better cog in the machine. I'm concerned that it might set you up for that, um, but not necessarily. I think it's also important to remember that most psychedelic use happens in extra legal settings still. So the vast majority of psychedelic users, at least in the United States, are not in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy sessions in a legal therapeutic framework. They're working outside the system, right? They're working in countercultural settings, settings that are taboo, that are at the borders of things. And so those are places certainly that have more danger because of the lack of regulation and the lack of oversight and accountability. But they're also the places where consciousness revolutions can happen and where there's opportunity for people to wake up.

Ailey Jolie: 25:48

A question that I often sit with, and I don't have any sway to either way, so I'm just genuinely to explore it with you, is if you feel or you perceive or believe that psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that is done outside of those kind of more clinical contexts or that legal way, if it can be safe in all of the ways that we would hope it to be, or if because it is in that countercultural hidden, you are doing something secretive against the rules, there is maybe a an inherent unsafeness to it. And I could argue either side of this. So I'm just curious to hear from you because I know that ethics and safety are such a big part of what you speak about.

Valeria McCarroll: 26:33

Answer this question, we have to talk about what safety is and what that means to someone. It's one of the paradoxes of psychedelic experience to me, is when we're talking about consent and safety, can someone actually consent to an experience that might fundamentally change their understanding of who they are, the world, and what they're up to. I don't actually think you can really consent to that. You can do your best to help someone prepare for, but you know, it's a it's a slippery slope there. So, so then what is safety with that in mind? You know, fundamentally, we don't know what's going to happen. We can take a synthetic psilocybin pill in a clinical setting and still have a medical emergency or be not well held by someone who doesn't have adequate training or messes up despite the best of their intentions. That's not safety necessarily. So it's it's an interesting question. You know, what what makes something safe? I think there's more risk in extra-legal settings by virtue of the fact that they are extra-legal. That is the ground, right? Is to take psychedelics in an extra-legal setting is to break a law. Um, so that right there makes them less safe, probably on the legal level. I think there are underground communities that have created more psychological safety and more spiritual safety than I see in some of the clinical settings.

Ailey Jolie: 28:06

I want to go back to the start of your answer and how you spoke about consent. And can you truly consent to an experience that will totally change your understanding of self, your history, who you are, how you've been in the world. And when you were saying that, I noticed I was like, had a little bit of tears in my eyes and thinking back to my first experience of MGMA assisted psychotherapy and how, yes, I had all of these little memories of things. But like when the medicine came on, like I reached for my male therapist and I was like, if I tell you everything, will you not leave me? And he was like, I'll stay here. And then it was just like the floodgate of memories to the point where I had to stop talking as I started having a panic attack because already on the medicine, it was too overwhelming. It had was too quick and too fast. And so I would love to spend some time here with you exploring like how do you do that preparation work for someone, knowing that we can't actually consent to something we don't know, even if we quote unquote want that or it's quote unquote best for us. It's it is like a really tricky one because I definitely know there was a period in my life after that, years later, where I was really angry. I was really angry, not so much at the therapist, at the therapist, but the lack of resource and the lack of language that was available at that time because I had no idea that level of identity shift and history shift could happen in, well, it was, you know, like three minutes, but you know, the whole session was eight hours. So in eight hours, I was fundamentally a different person. And I could never close that again.

Valeria McCarroll: 29:57

Yeah. Yeah. This is where I think the right to passage lensing, again, is so, so useful. And the concept of initiation that when we cross an initiatory threshold between life stages, we are no longer the person we were before. You know, we like take that person and we carry them inside of us, and certainly their unintended business still shows up, but we're a different being. It just is what it is. Right. And and so to make that deliberate to someone up front is be very counterintuitive to sort of client-led approaches, but to be like, look, you're entering an initiatory period, you're going to be in this really powerful ritual. How do you want to be different? What do you want to change about yourself? And to surface the places that are hungry for that already, to tend those places, to make them visible, to put them on the altar. To me, that's part of the kind of due diligence of preparation. As well as I could put my, you know, my good therapist glasses on and be like also like checking for trauma, you know, what hasn't been tended, what needs to be tended in the psyche from earlier periods in life, knowing that those tend to show up in those spaces and making that overt to a person.

Ailey Jolie: 31:19

Recently I was listening to a podcast, um, because I don't engage with that much in like the psychedelic world, but every once in a while I get a little calling. You know, so listening to this podcast, and the guest was speaking about how they now have information on how the brain is open for a certain amount of period after taking a psychedelic. And this kind of brought to my mind the importance of what you do after, but also the importance of assessment. Because I can look back on my experiences and go, oh my goodness, like even though on all of the credentialing papers, I looked safe, I looked fine, I looked like an ideal candidate, there was this undercurrent of domestic violence and relational abuse that quite frankly, now when I look back, knowing what we know about the brain, these critical periods opening up, I was like, it was inevitable almost that I was gonna go find myself in another very psychologically and sexually abusive relationship, which I did a few weeks after my first MDMA session, because it was like too fast, too open. And so after I listened to that podcast, I've been kind of sitting in this question of like, knowing everything that we know around domestic violence and how hard it is to leave a relationship, knowing it takes the average woman 11 tries over a span of seven years is usually the period to get out of that pattern, even if it's different partners. How do you actually do that assessment and keep them safe after? And and is that the therapist's responsibility? I don't know if it is. I I have no idea. Is it culture? Is it community? Can that be an informed consent? Like no dating for until your brain has recalibrated. Like, I don't know. These are just questions that I've been sitting with as I've been reflecting on my experiences, but also the emergence of new information and also being a clinician and knowing my story is not unique.

Valeria McCarroll: 33:16

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the general advice that I have heard and that I offer to folks in integration is don't make any massive changes in your life for two weeks after an experience, because that's kind of the you know, the open period. I also think what you're bringing up raises this really interesting question around gatekeeping. You know, and when you're talking about initiatory phenomena, whose responsibility is it to gatekeep? And is it ethical to give someone an experience and then send them back into circumstances that are destabilizing? We could talk about this with domestic violence. We could talk about this with folks who are embedded in the systems of oppression, you know, who have black or brown skin, who are living in experiences that are traumatizing in a daily way, you know. Is it ethical? I don't, I don't know. I know I would not ethically feel good saying, no, I'm not going to give you an experience that could potentially be resourcing to you and help you make massive changes in your life. That to me wouldn't wouldn't feel good, but I think it's a it's a massive question, you know, and and wouldn't it be wonderful, you know, if we had retreat centers where people could go for a month and really have space to integrate and stabilize and organize themselves psychically before stepping back into life. Not the way our culture is organized right now, but I think it's a a question to think about as the psychedelic field continues to unfold is 30% of the work happens in the journey, 70% happens afterwards. And so if that is so, you know, I'm making those numbers up. I don't actually, that's not in the data in any way, but but if that is so, you know, what's the responsibility of the person holding space to help in that after period, or or what kind of systems of support are necessary in the integration period to to really support someone? And and how do you also prepare someone for that reality of like great, you're gonna have this massive experience? And then there's gonna be this whole other body of work that emerges.

Ailey Jolie: 35:35

Yes, exactly. Yeah, you can consent to the experience, but then there's also a consent around, there's a consent around, okay, and for the next X number of months, you may be integrating this piece that you don't even know yet. And do you have the space in your life to do that? Which brings us back to I use the word unhealthy narcissism. You use the word kind of this individual effect that can happen when we're doing psychedelics and with maybe without community. And I would love to spend a little bit of time kind of here because I think if you've spent any time in the psychedelic community, uh, you've probably encountered someone who you may be projecting or judging that has maybe done a little too much or the ego has really like grabbed hold because the ego is a healthy thing. Like, I don't want to get rid of anyone's egos, but like maybe that's all that's left. And you know, and I and I get curious about is it in the protocols? Is it in how we're speaking about psychedelics? Like, how is this phenomenon happening and why is it happening? And I think that's just how my mind works when I see something out there in the world that I'm like, that's a bit odd. I I could try and de deconstruct it. And so I would love to spend some time maybe picking this apart from your perspective of what you see, also bringing that piece around ethics and safety.

Valeria McCarroll: 36:51

I mean, this question of like, how did this show up in cultures one I've thought about a lot? And we could blame it on Descartes and Cartesian dualism and you know, Plato and the Greeks, and sort of the emergence of Enlightenment philosophy. And regardless, we seem to be in a dominant paradigm in the world that really organizes around the individual as separate, which to me is a a lie and a myth. And I mean that in a fabrication, not in like myths or stories that help us find meaning and purpose and culture. Yeah, and the Western hyper-individualistic tendency we're seeing reflected in the paradigms of psychedelic assistance psychotherapy, psychotherapy in general. I mean, I, you know, yours Freud being like the therapist should be opaque to their clients and the ways in which the one-on-one dyad can unconsciously support someone's ego structures in rigidifying instead of becoming more malleable or shifting in ways that support healthy growth and development. You know, I see it in some of the shadow expressions of spiritual bypass, but also the archetype, for lack of a better word, of the psychedelic savior of psychedelics are the answer. I'm the next psychedelic savior of the world, psychedelics are going to save the world. To me, that's a marker of like, oh, you've had a really powerful experience, you're experiencing some healthy ego inflation. How do we appropriately deflate that and like ground you in what you actually have control over? This idea of individualism is problematic in that it makes us think of ourselves as these separate little body beings who aren't impacted by our circumstances, who have all kinds of agency and control over ourselves and parts of the world that we actually don't have agency or control over because we're interdependent. I find Western individualism to be one of the main underlying root assumptions that is creating suffering in the world today.

Ailey Jolie: 38:48

I would love to circle back to how you spoke about that being present in psychotherapy, because this is something that I've experienced and encountered. I still do some one-on-one work, but it's definitely not the bulk of my practice and how I invest my time and my education and energy. Um, because of what you've just shared right there. For me, there was a moment uh where it became like almost kind of fundamentally incompatible with my worldview. And that really shifted for me after being sick. I got an infectious disease from a mosquito bite. And for me, that was this deep moment of like, oh my God, like we're so interconnected. Even though I had those feelings on psychedelics, there's nothing like being in the emergency room thinking you're going to die because a mosquito bit you. Like that is a moment of just complete reverence for how we are one. And so I would love to just pull this apart with you a little bit around maybe some of the harms that can happen when psychotherapy really comes from this Western individualist lens, how you can know, even for people who are listening, that maybe you're working with a therapist whose therapy is a little bit more oriented that way. Because I think that there are little tells in therapeutic practice or therapeutic language that can kind of signal to you, okay, this is a therapist who's maybe a little bit more collective-oriented or understands the interconnection between us all and therapists who are maybe more trained, and there's nothing wrong with it. It's just different. Um, it does have some harms in that individual Western lens.

Valeria McCarroll: 40:20

Yeah. I mean, my major issue with the individual model of psychotherapy is the way in which it tends to subtly kind of reify the therapist as group and arbiter of knowledge and healer of the client. Find that really distasteful and problematic. And it comes right out of Freud, right? Who really held he was not going to share anything about himself and that his stuff had no impact on the field of the therapeutic relationship with his clients, who were mostly all women, right? And I there's come some kind of existential kink in that that I don't need to unpack right now. Um, not trying to piss off any of the Freudians, like I really respect the theory, but you know, but that so that model is sort of the unconscious ground, right? That the therapist should sort of be back in the room, which is different to me than the therapist being anchored in themselves and holding a space, acknowledging that they're in a co-created field and that their material is going to be activated by their clients and their clients' material is going to be activated by them, regardless of the degree that they're making it over it or not, right? So, but I think we're so enculturated in the West to look at power outside of ourselves, right? That, you know, we look to medical experts, we look to, you know, our government, we look to all the ways in which we're told that we don't have power gets recapitulated in the therapy room. And so we want our therapist to give us the answers or to tell us what we're supposed to do. And hopefully we have a good therapist who's like, I don't know, what do you think? You know. So I would be, I'm very cautious about the one-on-one model. I don't do one-on-one work with people at this point. I think group models are a much more interesting way to not collapse, but to massage the asymmetry of power in a space in a way that's healthy. And there are moments at which I think one-on-one work is really helpful and appropriate. I receive one-on-one work, I just don't offer. So, with that in mind, I would want to know, you know, how does a therapist understand the connection between personal healing and the collective? That to me would be a place I'd really want to understand. How do they understand their role in the space? You know, what do they hold as their job? What are they there to do in that frame? Because I think the answers to those questions will reveal a lot about someone's kind of orientation to the work.

Ailey Jolie: 42:52

Those are really beautiful questions around specifically around how does the therapist understand personal healing in regards to the collective, I think is a really good indicator. And I really enjoyed your answer because I just found it, I find it really validating. When another therapist is like, I don't want to be your guru, like, please don't look at me with those eyes or put that projection away because I know for me, don't know exactly when it happened, but for me now, it's just like an instant. As soon as I pick up any of that is happening, I was like, I just actually need to like get as far as away as I can because like I just don't want to be in that power thing. It just doesn't interest me in any way. And so this brings me to a question that I wanted to explore with you, which is around how do you, and it does tie into what we were kind of speaking about earlier, but how do you kind of suss out your maybe your psychedelics guide and their relationship to power? Because it's so important if you put yourself into psychotherapy, which is vulnerable, but also psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is even more vulnerable to know what that person's relationship to power is. Because when I kind of want Things back in my own experience or some things that I've seen. I'm like, oh yeah, they just had some really distorted relationships to power. And I think that was one of the best pieces of my integration work years later, working with a Youngin analyst was his relationship to power is very clean. Like you you knew what it was. May not be the one I want to have, but I knew what his was.

Valeria McCarroll: 44:21

I mean, I think this is a place where training of psychedelic guides becomes so important. And the importance of a guide doing their own personal work, not necessarily from the place of like, I'm gonna root out my shadows and cut them out and get rid of them because that's not possible. Then we have this whole other, like, we have to introduce this ground of being of like everybody's got a shadow, you know, this is like this is just what it is. We're not trying to kill it, we're just trying to know it so it doesn't show up in those spaces in an unconscious way and cause harm. So, with that, you know, is very, very seductive to be seen as a guru. It feels good, particularly for lots of folks called to the healing arts who are called there because of their own childhood wounds and places of needing to feel special or needing to feel love, right? It's a setup for a guide to become identified with the experience of being seen as a guru or being seen as special. And then they create pressure on themselves to have the answers, to be the guru, to like never mess up. Because if you're the guru, you're perfect, right? In the Western eyes of guruism, the guru is the be-all arbiter of all knowledge. So I think it has to start even before a guide takes on that title of really understanding where they get hooked. Where do they, you know, in their own history, have these places that want tending, that are young, that want to be in relationship, because those are the places that are going to get hooked by a client's unconscious material or conscious material, and getting really clear about those before they show up in a psychedelic session. From there, I think there's also a, you know, cultivating an appropriate kind of self-disclosure, which can be counterintuitive to a lot of the ways in which psychotherapeutic training happens. You know, we're supposed to kind of like keep our internal landscape a little bit quiet or a little bit kind of in the background. And well, I think it's important to metabolize and consider what we're going to say before we say it. It's also helpful to model humanness and imperfection and accountability. I mean, this is a whole other piece of, you know, basic harm reduction training for guides is capacity to repair harm. You know, do you do you have a basic training in what do you do when you mess up? Because you will mess up. That's just this is human nature, is we say things unconsciously and we're like, oh God, I didn't mean to say that. And look, it had this impact. I feel bad about. And so that's even before we get into the therapy room. Then I think, you know, if I was a client sussing out a therapist or a guide, I would want to know how do they understand and work with power dynamics in the room. And similarly to asking a therapist, you know, what do you see your role as? How do you understand your role as a guide or a psychedelic assisted therapist? And just really have them speak into that, because that's going to reveal really how they anchor themselves in the space. I'd also want to know who they trained with. Who are your teachers? What frameworks? You know, if they have frameworks that are more based in feminist social justice, transformative justice, consent-based sexological body work, kind of these more radical orientations to a healing field, those are going to be green lights for me, not necessarily total green lights, but but they're going to tell me something about their orientation. And then really, again, that axis of the individual and the collective, I think is important to illuminate. You know, how do you view psychedelic work in relationship to social justice?

Ailey Jolie: 48:11

Thank you so much for that answer and for leaving the listener with some really good kind of drops of wisdom and questions to ask so that if they are curious about psychedelic assistance psychotherapy, they're a little bit more empowered in in the questions that they ask and so that they can discern and be more choosy. Um, it's something that I am really passionate about, is I can, you know, as much as I can look back and maybe wish that things were different, I always have to hold a deep humility in my heart that I am the person I am today because I spent three years in a deep psychedelic hole. And there was a lot of stuff that went sideways and there was a lot of hurt that happened there. But there was also a lot of honesty and a lot of healing that it ultimately led me to. So I really appreciate conversations on psychedelics that can hold both and people that can hold both. And so that's why I wanted to have you on here was to have a little bit more of a nuanced conversation and so that you could share with the listener listener some of the pieces of wisdom that you did today. Before we end, I wanted to ask do you have anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about? Sure.

Valeria McCarroll: 49:26

Well, I just want to say one thing about what you just named. Again, Western individualism. My issues with Western individualism is we think that psychedelic experience is supposed to be this amazing, transpersonal, numinous, nothing ever goes wrong. We always feel amazing afterwards. And the reality is that deep transformation is sometimes dark and takes years and has us reconciling with all kinds of ontological shock or spiritual emergency, right? All of these very descent-based kind of in the weeds aspects of being that don't get articulated very well. But I think you just pointed out that, you know, we tend to think that those are bad or problematic. And not to say we should be in like unnecessary suffering in them, but to acknowledge that transformation through psychedelics is not all love and light, and that there can be beauty that emerges from the darkness, right? The metaphor, the lotus, right? It's got its roots in the muck and it comes up through the water and then it blossoms in the sun. Like, but its roots remain in the Negreto. It remains in the darkness. And so to understand the value of being in descent and darkness and the gold that that can precipitate for someone, I think is so important to keep in mind. Thank you. Upcoming, I am publishing a book this winter with inner traditions on the psychedelic guide. So it is a framework. It's designed for psychedelic guides, but anyone who's interested really in psychedelic exploration and really thinking about the aspects of psychedelic transformation that aren't embedded in the Western medical model. So we talk about creativity and we talk about desire and we talk about imagination and sort of bringing in these different flavors of it. So I'm excited for that.

Ailey Jolie: 51:17

Thank you. I'm excited for it too. And it's closer to the day you want to come back and talk about the book, please do. Like, no, it's an open invite. What I keep sitting with after this conversation is the consent paradox that Valeria named so clearly. Can you actually consent to an experience that will fundamentally change your understanding of who you are? And I think the answer might actually be no, not really. You can prepare, you can be informed, but the person who comes out the other side is not the same person who went in. And no amount of paperwork accounts for that. I brought my own MDMA session into this conversation because I think it matters to say out loud. I walked in ticking every box of an ideal candidate. And within minutes, I was reaching for my therapist asking if he would stay if I told him everything. And what followed was eight hours that I spent years metabolizing, not because it went wrong, but because it was too fast and the container wasn't built for what came up. I actually spent about five hours of that session having a complete panic attack, unable to speak, and have had nightmares around the level of panic that was going through my body at that time. And none of that is a failure of the particular medicine or the protocol. It's a failure of preparation and the field around it. The piece about sexuality that Valeria named is one I feel strongly about. And I want to be direct here. Eros is not a side issue in the psychedelic work. It's one of the most predictable things that surfaces, especially for those who have trauma histories, especially for those who've experienced sexualized violence. And the fact that most guide training programs are not built around an understanding of erotic transference, power dynamics, or even basic consent frameworks in a relational sense, that is a clinical problem, not a participant problem. This is not a fringe concern in my perspective. Every guide working in this space should have a grounding in somatics and a grounding in sexuality. In my mind, these are not extras. They're harm reduction, as Valeria named. I also want to hold the rights of passwords framework Valeria offered because I think it reframes something important. When we use the biomedical model as the primary container for psychedelic work, we're asking medicine to function as treatment inside a paradigm that pathologizes the very states those medicines tend to open. Mystical experiences, ego dissolution, contact with something larger than the self. These are not symptoms, but without a framework that accounts for them, a guy can inadvertently pathologize a person's most profound moment of their life. And that is no small thing. And then the integration, Valeria said it clearly. The journey is 30% of the work, and the aftermath is the rest. What I know clinically and personally is that integration period is also the period of greatest vulnerability. The brain is genuinely open. Old patterns are loosened, and without adequate support, people walk back into the same circumstances that created the wound and sometimes go further into them. That is not a sign that the medicine itself failed. It's a sign that the field around the medicine was not billed for what comes after. None of this is an argument against psychedelics. It's an argument for taking seriously the full weight of what these experiences ask of a person and of the people who hold space. Valeria is writing a book on that, literally right now. And when it's out, we'll link it in the show notes. If this conversation stirred something in you, if you've had an experience that cracks something open and you're still trying to make sense of it, come find me in Embody. That's where we do the slower, more embodied work of actually landing what the big experiences point toward. You can find out more at embodymethod.com. Again, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Ailey Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience and can inspire more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and nurturing the relationship you have with your very own body.