There are ways in which we unwittingly create situations in our lives that will wound us in the very same ways we’ve been wounded before, usually the painful and traumatic experiences of our childhood. There are unconscious parts of us that insist on continuing to experience these Cherished Pain States, and they also object to us having whatever its opposite might be: certain kinds of happiness, success, love, self-love, and so on. This isn’t metaphysics, it’s psychology, and it begins and ends with the psychological structure we call the identity.

In this article, I’m going to illuminate in very fine detail exactly how and why this happens. We’ll start with an in-depth discussion of identity, trauma, and the results of having formed one’s identity amid experiences of trauma. This sets us up to more deeply understand the Cherished Pain States, and why/how we keep creating them even if we have all the awareness in the world of what we’re doing. I will illuminate the necessary steps on the path out of these patterns, as well as the role that MDMA-Assisted Therapy can play along this journey.

MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy

I’m not a doctor or a neuroscientist, so I’m not qualified to explain the biochemistry or anatomy of an MDMA experience. What I can describe is the subjective experience and how it facilitates psychological healing.

When the drug has fully taken effect, it triggers a dramatically different experience of your own consciousness, but not in a way that produces otherworldly hallucinations or the “ego death” often associated with other psychedelics. You are very much in your body and you are very much in the present moment, and that’s actually one of the most potent parts of the experience altogether: you are so in your body and so in the present moment that it can sometimes feel like you’re experiencing reality directly for the first time.

The brain’s constant obsession with past and future dissolves, and they seem to disappear altogether (which is accurate in a way, because neither of them exist as anything other than a memory or an idea in the first place). Usually, past and future loom large in our experience, and our attention is usually “with” one or the other. By contrast, the now seems like a very thin slice between the past and the future, and it seems like there’s not very much happening there. But in an MDMA experience, past and future disappear, producing a profound realization of timelessness, allowing the present moment to dilate and reveal a high-definition, high-voltage experience of the Deep Now. That thin slice expands; it becomes very big and we realize that it is actually really full. So much is happening there all the time, and we just forgot that it was there.

Once you’ve stepped through the narrow gate and discovered the magical wonderland of the Deep Now, you see that it has an energy, an intelligence, and an unfolding life of its own; it is like a flowing river that you can join into. This experience of joining with the flow and being carried by it is a feeling of profound effortlessness, and you remember that life is supposed to feel that way – or at least, that it can feel that way. You see that the nearly universal human experience of feeling like a separate, isolated, individual self struggling for its survival in an indifferent world is a tragically comical fiction.

The Deep Now is extremely vivid, and it can feel like your senses are coming alive for the first time. Living in the past and the future is living in the mind, it is living in representations of reality and representations of self. These are inherently less colorful and less vivid, we don’t feel them as much because they’re only barely real to begin with. By contrast, an MDMA experience is like full stereo sound reality that reveals the incredible richness of the world, with all its detail and aliveness. It sometimes feels like you could stare at a single leaf for hours, truly absorbed in awe and wonder at the little universe that lives inside of it.

Also, when we step out of the cocoon of the mind and into the full blast of reality, the mind’s constant commentary and self-referencing chatter quiets down. This allows you to emerge into an incredibly calming experience of completely unselfconscious being. The need to constantly do, constantly think, constantly move melts away, revealing the completeness and peacefulness of a total selflessness that’s impossible to fully describe, but provides what will likely be the most profound sort of relaxation you’ve ever experienced.

(These four, timelessness, effortlessness, richness, and selflessness, are the qualities of ecstasis, a peak state of flow and self-realization described more fully by Jamie Wheal and Steven Kottler in their book, Stealing Fire.)

Somehow, when you become this deeply present in the moment, both with the world and with your own body, what often comes up is an expansive and overwhelming experience of universal, unconditional love – but not like any love you’ve experienced before. When you connect this deeply with yourself and the world around you, you simply can’t help but love it because you see what an indescribably beautiful, sacred, wondrous, and precious miracle it all is. It feels as though every atom of matter around you and within you is made out of vibrations of pure, all-encompassing, all-consuming love. It feels more like remembering something than discovering it, so people will often ask themselves, “How could I have forgotten this…?”

And as we’ll see, this engulfing, all-consuming love works in a variety of ways to facilitate profound psychological healing, helping us to get free from old, unconscious patterns that would otherwise continue generating the same sad stories over and over again in our lives.

The Formation of Identity

At some point in our very first year of life, we realize that we are a thing that is separate from other things. The distinction between self and not-self pops into consciousness, and it allows for all kinds of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and experiences that were not possible before. In the next handful of years, we’ll set about figuring out what kind of self we are (or what kind of self we need to be, given the environment we’re in). We do this largely by paying attention to the messages our environment sends to us, the ways that it responds to us.

Our environments were populated not only by our parents, caregivers, siblings, and family members, but also by our teachers and other children at school, people and cartoons on TV or in books, and other community members like neighbors, other kids’ parents, or people at our church or synagogue. When we were young, we didn’t yet have the capacity to self-reflect or to source much of our self-knowing from the inside. What that meant was that we could only see ourselves in the reflection of their responses to us. We sort of triangulated or crowd-sourced our sense of self, because we didn’t yet have the psychological abilities or maturity to do it for ourselves yet.

What makes this a precarious situation for us is that, when we are very small children, we have absolutely no psychological resources or defenses with which to protect ourselves if we happen to be in an environment that’s even a little bit crazy and/or dangerous (and you have to understand that what counts as “crazy” or “dangerous” for a small child is going to be very different than it is for an adult). Furthermore, we are not yet capable of things like reason, logic, taking a wider perspective, or understanding that what other people do isn’t always about us. Instead, we are subject to magical thinking (imagining relationships or causations between events that aren’t actually possible), as well as highly self-referenced thinking (imagining that we are the cause for everything everyone does, feels, and says).

In one way or another, and often without meaning to, these elements of our environment sent us messages letting us know that parts of us were valuable and acceptable while others were not-valued and unacceptable, that parts of us made people happy and proud and that others made them upset and angry, and that very specific (and different) things were expected of us as little boys and little girls. These messages came from literally every possible angle: how our parents responded to us and also how they treated themselves and each other, what we heard and saw modeled by other adults and by people on TV, what we saw reflected back to us in the toys we were given or not given, how we were treated differently from siblings or other kids, and so on.

Children pick up messages from elements of the environment that the rest of us have long forgotten and have come to take entirely for granted. For example, sooner or later, they will see that the faces on every piece of money are those of older, white men. The message this communicates to little white boys is something like, “You are destined for authority and power; it is your birthright.” And to little girls of any color, it communicates, “You are not destined for authority or power; you should defer to the authority and power of older, white men.” It’s not as though young children are having these thoughts consciously, they’re simply absorbing the meaning that is inherent in the way reality has been set up.

Whenever we were surprised by a judgmental or rejecting response to an authentic and genuine expression of ourselves, we figured out that it wasn’t always safe to be ourselves, to be open about the thoughts, feelings, fears, or desires we had, to vulnerably express ourselves in the ways that felt natural to us, and so on. And sadly, children do not possess the psychological maturity to understand that those messages are originating from some other person’s inner wounding and pain, that they aren’t the truth about themselves; without those mental and emotional defenses, negative messages from others get absorbed directly into the child’s concept of self.

When a child is in emotional pain this way, they are in a predicament: if they recognize that it’s their environment that is crazy, then they are really in a bad situation because they’re absolutely powerless to change things. So the magical thinking of the child’s young brain allows them to create a make-believe reality where they are the source of the problem, because that provides the illusion that they may have some power to change or control things. Believe it or not, that is a psychological protective mechanism; humans drop into even deeper states of despair and trauma when they believe they’re powerless. So we start to believe that if we can just change ourselves or be different in some way, then we can avoid pain and secure the love we need. Whatever we decide about how we need to change or how we need to be different becomes our survival strategy.

Sadly, these strategies often come at great cost: we disassociate from the body and from feeling (so that we can just not experience the pain), we disavow our own needs, hone our powers of empathy in order to anticipate others’ needs and moods, attempt to exist less and have as little impact as possible, take on responsibility for others’ pain or happiness, become the receptacle for all the family’s blame or the lightning rod that calls all the aggression to itself, we dim down our joy and brilliance, shroud our sexuality in shame and exile it to the shadow, become aggressive and overpowering, and so on.

Underlying all such strategies is the even more insidious belief: that there is something unacceptable, bad, or wrong with what we inherently and authentically are. So we create some kind of performance, act, or game to make up for this perceived defect or deficiency. The defect or deficiency itself is an illusion of course, but if we believe it is there, it is as good as there because the belief causes very real pain, which in turn creates a very real reflex to get away from the pain as well. And eventually, we can come to identify more with the performance than with the authentic self we’ve cut off and exiled. We may even forget about that authentic self altogether.

In all these different ways, we formed all manner of beliefs about ourselves, as well as corresponding survival strategies. We took whatever craziness or danger we experienced and 1. completely misunderstood what it was, 2. made it mean all kinds of negative (and completely untrue) things about ourselves, other people, and the world, and 3. assumed that it was our fault in some way – thus forming the foundations of our identity with painful falsehoods and mistaken beliefs.

And as if all this wasn’t enough (forming 1. an identity that makes it painful to simply exist and 2. a suite of survival strategies that require self-injury), all of that crazy and dangerous has a third impact: trauma. The experiences that cause us to form these painful identities and strategies are often also traumatic, which has a way of intensifying everything. We could understand all beliefs, identity, and strategies simply as the learning that the brain is doing in the first few years of life, but when learning happens during a traumatic experience, it’s as though the learning gets burned into the very flesh of the brain. And the brain does this to itself as a further survival strategy to ensure that it will never forget what happened so that it can either prevent it from happening again or at least be prepared when it does.

Identity and MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy

One particularly potent effect of MDMA is the heightened empathy it provides, especially the empathy it allows you to have for yourself and, even more importantly, for your child self: it becomes much easier to see and remember how open, undefended, dependent, and deeply loving you once were. And this helps you to more fully understand how you were impacted and shaped by your early environment and experiences. Luckily, the empathy expands to everyone else in the situation as well. You see the truth of it: hurt people hurting people, people doing the best they can with what they have, people not having the tools to do any better, etc. You see that there’s nowhere to place blame, and that blame isn’t necessary in the first place. Healing, understanding, compassion, and forgiveness all begin to flow like they’re on tap.

The overpowering experience of universal love creates a contrast that highlights everything within you that is not love, which is going to include all the false, painful beliefs you’ve been carrying around in your identity and the self–injury of your survival strategies. It begins to make sense where all that stuff came from; you start to understand how and why you were shaped the way you were in your early life. Somehow, it all becomes so much easier to see and understand; rather than being subsumed within and identified as these beliefs and strategies, you realize that this huge love is who you actually are (who you’ve always been), so you look at the beliefs and strategies from a removed (loving, compassionate, and forgiving) perspective instead.

Seeing these things and their ultimate source as well is a powerful way to begin releasing them, disidentifying from them, and retiring them with love and compassion (instead of continuing to demonize, reject, and fight against them - which never works, by the way). And being able to so strongly identify with this potent, omnipresent love is also incredibly eye opening; you realize that if you have an identity at all (which you might not), it would be this energy of love.

In this state, you realize that there’s nothing wrong with you, there never was, and that the only real problem or difficulty you ever had came from believing there was something wrong with you. And even beyond that, not only is there nothing wrong with you, but you are an incredibly beautiful, powerful, worthy, unique, miraculous being - without even trying to be.

When the self is no longer in opposition to itself, it’s possible to experience contentment and joy simply from existing, from being in your own presence. So not only does the potent experience of love help us to see and understand the wounded parts of ourselves (so that we can put them out to pasture in a good and loving way), it also helps us to remember and recover what has always been and will always be true about us.

Trauma and Identity

There is a continuum between stress and trauma, and the threshold between them is the overwhelm point: the moment when a person perceives that their defenses are insufficient to protect them from a (real or imagined) threat. As we’ve already noted, small children have few (if any) defenses, so they have a much shorter distance to cross before they reach the overwhelm point. Most of us have (understandably) forgotten what it was like to be that small, helpless, dependent, and defenseless, and also to have a brain/mind that worked in a fundamentally different way than it does today. But it means that we can have more trauma stored in our body and brain than we might realize (especially since trauma can absolutely occur before we were able to form what we would now recognize as memories).

In stress, the body is in full-on fight or flight: the brain perceives the possibility of self-protection or self-defense, so it triggers peak activation of all physical, mental, and emotional systems for that purpose. But when the brain sees no hope of escape, it tips over the overwhelm point and into trauma. It believes that it is about to die, so it sends the body into the freeze response: a physical, mental, and emotional shutdown. Like the gazelle who just drops down and goes limp once it realizes that it has no hope of escaping from the lion, our brain will disassociate from whatever experience is happening; we go numb and “leave” so that we don’t have to feel or be present for our own dismemberment.

Fight-flight and freeze are two radically different physiological and biochemical states; stress will spike and then resolve itself naturally once the stressor has passed, but trauma will neither spike nor resolve. The conscious mind breaks off from the trauma which blunts the conscious mind’s experience of the event, but the body is still having the experience at full force. This inner fragmentation (and the resulting inability to resolve or “complete” the experience) is one of the basic mechanisms underlying trauma’s ability to linger for so long and so intensely as post-traumatic stress disorder.

If a person goes under general anesthesia to have surgery, their conscious mind will be offline, so they won’t be aware of or feeling the procedure. However, if there isn’t also local anesthesia, the part of their body being cut open will be experiencing the procedure, fully registering the injury and futilely sending pain signals to a brain that isn’t available. Contrary to the way westerners tend to think of their own minds, awareness exists throughout the body, the mind lives in the entire nervous system, not just inside the cranium. People can (and do) wind up with symptoms of post-traumatic stress from surgery with general-but-not-local anesthetics, but this is also a metaphor for all trauma: during the “surgery” (the traumatic event) the mind “leaves” (the general anesthesia), but the body is experiencing the whole thing, just without the mind (the absence of local anesthesia).

And when the mind dissociates and breaks off from a traumatic experience, it cannot process, resolve, or “complete” it. The thing is, we don’t just have experiences, we have to process, metabolize, and integrate our experiences into learning, memory, our concept of the world, our self image, and also into their proper place in our life’s story and timeline (and our identity, for that matter). This processing occurs on physiological and biochemical levels, on mental and narrative levels, and also on feeling and emotional levels; some of this is conscious and intentional, but much of it is automatic and unconscious (iIt seems that dreams also play a critical role in helping us to process all the experiences we’ve had in a day). But in trauma, when the conscious mind breaks off from the experience and sends the body into the physiological and biochemical haze of the freeze response, it’s as though the experience becomes stuck in time, encapsulated in its own isolation, unavailable for conscious or unconscious processing.

Another key mechanism underlying post-traumatic stress disorder is that under the intense duress of the freeze response, the functioning of brain regions that are key to forming and accurately recording memory are disrupted. Memories get encoded all wrong: the timeline is off, key events are left out, and random confabulations (made-up-stuff) can get stuck in there as well. But of particular importance to trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder is that these memories are encoded without a timestamp. Without this marker to tell the brain that it is a memory of a past event, whenever the memory is reactivated by an experience in the future, the brain will experience it as though it is a current event; for the most part, the brain can’t tell the difference between an internally-generated image and one that’s truly coming from the outside.

When these broken memories are triggered, it’s as though the fragment bursts back into consciousness and the brain reacts as though this terrible thing is happening again, forcing us to feel the full force of the unresolved traumatic experience all over again. Usually, the person having this experience doesn’t understand what’s happening; they think that whoever or whatever has triggered them in the present moment is the source of the problem (thus, the majority of conflict between humans). Furthermore, the person will usually attempt to get away from or push the terrible feelings back down (or out) of consciousness; so rather than capitalizing on an opportunity to 1. recognize the reemergence of traumatic material and 2. process, metabolize, integrate, and complete it once and for all, we usually 1. misunderstand what it is and 2. try to dissociate from it once more by shoving it back down into the unconscious or throwing it outward in the form of anger and aggression towards someone else (neither of which allow for healing or resolution, but only ensure that we’ll have to deal with it again in the future).

So now recall our previous conversation about the formation of identity, and how difficult that process becomes for very small children if there’s any crazy or dangerous in their environment. That difficulty is compounded exponentially if they’re consistently being pushed over their overwhelm point and into trauma. They’re not going to be able to accurately or appropriately understand what’s happening in their world, they’ll make it mean all kinds of things that it does not mean, and those will usually be terrible and painful things about themselves. And furthermore, it’s simply quite difficult to create and consolidate a sense of self when that self is becoming increasingly fragmented by trauma.

These incredibly terrifying and painful events get marked by the brain as extra-important to study and remember, so that they can be understood, prepared for, prevented, and/or managed. Because the brain sees this learning as so critical, it quarantines it in some kind of capsule that makes it unavailable for future learning. So the beliefs, identity, and strategies that get formed under trauma live as “learning” that the brain has an extra hard time letting go of, because it’s holding onto it as a form of self-protection. This is a feature of the brain’s negativity bias: its tendency to remember negative experience much better than positive, for the purpose of hopefully surviving longer than it would otherwise.

Trauma and MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy

Surfacing, reconnecting with, and finally processing these fragments of unresolved trauma often play a central role in MDMA-Assisted Therapy. MDMA provides a unique form of fearlessness that allows you to “go back” to these early experiences (it also often allows you to remember them more fully as well, given that the fearful parts of you are no longer trying to prevent you from doing so). But sometimes, the memories of trauma come up unbidden because they have been seeking a way back from their exile for a long time. The psyche will seek to heal itself from trauma in the same exact way that the skin will seek to heal itself from a cut. We have to work to keep our unresolved stuff at bay.

Regardless of how it emerges, all the grief, rage, and terror that got locked away in these memories opens up and you feel all of it, which is terrible, but it is so dwarfed by the universe of love you’re also simultaneously experiencing – which facilitates the processing, metabolizing, and integrating of material that was just too difficult to deal with before. These old hurts are welcomed back into conscious awareness, bathed in compassion, apology, and forgiveness, and finally fully restored into your overall life story and identity, in a healthy and empowering way. There can also be a kind of euphoria that comes from finally getting free of the constant threat of getting ambushed by these feelings and letting go of the work involved in avoiding them.

I believe that this is one of the primary healing mechanism of MDMA, that it emboldens us to approach, look at, feel, process, and complete psychological and relational experiences that we were simply incapable of managing before (or even accessing in the first place). Our fear of walking into our own shadow melts away and instead, we march right in there to reclaim all the parts of our own wholeness. The endless, universal love is like being engulfed in a womb, a protected and fertile space where you can put yourself back together again.

Identity in Adulthood

All of the beliefs, identity, and survival strategies we form early in life follow us into adulthood. We can and do form different beliefs along the way, but usually, they simply pile on top of the old ones like layers of the Earth’s crust, allowing them all to operate independently but in parallel. This results in the experience that most of us are familiar with, where one “part” of us is feeling one thing while another “part” is feeling something quite different. Walt Whitman said it best, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The identity itself is of particular importance; it is like the operating system of a computer. And the unfortunate thing about it is that, once formed, it is very strongly incentivized to stay exactly as it is. The psyche will cling to whatever identity it has, even a painful one, because the alternative is worse than any painful belief you ever could hold about yourself. When identity starts to unravel, we feel as though we’re coming unhinged - because in a way, we are. Psychotic breaks can be understood at least in part as a breakdown or failure of the identity system, and that is what can make them so utterly terrifying and disorienting. Identity change is difficult to effect because there are so many internal forces that resist it; but any serious personal growth initiative will need to include some element of identity change if it is to be sustained over time.

The identity’s importance derives more specifically from the way that it provides two existentially critical experiences: orientation and competence, both of which give us a very good feeling. Experiences that contradict or threaten identity seem to have the power to throw us into disorientation and incompetence, which gives us a very bad feeling. In order to maintain its existence, our identity system compels us to avoid experiences that contradict it, and find or create experiences that confirm it. This is one expression of the “confirmation bias,” where we unconsciously seek out proof of what we already believe; in this case, it’s just proof of what we already believe about ourselves (and we will do this even - and especially - when the belief is unconscious).

To be oriented is to have clear answers to the fundamental questions of who, what, where, when, why, how, and what next in every moment. Once again, we can understand this more deeply through the experience of infants. The need to make sense of things is built into us biologically, so we can imagine that infants sometimes endure considerable frustration at their complete disorientation and their struggles to get oriented. Over time, they piece together who and what they are, who and what others are, what everything else is, how to interact with it all, what to expect will happen next, what it all means, and so on. Given how incredibly vivid and, at times, overwhelming their sensory experience can be, what a relief it must be to finally be able to understand what is happening to them, to predict it, and sometimes even to control it too.

Even though the identity is actually a construct, not possessing an inherent, unchanging reality, we believe that it is real, we believe that it is us, and that allows us to feel oriented: it tells us who we are, where we are, what everything is, what we ought to be doing, why, and what it all means. The identity is what creates our experience of being a certain kind somebody, which is one of the most crucial elements that allows our overall sense of orientation to come together. You are the center of your story, after all. Identity is the central node around which all our other sense making occurs.

And as we’ve already noted, an important part of the identity are all the strategies you’ve developed that enable you to live in this world as that person. All that know-how allows you to feel competent, and competence gives us as good of a feeling as orientation does. For example, if I have as part of my identity that I am “The Invisible One,” then I already know how to be: quiet and still, a wallflower. I already know what to expect: I won’t be noticed, seen, or heard, and therefore I won’t be engaged with either. I know how it’s going to feel: sad and painful. And I already know how to handle that: I back away even further and retreat to the things that make me feel better. I have this whole thing mapped out, I know exactly what to do here and what to expect. Painful though it is, this is both orientation and competence in action.

If my identity were to suddenly fall apart somehow or get replaced with something else, not only would I lose orientation, but I would also lose all of the skills, tools, and strategies as well. I would suddenly become both disoriented and incompetent, and that would give me a very, very bad feeling, a feeling that would be far worse than the pain of continuing to be “The Invisible One.” I might wish to be “The Visible and Loved One,” but I have zero idea how to be that, how to do that, or how to navigate the world as that. I literally have no maps, no skills, no tools, and no practice whatsoever at being anything other than “The Invisible One.”

And it might seem like being “The Visible and Loved One” is a simple matter, but it’s definitely not. Being “visible” means doing things like speaking up, sharing things about yourself (which requires you to know things about yourself), engaging others with questions, using humor, reading social cues, and so on. Being “loved” means showing other people who you truly, authentically are and it also involves receiving their attention and care. All of these are skills that have to be learned, and to someone who has identified as “The Invisible One” their whole life, it’s going to feel intensely uncomfortable, vulnerable, even frightening because they don’t know how (and they don’t know if they’re survivable either).

Here’s the thing that can be hard to catch (or admit): if you have some negative or painful beliefs stuck in your identity, when an experience comes along that confirms those beliefs, that’s going to look and feel bad to your conscious self. But upon deeper investigation, you’ll find that this negative experience, in confirming a part of your identity, also creates a subtle good feeling. It’s the subterranean feeling of relief, comfort, familiarity, and safety that comes when the unpleasant or terrible thing that we anticipated, prepared for, and know exactly how to handle arrives once again. It feels reassuring to be so oriented and so competent in handling that thing, whatever it may be. It may suck, but at least we were right about it all.

The Cherished Pain States

In addition to seeking out confirmation and avoiding contradiction, another primary way that the identity keeps itself in place is to unconsciously create situations that reflect and reinforce the beliefs that it consists of. This is true for both the healthy and positive beliefs in the identity, and also for the unhealthy and negative beliefs as well.

When we have unhealthy/negative elements in our identity, we create situations that give us access to what I call the Cherished Pain States. For example, “The Invisible One," needs to have access at least part of the time to the Cherished Pain State of being ignored, invalidated, or misunderstood. Being ignored will feel bad to their conscious self and the may lament how much they hate being ignored and how much they wish people would pay attention to them. But to the unconscious self, being ignored will also give them that small, subtle good feeling of being reaffirmed and secure in their identity, and thus in the orientation and competence it provides.

If they go too long without access to the Cherished Pain State, that itself will cause the identity to have a harder time holding itself together and staying coherent. The narrative (even the very existence) of identity requires constant maintenance, and going too long of a stretch without experiencing the Cherished Pain State itself begins to become the disconfirming evidence that threatens to unravel orientation and competence. That will create a bad feeling — a bad feeling that motivates “The Invisible One” to hurry up and find someone who will provide the Cherished Pain State of neglected and ignored, so that they can go on feeling oriented and competent. This all happens without the input of their conscious mind.

We maintain our access to the Cherished Pain States through three primary mechanisms: select, provoke, and distort. Without realizing we’re doing it, we will select people and situations that are likely to deliver the cherished pain state. If they don’t do it of their own volition, we can pull out our sure-fire strategies for provoking them into delivering it. And if even that doesn’t work, then we can take whatever they do offer and distort it in our minds, convincing ourselves that they are in fact doing the thing that feels so painful and damaging to us (even if they aren’t), ensuring that our identity will be reinforced and maintained (even if it isn’t).

One way that “The Invisible One” can cause the circumstance that will deliver the Cherished Pain State is to simply continue being The Invisible One and doing the things that The Invisible One does: don’t approach anyone, don’t make much eye contact, hang out at the edge of the room, seem very shy and awkward, be terrible at small talk and friendly banter, and generally be so full of fear, envy, and insecurity that you give off vibes that people tend to instinctively pull away from. That’s the select and provoke element, when people pull away not because the person is truly “invisible” but because it’s oddly uncomfortable to be in their presence. And the distort element comes in to make others’ retreat mean they’re invisible (inside their own head), even when it doesn’t mean that at all.

Another way that we unconsciously create the circumstances that will maintain and reinforce our identity is simply through the ways that our painful beliefs cause us to show up in the world. When we install such painful things as “I am the invisible one” or “I am disgusting” into our identity, it inevitably creates a source of constant pain. But after a while, it becomes our everyday baseline and we stop noticing it. But the pain can contort us psychologically into contracted or grotesque shapes, like a hunchback or a creature like Gollum. This contortion and disfiguration is metaphorical and psychological, but it can easily turn into physical contraction and pain as well.

Though we tend to assume that these are private, internal events, other people can absolutely sense this inner violence, inner crippling, and the constant buzz of self-aggression. Without having any conscious awareness of what’s happening or why, these other people will respond to that, whether it’s by pulling away, getting aggressive, or simply keeping you at an emotional distance. And of course, whatever their response may be, it will seem to serve as further “proof” and reinforcement of the original painful identity.

This is why I so often find myself saying, “Who others become in your presence can say as much about you as it does about them.” A common assumption is that others’ responses tell you about them, that that’s just how they are. But in fact, they’re usually responding to you, so there are clues about yourself to be found in their responses (especially in the patterns in others’ responses). And this is also the explanation for how others’ responses to you are also often a reflection of how you relate and respond to yourself. If you are rejecting and abandoning yourself, it’s likely that others will simply follow suit. How you treat yourself is basically a set of instructions that you hand to others about how they should treat you.

When circumstances outright fail to deliver the Cherished Pain State and instead insist on offering us the opposite, it’s likely to feel bad so we’ll push it away in one way or another. Again, that bad feeling is often not consciously registered, so we can be as baffled as anyone else when we push away, let go of, or otherwise sabotage something we “thought” we wanted. Whenever we or other people begin to contradict important parts of our identity, it sounds the alarm bells and generates the bad feeling, alerting us to the fact that our orientation and competence are under threat, and this is designed like a shock collar to get you to back away from whomever or whatever you were just engaging with.

If I have the identity of “The Invisible One” and I start connecting with a person who really wants to see and understand me, not only is that going to contradict my identity, sound the alarm bells, and feel uncomfortable, but it can also feel a little like I’m losing my bearings on reality (disorientation) and at a loss for what to do or how to respond (incompetence). I literally am losing my grip on reality, and that feels so existentially bad that my unconscious self will find a way, any way, to make it stop.

The Cherished Pain States and MDMA-Assisted Therapy

As we’ve already noted, the MDMA experience helps you step outside of your ordinary beliefs, identity, and strategies. You are so enlarged by the enormous experience of love, joy, and wellbeing that it pops you right out of the small, cramped, and limited spaces of your prior identity. From this new vantage point, where you can see it all objectively and from numerous different angles, you can spontaneously realize the ways in which you yourself are causing people to respond to you in these patterned ways, the ways that you are eliciting these kinds of reactions from the world, the ways that you are the author and architect of your own Cherished Pain States. The heightened empathy allows you to see yourself from their perspective, perhaps for the first time fully understanding what it’s like to be on the receiving end of you - all the while experiencing profound compassion for the parts of you that feel compelled to do these things.

When this comes on the heels of greater understanding for your child self and how your identity was shaped by your early environment, it allows you to finally connect all the dots between then and now, seeing the threads of causation as they weave through time. This insight and understanding is another force that can help you further differentiate from and disidentify with all those experiences and the false identities you formed in response to them. “You” are now the love-filled consciousness that is witnessing this entire story, seeing it all from a bird’s eye view, instead of continuing to be embedded and subsumed within the painful identity fragments enacting their survival strategies.

This is the “subject-object shift,” described most thoroughly by developmental psychologist Robert Kegan: the ability of consciousness to:

Create an internal belief/representation of self, forget that it’s made up, and come to completely identify with it
Spontaneously “wake up” and realize that “it” is not the belief/representation/identity, that it is actually the conscious awareness that sees the identity (and in fact, created the identity)
Consciously choose if it wants to continue utilizing that particular identity as a tool for navigating the world, or if it wants to update or discard it in favor of a new one

This is the most fundamental process underlying all healing, change, and evolution. In increasingly subtle and profound ways, consciousness wakes up to and dis-identifies from all that it is not. This process continues until consciousness sees and can choose between all of its own creations, while simultaneously understanding it’s own true nature. The “evolution” is quite literal. In step 1, there is only one thing: consciousness fused with its own creation. In step 2, there are now two things: consciousness separate from and looking at its own creation. That is literally a more complex, evolved mind that is capable of more complex, evolved things; and as you can see, it results from a shift in what we identify with.

Other Mechanisms for Creating Identity Change

For the most part, we can’t observe our belief or identity systems directly. They are like the 1s and 0s of a computer: they run the machine, but we never relate with them directly. MDMA gives us much greater ability to observe these things, kind of like when Neo “wakes up” in the Matrix and can see that it’s all made out of lines of code. But we don’t have to use substances like MDMA in order to get there.

We may not be able to see the 1s and 0s of the identity in our ordinary state of consciousness, but we can see all the thoughts, feelings, impulses, and behaviors that it gives rise to. So one of the first elements of identity change is to begin observing and studying those thoughts, feelings, impulses, and behaviors as objectively and scientifically as you can. You have to slow down long enough to ask yourself, “What would someone have to believe in order to have this thought/feeling/impulse/behavior?” In this way, you reverse-engineer your own mind and begin to catch on to the programming in your brain. Over time, you catch on to more and more of the processes that had been fully automatic, that had been generating portions of what you had previously simply taken for granted as “reality.” This is the psychological grind that eventually yields the subject-object shift.

Stepping Out of the Strategies

One of the most important things to begin observing and studying are the strategies: your patterned and habitual ways of responding to others and yourself in all the different circumstances you find yourself in. These strategies tell you who, how, and what you need to be and what you need to do in order to secure safety and avoid rejection. As you observe yourself interacting with others, you can begin to catch a glimpse of your “act” or your “game,” all the little ways that you manipulate yourself and the things you do, say, and feel, in order to earn love and belonging, accumulate status and power, ward off shame and rejection, etc.

If you watch closely enough, you can even begin to observe your face configuring certain expressions that don’t come from what you’re truly feeling, but from what you have been programmed to express in moments like the one you’re in. We begin to see that these performances are manufactured, which doesn’t make them bad or wrong, but it does mean that they’re not authentic, they’re not originating from your real self.

As we continue in this process and gain greater awareness of our strategies, we can begin experimenting with stepping outside of them. We can simply not do them and see what that feels like, and we can try out their opposites as well. As “The Invisible One,” my strategies will likely include silencing myself or speaking softly, diminishing or even deleting my own experience, and fashioning myself into whatever form I think will be most acceptable to the people around me. When I gain awareness of these strategies, I have the opportunity to step outside them and try something different. I can experiment with taking up more space and speaking more loudly than I’m comfortable with. I can practice prying my attention away from the project of trying to figure out what others want from me and paying attention only to what I’m feeling and wanting in the moment. I can put those feelings and desires out there in their raw form, just to finally find out what actually happens when I do that.

As you can probably imagine, that is going to feel so uncomfortable and difficult! It is the opposite of recreating a Cherished Pain State. I myself am initiating a situation that contradicts my own identity and pulverizes my own sense of orientation and competence. A great deal of psychological fortitude is required for this, because it can feel not only like you’re in grave danger but it can also feel like you’re about to lose your mind. Because for a while, you will lose your bearings on reality, it will feel like you have no idea who you are, how to be, what to expect, or how to stay safe. And the reality is that you don’t know any of that, you don’t yet know how to be in the world in any other way and you can’t anticipate how that will go for you.

So why bring this awful experience upon yourself? Because it will begin to break up the well-worn, habitual grooves and ruts that keep the old patterns and identity in place. It will clear out a space on the hard drive where you can begin to install completely new and different patterns. This is the fast and furious way to do it (there are certainly more gradual and gentle ways), but if you’re in a hurry, this is the most effective and efficient tool I’ve found. If you already know your core performances and strategies, can you design your own experiments and practices for not doing them and doing their opposites?

Another way to think about this is to see the strategies as habits: unconscious behaviors and automated choices. A quote that seems to have come from Aristotle (though its origin is somewhat unclear) goes like this, “We are what we repeatedly do.” If I repeatedly “do” invisibility, then that is what I become. If I repeatedly “do” visibility, then that is what I become. If I want to change my painful identity of “The Invisible One,” then I can begin to “do” its opposite: presence, movement, voice, volume, impact, etc. I have to “do” visibility again and again and again. We install new identity, in other words, by doing new things. For example, I only really feel like a swimmer once I have swum a great deal. I only really feel like a musician once I have played a great deal. I only really feel like one who is visible and seen once I have done a lot of making myself visible.

Even if the experiment goes poorly and causes pain and fear, if we can give our brain and unconscious mind the opportunity to observe that we simply don’t die, that alone is enough. Often our first attempts will be clunky and awkward, because we’re still so afraid and stuck in the old grooves and ruts. But the unconscious mind genuinely thinks that it will die if it doesn’t use the strategies, so seeing that you don’t in fact die, helps to create the conditions where it becomes increasingly open to further change.

Reclaiming the Exiled Parts of Self

Another thing we become aware of in this process are the rumblings and the cries of the parts of ourselves that we had to exile and exclude from our identity. And in the same way that we can practice reversing the patterns of our strategies, we can reveal, bit by bit, the things we feel fear, pain, disgust, or shame about (which, paradoxically, can sometimes be things like our brilliance, creativity, and joy). Letting go of our strategies, and especially doing their opposites, will surely set off the alarm bells and create some bad feelings, but recovering these exiled parts and revealing that to others will up the ante even further.

Let’s take a moment to remember that we first exiled these parts of ourselves and constructed all of our strategies when we were very young, and when we believed that doing so was absolutely necessary for our survival. We probably also did all of this under the duress of trauma as well. So it’s almost like there’s yellow crime scene tape wrapped around the compartment that holds all the exiled parts, and a pack of snarling dogs guarding it, all to warn you away from ever reopening it again.

But this is also where the magic can happen. When we get past the yellow tape and the guard dogs, clear off all the cobwebs, and take the risk to reveal our true, messy, imperfect, vulnerable selves to other people, it inevitably touches and opens their hearts. It often allows them to see themselves reflected in what you’ve just revealed, perhaps parts of them that they too have lost touch with. This can inspire others to say some version of “me too,” and speak about how touched and empathetic they feel towards you, how appreciative they are of your bravery, how emboldened they feel to do that kind of thing within their own selves.

I also sometimes see others feeling uncomfortable when someone reveals their exiled parts, which makes sense because it might trigger a few alarm bells and bad feelings in their body. If that reaction is strong enough, it’s true that they may respond in less-than-kind ways, which is why Brené Brown emphasizes the importance of choosing trustworthy and kind people to open up to. But when you do take a risk and other people respond with empathy, that loving energy flows into the cavity of that compartment and bathes the exiled parts in the love and attention it has been deprived of for a very long time. Their empathy goes right into the very place that was wounded and sealed up so long ago — and that is healing. This is why sharing your story and receiving attention and empathy from another is itself so powerfully medicinal.

It’s true that there is a great deal of healing and growth we can do on our own, but there is a certain kind of healing that must be done in relationship. This lets us learn not in theory but in real life that these parts of ourselves actually are acceptable, even lovable, and that they will not necessarily cost us love and connection in the way we used to feel so certain that they would. We get to learn what it feels like to be seen, accepted, even loved for all of who we most truly are. We need at least a few relationships like this in our lives in order to be fully healthy and happy, relationships where we can bring our entire self and be still be loved, still be enough just as we are.

The primary belief that keeps those parts of ourselves in exile is, "There is something bad and wrong with me, and I must conceal it if I am to be safe, to be loved, and to belong.” When we take the risk to reveal these parts instead, and when we are met with empathy and appreciation, that is a direct challenge to this belief. In allowing ourselves to finally receive and integrate disconfirming evidence, strange and scary though it may feel, this is the work of shifting identity. If I uproot this deep, core belief, then what do you think happens next? It sets off an entire cascade of updates as I realize that so many of my tools, mechanisms, and strategies are simply no longer necessary. It illuminates all the new strategies I’m going to need to master, and gives me hope that a radically different way of experiencing myself and the world is possible.

Developing Missing Skills

For people engaging in the process of identity change, at some point they’ll discover that they are missing key sets of skills and capacities, like how to give/receive attention, care, and love, how to know your inner, personal truth, how to speak that truth, how to communicate needs and preferences and how to endure the disappointment and/or anger that others may feel in response, how to use “yes” and “no” effectively, how to give feedback, make requests, and set boundaries, how to navigate differences and conflict, and so on.

“The Invisible One,” for example, has no need to learn how to do any of these things, and can go for very long stretches of time without ever putting themselves in a situation that would call upon them to learn these skills. But then, without the skill of articulating needs and preferences for example, those needs and preferences continue to go un-heard and un-seen, once again reinforcing the original identity. The confined space of the identity becomes a comfort zone. To leave it, we would have to venture into unknown territory and try unknown things. The discomfort of that is enough to keep lots of people locked in that confinement.

The process of identifying missing skills and designing small experiments where you can gradually and gently begin to learn them is another hugely important part of the process of identity change. It’s also grueling: there’s no shortcut, you just have to practice these nauseatingly uncomfortable things over and over and over again. There’s no other way to develop the same level of competence in them that you do in the self-destructive skills of the identity.

Becoming Authentic

All of this is potent medicine for reprogramming not only your identity, but your entire belief system about yourself, other people, and the world. You get to practice stepping out of your survival strategies one baby step at a time, you get to reclaim exiled parts of yourself, one little risk at a time, and you get to master important new skills, one nauseating experiment at a time. You realize that so many of the beliefs and assumptions that were driving so much of your behavior simply aren’t true (and never were). There is such relief available in truly knowing that you don't have to perform a better self, that who and what you originally and organically are actually is good enough. And there is such an incredible feeling of happiness, love, and joy that comes from being loved and accepted, and belonging with others as this person that you actually are.

When you do this, who you believe yourself to be, who you actually are, and what you present to the world come into alignment. You give up the shapes of the hunchback and the creature Gollum, realizing that that was never you to begin with. When your psyche is no longer contorted into those painful, contracted shapes, the world begins responding to you differently in return. It becomes easier for others to approach you, it feels good to be in your presence. The war against yourself is over, and that benefits us all. Just as they can sense the painful contortions of the negative identities, others can sense the healthy, positive, aligned shape of your authentic self.

After all, one of Brené’s most powerful findings was this: there was only one variable that separated the group of people who experienced a lot of love and belonging in their lives from the group of people who did not. That variable was this: they believed they were worthy of it.

Tools for Uncovering Identity, Strategies, and Missing Skills

Use these prompts to contemplate your own Cherished Pain States, the identities and strategies they come from, and how you use the mechanisms of select, provoke, and distort to keep it all going.

It seems to me that people often respond to me by…
In relationship with others, I often wind up feeling…
The painful experience I seem to keep having over and over again with others is…
If that experience is a Cherished Pain State, then the identity it is reinforcing in me might be…
If that is part of my identity, that causes me to feel….
When I feel that way, it causes me to show up like…
It probably feels like… to be in my presence when I show up like this.
If this is part of my identity, it will compel me to select people who…
I might be provoking this response from others by…
I might distort my perceptions of their responses by…

Here’s another:

To do this exercise, you have to go past what you think you already know about yourself; bring a beginner’s mind and dig deeper. You’ll also have to be honest with yourself about what’s going on inside; the image we hold of ourselves often contradicts what we’re actually doing and what’s actually driving us in the moment.

What are you most afraid of in relationships and in groups? What are the negative/painful possible outcomes that stalk and haunt you around at the edges of your mind?
- What are you doing, what are your strategies, for preventing or avoiding those outcomes? And how does it all feel?
- What would the deeper belief have to be in order for those fears and strategies to exist in the first place?

Example:

I am most afraid of being misunderstood, judged negatively, and shut out of connection and belonging.
- My strategy to prevent this is that I spend a great deal of my time, energy, and attention trying to read what other people are feeling, to guess what they’re wanting, and to make myself amenable to whatever that is. I spend yet more of my time, energy, and attention being extremely careful with what I say and do, making sure I always speak as simply and clearly as I possibly can. It’s like I’m always watching myself from outside myself, trying to make sure I fit with what every member of the group is wanting and needing. All of this feels like: pain, fear, self-disgust, sadness, and frustration.

Now let’s imagine what all of that looks and feels like from the outside, to other people. They witness 1) this person being silent often, 2) offering only short, simple shares, and 3) seeming hesitant and a bit mechanical when they do speak. The silent person seems fearful, so others wonder, “Am I scaring them…?” Or maybe they seem judgmental, so others wonder, “Am I not good enough for them…?” And that gives them a bad feeling. That bad feeling could very turn into the behaviors of judgment, rejection, withdrawal, criticism, shaming, humiliation, and so on.

Others are doing this not because there’s something actually wrong with this person, but because of how they are showing up in relationship, based on their internal beliefs, identity, and strategies.

Imagine the very young version of this person, writing down all of these beliefs in crayon. What had to have been going on in their immediate environment that caused them to think and believe these things? What kinds of identities were forged in the intensity of those early experiences?

What are you most wanting in relationships and in groups? What positive/desirable possible outcomes live in your imagination?
- What are you doing and what are your strategies for willing that outcome into being? And how does all that feel?
- What would the deeper belief have to be in order to drive these strategies?

Example:

I am most wanting to be perceived as knowledgeable, powerful, and respectable. I want everyone to think highly of me and trust me and listen to what I have to say. I want to be seen as a leader and I want to have power in the group.
- My strategy is to always sit with an upright spine and never slouch or lean. I often look right into peoples’ eyes. I am looking for ways to demonstrate my competence, to be impressive. I let people talk and debate and wander around a topic for a while, that way they feel super relieved and impressed when I jump in with a clear and thoughtful solution or idea. I hang back until I’m certain I have something powerful to say. Having done this for a while, when I go silent, people automatically get curious about (and a little afraid of) what I’m thinking. I seek to make people laugh. All of this feels: tense, nervous, pressurized, and fearful, but also exhilarating and pleasurable when it seems to “work.”

Wanting esteem, respect, and power isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The question is: what’s driving that desire? Where is it actually coming from inside? And once again, think back to the younger version of yourself who was writing the first draft of these beliefs. What had to have been happening in their immediate environment for them to think and believe these things?

MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy & The Cherished Pain States