I arrived at my therapist’s office on a sunny autumn morning for my first medicine session with MDMA. I had followed a physical preparation protocol involving high doses of Vitamin C and a complete array of B vitamins for three days. The day before the session I avoided meat, fermented foods, and alcohol and I took 200mg of alpha-lipoic acid, 500 mg of magnesium, and 125 mg of grape seed extract. First thing in the morning I had a small bowl of hemp hearts. 

At 110 pounds, I am a very small, extremely sensitive woman. Taking my body type into account and following the dosage protocols used in the MDMA clinical trials, my therapist and I decided to start with a dose of 65 mg, with an additional dose of 35 mg at the one-hour mark in the session. I took the crystal under my tongue and let it dissolve, put on an eye mask, and settled back on a comfortable couch while my therapist put on some soft music.

Before very long, my body felt like it was being pulled down a steep, narrow tube. I put out my hands and feet in an effort to slow my descent, but still I hurtled down the tube into a dark, cold, very small place. It felt like a coffin. I was completely alone, and I knew that even if I cried out, no one would come. I began to cry and told my therapist that I couldn’t stay there. I needed to leave my body, so I tried to calm my terror by using yogic breathing.

My therapist spoke soothingly and urged me to avoid using any such techniques—or tricks, as he called them—that I had learned over the years to manage overwhelming feelings of anxiety like these. He encouraged me to stay with the feelings in my body. This became almost unbearable. It felt like something extremely heavy was pressing down on my chest, and it became difficult to breathe. I’ve always had an immense fear of falling, and now I felt that I was falling backwards and couldn’t catch myself. I was overcome with fear and grief, and the pressure on my chest continued to grow. My body began to mime vomiting. I then got very hot and was sweating profusely. I began to shake as if I were having an epileptic fit, which was reminiscent of the fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system progression I’d experienced during our previous somatic therapy sessions, except that the shaking was much more violent.

When the quaking finally calmed, it felt like my body began to expand. My hands were like sparklers on the Fourth of July. When this, too, subsided, I was overcome with a feeling of complete peace and wellbeing. I felt tranquil and safe and able to be at rest in a way that had never been possible for me. Though time behaves normally when one is under the influence of MDMA, I’m not sure how long I rested, feeling blissfully serene and connected to everyone I loved.

 And then another wave of trauma recapitulation began. My unconscious mind took me back to age two, and I felt myself tied down in traction. I fought against being tied down and felt alternately panicked, angry, resigned, and frustrated. I didn’t understand why they had done this unfair thing to me. I missed my family and wanted to go home, but I was told I had to be good and remain quiet and still. My feelings of frustration and constraint were familiar; I’d had them all my life, in so many dreams and so many waking scenarios.

I was in a military hospital when I was in traction, and the nurses were very brusque, busy and distracted. They had no patience to hear about the pain I was in. However, I was given a lot of attention by soldiers. According to my mother, they visited me every day, bringing toys and balloons. While under the influence of the MDMA I realized how special the soldiers had made me feel, with their attention, empathy, and understanding. I’ve had a great love for soldiers my whole life, without understanding why. I also saw how this profoundly disempowering experience happened to me just at the moment when a child is typically learning about her will. At the same time, I incorporated the knowledge that being a poor little broken girl was a way to gather power.

 Still tied down in traction, I felt my right hip slowly slide into the socket. This was accompanied by a profound, mind-numbing ache in my hip joints. I saw my father standing in the doorway of my room in his military uniform, and he was crying. I was trying to make him feel better by telling him not to cry, and that it really didn’t hurt to be tied down. My mother couldn’t hear about the pain I was in; she needed me to be a happy, pretty little girl. My hips ached continuously but I didn’t tell anyone because I wanted to be a good girl. I’ve always had this feeling of being silenced about my pain, whether emotional or physical, and of having no way to voice it and feel heard.

 Then my therapist said it was time for the second dose of 35 mg of MDMA. At that point I was so shaky it was hard to walk, so my therapist had to help me to the bathroom so I could pee. 

Once I was back on the couch with the eye mask on, I breathed deeply for a while, and then I saw them tying me down to the operating table. I felt bewildered. The lights were very bright, and everyone was in a hospital gown. They tied my arms and right leg down with leather straps. Then my funny, kind doctor, so beloved and trusted by me, took my left leg and crammed it into the socket of my left hip, pressing my rib cage to the right and down into the table. The pain was unendurable. I screamed and threw up and begged him to stop. I fought against him, saying to myself, you can’t break me.

He looked at me with compassion, love, and deep focus. I felt like it was the first time in my life that I had been truly seen, the first time anyone had truly attuned with me—but at the same time, my trust in this person was completely broken. I was deeply confused, and devastated that someone I trusted so implicitly was hurting me so badly. I decided that I must have done something very bad, but I didn’t know what it was. If I hadn’t done anything bad, I must be very bad. I retreated into a very small space inside myself, where I decided that no one could be trusted ever again. I was heartbroken and shattered. I cried and cried in a profound, gut-wrenching way. This was how I had felt when my husband left me: completely emotionally annihilated. And then I left my body and watched the scene from the ceiling.

 I decided in that moment that I would make myself so loveable, everyone would love me and take care of me. At the same time, I knew I could never trust or let anyone get really close to me again. I also decided I would take everyone’s pain and become a being of light; in this way I would do my penance for whatever it was that I’d done wrong. This is when I went into the small dark room to live completely alone—the room I slid into at the beginning of the session.

 My grief for the way I’d lived out my life in that small room was overwhelming, like a vast lake. I let it take me under. I saw how that space where I kept myself safe protected me from deep pain but also prevented me from deep joy and intimacy. I’d lived a circumscribed life in a narrow margin of my experience. With this realization, I felt a great deal of compassion for myself. My hands and feet began to feel like they were sparklers again, discharging pent-up energy. Tremendous love washed over me, and I felt an extraordinary sense of peace. I seemed to expand endlessly outside the normal parameters of my body.

Then my body quickly went through being in traction again until my right hip seated itself into the socket. I went through the session on the operating table, without the horror this time, and my left hip reorganized and settled into the socket. As this happened the low-grade, dull ache that I’ve always felt in my hips evanesced and I felt so much relief. Then my body went through my first hip replacement on the right side and I revisited the pain and the trauma of that experience. I witnessed my own horror, pain, stress, but it was like watching a movie of the experience. Loving friends gave me a lot of support and care though this experience, but I had little support from my family. My mother came be with me through the surgery, but our relationship is so strained and difficult that her presence was very stressful for me. I saw how much pain this was causing her and was overcome with a wave of compassion for my mom. My right hip then settled into the socket, again accompanied by waves of relief, and I started into the second hip replacement. This surgery was much less difficult, as my children and friends really supported me, emotionally and physically, through this fearsome experience. My left hip settled into the socket and my body seemed to integrate and accept the implants. Again, I felt a great easing of long-held pain in my hip joints. 

Once again my body, especially my hands and feet, began sparkle intensely. I then moved into the feeling of expanding outside of the limits of my body. I and grew unimaginably huge; I felt myself merge with a shimmering web of consciousness and love that connected me to all beings. I realized this web is always there, and that gave me a benign sense of peace. The loneliness and feeling of isolation that I have lived with since my childhood hospital stay was gone, and I was at rest in a deep place of wellbeing. 

And then I felt like I was swimming back to the surface and my therapist said we had come to the end of our session. I took off the eye bag and slowly sat up. I felt shaky and frail, vulnerable and young, like I was a very small child. In the seven hours since the beginning of the session, I had cycled through the formative traumatic events of my lifetime several times over. I felt an intense sense of relief. It was like I’d been let out of prison.