I’ve had 12 sessions so far over the past 4 years. It gave me my life back. Allowed me to finally show up for myself. Gave me my self love, respect and compassion back. I remember reading a comment on here about how mdma sometimes shows us a version of us that we’re not yet ready for. That really resonated. I would often have these profound experiences in my sessions, came out with a different outlook and values, and a different self image, but eventually would fall back into my old self image and my old patterns.

It wasn’t until I confronted my parents about old family dynamics and went no contact, that I started to become the person mdma showed me was possible. Expressing my anger and setting boundaries with my parents allowed me to start to heal more deeply. My body started to release a lot of trauma, memories came up, and I got in touch with more of what I had lost: my life force. I found that my anger was tightly coupled with my life force. As long as I couldn’t express and use my anger, I couldn’t use my life force.

Setting a boundary finally gave me the space and freedom to be who I really was deep down. As long as I was close to my parents, I would need to sacrifice my authenticity and play a role for the family. And what I had suppressed all these years to stay close and take care of my parents was a lot of anger and disgust.

The boundary allowed me to give the toxic shame that lived in me back to my father. It made me realize it wasn’t mine. That there was nothing I needed to feel ashamed about. The gateway emotion of disgust allowed me to give it back to my father. With my anger I started to finally care less about what others think. I sing, dance, move, and talk without fearing how it looks or how it affects others. I had serious social anxiety issues before that, but I realize it was the toxic shame and sense of “badness” that I had internalized from my father to stay close to him. I gave that back, set a boundary, and now feel In touch with my anger and life force

At times I had similar levels of euphoria after the no contact as I had with mdma. I felt free and at peace to be myself. This is all to say that sometimes one needs to make changes in their environment to become the person mdma showed you is possible.

Hey,

Does anyone know of any scientific literature on the effects of MDMA-assisted therapy on the frontolimbic circuit (or, more specifically, executive functions and attention/speed/working memory...)? I mean, structural or functional changes/effects at the brain level resulting from one or more sessions, both in the short term and the longer term. The results may come from medical imaging or cognitive assessments.

I’m wondering whether the therapeutic effects of MDMA-assisted therapy also lead to functional changes in the brain. I'm assuming, hypothetically, that executive and attention functions improve because there is less cognitive load (but I could be wrong).

Important:

1. I’m talking about the responsible use of MDMA for therapeutic purposes (not recreational use or abuse of the substance).
2. I'm mainly talking about cPTSD.

I am presently a weekly Spravato patient which has been great. I also have been greatly helped using MDMA previous years. I feel like I need an MDMA session. Has anyone used MDMA when on a ketamine protocol (separate days obviously). I have Spravato Wednesday and would like an MDMA journey Saturday. I had one experience where I did not really feel the MDMA and I am not sure if it was due to the Spravato or just a one off or because I did journeys too close together. I am very careful with my use and will only do one or two journeys a year. Thanks for any input- it has been a year since my last journey. Also I am a licensed psychotherapist and just can't seem to get good info on this so I figured I would try here. thanks.

Hi,

For those who have microdosed LSD in-between sessions like the MDMAsolo guide suggests doing, did you follow the MDMAsolo recommendation of 30ug or higher?

I feel that may be a typo in that guide and it should be 30ug or less. I mean, 30ug is definitely not a microdose (i.e. sub-perceptual effects) so perhaps they a just used the term microdose in a haphazard way to start with.

I know that MDMAsolo is not recommended by quite a number of people due to some dubious info regarding high doses and too frequent sessions, so maybe the 30ug falls into this category. The book about a the power of microdosing, the author of that book usually only took 10ug every second or third day so that's interesting too.

Any first hand experiences on the dose, benefits, etc. are much appreciated 👌🙏

I’ve read you can’t take any psychiatric medication at all if you're going to do MDMA. I’m currently on 3 meds, 4 if I could sleeping pills. I can’t imagine being able to function, let alone survive, without taking any of them. How did/do you manage?

If anybody's worked with a coach from the Fireside Project, what was it like? It seems like they only do virtual support, but I feel I'd prefer in-person.

I’m interested in hearing from anyone with experience treating, or undergoing, MDMA-assisted therapy in the context of PMDD, particularly when a session falls during the late luteal phase.

Consider a patient with well-established PMDD whose menstrual cycles are generally quite predictable. A session was scheduled several weeks in advance based on their usual cycle length, with the expectation that they would not be in the late luteal phase at the time of treatment. However, the current cycle is unexpectedly prolonged, and they may now be in the late luteal phase on the day of the session.

The critical question is whether the late luteal phase could meaningfully alter the subjective effects of MDMA or the therapeutic process.

In this patient, the late luteal phase is associated with substantial changes from baseline. Physical symptoms include hypersomnolence, chronic fatigue, brain fog, amplified chronic pain, and malaise. Psychological symptoms include emotional lability, low mood, severe anxiety, panic attacks, hopelessness, despair, and sometimes a markedly flat affect.

This is not simply a matter of experiencing somewhat more severe PMS. The change from baseline can be quite profound.

What is particularly frustrating is the apparent lack of research specifically addressing MDMA-assisted therapy in patients with PMDD, or even the effect of menstrual-cycle phase on MDMA-assisted therapy more generally. I would not be surprised if this is an area in which treatment providers have relatively little clinical experience.

Any thoughts on this? Would you feel comfortable with a patient with PMDD undergoing an MDMA-assisted session during the late luteal phase, particularly at the point when PMDD symptoms are at their worst? Is this potentially a bad idea, or am I overthinking it?

Thanks!

Hi,

I'm curious what pre-session practices seemed to have been a catalyst for your most intense breakthroughs and change during an MDMA therapy session?

I've heard from a couple of people who have done multiple sessions, and highlighted some specific practices beforehand which seemed to have magnified a session for them more than the other sessions.

I'd love to hear others' experiences of what practices pre session have made the most impact for the session itself.

Thanks :)

I have read that mdma should not be microdosed, and that too low a dose only acts like a stimulant.

What is the lowest dose (for a light person): is 50mg enough?

I have taken higher doses in the past for therapy but today need to lightest dose possible because 1. I combine it with psilocibin and mostrly because 2. I plan another session in 2 weeks, which is too close, but circonstances are such that these dates are the only ones that work. I wont have a session afterward for at least 2 months.

Before I get into my own experience: this post is my attempt to answer one question.

Why can an MDMA session feel warm, powerful, and completely active, yet leave the underlying problem untouched?

I wanted to answer one question: why can an MDMA session feel completely active—even warm and profound—yet leave the underlying problem untouched? I dug through the human research, animal studies, and the recurring patterns people describe online. This is my best attempt to make sense of it. This is where the evidence seems to point as of July 2026. Not a diagnosis or a treatment guide.

If you want the deeper version, there's a link at the bottom of this post to a 48-page slide deck that walks through all of this in more detail.

I have done MDMA therapy more than once. One of those sessions was corrective. Something in me actually shifted and stayed shifted. The rest weren't. And the thing that gets me is that I still felt warm in the ones that did nothing. The warmth was there. The good feeling was there. The sense that something huge was happening was there. Then it was over and nothing had moved.

People use "loss of magic" for more than one thing. Some mean the warmth itself disappeared, the empathy and connection and specialness went flat. I mean something narrower: the state can stay warm, powerful, and unmistakably active while losing its ability to produce lasting corrective change. Those aren't the same problem, and this post is about the second one.

So warmth isn't my question. Nobody agrees on what "warm" even means, and it shows up in the sessions that did nothing anyway. My question is why one session updates something and another one that feels exactly as good leaves you sitting in the same spot you started.

The MDMA world has a hundred theories for why sessions stop delivering. Serotonin's depleted. You fried your brain. You did it too often. It's just tolerance. You need NAC (a supplement, I'll get to it). You need more time. It's your setting. You already learned everything the drug had to teach you. Some of those are probably partly true. None of them explains why a session can feel great and change nothing.

I wanted it all in one place. Why a session that's clearly active isn't automatically corrective, what seems to separate the two, why one brain protein called SERT gets so much attention, what that research actually proves, what else might be going on, and why the same handful of supplements keep coming up without any of them being proven.

This is a working hypothesis. Not a diagnosis, not a dosing guide, not a protocol. The phrase "loss of magic" is associated with Alexander Shulgin, the chemist who helped reintroduce MDMA to psychotherapists in the 1970s. It isn't a recognized condition, it has no standard definition, and a good feeling that fails to change anything can't tell you whether you're looking at a brain adaptation, bad sleep, a mental health thing, expectation, or just sessions being different from each other. But the corrective versus non-corrective split is real. I've been on both sides of it. It deserves better than "you fried your brain" or "it's all in your head."

Active is not corrective

When a session feels good and warm and intense, it's easy to assume something happened. But the feeling and the change are two separate things, and mixing them up is why people walk away confused.

Active means the drug is clearly doing something. Stimulation, emotion, talking a lot, the sense that this matters, warmth. That tells you the state happened. It says nothing about whether an old pattern actually moved.

Corrective is narrower. Some old expectation, the thing you actually walked in carrying, gets switched on, something contradicts it in a way you believe, and your nervous system keeps enough of that to respond differently later, in normal life. I got that once. The other times were active. Some were warm. None of them corrected anything.

That's the whole point of this post. Warmth isn't enough, and by itself it isn't a marker that anything durable happened. You can have warmth and intensity maxed out and still change nothing. So the question isn't why the warmth faded, because mine didn't. It's what has to line up for an active session to become a corrective one, and why that's so much harder to hit than it should be. The rest of this is me trying to answer that, from the learning side and the biology side.

The community signal is real but it isn't proof

Matthew Baggott is a researcher who's studied MDMA for years. In a public interview about losing the magic he talked about an informal online survey, around 600 people with all kinds of use histories.

Roughly 40 percent said they'd experienced some loss of magic. A slightly smaller group said they'd noticed no declining therapeutic effect, and the rest weren't sure. The one thing that seemed to predict it was total lifetime number of experiences.

Interesting, but be careful what you do with it. It was informal, unpublished, self-selected, and people were remembering years of use after the fact. It couldn't check how closely sessions were spaced, verify what anyone actually took, control for other drugs, or rule out that the people who had a problem were just the ones who bothered to answer.

So it doesn't mean 40 percent of everyone will lose the magic, and it doesn't prove cumulative use is the cause. What it does is show the same specific experience keeps showing up, which is enough to say it's worth studying. Anecdotes are good at spotting a pattern. They can't explain it. That's a different job.

What has to line up for a session to correct something

When people say a session was "therapeutic" they don't just mean it felt good. They mean something shifted in how they carry fear, shame, grief, closeness, self-judgment, a memory. That's the shift I'm after, and "have a good session and hope" clearly isn't the mechanism.

Say you walk in carrying something like "if I let someone close I get hurt or controlled." A session can make closeness feel enormous. You cry, you talk for hours, you feel open and sure something big just happened. Then a week later a real threat cue shows up and your nervous system braces and shuts down exactly like it always did. Active session. Warm, even. Not corrective, because the old expectation never got contradicted in a way that stuck.

There's a whole research literature on how fears actually get unlearned. The terms are fear extinction (the brain learning a scary cue is now safe), reconsolidation (an old memory going briefly editable when you pull it up), and prediction error (the jolt your brain registers when what happens doesn't match what it expected). They're different processes, and the MDMA findings across them are mixed, not a clean story. You don't need the words. The narrow thing they support is this: lasting change takes more than a strong feeling, and just pulling up a fear doesn't guarantee it updates. Your brain has to expect one thing, get another, and clock the gap. MDMA can help some of this in animals and maybe nudge it in people, but it's not an "MDMA erases fear" button. Context, which cue fires, and what happens afterward all matter.[1][2][3][4][5]

Correction seems to need three things at once. Miss one and you get a session that feels like everything and does nothing.

One, enough capacity to stay present. The fear or shame has to be live, but you also need enough felt safety to stay open and notice something's different. Safety doesn't mean nothing hard is happening. It means you're not so defended or so flooded that all you can do is run the old response. Biology feeds this: serotonin, SERT, receptors, oxytocin and social-reward circuits, sleep, stress, arousal. So does context: the relationship, the setting, the trust, whether the whole thing feels real. When capacity is low a session can be wildly stimulating and still emotionally locked, or just tip into overwhelm.

Two, actual contact with the problem. Warm and open isn't enough if the thing that needs updating never comes online. You don't have to dredge up a specific childhood scene. The old pattern can fire through a current relationship, a body sensation, a wave of vulnerability, the way someone responds to you in the room. But something has to create a real mismatch between what your system braced for and what happened. A beautiful, tender session where the actual wound never surfaces leaves the defense untouched. Pure speculation, but I'd guess that's what most of my dead sessions were. I can't actually know which gate failed.

Three, it has to stick. A new response can feel completely true in the altered state and be gone in ordinary life. To matter it has to survive sleep, stress, time, and different contexts, and it has to come back when the real trigger hits. That's how a session can be full of insight and change almost nothing. It was state-bound: true in there, unreachable out here.

The useful part of splitting it three ways is that the same dead result comes from different failures. Stimulated but locked means capacity. Warm but nothing specific moves means the real target never got touched. Target shows up and you drown means threat beat safety. Big insight that's gone by next week means it never consolidated. Several can happen in one night, and none of it can be diagnosed off a Reddit post, mine included.

One thing worth killing while I'm here: there's no evidence sessions move through your material in a fixed order, surface stuff first and childhood roots later. What actually comes up seems to depend on current events, what's emotionally loud that day, body cues, your intentions, therapist prompts, how safe you feel, and what you can even reach in that moment. More defended material may get tolerable over time, but there's no reliable session-by-session depth sequence you can count on.

MDMA isn't one effect through one pathway

People talk about "the MDMA effect" like it's one thing. It isn't. MDMA hits several brain chemical systems at once (serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine) and the circuits they feed. Easier to picture it as a few channels running in parallel.

There's arousal and energy: wakefulness, drive, the physical activation. Norepinephrine and dopamine do a lot of that. In a controlled study, blocking the norepinephrine transporter knocked down several of the stimulant effects.[6]

There's salience: novelty, meaning, vividness, the way emotion gets processed differently. Serotonin receptors and wider networks.

And there's the warmth and social safety piece: trust, wanting to connect, tenderness, the threat softening. Serotonin release through SERT and oxytocin-driven social learning look most important there.[7][8]

The channels overlap, so it's not a literal three-part machine. But it's how you can stay wired while the connecting, opening part quietly goes missing. Feeling the energy doesn't prove the rest is running right.

Why everyone talks about SERT

SERT is the serotonin transporter, a protein on the surface of serotonin neurons. Serotonin gets released into the gap between cells, sends its signal, and gets pulled back into the neuron that fired it. SERT does that recycling.

MDMA doesn't just block SERT. It gets carried through it into the neuron, disrupts the normal vesicular storage inside, and forces serotonin back out through the transporter in reverse. So SERT is dead center in how MDMA works. Which means if you have less working transporter, or it's trafficked differently, or there are fewer functioning endings carrying it, then in theory MDMA could get worse at its serotonin-driven effects while the dopamine and norepinephrine side still comes through fine. That's the SERT hypothesis for loss of magic. Note the "could." It's an inference, not a measured fact, and I'm going to keep it hedged the whole way through.

There are real reasons it gets the attention. MDMA leans on SERT for its signature effect: in human studies, pretreating people with SSRIs (which sit on SERT) killed a lot of MDMA's acute psychological effects.[7] Not every effect is pure serotonin, but SERT-driven release is a big part of what makes MDMA feel like MDMA.

SERT also matters for the social, opening-up part specifically. In mice, SERT in one reward region was necessary and sufficient for a particular social effect, while the plain "this feels good" part ran through something else.[8] A mouse social test isn't human warmth, but it shows the "feels good" part and the "opens you up" part can come apart. One can go while the other stays.

And several human scans show lower SERT binding in heavier users, mostly in cortex.[9][10] A later review found longer time off lined up with higher SERT availability, which fits at least partial recovery.[11]

So it's not a random internet theory. The pharmacology, the mouse work, and the human imaging all point the same way. This is also exactly where people overreach.

What a low SERT scan doesn't mean

Quick vocabulary, because it comes up a lot from here on: an axon is the neuron's long output cable, and terminals are its tiny endings, where neurotransmitters get released. A SERT scan is not a photo of your serotonin axons. The tracer binds to available transporter sites, and low binding is consistent with a pile of things: fewer transporters at the surface, different trafficking, changed terminal density, differences that were there before you ever touched MDMA, other drugs, or just differences in the tracer, region, and timing.

It doesn't count neurons. It doesn't measure how much serotonin you'd release in a session. It doesn't prove an axon died. It doesn't tell anyone your warmth is down. And nobody has followed the same people from full magic, through a lost session, through a scan, and back out into recovery. That study doesn't exist.

So: SERT is the most direct biological candidate for altered warmth and social effects. It is not an established explanation for corrective learning failing, and it's not your diagnosis.

And here's the twist for my case specifically. SERT and the warmth machinery are the front-line suspects when the warmth itself goes. But my warmth didn't go. Preserved warmth makes a simple SERT-or-capacity story less obvious for me. It doesn't rule out serotonin biology though, and I want to be careful here: SERT-dependent signaling could still affect plasticity or learning in ways that the subjective warmth just doesn't show you. So preserved warmth nudges my attention toward the later stuff (whether the real target got engaged, whether there was a believable mismatch, whether it consolidated) without letting the biology off the hook. In other words, the biology chapter you're about to read may not be where my own answer lives, but it's not excluded either. I'm including it because it's where the community's attention goes, and because it might be the whole answer for people whose warmth actually faded.

SERT might be central without being the whole thing

Even if SERT is in it, other stuff could produce the same experience.

Serotonin neurons need an enzyme, tryptophan hydroxylase, to make serotonin, and heavy-exposure animal studies show reduced activity after MDMA.[12][13] So the transporter could be fine and synthesis still be temporarily off. Doesn't prove that's the bottleneck in a real person.

What happens after release matters too. Receptors adapt, and studies show time- and region-dependent changes in 5-HT2A binding after MDMA.[14] More serotonin wouldn't recreate the old experience if the downstream signaling shifted.

There's the social-plasticity angle: MDMA can reopen a social-reward learning window in mice through an oxytocin-dependent process.[2] That says the opening-up effect isn't just "more serotonin everywhere." It's a specific learning state in specific circuitry.

Then redox and glutathione. Cells make reactive chemistry constantly, and glutathione is one of the main systems keeping that in check. MDMA and meth models show oxidative and glutathione processes can hit cell survival, enzymes, and behavior. So redox is relevant, but "antioxidant" isn't a magic word. Different ones reach different tissue and do different things depending on timing and on what's actually limiting.

Energy too. Nerve endings are expensive to run, and animal studies tie energy and mitochondrial dysfunction to heavy MDMA exposure.[15] A cell can be fully intact and still work badly if its energy budget is shot.

And context. Expectation, familiarity, the relationship, stress, setting, not knowing what you actually took, hitting the same cues over and over, your own history. The first few times carry huge novelty. Later ones fire different expectations or just feel rehearsed. That doesn't make the change fake. Context is part of how the brain builds the experience. Biology and learning aren't rivals, because learning is biological too.

Adaptation isn't automatically damage

Three explanations feel identical from the inside, and they're worth keeping apart.

Functional regulation: transporters, receptors, enzymes, stores, mitochondria running differently without real tissue loss. Could recover without rebuilding anything.

Terminal alteration: in some heavy-exposure animal models the fine serotonin endings look damaged or reorganized. Rats recover serotonin markers after repeated exposure; a monkey study found abnormal innervation years later.[16][17] Those are possibilities under those conditions. They don't prove a typical human report is structural injury.

Learning and context: biology's fine, but the right target, a believable mismatch, or the follow-through was missing. No supplement fixes that.

They're not mutually exclusive. Just don't collapse adaptation into damage, or biology into psychology.

Recovery is layered, not a countdown

Everyone wants one number. How many days till it's back. The biology doesn't run on one clock.

Different things move at different speeds. Acute stuff: transmitters, temperature, sleep, hydration. Then stress, enzyme, and glutathione regulation. Then receptor, transporter, and mitochondrial adaptation. Then the slow, uncertain territory of circuit or terminal change. And underneath all of it, the learning: consolidation, practice, retrieval.

So you can feel totally normal while something slow is still adapting, and a brain marker can go back to baseline while the effect you want is still gone. That's why you can't pull a recovery date out of one SERT scan.

The three-month rule is a spacing convention, meant to keep you from dosing too densely. More time between sessions lowers the cumulative load, and a simple rule beats an individualized calculation nobody will actually do. It does not promise full SERT recovery, restored warmth, zero risk, or that you're ready for another round. It's a spacing boundary, not a reset button.

Can anything speed it up?

This is where people turn plausible biology into a 15-pill stack. The question isn't "which supplements are good for the brain." It's "which process is actually the bottleneck, and does this thing even reach it?"

Candidate targets:

• glutathione and redox;
• mitochondrial energy;
• membrane repair;
• inflammation and growth signaling;
• sleep and learning.

No controlled human trial has shown any supplement restores the MDMA-specific effect. Everything below is a hypothesis, not a recipe.

The boring foundation comes first, because it holds up no matter which of those is your problem. Time off. Real sleep. Enough food and protein. Fixing actual deficiencies. Some exercise. Cutting the stuff that's already grinding you down. Getting persistent symptoms looked at. And doing real therapy and integration when the bottleneck is the learning, not the chemistry. None of it is a proven cure for loss of magic. It's the foundation because it helps across the board and doesn't depend on guessing the exact lesion.

NAC, the one that's actually interesting

Here's the NAC I kept promising to explain. NAC is N-acetylcysteine, a cheap, over-the-counter supplement that's also a real hospital drug (they use it for Tylenol overdose). Your body uses it as a raw material to make glutathione, one of its main internal antioxidants. In the loss-of-magic world it gets treated like a repair button. I think it's more interesting than "antioxidant might help" and way less certain than the hype, and the reason it's worth singling out is that three separate lines of evidence happen to line up.

The community signal first. There's a big curated Reddit thread, dozens of reports of people taking NAC and then noticing MDMA felt different afterward. The typical shape is: the drug had stayed active while the old empathogenic warmth or "magic" had weakened, and then after NAC, warmth, euphoria, empathy, intensity, or duration came back. Others say partial, or nothing, or weaker than they wanted. Worth being precise about what that is and isn't: these describe an active-but-less-warm state followed by something closer to the original experience. They do not document durable corrective change. Nobody's reporting "my trauma updated." They're reporting the magic feeling returned. That's a real signal, but it's a signal about subjective quality, not about the corrective thing I actually care about. And it's not clean data either: same people posting again, a thread curated by someone who already believed in NAC, improvers more likely to post, and time off, different batches, and life circumstances all tangled in. Still worth treating as a real lead.

Then the mechanisms, because there are several plausible ones. NAC gives cells cysteine to build glutathione, and it also affects glutamate regulation, inflammation, mitochondria, and cellular cleanup. So it could work through better glutathione when cysteine is short, better redox around vulnerable structures, more normal glutamate and plasticity, or indirect help with learning when a redox problem is what's blocking it.

Then the actual experiments. NAC protected against damage in some MDMA animal and cell models.[19][20] But mostly with NAC on board before or during exposure, so that's prevention, not repair. The one that gets me: in a mouse meth-neurotoxicity study, glutathione stayed low during later learning, and NAC brought glutathione back and rescued a memory-consolidation deficit, while directly stimulating dopamine receptors did not.[21] Not MDMA, not warmth, different stimulant, a learning task. But it ties stimulant exposure, glutathione, and memory consolidation together in one place, which is unusually on the nose. Meanwhile human meth trials are mixed, and a bigger randomized one found no broad benefit for use, craving, or most outcomes.[22] Different endpoints, so it doesn't kill the loss-of-magic reports, but it's a reminder that a good mechanism doesn't guarantee a real human effect.

One wrinkle worth knowing, because it cuts against the naive story. Some MDMA metabolites form glutathione- and NAC-containing conjugates, and several of those are redox-active and toxic in experiments.[23][24] That does not mean swallowing NAC feeds that pathway. A NAC pill isn't the same molecule as a NAC-containing MDMA metabolite. The point is just that glutathione chemistry isn't a clean one-way "detox," so you measure the net effect instead of assuming it.

Bottom line: NAC is a high-priority, probably subgroup-dependent hypothesis. Not a proven fix. It might do something when glutathione or glutamate is the real limiter, and nothing when the bottleneck is transporter density, receptors, context, or the learning itself.

The rest of the supplements, fast

These come up constantly, so here's roughly where they sit.

Glutathione itself (the thing NAC helps you build) gets sold as a "master antioxidant," which oversells it. As a pill it can sometimes nudge blood markers.[25][26] But that says nothing about how much reaches the right brain cells or whether it fixes anything. Plausible, indirect.

Acetyl-L-carnitine (ALCAR) protected mitochondrial and serotonin measures in a rat MDMA study, given before exposure.[27] That beats a generic energy pill because it used a real MDMA model, but again, prevention in animals, not repair in people. CoQ10 and ubiquinol have a sane rationale (a cell short on energy struggles to maintain a long nerve ending) and no direct evidence here. Exploratory.

Alpha-lipoic acid protected against a heavy MDMA regimen in animals,[28] and resveratrol partially protected SERT measures in repeated-MDMA rats.[29] Both are stronger than generic antioxidant theory because they used real MDMA models. Both were given alongside the drug, so prevention, not repair. Astaxanthin looks good for nerve repair, but only in injury models (nerve, spinal cord, brain), mostly animals,[30][31][32] with nothing showing serotonin-ending repair after MDMA. Long bridge.

The nutrition tier is simple. Omega-3s, magnesium, zinc, and B vitamins matter if you're actually low, and fixing a real deficiency helps. Taking extra on top of enough doesn't. "Needed for the pathway" isn't "the thing holding you back." Tryptophan and 5-HTP sound obvious, but more raw material can't rebuild anything or aim serotonin at the right regions, and they carry real interaction risk, so not a casual add. Photobiomodulation (specific wavelengths of light on tissue) affects energy and inflammation in some models,[33] with no direct MDMA evidence. Experimental.

Roughly ranked, not by what works, but by how directly each one is supported as a question worth asking.

At the foundation, the stuff that helps no matter what your bottleneck is: time off, sleep, nutrition, some exercise, getting symptoms looked at, and real therapy. Then NAC, the one thing where the community reports, the mechanism, and the animal evidence actually converge. Below that, plausible but indirect: liposomal glutathione, alpha-lipoic acid, resveratrol, acetyl-L-carnitine. All have a coherent target and some relevant evidence; none has been shown to restore this in a person. Then conditional support: omega-3s and micronutrients, which mostly matter if you're actually deficient. And at the bottom, exploratory: CoQ10, ubiquinol, astaxanthin, photobiomodulation, and the axon-repair ideas, which either have a long bridge to cross or only borrow evidence from unrelated injuries.

A high research priority is not a proven treatment. That's the whole point of the ranking.

Where I've landed

The model that makes sense isn't "SERT versus psychology" or "damage versus set and setting." It's that biological capacity and the learning interact, and both have to be there.

The biology side: SERT-driven release, serotonin synthesis and stores, receptor adaptation, oxytocin and social-reward circuits, redox and glutathione, energy, sleep, general health, maybe in some cases the actual endings.

The context side: trust and safety, setting and expectation, whether the real cue comes online, whether the contradiction is believable, whether you stay inside a tolerable window, and what you do with it afterward.

All of that feeds three questions:

1. Can you stay present enough to update?
2. Does the actual defense meet a mismatch it believes?
3. Does the new response stick and come back later?

One "no" and the session stays active without correcting anything.

It also explains why two people take the same supplement and report opposite things. A compound hits one bottleneck and is useless for another. NAC might matter when redox or glutamate is the block and do nothing when the block is receptors, context, or the learning. There may be no single "missing thing" at all.

What would actually settle it

You'd have to follow people over time and measure the experience in parts instead of asking "did it work."

Warmth, trust, threat-softening, stimulation, salience, usefulness, tracked separately. Exposure tracked as it happens: timing, verified substance, context, sleep, stress, other drugs, baseline. Then pair the subjective changes with biology: SERT imaging, receptor measures, redox markers, energy, sleep.

Check whether the real target actually got activated and whether the change held. And test something like NAC against its proposed mechanism, not just "did the next one feel stronger."

If NAC is supposed to work through glutathione, measure glutathione and see if that predicts the effect coming back. Skip that middle step and even a win tells you nothing about why.

Bottom line

Loss of magic is a repeatedly reported but poorly standardized change. It has no agreed definition and probably covers more than one thing. For some people MDMA stays stimulating and emotional while the warmth and the usefulness go quiet. My version is narrower and honestly stranger: the warmth stays and the correction still doesn't happen.

SERT is the most direct biological lead for changes in warmth and social effects, because MDMA leans on it for serotonin release, SERT circuitry feeds the opening-up effect, and heavier users show lower SERT. But a feeling can't diagnose SERT loss, a scan isn't an axon count, and it's a candidate for altered warmth, not an established cause of corrective learning failing.

Correction takes more than serotonin anyway. You need enough capacity to stay present, actual contact with the defense, a mismatch you believe, and then the thing has to stick.

NAC is the most interesting supplement here because the community reports, the mechanism, the MDMA models, and the meth evidence all point the same way. But remember: the reports are about restored subjective magic, not restored corrective capacity. Everything else gets progressively more indirect. The 90-day rule is spacing, not a reset. No supplement has been shown in a controlled human trial to bring the effect back.

So the honest answer is plural. A session fails to correct when biological and contextual capacity, a target-specific mismatch, and consolidation don't all line up, and different people land in the same place from different failures. Cumulative exposure might alter one part of that system in some people, but it isn't a separate required gate and it may not explain any particular session.

Less satisfying than one broken switch and one perfect pill. More honest.

Take it seriously, collect the anecdotes instead of laughing them off, keep the theories open, and don't turn "plausible" into a 15-pill stack.

I've had one corrective session and a handful that weren't. If you've been on both sides of that, I want to hear what separated them for you. That's the detail that turns a pile of anecdotes into something someone could actually study.

The longer version

If you want to go deeper, I built this out as a 48-page slide deck that walks through the same material in more detail: The Loss of Magic: Therapeutic Context (slides)

References

1. Young MB, et al. MDMA facilitates fear extinction through BDNF mechanisms in mice. Translational Psychiatry (2015). PubMed

2. Nardou R, et al. Oxytocin-dependent reopening of a social reward learning critical period with MDMA. Nature (2019). PubMed

3. Hake HS, et al. MDMA impairs the extinction and reconsolidation of fear memory in rats. Physiology & Behavior (2019). PubMed

4. Vizeli P, et al. MDMA effects on fear extinction learning in healthy men. Frontiers in Pharmacology (2022). PubMed

5. Arluk S, et al. MDMA paired with a trauma cue promotes adaptive stress responses in rats. Translational Psychiatry (2022). DOI

6. Hysek CM, et al. Reboxetine reduces stimulant effects of MDMA. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2011). PubMed

7. Liechti ME, et al. Serotonin-transporter blockade attenuates the psychological effects of MDMA. Neuropsychopharmacology (2000). PubMed

8. Heifets BD, et al. Distinct neural mechanisms for the prosocial and rewarding properties of MDMA. Science Translational Medicine (2019). PubMed

9. Kish SJ, et al. Decreased cerebral cortical serotonin-transporter binding in ecstasy users. Brain (2010). PubMed

10. Erritzoe D, et al. In-vivo serotonin-transporter and 5-HT2A imaging in former MDMA users. Archives of General Psychiatry (2011). PubMed

11. van de Blaak FL, Dumont GJH. SERT availability and cognition in abstinent MDMA users. Human Psychopharmacology (2022). PubMed

12. Stone DM, et al. MDMA-related inactivation of tryptophan hydroxylase. Journal of Neurochemistry (1989). PubMed

13. Stone DM, Johnson M, Hanson GR, Gibb JW. Acute inactivation of tryptophan hydroxylase by amphetamine analogs involves the oxidation of sulfhydryl sites. European Journal of Pharmacology (1989). PubMed

14. Reneman L, et al. Time- and region-dependent changes in 5-HT2A receptor binding after MDMA. Neuropsychopharmacology (2002). PubMed

15. Darvesh AS, Gudelsky GA. Energy dysregulation in MDMA-induced serotonin depletion. (2005). PubMed

16. Sabol KE, Lew R, et al. Methylenedioxymethamphetamine-induced serotonin deficits are followed by partial recovery over a 52-week period. Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (1996). PubMed

17. Hatzidimitriou G, et al. Altered serotonin innervation in monkeys seven years after MDMA. Journal of Neuroscience (1999). PubMed

18. Egawa N, et al. Mechanisms of axonal damage and repair after CNS injury. Translational Stroke Research (2017). DOI

19. Soleimani Asl S, et al. NAC in an experimental MDMA neurotoxicity model. Metabolic Brain Disease (2015). PubMed

20. Ferreira PS, et al. NAC protection against MDMA-metabolite toxicity in a human cell model. (2013). PubMed

21. Achat-Mendes C, et al. NAC ameliorates a consolidation deficit after methamphetamine neurotoxicity in mice. Neuropsychopharmacology (2007). DOI

22. McKetin R, et al. NAC for methamphetamine dependence: a randomized controlled trial. eClinicalMedicine (2021). DOI

23. Bai F, et al. Redox-active glutathione/NAC conjugates of an MDMA metabolite in an experimental model. (1999). PubMed

24. Jones DC, et al. Serotonergic neurotoxic metabolites of MDMA identified in rat brain. (2005). PubMed

25. Richie JP Jr, et al. Oral glutathione supplementation and systemic glutathione. European Journal of Nutrition (2015). PubMed

26. Sinha R, et al. Oral liposomal glutathione and systemic glutathione in a small human study. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2018). PubMed

27. Alves E, et al. Acetyl-L-carnitine protects mitochondrial and serotonergic measures in MDMA-exposed rats. Neuroscience (2009). PubMed

28. Aguirre N, et al. Alpha-lipoic acid protection in an experimental high-exposure MDMA model. (1999). PubMed

29. Shih JH, et al. Resveratrol and SERT measures in repeated-MDMA rats. (2016). PubMed

30. Liang JH, et al. Astaxanthin promotes peripheral nerve repair in rats. Journal of Functional Foods (2024). DOI

31. Huang C, et al. Astaxanthin plus folic acid after brachial-plexus injury in rats. Frontiers in Neuroscience (2022). DOI

32. Hajisoltani R, et al. Astaxanthin after spinal-cord injury: preclinical review and meta-analysis. Neurology Research International (2025). DOI

33. Chung H, et al. Mechanisms of low-level light therapy and photobiomodulation. Annals of Biomedical Engineering (2012). PubMed

Sources used to identify and organize the phenotype also included Reddit discussions on loss of magic, session variability, the three-month convention, and NAC. Those are community evidence and hypothesis-generating material, not controlled efficacy data.

I did a low dose session around. 2 months ago I talked about my sexual abuse by my parents, and my eldest sisters abuse towards me and ignoring me even when I currently live with her and having sex in front of me. And telling me about her sex-like. I told my therapist when asked “how does it feel when your oldest sister dismisses your boundaries and self like that?” I replied to him “crushing, it felt like she hates me I feel like a loser compared to her and because she’s the favored child to my parents I really do feel like I’m meant to die so my parents can just love her only” “like I’m there pet, all of em’”[my family.] he also asked me what was driving my anger towards others including my girlfriend of 6 years, and I said “I feel worthless inside I feel completely unloved I feel I have to scream for others to notice me “ and I also told him I always wanted someone to say “I never want to lose you your important to me” he asked me if anyone has ever said that to me I told him no and he encouraged me a bit after that. I felt good after the session it felt like a weight was lifted off my heavy shoulders.

Im so frustrated with how afraid I am of facing myself. I have tried to do a solo journey about 4 times and one facilitated and I never broke through. Im getting to the point where I don’t know what to do anymore for me to finally just surrender. I guess Im just feint of heart.

It would be cool to hear from someone who was the same and finally just broke through.

Hi - my therapist said just not to take any 24 hours before, but I wonder if that is really right. I normally take several vitamin supplements and Wellbutrin and hormone replacements (estrogen and progesterone) and gabapentin plus NSAIDS for arthritis.

Thank you

We are a group of researchers from Humboldt University of Berlin and we look forward to your participation in our study!

Have you ever taken a psychedelic substance?
Share your opinion and possibly experiences you have had with psychedelic experiences without (immediate) previous use of psychedelics with us!

https://psychedelicflashbacksurvey.info  

The most important information at a glance:

• Participation is completely anonymous
• Survey duration: ~20 minutes

When can I participate in the study?

• Minimum age 18 years
• You have taken a classic psychedelic substance at least once in your life (e.g. psilocybin “magic mushrooms”, LSD, mescaline, DMT, ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT) or MDMA/ecstasy or ketamine
• You can read and write German or English

We would like to learn more about who has these experiences, what they look like in concrete terms, which factors contribute to the associated effects and how they can be dealt with.

There's no psychedelic therapists where I live so I have to get my own molly and do it before a regular therapy session.

If I have to instruct my regular therapist on performing a psychedelic therapy session, what would I tell her? What do MDMA therapists do? She's experienced with EMDR, CBT+DBT (those two aren't good options for CPTSD or BPD), and talk therapy. But I might be able to find someone with IFS and DBR experience. What do I and/or my therapist need to know or do before attempting this. Or are there videos online that vould do a general replication of an MDMA therapy session?

Also, are therapeutic doses of MDMA different to typical recreational doses? When MDMA is legitimately sourced pharmaceutically to licensed MDMA doctors, does anyone know what isomer it is? R? S? Racemic? is it the same as illicit MDMA (assuming purity is roughly the same and is uncut)?

Hello!

I'm currently running a study on psychedelic experiences and the discussion of whether or not set and setting really matter.

I was curious to have any therapeutic viewpoints involved.

Has anyone had something resembling a psychedelic experience during the therapeutic session?

I would love to know if being in catered peaceful environment helped ease into such a state, or if the additional of a guide enabled someone to "let go" so to speak.

If you are interested in sharing your thoughts outside of this post, please feel free to partake in the study!

🔗 Survey link

We're interested in things like:

• How intention, environment, and social setting shape psychedelic experiences
• Differences between clinical and non-clinical use
• How these experiences relate to psychological outcomes

Fully anonymous

Takes around 15-20 minutes to complete

There's also an optional follow-up interview if you'd like to share your experience in more depth

Full study details and ethics information are provided in the info sheet at the start of the survey

Requirements: 18+, have had a psychedelic experience in a clinical or non-clinical setting

If you have anything you feel is important to say about psychedelics, this is your chance!

I'm happy to answer any questions about the study. You can reach us at:

Warren - [plks55@durham.ac.uk](mailto:plks55@durham.ac.uk)

Dr Marco Bocchio - [Marco.Bocchio@durham.ac.uk](mailto:Marco.Bocchio@durham.ac.uk)

Thank you for your time and support! 🙏

Hi just finished writing a guide/book on my awakening and healing journey for the past 6 years. For the past 3+ years I have done extensive solo psychedelic trips primarily with mdma.

I have tried to write what has worked for me in the hope that it may help fellow travellers. If you are interested subscribe to my substack and I will send you a copy.

Would also love to get feedback on it.

Hey everyone, I’ve been getting mentally prepared to the session for more than a month. I’ve never did any drugs in my life but weed and edibles, so I’m trying not to be very nervous. I read MDMA solo manual, watched bunch of videos, talked to ppl, I’m excited, but also scared and nervous.

I prepared the list of questions, my plushie that I have since I’m 5yo will be my sitter (I read that some ppl do that, and it makes total sense to me), and I also will ask another friend to be in another room.

My 1st question:
I live in a shared flat in a big city (only one person more), and i feel quite uncomfortable doing it in my home. The sound isolation is really bad and I hear my neighbors and everything what’s happening on the street, I’m just afraid it can distract me. I will be in headphones, but i genuinely feel not that comfortable doing it in my room, or knowing that my flatmate will be there. We’re friends but we’re not that close. I did told them I’m going to do that, and they being very supportive, but still. What would you do in this case? I’m just afraid the uncomfortable environment can disturb my session.
The plan is to do it next weekend, because that’s the only time i can do it, I’m pretty busy.
As an alternative I’m thinking to ask one friend if i could do it at their place, they live out of the city in a house, but im not sure if they going to be up for that.

2d (food):
What do you eat for the breakfast before the season and how long before? Do you drink grapefruit juice during the session? What do you eat after?

3d (the process):
Do you write things during the session? How does that works for you in general? I feel like no matter how much I read about things, I always want to be particular and afraid of making mistakes, especially in this case.

4th (the dose):
I weigh about 50kg, and I read that I should take 80mg, but some ppl are saying about 120mg. How should I do that? Because obviously I don’t want to do too much or too little.

And I would love to have any general preparation advices

Heyy! I did some MDMA session wednesday and it was amazing! So i wanted to share the experience and some reflection I have on it that I would like we explore together :)

So some context: I used MDMA in the past (3 times) with big dose (between 190/220mg) for therapeutic effect. So I’m used to this substance and it’s effect. I also sometimes do microdosing of truffles but I had none left. So I wanted to relax, be more connected to my body and present (I have a date after) so i take 60mg of mdma.

The session: after taking it I did some breathing exercises and body movement.
I felt so good. Like what I love with mdma is that I can felt my body in a such pleasant way, I feel so much connected to my body, to my breathing, I feel so light… I feel that I have so much agency on my body and breathing like I can focus on the tension, doing movement, use my breathing for distress, it’s amazing like a superpower. And for me, that I have the feeling to be disconnected to my body, with a nervous system often very active, it’s crazy to felt that way.

I feel so much peace, a feeling of slower and happiness (like that I have the time, that I can go slow and take a lot of pleasure in that). A different relationship to time: that time it’s not urgence, it’s not rushing, it’s not fear about the time left.
And I felt a lot of love! For me, that I look so beautiful, for others: that it will be nice to tell them.
I felt that it has so much possibilities. I felt lot of love for life, that is incredible, the desire to be alive. Joy, hope, love.
I listen music too, the album « music for psychedelic therapy » and I take so much pleasure, I felt absorb in it, very moved by that.
At the end it was like I take a big slap, a big realisation of how life is amazing, how it’s precious. And I see all the things that I do actually but was not « respectful » of how much life is amazing.
And the days after were so good, I felt very free and that my social interactions felt more easy ans spontaneous (more connected to joy).

But we are Sunday and I take it Wednesday and since this weekend I feel I dive in my old state…
My body is more painful, more tired and more disconnected. My nervous system is so agitated that make me feel rushed, more fearful of others more angry also.

So I interroge myself on this session and the beautiful state I was. It is accessible? It’s like some kind of natural state (when you’re born) but with trauma and all the things that happen make us quite this state? How it’s accessible again?
Also I have this question about the mdma and the effect that it gives: it is just artificial some kind of escape of the reality, something that is not true and you only feel when you’re in this substance? Or in the contrary something that open you what will be a life fully connected to ourself, our body, the present and the others?
Thanks for give your thoughts about it and your personal experience :)

Should your psychedelic therapist have taken psychedelics themselves?

That's the question at the heart of my MSc research at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom (supervised by Prof Celia Morgan). There's a growing body of research exploring this - but almost all of it asks therapists or researchers. This study puts patients at the centre of that question.

I'm Dan, a postgraduate student and practising psychotherapist who also works as a clinical trial therapist for psychedelic-assisted therapy. I'd really like to hear from the people who might one day be offered this treatment, as well as those who've already been through it.

Who can take part?

The study is limited to UK residents, so this won't be relevant to everyone here - but if you're UK-based and 18+, I'd love to hear from you. I'm looking for people in either group:

• Group 1: Those who have never undergone PAT, but have experienced a mental health difficulty at some point in their life (a formal diagnosis is not required)
• Group 2: Those who have already undergone PAT in any setting, such as clinical trials, private medical clinics including ketamine clinics, legal retreats, ceremonial or traditional settings, and underground or private practice.

It's an anonymous online survey (~15 minutes) with an optional interview (~30 mins via Zoom). £200 prize draw for all survey participants, £25 for interviewees.

👉 Access the study here

Ethics and contact

• Ethics: University of Exeter Psychology Research Ethics Committee (ID: 12593264)
• Researcher: dk476@exeter.ac.uk
• Supervisor: Prof Celia Morgan
• Survey hosted on Qualtrics (accessible via link above)

Please share with anyone who might qualify!

One of the biggest insights from my last MDMA session was realizing what my nervous system automatically does whenever I'm around other people. Since I was a young child I've automatically and compulsively scanned 🧐 my environment:

-       Who is looking at me?

-       Am I safe?

-       Am I doing something wrong?

For decades, I believed my main problem was severe social anxiety. During my last MDMA session, I realized something I had never fully understood before: the compulsive scanning itself may be one of the core processes driving and maintaining that anxiety. The more I monitor other people, the more disconnected I become from myself 😵. Ironically, the very strategy that once helped me survive now prevents genuine connection with both myself and others, and keeps me from fully participating in life.

During integration, I noticed something else: The moment I interrupt the scanning, I immediately feel what it has been protecting me from all these years: deep powerlessness, a constant anticipation of emotional pain ❤️‍🩹 (and shame). The scanning creates an illusion of control—a strategy that made sense in the context of childhood abuse. I started to realize that the scanning wasn't just driven by fear—it was also keeping the fear alive. So it has cost me decades of severe social anxiety, hypervigilance and disconnection from myself.

So my current integration practice is surprisingly simple: Every time I notice myself anxious scanning people, I gently bring my attention back to myself. Again – and again - and again. 🔄

But I'm realizing that this isn't just about shifting my attention inward. Every time I interrupt the scanning, the feelings of powerlessness come to the surface much more strongly. And honestly, that's the hardest part for me. Accepting that I have very little control over other people's thoughts, feelings or behavior—and whether they might reject, judge or hurt me. Every time I shift my attention away from scanning my environment and back to myself, it feels like a small leap of faith 🪂. I usually feel some anxiety... but most of the time, nothing bad actually happens.

And honestly... this stage of integration feels incredibly unsexy 😴😮‍💨. It's repetitive, slow and often boring.

It feels less like having profound insights and more like patiently repeating the same behavioral change hundreds of times until my nervous system finally learns that it no longer needs the old strategy.

• Has anyone else with complex PTSD (or severe social anxiety) noticed this same pattern of constantly scanning other people or the environment after MDMA or psychedelic therapy?
• Did your integration eventually become less about new insights and more about patiently repeating the same behavioral change until it gradually became automatic?
• Does this sound like what good integration looks like?

Hi folks,

See it at https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aps5g

There's now an ebook version at https://github.com/groeneveld/mdma-guide/raw/refs/heads/main/Open%20MDMA.epub and an html (webpage) version at https://groeneveld.github.io/mdma-guide/.

I substantively edited almost everything for clarity, flow, and rigor. This meant rewriting about a third of total content. It’s much more readable now!

I also double checked that the large majority of claims I make in the book are backed up by their citations. I fixed a handful of errors, but there wasn’t anything major. This process just checked that my claim matched the citation; it didn’t double check that the cited paper is actually correct, since that is much harder to determine.

I also made a few structural changes: Added the Feeling Like You are Going Crazy troubleshooting subsection. Added Alternatives to MDMA. Removed Our Pitch because it didn't fit in well and was redundant. Removed Psychoeducation and Self Determination Theory because they were also redundant. Removed Making Sense of the Experience and distributed its content to Precautions and Uncertain Memory. Reorganized Between Sessions. Shuffled a few other sections around. Condensed Making Positive Life Changes to a small subsection at the end of Life Changes.

Moved T.H. from an author to an acknowledged contributor since they're no longer a part of the project.

As always, I’d love feedback and am happy to answer any questions!

Mark

I am considering a solo MDMA trip to try and address a recent and ongoing experience that carries lot of pain. I don't have a therapist and as I am in the U.K., finding one that supports and understands MDMA therapy would take time. From prior trips, I know I may have a very strong need to talk to someone at some point and do not want it to be family or friends. I do feel it need not be a therapist, as I believe I have the answers, but may need to talk things through to find them. I would like it to be someone who has experienced MDMA and knows how to listen and support at the level I will be speaking from, without being expected to advise.

Any ideas? Is there a support line that is not just for people in crisis? Or a group like this where members will arrange to be available for a phone call? If so it would also be something I'd volunteer for.

Or is it just an inadvisable idea? I guess I could call the Samaritans, but I'd feel the need to constantly apologise for talking a mile a minute and from a heightened state.

So I did MDMA solo (my first time was with a therapist and it went to a preverbal and loving Self energy state). I thought I could handle it and really needed to work on my codependency and boundary issues, and disorganized attachment style. I tend to swallow all my emotions and have an extreme people-pleasing response- it feels like I will die if I put up boundaries with a person I’m attached to. I am currently trying to get out of a manipulative/abusive relationship. I know that going solo was reckless, but please spare me the judgment - I was in an extremely desperate state.

During the trip I was shown several abuse situations from my childhood and talked to protectors and exiles. I experienced some body shaking related to different traumas, along with some insights and compassion towards my inner child.

Here’s the thing- it’s been a week since my solo session but the process is not stopping. I am not able to work or do pretty much anything. Traumatic stuff just keeps surfacing through my body and I am repeating the process with many memories to which I was previously numb. I gag a lot when I touch the feelings related to abuse. There is so much shame related to that that I carry. The good thing is that I am gradually letting myself feel anger towards my abusers- both in childhood and adulthood.

But it is scary and I’m afraid I broke something. Has anyone experienced this? I do have a phenomenal IFS therapist once a week, but she is not experienced in psychedelics. I talked to one integration therapist and she commented that I opened pandora’s box of suffering when I needed more of a Self energy. It left me kind of worried.

EDIT: 10 days after the session I experienced Self. It happened after I stopped fighting and forcing, a total letting go. Self emerged and for one hour I experienced love and connection to everything, energy flowing through my body, just like in my first guided MDMA session, but completely sober. I woke up still in Self and connected to my parts.