Psychedelics, Trauma & Psychic Housekeeping

May 25

In 1909, while on a trip to the United States with his mentor Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung had a dream about a multi-level house with different rooms.

It was a dream that proved especially significant to his career and his separation from Freud, because it provided him with a “guiding image” that led him to develop his own ideas about the structure of the psyche — particularly the relationship between the conscious, personal unconscious and collective unconscious levels of the psyche. He recounts this dream in his memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

“This was the dream. I was in a house I did not know, which had two stories. It was ‘my house.’ I found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, ‘Not bad.’ But then it occured to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor.
There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark. I went from one room to another, thinking, ‘Now I really must explore the whole house.’ I came upon a heavy door, and opened it. Beyond it, I discovered a stone stairway that led down into the cellar.
Descending again, I found myself in a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.
My interest by now was intense. I looked more closely at the floor. It was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted, and again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths.
These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock. Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated. Then I awoke…
It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche–that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style.
The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene came. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself — a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before men laid claim to them.
The dream pointed out that there were further reaches to the state of consciousness… the long uninhabited ground floor in medieval style, then the Roman cellar, and finally the prehistoric cave. These signified past times and passed stages of consciousness.
My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. It ‘clicked,’ as the English have it, and the dream became for me a guiding image…”

The “guiding image” given to Jung of the psyche-as-house, one with multiple levels and rooms, is a useful one and makes intuitive sense. If we take a moment to reflect, it’s clear that most of us seem to live inside our minds, so it’s not a great leap to think of the mental-emotional space we inhabit as a house. Where else could the proverbial closets containing our skeletons exist but in a psyche-house?

I was reminded of Jung’s psyche-as-house analogy recently when I was thinking about the current trend in western psychotherapy for healing trauma with psychedelics.

Following the guiding image of psyche-as-house, it occurred to me that trauma can be thought of as a painful experience that’s been locked up in one of the rooms on the level of the personal unconscious.

A traumatic event becomes trauma when the psyche-house is under construction, has a shaky foundation, or when the event is powerful enough to rock even the strongest psychic structure. Think about how we call someone who has a strong sense of self grounded, solid, and stable — terms that could just as easily be used to describe a house with a strong foundation and structure.

Unlike a young child with a developing ego (or an adult with an under-developed ego), the solid, grounded person is less likely to experience post-traumatic stress after a shock or attack. Another factor that greatly contributes to recovering from such a shock is the presence of a caring community that can support the person and help build them back up. Note the use of house-related metaphors, support and build.

Trauma, as a psychic disorder that endures long after the traumatic event, occurs when the psyche-house lacks the strength and stability to withstand the shock. The only way for the structure to survive is by containing the energy of the traumatic event in a separate room of the psyche-house.

While this self-protection strategy works in the short-term to avoid a complete breakdown of the psyche-house, what we find over time is that it’s not only the painful memories that get safely locked away. Other things get locked in there with them, like the openness, curiosity, creativity and wonder we had unrestricted access to in our childhood.

As long as the traumatic memories remain locked away in the hidden rooms of our psyche-house, we are cut off from the positive qualities and potentials we embodied at the time when the door was shut.

This situation is what is known by the shaman as “soul loss.” The release of locked up trauma and recovery of positive potentials and psychic energy is encapsulated in the process commonly known as “soul retrieval” (I prefer the term soul recovery).

Now, where does psychedelic therapy come into the picture?

Psychedelic Therapy

The use of psychedelics for healing and recovery is a way to force open the locked doors in our psyche-house. The molecules of the psychedelic are like a SWAT team that comes in and kicks open the doors of the psyche-rooms, revealing both the painful memories and the gifts that are locked away with them. It’s telling that the word “breakthrough” is used frequently in this kind of therapy.

One of the problems with this blunt force method is that the doors holding in the painful content are often destroyed in the process. The traumatic memories are no longer contained and flood into the other levels of the psyche-house, wreaking havoc and potentially causing even more damage to the overall structure.

With expert help, one can release the painful memory, recover the hidden potential, and repair the damage, but this is often difficult and slow work.

The cleanup project is generally known in psychedelic therapy as “integration”, but unfortunately, the crucial stage of repairing the damage isn’t often addressed. The damage to the mind and subtle body that psychedelics can sometimes cause doesn’t fit well with the popular narrative that promotes psychedelics as a non-addictive, relatively harmless “medicine”. This is the shadow of psychedelic therapy, and it’s lead to numerous problems including post-therapy depression, psychosis and even suicide.

The standard format of psychedelic therapy consists of three stages: preparation, therapy and integration. But really, because of the way these substances force open the psyche (or “break open the head” to quote a popular book on psychedelics), psychedelic therapy should also include “repair” as one of its steps.

But what if the “breakthrough” and subsequent “repair” could be avoided altogether?

Inner Journeying

In working with clients over the past years, another method for soul recovery has emerged that isn’t forceful and destructive. I call it Inner Journeying, and it developed organically out of my exploration of neo-shamanic drum journeying and Jungian active imagination.

In this method, we learn how to utilize our faculty of imagination while in a light trance state, which helps to open the front door to the psyche-house. We can then “track” mental-emotional impressions, which will lead us to the room where the original memory is stored (along with the soul potential). We can then retrieve the soul part that split off at the time of the painful event, care for it and bring it into the main room of the psyche-house (Jung’s “salon”) so that it can live with the rest of our inner family. This procedure effectively frees the soul part from the pain room, and integrates the potential it holds into our conscious psyche.

A Client Experience
Recently, a client came to me feeling like she was blocked creatively and wanted to feel more empowered in her relationship choices. During our session we spontaneously entered into an inner journey together. Tracking the mental-emotional impressions that were arising, she was lead down into the basement of her childhood home. There she found her infant-self lying in a crib, unattended, ignored and wailing with discomfort and loneliness. She proceeded to pick up her infant-self, and holding her to her breast, carry her up the stairs. She then brought her infant-self into her warm and open heart-space. Note the resonance between the words “heart” and “hearth”. Emerging from her inner journey, she experienced a deep emotional release and felt that she could now care for her infant-self, no longer alone and unattended. Following our session, I recommended she find a photo of herself as an infant and place it on her altar as a reminder.

Following the recovery and integration into consciousness, we continue to care for the wounded part through ongoing dialogue, ritual and body-soul care. We can even periodically return to the memory contained in the pain room and open a window to “air it out” so it doesn’t feel so congested and oppressive.

The memory traces of that initial painful experience will always be a part of our psyche-house, but we now have the ability to contain it and enter, or leave it, at our will. With the ongoing integration of the recovered potential, the energy of the trauma wound loses its intensity and effect on our present moment state. Over time, our psyche-house begins to feel more open, spacious, clear and welcoming.

The Guest House
by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
Taken from SELECTED POEMS by Rumi, Translated by Coleman Barks (Penguin Classics, 2004).