How to alleviate loneliness with MDMA

Jan 18, 2023

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I ran across a tweet recently saying: “I did MDMA recently and I thought it would make me finally love myself but instead it seems to have given me access to a LOT of feelings I previously had firmly barricaded away into a locked room in my subconscious.”

No stranger to MDMA or repressed feelings, I responded, “You can’t love something you can’t look at. Looking at the frightening parts of yourself is a powerful act of loving and trusting in yourself. It’s letting curiosity take the reigns from fear and self-loathing for a moment.”

What I want to add to this, especially in the context of having done so much writing on loneliness (and some on MDMA), is that looking at the frightening parts of yourself not only connects you to yourself, but can help connect you to others.

Boringness is, in my opinion, a huge impediment to authentic intimacy and deep social connection. Now, I’m probably on the severe end of the curve here. I seem to get bored more easily and tolerate boredom more poorly than the average person (hi, ADHD). I’m also probably on the low end of interest in other people (hello Autism and low need for social connection).

But I think my severity just makes me more aware of something that deeply impacts a lot of people.

Here’s the TL;DR: If you want more, deeper, more satisfying relationships then try learning to love your drama.

Humans love storytelling. What kinds of stories do we like? DRAMATIC ONES. We like villainy, high stakes, and character development. We like complicated characters and anti-heroes.

In a real way, all my friends have subscribed to my YouTube channel or podcast where I tell stories about my life. This is a bad analogy because I have a literal YouTube channel and podcast. But think about it. When you get together with your friends you both kind of give each other episodes in the ongoing drama that is your lives. Your close friends get special episodes and BTS footage. Acquaintances get the general arc.

Now, I’ve been reading a lot of biographies of female renaissance monarchs. I could easily regale my friends for hours with stories from these books. (Okay, fine, not easily because I’m a stoner with a terrible memory for details, but you get the point.) But it’s like, even if they were as interested in female renaissance monarchs as I am, they could just read these books or listen to podcasts and have a better experience. They didn’t befriend me to subscribe to weirdly relayed female renaissance monarchs facts. They subscribed to the Cathy’s life drama interactive podcast, which occasionally involves her thoughts on female renaissance monarchs.

Do the stories you tell your friends involve villainy, high stakes, and character development? Does your life involve villainy, high stakes, and character development?

I guaran-damn-tee you that sometimes you’re the villian. And if your stakes aren’t high and your character isn’t developing, that’s an opportunity in and of itself.

I think we’re all isolated from each other in large part because we’re isolated from ourselves. We don’t want to look at our own villainy. We don’t want to acknowledge the stakes. We don’t want to admit where our characters could benefit from growth. We barricade our feelings away in a locked room for a reason. Because those feelings scare us. We’re afraid they’ll overwhelm and paralyze us. We’re afraid they mean we’re bad people.

But denying our drama makes for a terribly boring story. We know it’s boring, so we don’t bother reaching out to someone who might want to hear it. Looking at the scary parts of ourselves gives us the opportunity to tell a compelling, full, interesting story about ourselves to ourselves and to other people with whom we might want to connect.

So how does MDMA help here? MDMA can foster a sense of psychological safety. It dampens the fear response. For some people, when they feel less fearful of others on MDMA, a profound feeling of love fills the gap. For some people, they cuddle, hug, dance, cry, and otherwise connect in ways they hadn’t when their fear response was fully online.

But for others, especially people carrying more unintegrated trauma, MDMA has a different effect. For them, previously repressed thoughts, memories, and feelings see that the sentry guarding the door (the fear response) is half-asleep and take their opportunity to say hello to the conscious brain.

This is not an altogether universally pleasant experience. It really fucking irks me that drugs are illegal and stigmatized because it greatly contributes to our collective ignorance about them. So many people expect MDMA to be a “party drug” that makes them feel happy and dance. They’re altogether totally unprepared for what happens, which makes it far more unpleasant than it would otherwise be if they had known what to expect and prepared for it.

Obviously MDMA isn’t the only way to lower your fear response enough to look your frightening memories and feelings in the face. And MDMA won’t do the work for you. Regardless, feeling your feelings and integrating your trauma is a process. As my friend puts it, drugs will zoom you up to the mountaintop for a peek. But you have the climb it yourself to stay there.

When it comes to unpleasant, big emotions I’ve found it really helpful to spend less time and energy trying to figure out intellectually what they “mean” and more time and energy trying to make space to just experience them. I try to take some time, maybe five minutes, where I’m alone and feeling safe. And then I try to quiet the part of my brain that’s interpreting. So if I’m feeling sadness, my default might be to try to figure out why or next steps. I’ll think things like, he’s being an asshole or I should tell him he sucks or I’m unworthy of love or no one will ever love me. Instead I try to lie down and just feel sad without assigning any meaning to it or making any attempt to change it or judging myself in any way. Just experience sadness. I find the more thoroughly and cleanly I can experience the emotion, the faster it goes away. Feelings are your brain’s way to try to get your attention about something it thinks is life-or-death. Your brain is very often wrong about what is actually life-or-death. This is because humans with brains that overestimated the stakes had kids who reproduced more often than humans with brains that underestimated the stakes.

This is probably the most important thing to know about your brain: It wants you to have kids who reproduce. It does not have an opinion about whether you are happy or thriving. So, if you ignore or intellectualize a powerful emotion your brain isn’t going to be like, “Oh, okay, it’s chill she’s not listening. I’ll give up.” No, your ancestors didn’t survive because their brains just let potentially life-threatening shit go. Their brains, and your brain, says “YO DAWG FUCKING PAY ATTENTION” using every method at its disposal. You didn’t respond to sadness? “Try some anxiety, motherfucker.” Anxiety during the day not working? “Enjoy a racing heart at night when you’re trying to sleep.” Take a sleeping pill? “Hope you enjoy these nightmares and stomach cramps.”

If you want an easier life, here’s my advice:

Do not, under any circumstances, uncritically do what your emotions are telling you to do. This is about starting a conversation. Most of my life my emotions have been screaming at me in various ways (hello insomnia, IBS, and anxiety).

What I’ve tried to do is to lower the temperature of the conversation between my conscious brain and my emotions. When a person is yelling at you, it’s usually because they are an abusive asshole who doesn’t feel heard. I think of my brain as an abusive asshole who doesn’t feel heard.

When I lay down to feel, I’ll think, “What am I feeling?” Which is basically me asking my brain, “What’s wrong?” My emotional brain is also an infant. She can’t really answer in words. But my conscious brain will try to notice what’s going on in my brain and body and put words to it. I feel listlessness. I feel fatigue. I feel sadness. I feel anger. I feel bewilderment. I feel fear. My infant abusive emotional brain recognizes that I’m paying attention to her and trying to understand what she’s feeling. This is instantly soothing to her. Sometimes I have to take a few minutes to feel out the contours of what she’s trying to convey. Sometimes it takes more than one session, because my conscious brain can’t stop interpreting or making meaning long enough to fully just feel my feelings.

But eventually, every feeling either fades or transforms into another, stronger feeling, based on whether and to what extent I’ve acknowledged or suppressed it.

The vast majority of the time I’m doing this I’m not on MDMA. I think if you have absolutely no practice doing this and/or are too afraid to start without help MDMA can be a great tool. But it’s absolutely not required. And you’re probably going to have to learn to do it without MDMA to get the full benefits.

Hope that’s helpful, my babies.