As a bodywork therapist, I not only worked for three decades to heal others’ physical pain—I also wrestled with my own. In the wake of serious early-childhood trauma, I was diagnosed with PTSD. And though I’d practiced my healing craft for decades, I couldn’t escape the physical manifestations of my own trauma.

It took me 35 years as a therapist to learn that pain in the body is due partly to structural imbalances but is primarily the result of suppressed emotional pain. And no matter what physical medicines or treatment we get, the pain and symptoms will persist until we heal emotionally.

A few years ago, my therapist suggested I look into MDMA clinical trials as a way to manage, treat, and eventually clear the PTSD symptoms I’d lived with for so long. I found a therapist trained to treat trauma with psychotherapy and entheogens. This word, which means “substances that awaken one to one’s inner wisdom, one’s inner physician, one’s inner divine,” is now being used in the place of psychedelics, a term too loaded with negative connotations. And after a series of sessions over the course of many months, I finally began to process and heal the things that had been causing me pain and suffering for my entire life.

That’s why this blog exists: to chronicle my profound personal healing through MDMA-assisted therapy.

By sharing my first-hand account of why these therapies need to be explored and made available everywhere, I can also share hope. I can share what it was like to experience this treatment, so others may feel emboldened to do the same.

Read my story, organized session by session. Have hope. And be well.

Why we call this blog "The Starling." 

The starling is a tiny bird—vulnerable yet beautiful, small but swift. It must traverse extraordinary distances to find its way home… and yet it does.

For us humans, trauma of any sort—accident, abuse, war, injury, abandonment, or neglect—sets the body in motion. Afterward, our bodies begin a constant search, revisiting and recapitulating the original trauma in hopes of finding a way to overcome or make sense of it. Society may encourage us to swallow our trauma. To suck it up, to stay silent, to "be good." I was told to smile pretty, because nobody wants an angry little girl who talks about being in pain.

Thus repressed, trauma keeps circling into our lives over and over in different forms as we wrestle with it. And yet, like the intrepid starling, which creates a murmuration when it flocks together, we can traverse the pain and find our way home. We can take flight. We can find peace.