Healing Trauma using MDMA with Rebecca Huntley

0:00 Before we get into the episode, I want you to know that Crappita Happy is now a fully independent production, created, edited, produced and funded entirely by me. If you enjoy the show, I would love to extend an invitation to you to join a brand new community I am creating in twenty twenty five, which will feature exclusive subscriber only content for a very low monthly subscription fee. I want to be able to share more content, answer more questions, offer more exclusive access, and in turn, your support will help me to continue growing the show that I absolutely love. Stay tuned to hear more about the brand new Beyond Happy subscriber podcast launching in twenty twenty five. This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspired, ring intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Today I'm talking to Rebecca Huntley, a renowned author and social researcher in Australia. Who, after being in and out of traditional therapy her whole adult life, finally, at the age of fifty, turned to an underground healer

1:30 for MDMA therapy to heal from the childhood trauma that she'd experienced, which continued to impact her mental health and that she feared would impact her own children. MDMA is of course known as a party drug. You may know it as ecstasy or molly, but it's also been authorized for use in Australia as a treatment for PTSD. After three sessions of MDMA, Rebecca's life and view of the world had changed. She now experiences greater wisdom and compassion, and of feeling of safety in her body that she had never experienced before. This is the story of a woman determined to confront her past head on, and she's sharing her story for the benefit of us all. Rebecca, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy Podcast.

2:16 Thank you so much for having me. I am a psychologist and I love, love, loved your book, Sassafras, Thank you. I honestly devoured it, which we'll obviously get into. But this. Whole area of you know, psychedelic therapies and is so fascinating to me, So I was really riveted to your whole story, and I'm sure listeners will be as well that. I'm very pleased, And I'm particularly pleased when mental health professionals or jpas or psychologists or people who are who do this for a living, because obviously mental health is not my air of expertise.

3:01 When it resonates with them, it means a lot. It means I got something right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Rebecca, Just to go from the beginning, you describe your upbringing. You know, as you know, every family has their issues. You never really considered yourself to be a person who would experience quote trauma. So what were you experiencing and what was it that kind of led you to start thinking that maybe there was something a bit more going on here that you needed to get some help with. Yeah. I look growing up as a teenager in my twenties and onwoods when I would sometimes when I would tell a story, I hadn't told everybody the story of violence and abuse, but when I would say stories about my parents, sometimes it would be met with silence, and would I thought I'd be telling like a funny story, like isn't this funny or kind of and then you would kind of people would look at you.

3:58 So I knew. That perhaps it wasn't you know, there was some extreme things that had happened, perhaps weren't a universal experience, but I and there were lots of things I hid. The extent of the abuse. And the violence. I hid from a lot of people really out of shame, which is not uncommon for children who grow up in violent households, because in so many ways you feel it's your fault, and even when even when intellectually you know it isn't your fault, you don't want anyone's pity, or you don't want people to think of you as damaged goods, because sometimes you feel that way. And then and then on top of that, you also have been told while I was my sister and I were told all our life by both our parents that we had nothing to complain about. So you also didn't want to talk about it because so there was shame, There was not wanting to be pitied, and also there was a sense of, well, what have I got to complain about? Get a middle class you know, a young woman, and you know I've got all the privilege of the world, so why should I mean, you know, I'm not feel like I've come back from Vietnam or it's not you know, it's not like I'm in as all those kinds of things. You know, so all of that stuff isn't it. But really for me, at about fifty I found, after you know, i'd been in psychiatric care and off for thirty years, I had, I think, a really very very good mental health regime.

5:28 You know, if when you google you know what should you do for your mental health? You know that I like tick tick tick. You know, lots of exercise, lots of wonderful friends, lots of time in nature, you know, yoga, meditation, eat well, sleep, for all those kinds of things. But at fifty I was really angry. I'd been angry. My whole life is kind of you know, churning anger, hypervigilance, and you know, I would sometimes snap where it would all boil over into stress through a lot of things, through a television and. You know, through cakes, through all these not at people, but. Just you know, at you know, I wasn't a through stuff at people necessarily, but really could be quite explosive.

6:12 And at fifty I thought, I don't how long is this going to be inside me? How long am I going to be angry? And I felt really taught in some ways. I felt really tired, and I felt like I put so many decades of work into trying to process all of this, and I didn't feel like I was getting far enough. I felt that the efficacy of all of this was slowing down in a way that was very kind of frightening for me. So I felt like I'd kind of been keeping a little on it. So fifty was a bit of an inflection point for me in that respect, and I was looking for something different. And you mentioned that you had been kind of in and out of therapy like you were quite you know, in and out of therapy through your whole adult life, dipping in getting support when you needed it. How was that helpful? And in hindsight, like what were the shortcomings?

7:04 It was really helpful. I mean, I'd write it as you know, I write about it in the book. I took myself off to therapy at about nineteen twenty, which when I look back at it now, is really quite an extraordinary thing because that was thirty over thirty years ago. And this we know that there's a mental health stigma now, a stigma around mental health I didn't tell anybody that I had gone to seek sychatric care. And I met a fantastic woman. She was a professor of psychiatry at one of the hospitals. She had kind of seen me briefly for eating disorder when I was in my teens, and I went back to her and I thought, Okay, there must be something really wrong with me, Like I'm not talking to my mother and like I'm just like really socially isolated and isolated for my father, I'd never feel like I had any family.

7:57 And I had internalized. A lot of the thing that my parents had told me my whole life, which is that I was not a good person, not a lovable person. And I thought, Okay, well, I don't want I want to be a good person and I want to be a lovable person, and so I'm going to go to this psychiatrist, and this psychiatrist is going to fix me and tell me what's wrong. And maybe I'm there to go and like some kind of drug for a while. But I didn't want to be a direct so you know, I was pretty naive about what psychiatric care involved. So I went to her and we. Had a numerous sessions and then I said, okay, Doc, tell me what's wrong with me and how are you going to fix it? And said, oh, there's probably nothing really wrong with you, except you've had, you know, a very dysfunctional upbringing. And she said, but it's unlikely that your parents will ever seek psychiatric care, so you'll probably be in care for the rest on and off for the rest of your life. And I remember just being so confronted. But why that was so important, and I don't think I was fully ready to absorb the message at the time. Was that was important because she said there was nothing wrong with me. It was the first adult that I trusted who said you're not a bad person.

9:10 Your reaction, the anger that you feel against your parents, essentially you're saying, is understandable. But you also, I think, tried to tried to tell me that this is not something you fix over night when you have grown up in a family where neither parent is attuned to you and they themselves, certainly my mother had a childhood of violence. But she was trying to say, this is hard to break. Intergenerational trauma is hard to break, is what she was saying. And then at. Different times, you know, I had gone back to different psychiatrists at a different time. I was really open to doing it, but I often didn't tell people that I was doing it. And what has been so useful is really is a partner in the lifelong journey of self knowledge that you need to take, and the right therapist, So psychologists, psychiatrists, regardless, the right therapist you know, is a disinterested, informed partner in your own self guided journey.

10:18 And I'd like to overuse that word, but it really is commitment. I suppose, lifelong commitment to understanding yourself, understanding where you've come from, and the kind of person you want to be. And even more important, you know, you need to be a good person in the world to everybody you interact with. But you've got kind of an extra level of responsibility if you have children. Yeah, so they're a partner in ensuring that you're the best possible human being you can be. Better, so the best possible parent you can be, if that's what you've chosen to do. Yeah. At some point though, and I thought this was worth mentioning that somebody you met casually suggested to you too.

11:00 Particular books, Yes, and one was The Body Keeps a Score by Besil Vander Kolk and What Happened to You Yes by Oprah Wimfrey and Doctor, which the two books are I love and recommend it as well. So how did they kind of open your eyes? Like? What was the impact that reading those had on you? Yeah? I mean, look I look back at it now, you know, I had just the person who recommended those to me is a friend of a friend who's a psychologist, and I had just come back from a short walk on the Camino, which I'd always wanted to do at fifty and the Kamino is a place that gets a pilgrimage, like lots of people go on the Camino to kind of find themselves. You know, there's lots and lots of lots and lots of literature and books and everything you know from Millennaire about people doing that. I just really I've just found walking one of my kind of self important, self regulating activities. But I was still so angry and so like worked up even after I'd done all of this walking. So anyway, so she we went to dinner at the end of the walk, and she wasn't on the walk with me, but we met, you know, met in Madrid and she said to me, read these books and they're really good on trauma. This is the first time anybody had ever said I know a little bit.

12:11 She said, I know a little bit about what you're going through with your mother and what she went through with your father. I'd like you to read these books on trauma. And I had never had anybody talk about what happened in terms of trauma. And I was a bit taken aback, which is like, how these books are going to be relevant to me? But something made me buy them. You know, everybody's always recommending books to you and me by them, and I ordered them so that they were there when I came back to Australia, and it was it was a very like I started with what Happened to You and I had to keep stopping because I was like, oh wow, it really it felt like a yuser manual to me myself and my family, Like I almost felt like there should be ature of my family.

13:01 Is the cover. And I think that the most important things about those two books is it opens your eyes too. We kind of imagine certain kinds of people have trauma, and those people are over there. And everybody else has problems. But that's trauma and even and so what it really opened my eyes to was the prevalence of complex childal trauma. And in some ways, I think both of those books said, if you've had that, and you know, if you have that complex total trauma, it can sometimes be harder to deal with that than if you actually had quite a safe, secure and attuned childhood, you know, with the kind of that loving relationship between a parent or parents, and then go on to have a traumatic experience. Yes, yes, that can still be awful and you can still find it hard to recover. But what it showed me was that kind of that that fundamental lack of safety, yeah, and attunement as a child was showing up and had shown up throughout my life without me being in a war zone or going you know what I mean, or being in combat or all those kinds of things I associate, or being in a car accident, all those kinds of extreme events. I thought that was trauma and I think that was very important.

14:23 Yeah, let's talk about how you came to be exploring alternative approaches to therapy. Yeah, oh, well, you're ass surprised, as you kas. It was just fascinating. So, yeah, how did you come across MDMA as an option even. Yeah, well, look, I mean, and sometimes people find it hard to believe I'd never taken MDMA recreationally. I'd taken other recreational drugs in my twenties, but it just there had been a really bad incident of somebody dying in my twenties that not somebody I knew, but it was in all the newspapers. I don't want that, so I had never even actually I hadn't. People hadn't offered it to me, So I'd never had it, So I had no point of reference about it. In a lot of those classic books on trauma that you talked about, there is mention of some of the early work and some of the now clinical trials around MDMAY and that was kind of intellectually interesting to me when I read about it, But it wasn't like, oh, maybe this is an option for me.

15:29 At that stage. I was just. Getting my head around some of the theory and language around trauma and the kind of this this concept that was a bit mind blowing for me, and so I was kind of working through that. So not last Christmas. Of Christmas before I kind of had lunch with a friend it wasn't something something that popped up in the last moment. And I had been thinking for months really deeply about what had happened to me throughout my life, and I felt like I was really at a turning point. So this friend of mine said to me, how are you? And in that moment I made a choice to be really honest with her in a way that I'm not often honest when people ask me how I am, you know, because oh, I'm fine, I'm doing you. I talk about what I'm doing rather than how I'm feeling doing.

16:16 This work is good, blah blah blah. I looked at her and I said, oh, I decided I'm just not going to see my mother anymore. And there was a moment where I thought, oh, she's going to judge me too, because we were friendly and closed but not really really close. I hadn't told her much about my childhood, and there was a moment where I thought she's going to look at me like what a terrible person? Or why are you doing that? Or you know, she's going to try and talk me out of it, and I never forget, like almost like her eyes started to whirl with tears, and she said, how wonderful. I wish I could do that. Too, and I was like, really, And we just had a very long conversation about Ian even though in some ways different families similar things. And then she said I've done this. She dug one session, and she said I did this session, and I think you'd find it interesting.

17:08 And she talked about what had happened in that session, it sounded really profound. And I think, had she not had that experience and been able to talk to me about it, and had I not known her very She's not an alternative medicine person, she's not a drug person, like she won't even take a pactual barely take a panadole. We both have law. Degrees in a very evidence based that we both consider ourselves to be very kind of sensible. You are sensible people who do And the fact that she'd had this really profound experience and recommended it to me, so I thought, oh, we'll just give it a go. So I was open at that stage. I was concerned enough interested in perhaps trying to find something that would break through the kind of sense of malaise that I was where I was at in terms of my own mental health, and I was thinking Oh, well, you know, she had a good experience.

18:06 Maybe maybe maybe I should try it. Did this woman who obviously she's not a registered mental health professional, she's no so unregulated, but she's like a healer essentially. Yeah, living in Byron as they do. Yes, she travels the world, but when she's in when she's in Australia. She's so she's in high demand, she is. We talked to her, and she's always in some different port in some other part of the world. Yes, so she travels around. Fascinating. Did you have a website? What sort of research did you do or did you just like take your friend's recommendation and say, I'm going to give this a go.

18:46 So I think my friend's recommendation was important for sure. Julia, which is a fake name talk in the book, was a friend of a very very good friend of hers that she also trusted and liked. And Julius worked with what she's had worked with plant medicine, but not necessarily MDMA for a very very long time and has done certainly some university degrees, but obviously this is very different. But she's worked almost exclusively with MDMA and to some extent psilocybin for the last five years and trained with people around the world, including formally trained with a particular protocol through MAPS, which is the one of the global organization looking at psychedelic therapy. But she's not a psychologist or a GEEP, and she doesn't pretend that she's very clear about it. Yeah, what I think engendered some confidence was just the barriers that I needed to get over for her to even consider talking to me. And she was.

19:54 I filled in one of the most comprehensive questionnaires about my entire life before she's ready to talk to me, and clearly what she's trying to work out is that she will will not treat people in crisis. She's very very clear about that this works for people with PTSD, So the. Post part is very important. And she's really quite visual about trying to work with people who are in a safe and supported environment, so that can be like including where they live, who surrounds them, what's their physical health like, what's their financial situation like, because the effort, you know, you don't start to open up things and stir up things if people are already stirred up.

20:38 So it's very vigilant about that. And I think the other thing I really liked is there was no like you're going to take this and be fine kind of she was like, this is It was very much about the intention, like why are you doing this, and very much about the work that you were going to put around it. So in some ways, the session themselves and then where's the easiest thing, because you've got this beautiful drug that makes you feel happy and you're you know, you're on a couch and all the. Rest of it. It's what happens after that, is in the weeks and months after it and the integration, And she's very insistent on the integration being part of that.

21:22 Your puppy is really. Yes, thank you. So I think that was really important. If she'd been a bit of a I think a snake or salesman, like, wow, are you're going to take these and everything's going to be fine, I'd be like, And we had a couple of meanings before she said let before she gave me a date, and I really feel I felt the time like we were just feeling each other out. So I really I liked that about her, and I liked also just the amount of information and you know, the therapy is only as good as the therapist. Exactly, yeah, exactly. Can you kind of walk through what you experienced during I mean, you had more than one session, but I think listeners would be really interested. What do you experience in an MDMA session?

22:11 Yeah, So the way I describe it in the book is that it's like kind of floating on the top of a kind of immense, warm ocean of memory and feeling, and you're kind of moving through that ocean in a way that could actually be a bit terrifying, but it's not because what you've got, and this is the other thing that's really important, you know, really really good practitioners use a very high grade quality of MDMA, so it's not cut with anything. I mean, my understanding is sometimes ecstasy can be cut with a other stuff. This is pure grade MDMA. So what it does is it cloaks amigdala in serotonin. You know, it gets the serotonin from inside do so a couple of days later, you feeling a bit low. But there's a whole lot of stuff you can do before it to kind of prepare yourself for that kind of you know, inundation of those beautiful foremonths.

23:09 So you feel very safe and secure while this happens. So that's that's the metaphor I use. You're given a really big, quite big dose of it to start, so it's kind of a seven to eight hour process where most of the time you're not really moving. I mean most people just lie there. Some people I just didn't really move from the couch except to go to the lure. I think in the middle of it. Some people walk around a bit, but it's not very energetic experience. It's quite a quite an internal experience with this drug. And what it does is that it allows with your amig DEALOC, which is your fight or flight response, kind of offline for me, potentially for the first real time in my life, you know, because I.

23:53 Was always so I was living. In this constant state of hyper a lure, hypervigilance. Then stuff starts to tumble out, not the stuff that you think, my tumble. And that's the thing, like I thought, Okay, well this is going to happen, and you get the trauma list to go tick. The memories that it surfaced resurfaced made me think differently, maybe say, we're not ones that I expected, But now when I look back at it, make a lot of sense. And what was happening was physically what's happening. I mean, different things happen. You actually get quite cold, and you don't have a lot of appetite, But it's not a kind of it's not I didn't find it particularly physically jarring. But what was interesting in that eight hours was the anger that I talked to you about that I'd had my whole life.

24:45 I felt it like a. Well, I kind of felt that at one stage I kind of almost like pry to part these floorboards. That was the anger. And underneath it was and I was staring in it was a kind of endless, bottomless whirlpool of gray sand, which was grief and sadness. And it was like inside me was that this endless, deep pit of sadness and grief underneath the kind of veneer of anger, which and that sadness and grief was interestingly not necessarily for myself, but for my parents interesting.

25:31 And for my I mean, and for our family unit. This kind of sadness that for all of it, And that is a very common experience for people on MGMA, having been now at lots of events, is. That they go in. Being very upset or angry about the people that had hurt them and come out with a sense of connection and empathy with the very people with them, which is often very surprising. And that's what I got in that first session, and the whole time of the session, just like my tears were coming. Out of my eyes. I wasn't crying, but it was just like just coming and coming and coming, and at once I didn't even realize what it was. I was like, oh, my sweat, what's happening anyway? So this, I think, this kind of release of emotion, but mainly of sadness and grief which I probably had never allowed I know, which I'd never allowed myself to express.

26:30 And of course Julia she's not just there to administer the pill, but she's holding the space the entire time, right, so she asking questions, is she what's her role through that process? Yeah? I mean, look, they often call Julia in this context often called sitters, those that it's very important that somebody sits, but it's also very important for that person to realize that in that open state, they have to be an anchor. But she's very careful about it. One stage, when I was really, really really weeping, she was like, can I come and sit beside you and put my hand on your shoulder. So there was really. Really a therapist are very very careful about the amount of physical touch they do with you in that session.

27:13 So that is the interesting thing. She didn't really say anything, So when it started I was a bit worried that she was going to be bored because and she does is that with some people it's such an internal process that they say nothing in the whole eight hours, and all she'll do they're really silent, is every hour she'll go, can you tell me that you're okay? And can you put your thumbs up? So some people will just lie there for eight hours and she'll just check in on them. But she really didn't ask me many questions. She just listened. She wrote down everything that I said in order to then give it to me afterwards. In the certainly in the first session, she didn't say much except to say she was very sorry that these things happened to me.

28:00 In the other sessions, she would. Occasionally, certainly when we're at the tail end of it, sometimes just invite me to see things in a slightly different way. But really she was just there to observe. I mean, she almost explains it a little bit like. A trauma, a duella. In that y R, A process is happening, and they're there to keep you safe, secure. You know, if something goes wrong, you know. So they're there to kind of facilitate a process. And I think she did it, did it in quite a deft way, but there was never any time where I felt she was. She's not guiding you in any direction. It's self guided. Like once the drag is in you, the body and the brain take over and that's what the guide is.

28:47 It's so interesting, and like I said before, you had more than one session, so what happens afterwards and then what's the purpose of follow up sessions? Is it just more uncovering, more insights, more through integration. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean at the moment with the clinical trials, particularly around PTSD and MDMA, the standard protocol that the clinical trials are using, and indeed some of the legal public treatment in Australia that's starting is a three session protocol. So you have integration, so a whole lot of preparation the session itself more integration, and then after about a month or six weeks you need that integration. Your body also needs to recover, and Julie is very insistent. Maps a bit more insistent, very much to you completely need because serotonin has to and your whole body has to help, and then you do it.

29:45 So this idea about three. Times is the MAPS protocol and the one they're using. There's nothing magic about it. For me, three worked, and the last one I really felt like i'd it felt like there was almost a story that it's way around the three and the third one I felt like I'd come to really a kind of particularly, really great level of understanding about my mother, and. For me that was enough. Other people will do three and then in a couple of years or do another, you know, people do different things. Is I think kind of magic about it. But the integration sessions are very important. I did them with Julia, but also I went back to see my psychiatrist, who i'd been I wouldn't say avoiding, but i'd been perhaps hadn't been seeing her for a couple of weeks before I decided to do it because I didn't want to.

30:36 I didn't want to say to her I'm doing this thing and have her trying to talk me out of it. And I also didn't want to hurt her feelings. It's not like it's not you know, it felt like I was cheating on her a bit like another. It was nothing that she was doing was wrong at all. It was like I really felt like I'd got to a point where I'm wasting my time. I'm wasting this amazing woman's time and my time sitting here. I'm just like. Anyway, So that for me, there was something about the three and three was enough as well. And I'm still I'm still unpacking everything that happened in those three sessions. How long ago was that? Eighteen months ago? For some time? Hmm, yeah, I think I will be so sometime. Yeah.

31:20 So I guess that's my next question when you say, you know, that was enough for me? So what was it? What was the change in you? What have you experienced since that? So a couple of things, And I think in some ways the most profound thing is the impact on the body in terms of how I feel a my own body. So the day after the first session, because there had just been this kind of gnaw again, this kind of recognition of the depth of the grief, and this almost and almost kind of release through the crying and all the rest of it, of the grief and the sadness. I woke up the next morning just without this sense of relentless pressure to get up running around, you know what I mean. Like it was almost like the way I was walking and moving in the world just felt less less kind of here. It's almost like i'd suddenly I felt like I woke up in a different body. Wow, I really did feel like that, And it's not like that stay And I remember at the time thinking, oh, wow, like I could get if I could take a drug that would make me feel like this all the time, like not kind of like that.

32:24 I can see why you'd be addicted to it. Now that feeling came back, But I remember what it's like to be like, it's okay to rest. You don't have to run around proving yourself every two seconds to everybody that you deserve to exist. You deserve to just exist and rest and not constantly be doing, constantly be doing. I know the sounds banal, but it's really profound. It's probably the first time I've ever felt that, even as a child, I felt like I needed to be doing proving constantly, worried that my parents had done something to upset my parents or there we're going to get upset, or my father was going to burst in the room and throw me across there, all that kind of stuff, and it was like, actually, you're safe, it's okay, you're enough, all that stuff. But it's not that I intellectually knew it.

33:14 I felt it in the body, which was really quite profound. And even though I don't have that all the time, because it's not magic, I have access to that feeling, and I'm able when I do start to lose it, I'm able to bring myself down. I've also, for the first time really my life, have healthy boundaries in situations which I didn't previously had before, particularly in romantic situations, which is huge, huge for me, saving me a lot of heartache and say, yeah, you know, all of those all of those kinds of things I do, honestly in many ways in the same way as I kind of seen my life before I had children and after I had children, think about kind of really fundamental things that ever before and after.

34:13 This is one of them, having my children and doing this. And I think while I still sometimes feel terribly upset and angry with my mother in particular, that anger and sadness is a lot less and my sense of empathy with her is. A lot was a lot more kind of much more in control. And I also realized that I also you know that revelations come thick and fast when you start thinking about this, and I realized one of the triggers for this, you know, this feeling of really like real anger about her is whenever I'm feeling tired or hungry or kind of cold, you know, in that kind of very childlike way about I feel upset or really low, and then suddenly I think about her and get angry that she's not there for me, and I realize where that comes from. I have a lot more knowledge about and understanding about that, and then are able to get over it quicker. And I could have appreciated all of that intellectually, because you know, I've spent thirty years trying to intellectually understand why this has happened. But I think it's one thing to kind of know it in your bones, and that's where I'm at.

35:34 That's what the that's what the MDMA gave me. That's the thing, isn't it, Like I think many people would relate to that. You can get all of the insights intellectually, but it's actually embodying that that shift in your body. It is profound. When you say it's banal, I think there'd be women listening to this going no, that sounds miraculous to me. It really does. Yeah, it's and of course it has a really of effect the more you are doing it. I mean, really, you're trying to recalibrate a whole lot of ways that you've. Been for many, many years. And yes, you know when we talk about cycles of intergener intergenerational trauma and particularly cycles of violence, whether that be men or women, but particularly women.

36:20 So my mother, her father was incredibly violent towards her. She grew up in a time of also both racism and sexism in Australia as an Italian woman in Northern Quinsan in Theft in the fifty sixties. Sent you really internalize that shame about being Italian, which I never really understood. So I thought Italians are cool and it's all a cappuccinos and everything. But she just remembers, remembers that, and you know, it's there. I think when I think about what wasn't available to her, not just what she experienced, but wasn't available to her in terms of the language or understanding around mental health, the permission or eat all of the stigma which they would have been significant. There was significant stigma in Italian Italian Catholic communities around mental health as well, and everything that her mother experienced or whatever.

37:16 All the women and men down that family tree, I'm doing the therapy. For all of them. All of them they couldn't or wouldn't. Do, and therefore it was never you know, So when I go back to being, you know, nineteen twenty and saying to the professor of psychiatry, all right, well, you know, let's get this fixed in six months, when she just was like, no, it's going to take a lifetime. And what she was trying to say is, in some ways I don't have to That's what she was trying to say. But when I look back to think. You're doing this for everyone, yeah, and you're also doing it so that your children don't have to also do all that hard work. So you're doing it for both ends behind and forward on the family tree, which.

38:07 Is actually quite a big job. Huge, huge, and so important. So just for listeners, MDMA has been made legal for therapeutic purposes in Australia. This is right, right, that's. Right, first in the world for that to happen. Yes, I remember, as part of my training a few years ago, watching a video of a MDMA facilitated session. I don't quite remember the context, but I know that there were two people sitting in the room with somebody. As you said, it can take hours. So this I am imagining, it's still you know, go down the traditional therapeutic route. It's still very cost prohibitive. Absolutely, it's cost prohibitive. And in Australia, both of those people have to be psychiatrists.

38:51 Right, So on the one hand, yeah, but on the other hand, not that helpful for a lot of people necessarily because also you have to be trained. Yeah, you have to be what's called an authorized prescriber. So I just can't be any psychiatrist. At the moment, there's about twenty authorized prescribers in the whole of Australia working out of a couple of key clinics. This is separate to the kind of twenty or so clinical trials that are happening all around. But of course, you know, as you would know, the clinical trial there's a lot of you know, you have to have to be able to be accepted and you might get the placebo, you know what I mean. It's a clinical trial, so it's about twenty prescribers. It's very time consuming to become a clinical prescriber. There are people who are going through the motion, are going through the process, so there will be more.

39:43 So there are three there are integration sessions, and then it's all psychiatrist doing so you imagine that's very cost. It is cost. The cheapest formal legal way to do this as a member of the public is about twenty one thousand dollars. That's the cheapest where they're making almost no margin up to about thirty k. So it is expensive. I think that once the evidence base starts to build, and once there is a real understanding of who this could be helpful for and under what conditions is it may not work for everybody. There's everybody, even the most enthusiastic researchers and psychiatrists who are working on this, So this is not for everybody. However, if you do fit the criteria, it can be just profound. It can either really really reduce your symptoms of PTSD and do a lot to your connection and wellness afterwards, and in some cases pretty much diminish it to the point where you don't have to be on medication a whole range thing.

40:48 So the results if you get it right, are extraordinary. One thing that the researchers that I've been connecting to and the psychiatrists who are working with it say to me is that it can be particularly a five for people who've sought conventional treatment for a while and then kind of plateaued or stalled. So if you've never done any therapy or never done any you know, I never started to address things, going into MGMA therapy might be a bit like a bit too much. It's often when you've got all of that stuff behind you and it's not quite working again. This is like it can provide this great foundation for this to be a breakthrough. And I also think there's something about being in the middle of your life and your forties and fifties and you've starting to really see, like really see the cycles and really start to see, you know, really make a decision that you really want to nail this, and you really want to kind of address the root causes rather than the symptoms.

41:51 Of what's happening. Exactly, and I think that's where this can be very useful. So they, I mean interesting, some of them anecdotally said, there's just something about that it seems to work particularly well with highly reflective, empathetic women in. Their forties and fifties. Seem to be quite you know what I mean, seemed to be quite a good It's not that it can't work for men or whatever people at different ages. I just think it is interesting the determination of perimenopausal and menopause or women to deal with the heart of issues that potentially exactly effective with exactly. And that is a really good point that you make. And you said at the beginning that you had all of this this scaffolding around you, you had solid mental health practices, you'd had therapy, you had the insight intellectually, and this was just like take all of that and kind of go to the next level and get to the root of it.

42:44 Yeah. I think once there starts to become as my understanding is, after written this book, I've connected with so many of the great psychiatrists around Australia and researchers who are actually doing the work. They feel that once they're kind of in a bit more sense with the evidence space that they'll start to be able to do things, start to train psychologists, to start to do the integration, and maybe sit with the psychiatry, you know what I mean that then it gets slightly less expensive. One of the things that Julia has talked to me about is she said, look for the really professional, seasoned and ethical practitioners in the underground. There's a lot of knowledge and potentially they could be part of clinical teams. So she would be somebody who, having sat with hundreds of people over the last three is be the person sitting with the psychiatrist.

43:38 So I think clinical. Treams a whole lot of people who are actually trained would be the way to reduce the costs. I mean, you don't want it to be so cheap than anybody else. I mean there's a balance. You would hope that for the government if they think about, you know where one group of people where it's been particularly useful some of the clinical trials are turned soldiers with PTSD, And if you think about veterans who've really given a lot of their livelihood to protect their country and to serve their country and then come back and find real challenges in terms of mental health, in terms of family, in terms of keeping a job. You would think if this is something that could be really useful and helpful for them in their relationships, in their physical health, in their ability to kind of get then you think, you know, maybe this is a pretty good upfront investment about what you would need that citizen in the long term. So you want to make sure that we're not cutting corners and cutting the efficacy of it.

44:46 And I think that's where we are. So at the moment, I kind of feel like the people who are in the clinical trials and paying the money are investing in an ongoing understanding of how it's going to be useful. Yeah, you would not want this to continue. Need to be just something that you pay thirty k out of pocket for that would you know, No, be really terrible if that's how it remained. And just before we go, Rebecca, so I know that there'll be people listening to this going all right, how do I find myself a Julia, this is what I need? I guess you know you're not in the position to give people advice necessarily, but what would you say to those people? What do they need to be on the lookout for you? Know what I mean, Like what now, I know what you mean.

45:28 Yeah, look I laughed with it before the book came out. Of one of my research assistants, I asked to become my media manager social media manager to kind of manage the correspondence that would come through people asking and you know, it's just been a steady stream and stuff which are called the hugs and drugs, the hugs and drugs crowd, the people that say I read your book and want to hug you, and they say, oh, where do I get the drugs? So look, there are I mean for people who do want to go around down the legal rouge. There are some clinic that are starting to you know, they have that money and want to make that investment. There are some clinics and I know those people who are doing a really good job.

46:09 The first step really is your GP or GP. Or your psychologist to kind of actually connect you to some of those clinics. I mean, there is a huge underground, not just like the Northern rivers. So you know, and I can understand why people would want to do it because obviously I stumbled into it. I think the most important thing before you even think about it is you have to ask yourself some really searching questions about whether you're ready. Like when people say this to me, they want to do it. I said, is everything on your life ready for all the stuff that you've been blocking out in your head to come tumbling out, not just for a couple of sessions, but for the foreseeable future.

46:55 So are you set up for that to happen? Because that happens a lot to me even now, right, something will happen like smell touch, I'll remember something and I'll be you know, that's what. Once it starts to unfurl, it really unfills. So are you ready to slowly and surely fall apart? Like is your life ready for that? Do you have the support? What is your intention for doing this? Do you have expectations that are kind of like I'll just do it and it'll fix me. That I'll take these drugs and fix me. Generally, whether they're legal or illegal is. Not doesn't tend to work out. But I think if you find somebody you really want to ask, you really want to go slow and get to know them and ask questions and see what are they over promising and what has there been experienced in the past and all of those other kinds of things you do want to take in the same way as anything, a kind of harm minimization approach to it, and if there's any red flag in dealing with that person, then just walk away because you're going to put them in. And had there been any red flag with Julia, had I been like, Oh, that's a bit weird that they said that or did that or whatever. There was just I immediately felt, before I even had taken the drug out a good experience, I immediately felt, this person knows what they're doing. They're not here just to make a ton of money. They're thoughtful,

48:26 they're reflective, all of those other kinds of things, and that engendered a lot of trust, and that trust ended up being you know, we now talk and interact a lot, and I've met some other people. She's quite a number of other people she's treated and exactly the same kind of ethical approach. I don't know how many I've never worked with anybody else, so I don't know how many people are. They're about it, and there's quite. A lot at the moment online you can read about it as well. I mean, it's hard when you're online to know the right thing. But that's what I would say, if that's what you want to and surround yourself. I did confide in a couple of people that I was doing it and was continuing to do it, and they were a very good support network for me throughout the process.

49:12 So, yeah, one thing I didn't ask you, which I just should for comparison, what did it cost you? What is somebody like Julia? I know it will vary, but what's the ballpark? So so for the eight hour sessions, so the full day sessions and it was everything included and she brought the drug for example, and did all the other stuff, was eleven hundred dollars. And then the integration sessions, you know, an hour like one hundred and twenty. So you know, I thought, well that's probably what I would pay for an hour for a massage. You know what I mean. I'm not going to be able to get off Medicare, so it's still a lot of money, but it's no when you know what I mean. So the whole process probably cost me about five or six thousand dollars, you know, a lot for a lot of people, but you know, kind of something like a third or a quarter of what, yes, what you would get if you went through the private Yeah.

50:10 I so appreciate you writing the book and sharing your experience, Rebecca. I know lots of people will as well. It's really well written. It's so vulnerable to You've really brought all the skeletons out of the closet. Let's face it, haven't you, but for the benefit. I think of a lot of people who will thank you, really resonate with your story. So thank you so much for your time today. I have really really enjoyed this conversation. I've loved it, and I'm apologies for the dogs and the children. Dogs and kids are standard these days. It's just part of the gods. They are wonderful and they could have Can I tell you they could have been a lot worse. If you enjoy this episode, please do share it with a friend. Make sure you leave us a writing and review.

50:53 Subscribe to the internom as an episode. Come and connect with me on Instagram, Cast Done Underscore XO or Crepit Happy Pod my website castone dot com. Always happy to hear from you and I can't wait to catch you next week for another fabulous episode of Crappy to Happy