The Rise of Traumadelic Culture & the Capture of Psychedelics
In this article, it’s not my intention to downplay the profound effect that trauma can have on an individual’s wellbeing, but to explore a critical analyses of psychedelic psychotherapy and trauma-centered therapy based on my experiences in the overlapping worlds of plant medicine and therapy over the past decade or so. The intention with all my work is to support individuals on their path of healing, growth and transformation, not just for their own sense of wellbeing but also so they can become agents of positive change in their families, communities and the world.
This article has been a long time coming, but it seems perfectly timed that I feel compelled to write and publish it now. As of this writing, I’ve decided to not renew my 3-year certification as a Compassionate Inquire practitioner, and it happens to be just a few days after an event we can mark as “peak Traumadelic Culture” — when Gabor Maté interviewed Prince Harry about his childhood trauma on a pay-per-view broadcast that cost 50 bucks a pop (no refunds). An interview in which Maté, who is a retired family physician and not a trained psychiatrist, diagnosed Harry with ADD. Trauma as public spectacle is nothing new, but the commercial crassness of this event surely signals a new low, even for Traumadelic Culture.
Let me start by giving a bit of background. I started experimenting with psychedelics in the early 90s. It was the dawn of the grunge era, I was in my late teens and heavily into music and the “alternative scene” which for me meant listening to and playing music, thrift store shopping, ‘zines, trading VHS tapes of underground cult movies, discovering the Beat writers and writing earnest poetry while smoking clove cigarettes in bookish coffee shops.
If you were involved in this scene it was only a matter of time before you got hip to psychedelics. Mushrooms, LSD and hash were readily available. Ayahuasca was still a mysterious and exotic potion from deep in the Amazon jungle that you only heard about in obscure books by William Burroughs and Terence McKenna. The main selling point was the promise that psychedelics could free your mind and open you to new dimensions of creativity, as evidenced by the work of the Beats and musicians like the Grateful Dead and other relics of the psychedelic era that were experiencing a renaissance in the 90s. Psychedelics were the domain of spiritual misfits, societal outsiders and cultural vanguards — my kind of people, or at the least the kind of people I aspired to be like.
And while I had my fair share of bad trips due to a complete ignorance of proper “set and setting”, psychedelics delivered on those promises of consciousness expansion and creative expression. During my last year of high school, I was playing lead guitar in a grunge band with a group of older guys in their 20s. Our “manager” conveniently moonlighted as a hash dealer, and before every band practice we’d go through a ritual that involved sitting in a circle and freebasing hash through an old military surplus gas mask. The ad hoc ritual helped us all get on the same wavelength and free ourselves up creatively, and allowed me overcome the crippling performance anxiety that formed during my early years as a guitarist when I was pressured into participating in music competitions.
The Rise of Traumadelic Culture
When I revisited psychedelics years later during a period of crisis in my mid-30s, it was pretty clear that the psychedelic scene had changed. It was now all about healing and personal development. In fact, it was my therapist who invited me to my first ayahuasca ceremony. In the dozen or so years since my own psychedelic renaissance, I’ve witnessed the almost complete transformation of Psychedelic Culture into what I’ve been calling Traumadelic Culture.
The indigenous people who have utilized these substances for millennia recognize that the source of our distressing symptoms is not that we’ve lost our minds, but that we’ve lost our soul.
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The word psychedelic is supposed to mean “manifesting or revealing (delos) the soul (psyche).” The fact that it is usually wrongly defined as “mind manifesting” is something I wrote in the book about my midlife psychedelic experiences, Yoga & Plant Medicine (2019). Even if they got their Greek wrong, the early psychedelic pioneers knew that these substances enhanced their art and creativity, awakened them spiritually and helped them remember that “It’s all ONE” and “Life is beautiful, maaan.” Art, aesthetics, creativity, spirituality and ecological awareness have historically been the domain of the soul, not the mind.
It’s the mind — conditioned by a rational, materialist, consumerist society — that keeps us from remembering and appreciating the things that really feed our soul. The truly healing potential of psychedelics lies in their uncanny ability to reveal the soul, that deepest part of ourselves that carries the blueprint for our character and destiny. The indigenous people who have utilized these substances for millennia recognize that the source of our distressing symptoms is not that we’ve lost our minds, but that we’ve lost our soul.
The New Psychedelic Renaissance
Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed a striking shift in the narrative about psychedelics. The Psychedelic Culture that blossomed in the 60s and 90s that was all about freedom, creativity and transgression of social norms has been almost completely captured by a narrative that says all our problems — anxiety, depression, addiction and even physical illness — are due to past trauma. The idea that childhood trauma is the root cause of adult suffering is nothing new. James Hillman was writing about how that ideology had taken over the therapy industry decades ago.
“Because the “traumatic” view of early years so controls the psychological theory of personality and its development, the focus of our rememberings and the language of our personal storytelling have already been infiltrated by the toxins of these theories. Our lives may be determined less by our childhood than by the way we have learned to imagine our childhoods. We are … less damaged by the traumas of childhood than by the traumatic way we remember childhood as a time of unnecessary and externally caused calamities that wrongly shaped us.”
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code (1996)
The latest “rebirth” of psychedelics has been midwifed by psychotherapy (as opposed to the artists, musicians, writers and spiritual gurus of the 60s and 90s), which has infected the emerging culture with its trauma ideology on its way through the birth canal. Psychedelics are no longer considered a way to manifest or reveal the innate gifts of your soul, but have become a way to reveal your childhood trauma.
The Cult of Trauma
Trauma ideology may have started out within a small group of therapists, but it has grown into an entire cult with its own creed that you either swallow wholesale or risk being cast as a heretic if you so much as question it. The word “creed” is appropriate here because Traumadelic Culture looks and acts a lot like a religious cult, and as writer Alan Moore has said, every culture began as a cult.
The tenets of Traumadelic Culture go something like this:
Everyone has suffered childhood trauma
The problems you experience as an adult are caused by that childhood trauma
If you can go back into your past and identify the causal traumatic event, you can heal (ie. become a better, happier, sexier, wealthier version of yourself)
The way to do this is through trauma therapy, with psychedelics as the most powerful treatment (“10 years of therapy in one night” is the standard claim)
The foundational belief system of Traumadelic Culture became apparent to me while I was training with one of the high priests of this new religion: retired family physician Gabor Maté, widely considered to be one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma and addiction. He would often boast that he could prove to anyone that they had suffered childhood trauma, even betting that he could do it within a few minutes.
He’d start by asking the audience, “Who here had a happy childhood?” One of the few people brave enough to raise their hand would be brought on stage where Maté would subject them to a series of manipulative and leading questions. When it was revealed, for example, that the father was a workaholic, Maté would excitedly point out, “See? That’s your trauma right there” and explain how the father’s absence had surely led to the audience member’s inability to maintain long term intimate relationships (or whatever the presenting problem was.)
Witnessing this from the audience, you could see the relief spread through the face and body of the person on stage as the revelation hit them. “Now I know why I’m so messed up, and it’s not my fault.” It’s what some people have called a “manufactured epiphany,” the kind of thing that self-help cults like Landmark Forum and self-help gurus like Tony Robbins are so good at reproducing on a large scale. It’s not surprising that Gabor Maté participated in the Forum and cribbed from their self-help manual and organizational structure for his own therapeutic practice that he calls Compassionate Inquiry.
A Culture Fed By Predatory Capitalism
The new religion of Traumadelic Culture is catholic in the original sense of the word. It strives to be a universally accepted truth. Trauma has been used to explain every conceivable human ailment. Like any successful religion, it presents the cause of your suffering with one hand and offers the cure with the other. It has infiltrated and absorbed existing and emerging industries — first psychotherapy, then yoga, and now the burgeoning psychedelic therapy culture. Key to the growth of Traumadelic Culture is the promotion of psychedelics as panacea (universal remedy), for the pannósos (universal ailment) of trauma.
I saw this first hand while teaching yoga at an ayahuasca center in Peru back in 2017. Because the center’s American founder was a follower of Landmark Forum and Gabor Maté, the predominant framework for the retreats was trauma-centered. Unless the participant was someone who’d experienced a “big T” trauma (such as war or natural disaster), the focus was on uncovering the childhood trauma that was undoubtedly at the root of their adult symptoms. Whether it was physical illness, addiction, anxiety, depression or relationship issues, the cause could always be tracked back to childhood experience.
During the retreats I watched young inexperienced facilitators offer techniques for “releasing trauma” that were eagerly taken up by impressionable and desperate participants to the point where it became obsessive. I remember one young man in particular who would spend any free time lying on his back with his legs in the air, trying to get them to “shake out the trauma” that was clearly stuck in his body. In the sharing circles that followed each ceremony the predominant themes were childhood trauma and the recovery of repressed memories.
There seemed to be a not-so-subtle message pervading the retreats that unless you were working on your trauma, you weren’t “doing the work.” Experiences of joy and wonder carried far less weight than the revisiting of old traumas or “shadow material” and were often discounted as “spiritual bypassing.”
On the last day before I left the center, the founder invited me to meet with him to discuss potentially working together down the road. Once I was seated in front of him, he proceeded to deliver a long and seemingly pre-rehearsed lecture/sales pitch on the Landmark Forum. He let me know that anyone who worked at the center longterm was required to attend the Forum.
The goals of Traumadelic Culture — learning how to self-regulate, heal oneself, become the author of your story and the hero of your journey — are symbiotically tied to the capitalist, individualistic culture that’s making us sick in the first place.
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Later on, I found out that they were making the indigenous Shipibo healers who led the ceremonies take a Landmark-based training so they could better understand and work within the trauma framework. Forcing indigenous people to accept your language and beliefs and modify their rituals to cater to Western expectations? Sounds like old school colonialism to me.
The goals of Traumadelic Culture — learning how to self-regulate, heal oneself, become the author of your story and the hero of your journey — are symbiotically tied to the capitalist, individualistic culture that’s making us sick in the first place. The main tenets of Traumadelic Culture are set up to maintain a hierarchy of power and wealth where the high priests dole out wafers of wisdom and bestow blessings of absolution to the healing-hungry masses.
A Cult Built Around the Wounded Child Archetype
In the three years since my training with Maté and certification as a Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, it’s become clear to me that the obsession with the Wounded Child archetype has an infantilizing and disempowering effect on those captured by it. Maté’s strange blend of atheistic non-dual spirituality and centering of the Wounded Child breeds what I call passivists, rather than activists. A society full of adult-aged passivists is good for capitalism and maintaining the status quo, but terrible for the planet and health of the culture at large.
Here’s an example of what I mean. When I was taking Maté’s training, I had some objections to one of his core tenets that we are “100% responsible for our emotional reactions” regardless of the situation or what another person has said or done. We should all strive to contain our emotions and process them later using his inquiry techniques to find which childhood trauma has been triggered. When I pushed back on this idea, offering an example of stopping someone who is beating a dog on the street out of a sense of civic duty and moral obligation to protect the vulnerable, Maté replied that the right way to deal with this would be to tell the person that what they’re doing is upsetting to you. To tell them to stop (let alone physically make the stop) would be a form of violence and therefore wrong.
A cursory survey of the most popular figures in the trauma world reveals a familiar demographic holding positions of power and influence — well-educated, wealthy, white men. Sound familiar?
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I felt then, and feel now, that this kind of position could only come from someone with a great amount of wealth and privilege, far removed from what’s actually happening in the streets. It’s this atomization of the individual — isolated from the world around them, lacking any sense of civic or ecological duty — that was at the heart of Hillman’s critique of psychotherapy.
A cursory survey of the most popular figures in the trauma world reveals a familiar demographic holding positions of power and influence — well-educated, wealthy, white men. Sound familiar? The fact that psychedelics have so quickly and eagerly been assimilated into psychotherapy this time around is a good indicator that conventional cognitive, behavioral and pharmaceutical therapies had run out of solutions. When all else has been tried and failed, psychedelics inject a little life into a dying industry. But this too will fail, as we’re already beginning to see with the dissolving of so many psychedelic therapy startups that began with so much investor excitement and media fanfare.
Psychoanalyzing Psychedelic Psychotherapy
To borrow a trope from Traumadelic Culture itself, psychedelic therapy is suffering from its own ancestral trauma. It is afflicted by the same loss of soul and disconnection from the larger world that made its psychotherapy predecessor ineffectual at creating healthy individuals. They still don’t get the fundamental lesson from biology that you can’t have healthy organisms inside a sick culture.
The fundamental fantasy of therapy is that it can create a healthy world by creating healthy individuals. If therapy (including psychedelic therapy) is going to work toward this goal, it’ll need to be centered around larger, more complex and mature stories than the prevailing narratives of the Wounded Child and the Hero’s Journey. Those stories can be helpful, but only up to a point. We need stories that inspire people to first become true adults so they can become true elders, able to stand up and fight for the values we want to preserve and foster.
“Psychotherapy has emphasized the Inner Child, and the voice in one that feels disempowered and unable to change anything and abused by everything around them — the victim voice — is the voice of that Inner Child which psychotherapy keeps reinforcing. Psychotherapy and the backing off from the political comes out of that Inner Child work, or is connected to the Inner Child work. The more we focus on Inner Child work, the less we are politically engaged.”
James Hillman, Interview with Michael Toms (1992)
I take up the call that Archetypal Psychologist James Hillman began trumpeting from his outsider position way back in the 1970s, that underneath the story of personal trauma, “despite early injury and all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we bear from the start the image of a definite individual character with some enduring traits” and that it is our life’s goal — or at least the best way we can contribute something to the healing of the world — is by uncovering “a sense of personal calling, that there is a reason I am alive.” (The Soul’s Code p.3-4)
And isn’t that just what the promise of psychedelics used to be? Not just a way to reveal a unique, individual soul with all its gifts, desires, creativity and idiosyncrasies, but to also reveal the soul of the world, with all its beauty, complexity and wonder?
We Can’t Heal In A Sick Culture
As philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote back in the 1950s, right when both psychotherapy and psychedelics were starting to get a foothold in the culture, “Without first questioning the health of society, what is the good of helping misfits to conform to society?” That’s really what I’m calling for here — turning the questioning lens of psychoanalysis back onto society and the therapies that are designed to uphold its norms.
When I was touring my book Yoga & Plant Medicine in 2019 I frequently put the question to the audience of psychedelic enthusiasts, “An organism, whether a cell or a human baby, is shaped by its environment, its culture. If this is truly a psychedelic renaissance — a rebirth — shouldn’t we be concerned about the health of the culture that it’s being born into?”
As they’ve been reborn into a Traumadelic Culture, psychedelics are no longer about letting your freak flag fly and sticking it to the man, they’re about fitting in and feeling fine. Is that what’s really needed now at a time when the dominant culture is so profoundly messed up and so profoundly messing up the planet?
90s psychedelic icon Terence McKenna:
“Culture is not your friend, it’s an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why the words cult and culture have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation, and automatic, unquestioned and unthinking behaviour.”
Psychedelics have the power to “break open the head” and connect us to the wider world and a more expansive worldview, but only if they’re freed from the constraints of a trauma- and child-centered psychotherapy that is hung up on what Hillman called “parentalism” — the belief that who we are is only a result of how our parents treated us.
“The more I believe my nature comes from my parents, the less open I am to the ruling influences around me. The less the surrounding world is felt to be intimately important to my story. Yet even biographies begin by locating the subject in a place; the self starts off amid the smells of a geography. We are ecological from day one.
So the coming ecological disaster we worry about has already occurred, and goes on occurring. It takes place in the accounts of ourselves that separate us from the world by attaching us to parentalism, the belief that what’s out there is less of a factor than my close family in the formation of who I am. The parental fallacy is deadly to individual self-awareness, and it is killing the world.
Until this psychological fallacy is set straight, no compassionate campaigns of multiculturalism and environmentalism, no field trips, Peace Corps, bird-watching, or whale songs can fundamentally reattach me to the world. First I must make that psychological reconstruction, that leap of faith out of the house of the parents and into the home of the world.”
James Hillman, The Soul's Code
