A Journey Through the Psychedelic Revival: Personal Stories of Transformation

good afternoon hi everybody uh welcome to penn school of nursing i'm tony vietwell and i'm the dean here of the school um it's so fabulous to be here in person to be here for this wonderful event how many of you have been on the zoom calls or in the zoom meetings before great well it's nice to we couldn't see the little hollywood squares with you beforehand so again it's great for you to be here i know many of you have been on this revival series with us and i want to thank sandy and her husband joe for the generous donation and and again it's not only the gender it's not only the donation but it's been the fire and the spirit and the prodding and the and i wouldn't say pushing but the pushing in a gentle way and i feel like i've been on this revival without the psychedelics and my mind has been opened and lots of lots of exploration here and again sandy thank you for bringing this opportunity not only to penn nursing and to our students on campus but again to this whole community here i think this far exceeded any expectations that we had and to the audience we're not done yet this is just the start of this here so we've all been dedicated and inspired by those who have shared their experiences and again we're grateful to our panel who came here with us today to share their stories with us as well too i think it has really worked to humanize and to put in context why this work and why these opportunities are so important so i think there's after being on this journey with us there's no doubt that the psychedelic therapy has important use in mental health treatment and i'm happy that penn nursing can be part of this component here i like to pride myself that penn nursing has a strong innovation in ecosystems that prepares nurses to be leaders in health care and again very appreciative of the engagement of our students throughout the process here and you'll be hearing from one of our students who's uh getting herself all ready for the zoom screen kayla who will be moderating this this discussion today so um where our program here in particular our psych mental health program offers a holistic approach that blends neuroscience and psychotherapy and psychopharmacology in addition to our psych mental health program we have great experts like dr salima magani who is a leader in end of life care and who again is working with us to understand how this will work and be made available to people who are on this journey so again selima appreciate your support and your support of kayla here as well i also want to thank quasi aducy who has been sharing his expertise and helping us develop the nurses we continue to be grateful to him for his expertise and for shepherding us on so tonight is going to be the culmination of the previous six sessions and we will hear five personal stories of transformation led by kayla baker and so without further ado kayla it's all yours thank you [Applause] thank you so much team for being here tonight uh for supporting this series um and of course for your inspiring words um as the dean mentioned my name is kayla baker it looked like we saw a lot of hands in the audience for people who had watched the series so i did moderate to the series sessions um so i won't reiterate about myself too much but i was an oncology nurse prior to coming into this program and i read some of the research about how psychedelics were used for oncology patients experiencing existential distress and even though i didn't come into this program with the intention of studying psychedelics things sort of evolved that way and i was really lucky to find support in dr magani and we've been sort of exploring this more so i'm happy that ped nursing has this happening and i'm happy to have you guys all here tonight i am just going to do a quick little recap of some of the virtual events that led up to this just as a reminder our first session was with two nurses dr maria mangini and dr stephanie van hope and in that session we just talked about a general introduction to the psychedelic space and it was great to have those expert voices there we were lucky enough tonight to have dr stephanie van hoop here with us um so thanks stephanie for being here um the second event featured andrew penn also a psychiatric nurse practitioner in this space who's really doing a lot for psychedelics really bringing the nursing voice to the table and that session was moderated by pat chow who's also here tonight um so thanks pat for being here uh in our third session we talked to um that dr ben malcolm pharmacist really important role um he talked about neuroscience and pharmacology and that was a great conversation um in our fourth session we talked to uh nurse karen cooper and that session was moderated by one of our psych np students um tanya gertzman who i hope is also here tonight tanya yes all right great um in our fifth session we talked to dr steven ross dr scott shannon and dr rachel yehuda about the future of psychedelic assisted therapy i know we have dr ross in the house tonight thank you for being here and randy mouskey who introduced that session and our last virtual event was a panel of leaders in the psychedelic space joseph mcgowan dr hannah mclean rick doblin and leah mix and they talked about you know where psychedelic therapy is going and so i believe we have uh dr hannah mclean here hannah not sure um but anyways hopefully we'll be seeing dr maclean at some point um steve akpon um was not able to make it tonight but i do want to mention that all the short videos that featured transformations by individuals who had used psychedelic therapy um those were you know made by steve and they were just moving and wonderful it's always great to see even just a snippet of somebody's personal transformation so um i want to thank steve for his creativity um in in those videos um so without further ado we have more stories tonight and so i just want to also mention that after this session we are going to do breakout rooms i'll give more instructions on that later this is just a little overview of what we're going to be doing tonight so we have about an hour here to hear from our speakers and also to do q a so as the speakers are telling their stories think about some questions you have for them and we'll be sure to leave plenty of time to get your questions um we definitely want to you know we have a smaller crowd so we definitely want you guys to feel comfortable with standing up and asking your questions especially while you have such a wonderful opportunity um so without further ado jesse gold um former army ranger and the founder of the heroic hearts project which supports veterans with ptsd john costacopolis a participant in an nyu trial and has also has a non-profit which is aimed at you know trying to mitigate the mental health crisis dinah bazer was also a participant in an nyu trial as part of her cancer journey jonathan wilson former navy seal um and he also has a non-profit and so you can talk more about that and his lovely wife is also here and accompanying him and she has a non-profit as well which supports military spouses and widows and female veterans um so jesse you're up thank you so much and thanks everybody for for being here and joining us on wednesday can you hear me if i speak late okay um yeah so and and thanks for the introduction uh really happy to be here uh and it just it's it's so cool to be at such a great university like university of pennsylvania talking openly about psychedelics and if you realize like even five six years ago that would be virtually impossible so it's a pretty amazing thing that that we're having this discussion so my story is relates to this i was army ranger which is a special operations unit in the us army i was a non-commissioned officer so i was a leader of many junior rangers both at home and training and then overseas in combat situations during the time i was in it was mostly afghanistan focused and so i did three combat deployments to afghanistan various parts um and so when i got out of the military i generally speaking my military career was was very fulfilling i learned a lot about myself challenged myself and was excited to go into civilian life i had already a background in economics and finance and i thought i was going to hit the ground running and at first it seemed like i was i found a great job in finance and on the outside everything was green check marks you know i was doing well had the good job um had a good social situation i was in tampa florida had friends but on the inside there's just this burden like called a dark cloud that i just couldn't overcome and i thought it was just something that you know kind of the the military in me i could just kind of storm past or just keep hitting that wall until it broke because that was how i was trained but little by little it just kind of kept uh having more deleterious aspects in my life and i think because i was high performing it lasted even longer where you know i could show up to work and do well and get compliments but then i'll just go home and just drink until i passed out and then you know that became more nights than not and i just found myself in this depressive spot this very anxious spot where panic attacks would come where i was relying on alcohol so much just to just to to survive and fortunately i'm fortunate that i saw the red flags right i saw this and so i tried self-help i tried you know all these sort of stuff i would wake up at five do journaling all this kind of and meditation and i went to the va and unfortunately the va was just very sort of dogmatic about um talk therapy with prescription medication and so there i was in this situation where i knew i was struggling and my two options were continue on with my self-medication with alcohol or go on to this ssri path which i had seen sort of the negative sides of it as well and not to talk bad about medications that you know there's a time and place and they can definitely save lives but for me it was just this one or the other and so i just found myself where i was labeled ptsd that didn't seem to really encompass everything i was struggling with and even the professionals didn't have any sort of help the prescription model is really sort of a maintenance thing of you have ptsd you're probably going to always have ptsd here's how you can live life you know and that wasn't acceptable to me and so continued to just sort of trudge along and live unhealthy life um and heard about ayahuasca and at first i heard on a podcast it was kind of a curiosity of like oh that's an interesting trip in the woods never done psychedelics didn't personally identify with somebody that did psychedelics it was like okay that's for other people i have no need for that in my life but it was just that fortunate time of things aligning where i was just going downhill quick and there was this thing that presented to me and for whatever reason the smarter part of my brain that you know i didn't even realize there the the unconscious just kind of had that sort of repeat ayahuasca ayahuasca until eventually i just found myself booking a flight to peru and um i couldn't really explain it to anybody else i kind of kept it sort of low-key but i just knew whatever i was doing in florida was not sustainable and i wasn't happy in any sort of aspect and so i just took a leap of faith essentially bought a one-way ticket to peru went to found a place i felt comfortable with it was a week-long indigenous ayahuasca retreat so multiple ayahuasca ceremonies and dove right in and it was one of the most challenging things i've ever done but towards the end of it it was just one the immediate sort of realizations were one that this was not what the dare program had told me drugs were right this was not what it wasn't fun first of all is the opposite of what i was expecting a psychedelic journey to be just throwing up each night for for the five hours but two there was something profound to it there's something really deep to it and i noticed immediate benefits in terms of for the first time it felt like my brain was on my team as opposed to actively trying to destroy me or fighting against itself and two over the course of months i just noticed a extreme reduction in anxiety and hyper vigilance and just sort of me not going to sort of magic bullet uh scenarios to try to fix my life i had much more restitution i was much calmer i was much more focused and moving forward and all this led me to found heroic hearts project because even when i was going this was 2017 this year's our five year anniversary there just wasn't any guide work framework really no talk about integration and so what i was lacking i wanted to provide for other veterans including the education not that everybody should do this but hey if you're looking if you've tried everything else there might be another tool out there and let's explore it together and so that's what we've been doing we developed a program where veterans come to us and we provide integration coaching support preparation we use retreat centers of not only ayahuasca but a variety of different psychedelics depending on where the person's at and then the follow-up care and preparation and beyond that we've been doing a lot of policy initiatives around the country to sort of push forward talk to legislators about this and then also research uh so we're working with a few different universities around the country to really push forward the scientific literature on this um and happy to dive into any of those but really happy to be here and uh thanks thanks for listening so much jesse and we can just keep going down the line john you're up oh great uh can you guys hear me okay yeah okay um that was great jesse thank you for five years yeah we got we got some great panelists on here um and thanks sandy uh and the dean for having us um so i'm john uh as mentioned earlier i was a study participant at nyu uh what they were looking for to research was alcohol use disorder or alcoholism prior to that i had tried everything to stop drinking and i really wanted to stop um but i i just couldn't i would you know go maybe a few weeks or a couple of months and then relapse and you know even if you want everything in the whole world you want you know you know you want to stop it's addiction is a very very tough disease to get over so i checked myself into rehab when i was 21 i tried everything i tried different pharmaceuticals and abuse that would make you sick when you ingested any alcohol and a few others to to help curb the craving but none of that worked for me so just by luck i tracked down dr steve ross who's in here probably one of my favorite alums to come out of this place because he saved my life and you know he he was working on launching a clinical trial to treat alcohol use disorder and prior to that i was terrified just like jesse never touched psychedelics wasn't for me and i was also just flat-out terrified i didn't want to have a bad trip i thought maybe i could go crazy if i had too much or get stuck in a trip and the doctors assured me that wasn't the case and you know why you'll be fine so after a very intensive medical screening i was lucky enough to get in um and i got lucky again because it's a double blind and i got the psilocybin and then i got lucky again because i stopped drinking after my very first session so uh you know this was back in 2015 so it's about seven years and i haven't had the urge to drink it's not like i'm counting days or that's what they do in these addiction programs you count days you you know you have a good support group around you um but i didn't need to do any of that since leaving the clinical trial because i mean i don't know if you'd get upset about this but i think because he doesn't like to hype things up dr ross he's a very responsible guy and i don't blame you that's what drew me to the study i was like all right they're not selling snake oil here but i mean this flat out cured my alcoholism and you know i there's no other way to put it i had a burger and a non-alcoholic beer at the white dog right before this um and i not once did i it didn't even cross my mind to order a real beer and back in the day i probably would have been like maybe i could have one or two do this talk maybe just get a hotel room you know in philly before i head back to new york and keep drinking and then go back to my normal life um but that you know that didn't even cross my mind that's how well this worked so um you know if you have any questions about that later on you could catch me on the second floor whatever you got me there thank you appreciate that i know we have friends thank you for hosting this and giving me the opportunity to tell my story which is similar to john's story and i also was in a psilocybin study with dr ross in january of 2010 i found a hard lump about the sinus of a walnut in my abdomen and i said this is going to kill me i know what this is and it took me three months to find a doctor that took me seriously um fortunately he was at nyu and i went in for surgery and expecting to come out and being told i had a few months to live because by that time this walnut size lump was the size of a grapefruit instead i woke up to be told it was stage 1c ovarian cancer and we can cure this which i knew wasn't exactly true but then i went through six rounds of chemo and i just kind of powered through it like i have to do this and it's going to be okay nothing bad is going to happen here and luckily nothing bad did happen i thought i would celebrate when it was over no when it was over all of a sudden i was just waiting for the other shoe to drop when is this coming back most of the time it comes back in the first two years and so every exam i thought oh this is it this is it and meanwhile i was totally consumed with this fear and this anxiety every day every night that's all i thought of every little stomach rumble oh it's back i was living in terror constantly when i went in for my two-year exam that it really had peaked at that point and when the nurse practitioner asked me how i was doing i said great except for this anxiety is killing me and she said i have something for you and she told me about dr ross's study i felt very lucky to get into it i did the required 16 hours of therapy which i don't recall as therapy but just getting to know the therapist but i'm assured it was therapy and the format of the study was dose a and dose b one of which was the real thing and one of which was a placebo i went in for dose a and knew pretty quickly that it was the real thing so i put on a face mask and the headphones to listen to the six hours of carefully curated music and was thrown into such chaos and terror i thought oh god it's a bad trip and i had had a bad trip when i was young so i then i remembered that my therapists were with me and i stuck out my hand and i said i'm so scared and one of them took my hand and said just go with it and then i was floating in the music and after a while i saw my fear as a physical thing up under my rib cage and when i saw that i was so angry i just exploded said what the who the do you think you are i won't be eaten alive get out and the scene changed just like that it was gone it was gone and i was floating in the music and i was feeling love i was feeling the love of my adult children the love of my husband the love of my friends i was bathed in god's love which as an atheist and i still am was was truly remarkable truly remarkable when i surfaced from this my daughter accompanied me home in a car service and i said to her it wasn't real was it god's love and she said no ma she's also an atheist but in harry potter he sees dumbledore after dumbledore has died and he says to dumbledore i'm going to paraphrase this is all in my head isn't it and dumbledore says yes but that doesn't mean it's not real this experience was real it took place in my head but it was real i really felt god's love even though there's no god so i'm sorry i do need notes afterwards everything slowed down for me i had always been a very anxious person and a very speedy person i would grab a piece of toast with peanut butter and coffee and race off to work and have my breakfast in the car now i wanted to sit at home and eat my breakfast and have my coffee and read a little bit of my paper and drive to work casually and that's what i started doing and i began making time for myself to live my life and feel every moment i reconnected with friends that i hadn't seen much over the past years i joined my local why and made new friends there i had been a somewhat aggressive driver my husband may say it was more than somewhat that seems to have been really cured my mantra is you are not in a hurry um i don't worry about the cancer i really have not had one iota of anxiety about a recurrence in it's been 10 years since i took psilocybin i've had a few times when i thought i need to get this checked out and i did i just went to a doctor i i had blood drawn i got it checked out wasn't worried about it about a year and a half ago i accidentally found that i had a different cancer and i didn't freak out i just you know i sought out an expert i got that treated it was very extremely early slow growing i had some surgery i go in for a checkup once every five years i guess we've done two now and i don't think about it other anxieties have crept back into my life but this i really it's gone this is just gone my life is completely changed thank you dr ross thank you for hosting us and giving us the opportunity to talk about this thank you dinah that was wonderful you definitely put a tear in my eye i'm appreciating that you each have a very different uh storytelling style so thank you thank you all and uh jonathan europe thank you um so bathed in god's love and i don't believe in god i think that's really how do you follow that and i do need to verify has she toned down the driving is it okay [Laughter] so we're on to something here then uh jonathan wilson uh i am allison's husband father of five as mentioned earlier i was a seal and how do we normally um describe who we are we start with our accolades so let's do that uh navy seal goldman harvard oxford husband father i'm a pretty badass right like not at all not at all all that was chasing something that i didn't realize it was planted with my father who i loved to death but i didn't realize what i was doing i was seeking his love i was trying to win his love um i'll start with the seal teams i've deployed four five times and uh iraq afghanistan and and uh what we do there is we compartmentalize so we do what we have to do it's the mission it's the job and you you compartmentalize and you go to the next thing so i've buried a lot of friends i've been to arlington i've been to a lot of cemeteries we have a lot of widows that are part of our tribe that we we stay close to and it's all normal it's normalized in our community but it's not normal so then you move on and it's time to transition you have a wife and kids and um you can't keep doing this we've been lucky and we've been lucky i you know again we've lost a lot of friends it's time to get out how do you get out how do your skills translate from being you know a navy seal which is a lot better than an army ranger by the way um just want to throw that in there to to this outside world and the reality is i you don't know how to and um i was lucky i had a friend that was at goldman and made some synergies between being a traitor and being a seal and oh my gosh was i way off base i thought like the high risk of trading and high risk of being a seal is what i needed it's not what i need i need purpose i need passion i need love in my life and i just didn't realize that i didn't have mentors i didn't have friends outside of the steel team so my time at goldman was quick i did a few years there and i started a non-profit in 2012 with my beautiful wife to help these veterans transition and that started us down another journey of of trying to understand these pains and traumas that were accrued during our time in war um and on our relationships by the way um and in 2017 on that journey five years after starting the nonprofit we were helping with education so partner with harvard i did try to partner with you penn by the way but they they didn't want any part of that at the time maybe we can have a conversation afterwards okay but partner with a bunch of great universities to help with scholarships and job placement and communities around the country and getting these seals and their spouses eventually these amazing jobs but they weren't okay and it would implode in due time and in 2017 that's when we woke up when a friend of ours senior seal team six member got on face time with his wife and shot himself and we took a step back and we realized we're missing the mark here we need to address these internal wounds that we have these emotional wounds that we have and how do we do that no effing idea we don't talk about our emotions our monster in the seal teams would suffer in silence and it got the job done and that's exactly what he needed to be but on the outside we had all these things inside of us just compartmentalized waiting to implode and it did time and time and time again so 2017 we lost a good friend we started exploring what was out there inevitably landed on psychedelics and how that happened was i was going through my own struggles had gotten out i was trying to figure this out felt to be honest i felt self-loathing i felt worthless at times i you know i had gone from being a at the top of my game to just going through the motions addictions so drinking not realizing uh the amount of alcohol that we were consuming and uh the relationship was non-existent so i have five kids as mentioned they're amazing i have one at trinity right now and the youngest is 11. i left my family because i thought it was her i thought it was them so i left my home got an apartment and started for the first time my life thinking about taking my own life oxford harvard goldman sachs navy seal that's who i really am that's who we really are i think it's time for us to start having a real conversation an honest conversation so we can start addressing these issues i've came across a friend who was kicked out of seal team six for drinking which holy crap if you get kicked out of seal team six for drinking you got a drinking problem because we all had drinking problems i didn't even recognize who he was he looked beautiful when he got kicked out he was 270 pounds obese flush red and when i saw him he was glowing 170 5 foot seven just long flowing gold golden hairs like who is this guy giving me a hug and then he tells me who he is and i was just dumbfounded and then he proceeded to tell me about psychedelics the sleeve was planted i thought he lost his mind i left that barbecue and got on the internet started looking into this started looking at the research started scratching my head wait a second this isn't the psychedelics that i remember from the 60s and 70s you know what's been portrayed by society there's something here so i gave him a call a few months later and did my own journey and it absolutely saved my life i saved my marriage i'm a father i'm a husband that's who i am now that's my priority now and it's not perfect it's not a panacea let's be clear about that you don't go there there was struggles and oh boy was there struggles during that journey but it was meaningful and it was needed to get me to where i'm at today with perspective and understanding and empathy for the first time in my life with love to be honest with you self-love which has allowed me to amplify that out i'm truly grateful for the opportunity to have been exposed to this and now the mission that we're on trying to help others with this and maybe at that point i'll turn it over to my wife for to for her to share her portion of the story [Applause] okay gosh see i should have gone before him my name's allison wilson and um like jonathan said we have five children 11 to 21. um you know he mentioned a lot of our life in the seal teams and how we started a nonprofit in 2012 and you know i i always said to him in the very beginning of starting that i said if you don't support the spouses or the family at home this is it's never gonna mesh um it just it's taken quite some time to get to this point um but you know starting with i'll just kind of start with my own journey um the seal teams is it's really tough you know military is tough either way but in in the teams there was something about these guys that they did they always had to portray this um hero you know and everyone's saying to me oh you're married to a navy seal you're married to a navy seal and i was like oh gosh this is not like when he told me he wanted to be a seal i was like what you want to be an animal like what are you talking about you know i had no idea no military background um and we met in annapolis and it's just i just had no idea how hard it would be he was gone 300 days out of the year we now currently live in our 20th home and you know again five children like beautiful children but it's really hard on the family and that's kind of what was missing in all of this the guys seemed to get a lot of the support and when they came home we they really didn't have support for the family you know there are a lot of oh we can have a dinner here dinner there while the guys are gone but it was a lot of just kind of bad bad-mouthing them and i can't believe they left me and i can't believe this and you know just you kind of got to the point where you didn't really want to to go to them anymore so you felt really alone you know when jonathan was deployed it i used to definitely numb myself with alcohol i was on bentos for 16 years i you know then started abusing the benzos because every night it was okay if i can get to bed tonight and wake up in the morning then that was a good day you you know you stop watching the news you don't know if you're going to get a knock at the door knowing you know saying that your husband's not gonna come home but then you start thinking like maybe i want to get that knock on the door because i don't want to live like this anymore and then how awful i felt for feeling that way like i actually want this to end because then maybe i could move on with my life the command used to tell us you have to hold it together at home you have to hold it together at home because if you're not together then the guys are going to be bad operators and that i mean frankly that sucked you know trying to be a mom to five kids and hold it together and shove everything down inside and when you when i went into the marriage forget about the traumas that you know everyone has trauma and forget about the traumas that happened to me when i was younger or that happened to me in when i was a teenager because that had to be shoved so deep down inside that i had to be able to just hold it together on the outside and i held it together by benzos antidepressants and alcohol and that was it for 16 years um jonathan like he said when we got to we just moved to colorado recently but we were in connecticut for five years before that when we got there he did he moved out to an apartment and you know it broke my heart because when he got out i said oh it's my turn you know it's my turn to finally live it's my turn to hold down a job to be able to find friends to be able to maybe go back to school to be able to be in a home and it feel like a home and not just a house and it wasn't that at all it was me picking up the pieces because he didn't have his purpose or his passion but like he said on paper all of these things but he you know we we tend to forget kind of what's right in front of our faces um and i was not a good wife it was a very volatile relationship again still running on medication and alcohol and he about four years ago it was went to his ibogaine journey in mexico and came back changed but i was not this ball of love to come back to i was mad i was angry i was resentful i was hateful i said why why do you get to feel this way and what about me and then i started feeling even more awful because i felt that way so it was like the teams all over again it's like what is happening when am i ever going to get off this hamster wheel um and it was i wanted nothing to do with psychedelics nothing i said this is like i need to take my medication i went to the psychologist yesterday and she told me i just need more so that's what i'm gonna do i can remember the day like it was yesterday we had a small farm in connecticut i was sitting in our horse's stall and just broke down and called him and said if you don't get me on a plane soon or call the doctor soon that i'm not sure if i'm going to make it until tomorrow i had thoughts constant thoughts of killing myself in many many different ways but i also had five beautiful children and a husband and this beautiful home in connecticut you know we had everything um so kind of kicking and screaming he got me on a plane to costa rica i almost didn't get on the second plane or the first day and i went to costa rica you know it's the universe works in incredible ways because the the two women that i went with won a gold star wife she lost her husband and one a former um veteran and also a seal spouse were the three women there it was the first women's retreat that this group had had but i was scared shitless i took forever one to get to costa rica and then we had to take this little bitty plane and i hate flying um you know to our spot and then drive two hours to the jungle somewhere and i could remember the day that we took the medicine just thinking what the hell am i doing like i have five babies at home five kids at home and i am in the middle of the jungle where i don't know anyone about to take drugs what am i doing but i had gotten to the point where there was nowhere left to go so it was just you know i have to do this leap of faith i have to do this what else do i have to lose um i did mdma and psilocybin both together the next day i did five m eodmt the first day when i did md man psilocybin mdma is very much a heart opener and this isn't like the ecstasy that you go out and take at raves you know it was very with it with a doctor and we had a huge staff of coaches and therapists and doctors there and um my ego was so large mind you i had to taper off of my medication you know before i got to this point so i just i wasn't in a good spot at all am i i can remember laying down they had us on three mattresses the eye shades the music and i can remember laying down we were outside you know you could hear the birds you could hear every everything was beautiful but i can remember crossing my legs and i kept saying no this isn't working this isn't working you know this isn't working it was like the the control frequency and the ego and and then i kept hearing this voice and she kept saying mommy mommy and i was like what is happening you know this is my kids trying to talk to me what is happening she just kept saying mommy mommy i'm okay i'm okay and i sat up and i wrote that half since tattoo but i wrote hope on my arm and she was the little girl that i had an abortion when i was 17 and she came to me in that journey and she just kept saying i'm okay you can you can let go now and it's like she just opened up this door of love and i had no i had not thought about this in years and years and years and it was shoved so far down inside that as soon as that door opens it's like she took me through the entire journey of my entire life and the coming out of that journey i knew that i had to love myself that was the entire journey i had to love myself i did not love myself because of what happens when i was younger and it just kept piling up and piling up that i never ever let anyone mostly my husband and my children love me ever i had a wall up the entire time and i will say it just like these other panels will say the same thing that journey saved my life it saved my children's lives it saved my marriage but remember it's a tool this is a tool to get you to where it's fast track where you need to be but these tools you don't come home and you're changed and it's this you know you are integrating into this beautiful place because the world doesn't change the world's still as sometimes and i always said you know what i feel like the world should have to integrate to us we should all take psychedelics the world integrate to us and we should not have to integrate to the world because there is so much more work that has to be done i have since in two years done a few smaller journeys to help me when i get stuck in a spot um but that is the start of the integration process it allowed me to love myself so i could react to things differently so i could see love differently so i could accept love differently that's what it allowed me to do on that journey i was also told that i should start the hope project i came home hit the ground running which they tell you not to make any big decisions in the first four to six months so that was very purposeful for me i needed to kind of step back and integrate myself but in the last about six months to a year the whole project has really picked up it's a non-profit now that i have made it my purpose my passion to connect other spouses other female veterans and gold star wives to psychedelics but to also be there for them with prep and integration coaching we work closely with heroic hearts and help the spouses as well when their husbands go to journeys um so you know i just i love being here that we're at you know university of pennsylvania and being able to talk about this openly like jesse said and you know i just want to thank all of you for listening to our stories [Applause] thank you all hello um thank you all so much i just think there's something about sort of talking about the most challenging moments in your life and the most transformational and you know important and uh you know good moments in a way uh all in one story so i think it just speaks to the real complexity um you know um speaking as a nurse i think there's a lot of overlap with for sure you know the wife of a person in the military and maybe even just being in the military yourself i mean i don't know i hate to compare it i don't want to marginalize anybody's experiences but you know when you are close to other people suffering you know it can really affect you so i don't know if any of the other nurses in the room share my feelings on that but i want to open it up now for q a so you got a question all right i'm gonna come up to you everyone get your questions ready we have about uh 20 minutes yeah or you can tell me oh yeah and just uh for everybody to please uh direct your question if you if you have a question for a specific person just let us know um sorry i had to make a joke because i always have a question but um i'm in the psychiatric nurse practitioner program here at penn and actually have been on my own journey of being very against psychedelics and now like slowly actually opening my mind up to them so i identify with everyone who's had that but um my question is allison mentioned this a bit in your bit um i'm really curious as to whether you feel like you have to repeat these experiences and go through that whole ayahuasca journey or psilocybin journey and if so how many times do you think you'll have to do it is there a point where you're like i definitely need to go do that journey again or is this like a one and done like cure all kind of feeling thanks i think it's so different for every person i really do um i have i've heard both um personally i you know i had such a transformative first larger journey that i really haven't had to do another one of those but again i i do think that i know this sounds kind of crazy but i feel like it really calls you and you know when you're supposed to go do another journey there are some people that i've worked with too some women that have dealt with a lot of trauma-like military sexual trauma and a lot of trauma that it just that tool is to kind of you know open up that first layer and then they continue on the integration process and then maybe in six months to a year they do have to do something else to kind of really hit that trauma um but i do think it's dependent on each each person yeah i would agree with that you know sometimes some people we see they have it they they have a powerful experience they hit the ground running that's all they need some people have layers of trauma you know complex ptsd a lot of veterans have childhood trauma which then makes them more susceptible to ptsd or seeking out traumatic situations that add on to that and so sometimes they might need you know one one session they'll uncover some things and then another session that they might uncover other stuff what we sort of push is if you're going to go back go with intention know why you're doing it if you just repeat the same sort of thing then it becomes a dependence and it doesn't become a healing modality but i also think this is with psychedelics with all of our sort of rethinking our perceptions on what we thought we knew uh whether it's about drugs or mental health it's sort of an opportunity to really reassess how we treat mental health and in my my mind we've really kind of been kind of dogmatic about treating it almost like a physical ailment where you have this this is the protocol this is a diagnosis you do this six months you'll be good to go right mental health is a lifelong journey a lifelong check-in even all of us it's not like hey i'm done hey i'm done drinking alcohol it's days you have bad weeks you have bad days you you slowly but surely build the infrastructure around you to where it becomes easier but it's part of that community and so in my mind and how we work with veterans is the psychedelics allow an opportunity to better know yourself better be aligned with your intuition and emotional intelligence and so if you use it to that that that goal then you'll have a better sense of if you might need it down the line right and that's this whole thing if we can empower people to be better arbiters of their own health or on mental health then that's the situation where they're not as dependent on the doctor or that maybe they need to do periodic check-ins and so that's kind of what we see is like if people do go back not guilt them in that oh they're they're doing this but enforce uh what hey what what's your intention of going into this are you doing it with with set and setting and then i think that is the ideal healthy situation for the individual and for moving this forward and that takes a more comprehensive understanding where the person's at in their healing journey versus kind of you know using sort of the the diagnosis of depression all that kind of stuff as a starting point but where's that person at like what's going on in their life because the psychedelic's not going to cure everything if i go to an ayahuasca retreat go right back to the bar and eat you know mcdonald's every day i'm not going to be a happy person you know there's there's so many different layers of it and so these are tools that really empower us to better know ourselves and i think that's the rethinking of this of better self-knowledge better community support of that self-knowledge and then rebuilding sort of this thing where i think we've kind of lacked as society in terms of how prominent mental health issues are right now not only in the the veteran community thank you really appreciate your your sharing with us today certainly want to have further inquiry about the transformations you've actually experienced perhaps things you might have now realized politically or perhaps ecologically or things that you might want to recognize being in the military or an atheist or a former drinker to the degree of absolute direct turn or like there's systemic trauma going on here or i no longer will participate in this or this political thing or if you could just expand a little bit other than your personal thank you um i'll share a bit of just i think i'll be general but um what it allowed me to do is uh to somewhat hover over myself and see from a different angle the conversations the relationships i had so it allowed me to see a different perspective that i never could before very uh stubborn-minded or my thoughts were you know facts in my head at times and really had a hard time taking other people's opinions and thoughts and even to some degree i didn't show them the respect to or create an environment for them to share theirs so again generally speaking it's allowed me to recognize we all come from different places backgrounds we have different experiences we need to respect those as a collective and understand how we can push forward together and i can kind of see that now so i appreciate other people's opinions and try to create the environment now where they appreciate ours as well so speaking generally not avoiding them political questions i i'd agree with that it gave me at least for addiction or at least my addiction i had a subjective point of view on it where i would always justify my drinking i mean i was i was pretty young i was 25 so i always gave myself plenty of time i said i'll clean my act up when i'm 30 35 40. so i was always justifying my drinking making excuses and to echo what jonathan said it gave me a different perspective and and more of an objective point of view that i wasn't just harming myself i was also harming my loved ones that cared about me hi um i'm taylor i'm also in the psych nurse practitioner program with sarah i can testify she's a question gal um thank you guys so much for sharing your stories um uh one thing i want to hear about not from anyone in particular is you know we know that in individual therapy that as one person changes the whole system can change um in terms of like your relationships and your families and work um and so i know we heard a little bit from a lot from jonathan allison about your guys relationship and like you know john they came back and allison you're upset um and kind of seeing his transformation so i'm kind of curious to hear like how your systems might have changed based on your guys kind of dramatic changes within yourselves uh-huh so i've tried quite a few things in the past um you know antidepressants sris to deal with some of the the war wounds and honestly some of the childhood trauma that i didn't even realize i had i mentioned um you know a few earlier but a lot of my experience was centered around that so the child my childhood and again i go back to is like when i did my journey i thought i was going to spend a lot of time focusing on what i did and more and what i saw and more and the friends that i lost and that's not really where i spend time but i share that with you because i've done tms i've done you know talk therapy i could barely last i think we did a session where i was so anxious i like literally left things just didn't work and when i came back from this it's pretty damn obvious that something had changed i knew but for her seeing you know i'm on the sixth iteration of this like oh boy here we go again this one's going to either fade off like the tms the magnetic stimulation or some of this other stuff and with time you know it's kept going and a little bit more and it took about a year for her to to get to that spot that she described in her her opening comments but um it is contagious like my favorite quote is you're the average of the five people you surround yourself with right like it's super contagious and and you can see it it starts with your transformation and people see they feel it and then they go off and they start doing their own research they planted the seed and then they go do their journey potentially and if they don't that's absolutely fine too but they're intrigued and they're having conversations and we're sitting in a room at you penn talking about it now but it just keeps going and then for us it went over to allison and you know she mentioned i'll let her talk a little bit more about what she's done but i mean the women that she supported is just it's just it brings me to tears here in some of these stories um and you know dozens and dozens of women now and the transformation that's gonna have in their household and their relationships and their children um it's just so beautiful to be a part of that um but i don't know if you wanna it's very generational too um you know i feel like personally with my kids like they would even notice like mommy like why you're very happy today or you know they would say little things and they'd see us joking around it's funny because now they're like are you guys talking about mushrooms again oh gosh shiitake mushrooms you know but it is it's very generational i think um and also with with the you know what you said about the therapy being you know a community to that's like what we're trying to build with these non-profits is these communities because it it does go from person to person most of the women that um i coach that their husbands go through they now have seen such a change in them that they want to go on their own journey um and it's such a beautiful thing to watch when you know both spouses have done journeys on their own and then they're able to come together after that so you know i think it is just about it's you know building this this community as well and with the the support too yeah just add on quickly trauma really begets more trauma you know like when you're in an unhealthy spot you attract unhealthy people and vice versa and before i went on this you know i was just yelling at the sky of like why can't i find a good relationship but now reflecting back i was on tinder and i would go to bars and try to pick up people at bars and then of course what am i going to find you know other people that have drinking problems and are in the same sort of boat it's it's easy then but when you're in it it's so hard you can't see outside of this this traumatic bubble and then after i did some of this work i wasn't healed at all it took more work but i finally wasn't self-sabotaging right i was finally a little bit healthier and lo and behold i met my now wife and we have an amazing relationship because it's one of those things that a lot of us don't feel that we deserve it and it's one thing to intellectually know you deserve it one thing to say yeah i love myself it's another thing to feel it and embody it and you know not only know it intellectually but subconsciously and on all levels and when you do that you find those other people that can see that they want to love you but they also love themselves and it creates that one of my my favorite stories of a veteran worked with green beret uh came in like you know formidable kind of guy you know it's scary if you saw him very straight face went to uh ayahuasca ceremony and like almost immediately turned into this like goofy hippie kind of person and uh he said he went back to his like goofy self pre-military like high school and his his relationship didn't end up working out it kind of had done its course but they both maturely left it because they started really talking and they didn't just but the story he had was just one morning he was with his kid and they were just making pancakes and he was just telling me how he enjoyed that and where before he'd be kind of military military like hey we gotta get you gotta get to the bus all right hurry up eat where's this he was just like relishing and enjoying the time with his kid and like hey if we miss a bus i'll drive him there whatever you know and just to think about that how generationally that affects people's lives like that kid now has a better loving relationship with his father which allows him to understand that that schema so that he can then have that with his children if he doesn't have that then he's always going to be searching that and that's going to reflect in his children and their children generational trauma is such a real thing and such a hard thing to to break and we see that with abuse we see that like i said so many people who join the military and have ptsd come from childhood abuse or or chaotic situations and it's this cycle that just keeps repeating and so that really is the power here of actually effective modalities where you can break that cycle bring it to both sides of the spouses and then you know if the kid down the line wants to do it too they have that option but at least for the very they they have those schemas of loving healthy relationships dinah i thank you dinah here i'm back down here hi thank you all for sharing i think dinah you were probably the only one that talked about um the therapist in the process of the journey so i'm wondering to all of you how did that play into to what you did you saw the nurse practitioners here and so that's that's a a certain place for them but tell us a little bit about that and then what happens after this journey i mean is there a need for continued i don't know call it talk therapy or is it this own community that provides support you talked about you know when you need to go on another journey but what's what's in between because i don't think you're talking about this as a magic bullet i think you're talking about this is a process so maybe if you could expand a little bit about what happens after yeah well the therapists were really essential for me i was concerned about a bad trip even though people i know in my family have done shrooms and said you won't have a bad trip i was concerned but going in there and knowing my therapist anthony bossus and michelle michonne so well by that point i really felt safe and and like i said when i was in this terrified state at the beginning and i didn't know what was happening i remembered they were there and i reached out to them and so i think that enabled me to progress in a helpful manner during the trip um i would actually really like to do this again i don't feel like i need any help with cancer anxiety that i feel like yes that was one and done i'm just not concerned about it but the next day and for a good two years afterwards i was so relaxed it was so wonderful not to feel anxious about everything around me i'm an anxious person anyway and the way i deal with that is by trying to control things and that gets on my family's nerves and so what jesse said about intention i think i need to formulate an intention if i want to do this again and i actually have an opportunity to do it again but what would my intention be exactly it seems a little amorphous to me to just say well i'd like to reduce my general anxiety i have anxiety over my grandchildren they were preemies in the nicu they're four and a half and doing great now but i worry when they come home from school you know being taken on the subway the platform's so narrow it goes on and on who doesn't worry about climate change now we have ukraine it's like mad men are in charge of the world i'm anxious i would love to be able to deal with that so first i need intention and then i need someone to do this with me that you know i think would be the ideal person and i don't have that person you know as much as i have my family's love i don't have that person so that's where i am with this but i do think it is it's a very individual thing can i so we um to touch on that a little bit too we have coaches that we work with the same as jessie's nonprofit um that did go through a coaching program um and at the coaching programs just for like to work with their clients on you know pre and post integration um at the actual journey you you know will have either a nurse or a doctor there usually um and sometimes not sometimes just coaches but a lot of times these coaches will come from a therapist's background as well and like with the hope project we usually set up everyone with five sessions right now we're trying to build a program that that's larger so they'll do a month of one-to-one coaching before their journey which we'll do you know setting intentions which we'll talk to them about diet which we'll talk to them about sentence setting um kind of where what place to be in you know emotionally if they can get there before they get to their journey and then afterwards they'll have one-to-one coaching for three months um so it's you know it is a continuous program we're definitely trying to to build that but also the biggest thing i think around psychedelics is community too so you know like we will have weekly calls with all the women that have gone through our nonprofit and they'll be able to hop on a zoom and just see some faces or talk to people that have gone through this before you know and just kind of get some questions answered from some coaches that have been doing this or therapists that have been doing this for a long time during the journey it's very much you know i i coach a lot of the women on when their husbands come home it's called holding space so they you know a lot of the times people allow them to the clients or the patients to be in their own journey and they just kind of hold space for them they can hold hands with them like diana mentioned you know just to for them to feel safe they can also just kind of just sit there and really hold the space for them to feel comfortable in that sentence setting so that they can be on their own journey there's definitely journeys that have been tough like with my journey i know i had to talk a lot so you know we we kind of went through coaches i had to get everything out people used journals during their journey to do that people you know might need to just be just them with themselves or in a group setting so it's very different but we definitely make sure i know that we like to have that support for them before and after too sorry to uh break in i know we have so many questions and i hate to interrupt um i do want to say that we are going to be moving to breakout rooms in just a minute so hang on to your questions you're going to have time to ask them and have more discussions after the breakout rooms we are going to have a little meet and greet down here with some refreshments so we're going to keep the conversations going so definitely don't feel like your questions are not going to get answered tonight i do want to thank you all for sharing your stories thank you to everybody who asked questions definitely take those questions into the breakout room thank you to our speakers we are so grateful to have you here um and on behalf of the dean in the school of nursing we do have a small token of appreciation for you um i skipped some of my slides here i feel like i'm going to be the debbie downer but i did just want to say that i might fall in the bucket with you know dr ross i think it is important to keep in mind you know that this is still science and research of course um you know some of these substances are still illegal so we just want to say that you know we're we're not necessarily endorsing these but i'm glad that we're here having the conversation talking about the promise and the perils i think it's important to hear your stories and kind of understand one side of it and um you know we'll keep doing the research to to to understand more so the breakout rooms are going to go until 6. if you feel like things are wrapping up early feel free to make your way down here to get started with the mixing and mingling but we will have about 40 minutes to do that we have some school of nursing students here obviously so if you're not familiar with the school of nursing and you don't know where the breakout room is we are going to identify some people that you can kind of follow along so i think pack you were going to go up to oh let me go to my um here we go so we know where we're going um so um pack where were you headed 207 so if anybody else is going up to 207 you can follow pac right here um for the ptsd depression mdma we're going to stay put so you can stay right here um is anyone going to room 219 who's from the school of nursing okay if you're going to room 219 follow ivory right here and then room 205 uh i believe dean you were going to be going to that breakout session so if anybody is not familiar with the school of nursing building i mean you um are going to that breakout room you can follow the dean enjoy your breakout sessions we'll see you back down here at six and we have your gifts here

Channel: Penn Nursing

Views: 3,400

Keywords: Penn Nursing, Penn Nursing Science, Care to Change the World, Penn Nurse, Nursing Research, Nursing Science

Id: ccD2FlAWYdE

Length: 69min 50sec (4190 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 15 2022