Psynapse.Pro Blog Series
A Path Through the Darkness
The bison stands majestic on the vast plains of North America, an enduring emblem of survival against overwhelming odds. Once teetering on the precipice of extinction, these magnificent creatures have resurged through concerted conservation efforts; their thundering return a testament to the power of resilience. This revival narrative is a powerful metaphor for psychedelic medicine. Like these great beasts, psychedelic therapies were nearly extinguished in the long winter of prohibition but now flourish as on-going research continues to reveal new healing potentialities across a spectrum of recalcitrant conditions, each with the central theme of ‘stuckness’.
Facing the Storm
When a harsh, snow storm blows across the prairie, rather than flee, bison turn directly into the inclement weather. Beyond a symbol of resurgence, the great beast is a testament to outlandish bravery and the impact of focused attention on recovery and growth. Through the practice of presence in the midst of crisis, and examination of the deeper fractures and fears associated with older storms, we may discover resourceful paths to recovery, change, and more self regulated “WHOLE-being.”
A core tenet of Hayes’ Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (1982) is “psychological flexibility” (e.g. perspective taking, openness, and creative intelligence.) As a cognitive behavioral construct that has evolved in synchrony with brain science, it posits that pliancy fosters resourcefulness in braving the “storms” of both the mind and the body. Bison medicine does not differentiate, but rather seeks to heal the mindbody, the interconnected psychophysiological system integral to the flow of health and the qualitative experience of life.
This “turning-into” approach builds tolerance for distress while facing uncomfortable truths. By reorientating to, rather than away from difficulty, we exercises an important coping muscle with each successive challenge that life inevitably presents. Bison understand the value of building strength, as there will be other storms to weather. Across disciplines entangled in mindbody stress physiology, what our clients need most is not shelter from storms, but supportive partnership in facing them directly.
Avoiding the Storm
Conventional medicine, in its drive for clinical effectiveness, commonly emphasizes a swift dampening of symptoms. On the surface, it is clearly rational to counter pain, sleeplessness, and/or anguish in one form or another, with opiates, benzodiazepines, SSRIs, etc. However, prescriptive eradication of discomfort is so embedded in western healthcare, that it can unintentionally suppress or distort the body’s natural signaling that a dynamic process has become imbalanced. In fact, much harm is rendered when biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural factors are dismissed or inadequately appreciated as contributors to the “chief complaint.”
By prioritizing approaches that impart temporizing mechanisms when a condition is more chronic than acute, recipients of modern western care have speciously learned that turning off pain (or psychologically turning AWAY from obstacles in general) constitutes a solution. What is the trade-off? Why not accept swift, repeated symptom relief, numbing, and distraction? Why not whack-a-mole our dis-ease until we are again a victim in its grip? What’s the harm? Well, by definition, chronic conditions of the body (and rigid patterns of the mind) persist. In fact, chronic conditions are conditioned to be chronic!
The “Stuckness” Problem
Avoiding pain is rational, but as an overused default mode, avoidance perpetuates harm and deepens fear. As an example, in a prior context such as childhood abuse, a physically, emotionally, or relationally avoidant response was problably life saving! Learned protective habits that helped us survive legitimate threats were quite adaptive during an earlier developmental period. In adulthood though, the avoidance habit tends to distort relational mindsets and behaviors. Applied to chronic physical pain, which is intimately tethered to emotional experience, the same holds true. Soothing a flare without attending to its complex mindbody system underpinning is a recipe for symptom return.
Across clinical domains, conventional treatments with good intention may actually reinforce “canalization” — those deeply habitual neural pathways carved reflexively to avoid discomfort, be they mental or physical. Short sighted avoidance interventions produce quick relief, while strenghtening the recurrance cycle. Progressively, “experiential avoidance,” operating like phobia, is learned, over-applied, and behaviorally reinforced in contexts where there is little to no danger. Based on an old (and real) personal story of victimhood, new encounters are perceived as high risk and provoke habitual worry spirals. A misapplied safety-seeking rut is BOTH a distortion of thought and a psycho-neuro-biochemical mechanism that paradoxically deepens the channels of suffering. Unless we mindfully appreciate and sufficiently value pain and anguish as useful information, we instinctively seek refuge from it.
Wisdom of the Mindbody
In the murky spaces between behavioral neuroscience, sociocultural context, and existentialism lies a web stretched over the relational field. “Stuckness conditioning” is multifactorial, context dependent, and attacks our psychophysiology. In other words, stressors that manifest problems of the mind (like depression, PTSD, and disordered anxiety) have as much impact on the body as stressors that manifest as problems of the body (like autoimmune flares, insomnia, back pain) have on the mind. Thus, the “mindbody” does not yield to single-mode interventions. Rather, it learns, grows, and recovers much more readily with prescriptions that un-condition (and accurately re-condition) its central regulatory function.
Yet, the patient with as many needs as specialist appointments is left with the task of reconciling the guidance of disparate, even contradictory expertise. Among the vast majority of medical specialties, psychophysiological interplay is rarely featured as central or even significant. Like a stone in the shoe of all clinical disciplines, the mindbody can be a vengeful storm when dismissed. Chronicity is recurring bouts of an under-treated infection of the mindbody.
Attuning Practice with the Neuroscience
Temporizing solutions are, of course, necessary sometimes. It would be foolish to dismiss relief measures as a component of care. But from a 30-thousand foot view, there are clear parallels between the hijacking of a nervous system and the resistant “rigidity” of outmoded clinical paradigms. Tracing systemic root causes in the healthcare system itself reveals “entrenched” payment models that are woefully bereft of financial incentive to treat the mindbody. Meanwhile, the high cost of systemic impairment is evident in the “body” of the organization. The demand for transformation is clear.
Bison medicine shows us these realities and prompts a deeper, more effective invitation to work with, rather than against the origin of pain, problem, and pattern. Expanded states that are activated in experientially-assisted therapies (like in expressive movement, breathwork, etc. and more intensely in psychedelic healing applications) support people through their own arduous excavation of core index events in life and help them reckon with the narrative roots of rigidity.
Professional Self-Awareness
The delivery of health and “wholebeing” service depends on relational exchanges between people and their providers. In fact, a strong therapeutic alliance is the strongest indicator of clinical outcome. As such, the most competent professionals in the healing fields are those who are engaged in their own ongoing personal work. With humility, they know the challenges of walking the same paths as the rest of us.
A significant difference though, is that even the most client-centered provider or facilitator has an authoritative or influential role. This power-differential means that safe and effective care depends on a provider’s recognition of potential interactional harm. As such, regulated professions are explicitly tethered to professional ethics practice and are subject to sanctions for exploiting the privilege of licensure. To this end, many (not all) reputable training programs of psychotherapy require students to experience their own psychotherapy as well as supervised experiential education around transference and countertransference. Practiced understanding and active use of these critical constructs are not only central to reducing harm, but foundational to process-oriented treatment with people contending with relational dynamics outside the office.
As mental health disciplines learn and grow from our physical medicine colleagues, so ought our medical specialists, entrusted with the personal health data tied to deep vulnerabilities, expand their responsibility to “do no harm” to the mindbody. For all facilitators of experiential processes, meta-awareness of psychodynamics within groups adds complexity. And, in facilitating “non-ordinary” states (regardless licensed mandate), dynamic relations are exponentially relevant; Wounds surface, mindbody issues arise, and abstractions become grist for the mill.
The Journey of Post-Traumatic Growth
Harnessing expanded-state neuroplasticity with experiential therapies (including the rapidly evolving “class” of psychedelic molecules) diffuses resistance. The merging of modalities (psychotherapy + psychedelics) is a catalyst, not a cure. Innate to all humans, and potent in healing “dis-eases” that infiltrate the mindbody, our own bison medicine confronts the paradox that deliberate and supported reorientation to injury, illness, loss, and grief exposes a path of recovery and resilience. In facing rather than circumventing tragic and tempestuous experience, a trusted, trauma-informed, psychotherapeutic alliance can open fresh space for insight, meaning-making, post traumatic growth, new development, and optimizing.
The harder-earned approach yields precious rewards: clarity where confusion once reigned, expansive compassion in place of judgment, quiet confidence instead of doubt, and profound connection where isolation once dominated. As humanity continues exploring the therapeutic landscape of experiential care and psychedelics, bison reminds us that renewal remains possible, even through the most devastating storms. The steadfast bison inspires a movement that values direct engagement with life’s challenges and cultivates resilience through life’s inevitable adversities.
