In conventional psychology and mainstream psychiatry, multiple personalities and dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a life-sentence. According to the mainstream model of medicine, there is no cure and little hope for people with this disorder. You have to learn to live with it. Yet, even as conventional medicine / psychiatry and psychology preach that there’s no hope, there are practitioners like Dr. Richard Schwartz who have developed talk-therapy-based models of treatment for various mental health issues like depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, and more, basing their entire system on the idea that the psyche is normally made up of different “parts” / personalities. Indeed, Dr. Schwartz is not the first mental health practitioner to work with sub-personalities as the basic structure of the human psyche. Dr. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology acknowledged at least 3 parts of the human psyche that were always in conflict with each other: the id, the ego, and the superego. It was normal for people to have these three “parts” (or “personalities”, if we were going to directly compare his theories and today’s model of DID) and for these parts to be in conflict, sometimes in a way that produces “pathology”.
At the time when this theory was developed, the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and other organizations that dictate how we view the psyche and the models that can be used to treat psychological issues, did not exist. Once these organizations took shape and once they began to control and steer reality and the business of psychology and psychiatry, the model that developed became profit-centric versus patient-centric. As a practice, psychology began as a model that acknowledged different “parts” of the psyche that would talk to each other and produce various forms of psychological disturbances as a result of conflict, but as psychology evolved and integrated into conventional medicine, insurance companies required that psychologists solve their client’s problems within 8 sessions or less. At this time, behaviorism (Dr. Skinner’s model) became popular because behaviorism didn’t acknowledge deeper layers to the human experience and instead focused on observable behavior, namely the words that people say, the actions they take, and anything that another person might observe from the outside. Behaviorism was not chosen as the best theory for psychology but rather as the most profitable theory for psychologists to use when treating patients. If a psychologist could get a patient to conform their words and behaviors to Consensus Reality, they could be dubbed “cured” or at least “successfully treated” (as the word “cure” has often been censored by big organizations over the past 100 years or so).
Recently, trauma-informed therapy has become easier to access, but most psychologists and psychiatrists are not trained in trauma-informed therapies. The trauma-model of psychology, once again acknowledges that a normal human psyche is made up of “parts”. Rather than working with a lot of talk therapy that doesn’t really work to treat mental illness, trauma-informed therapies take a body-centric approach that uses physiological “hacks” to gain access to what Freud might have viewed as the “id” or the “superego”. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR is one such hack that works much better than talk therapy but still much worse than the sacred medicines.
Hypnotherapy is a system of treatment that has been using the model of DID and the existence of multiple personalities as the normal state of the human psyche for decades. In hypnotherapy models, an average person has no less than 10 to 15 “alters” and these alters are “built” as we grow up to deal with different situations in which we have to conform to a set of rules. The rules, after all, that exist in one setting, such as at school, may be entirely at odds with the rules that exist in another setting, such as the church. Modern humans conform to varying sets of rules fluently by producing “alters” or “sub-personalities” even in fairly normal states of existence. In hypnotherapy, we may also have introjects of our parents or other authority figures and archetypes. In hypnotherapy, a sub-personality may also be developed to conform to a traumatic situation in which the normal rules are turned upside down in some way such that the personality must retreat into exile in all situations except the traumatic one.
In contrast to the average talk-therapy psychologist, Dr. Richard Schwartz belongs to a category of therapists who address their clients using trauma-informed therapies which are usually body-oriented and not-so-talk-y. His model views the mind (the left hemisphere of the brain) and the body (the right hemisphere of the brain) as the primal split in terms of personalities that talk to each other and that can become conflicted and have differing opinions about many things. But Dr. Schwartz addresses other mental health issues from the perspective that all (or at least most) of them are essentially a form of DID. We use Dr. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems model when we do “integration” using the ancestral medicines here in Mexico for the treatment of mental illness, including DID. Dr. Schwartz is a mindfulness meditator and he advocates for mindfulness practices, but essentially observed his own mind to develop his theories to treat mental illness.
Let’s explore that idea a bit more…
Lydian is my daughter and she and I studied the sacred, ancestral medicines under a curandera in central Mexico for almost a decade before we built our own temazcal (a type of sweat lodge) and began administering things like Sapito and Kambo at our farm-facility that’s located about 90 minutes in the mountains above Mexico City. She and I were very lucky to have worked intensively with the sacred medicines for many years before she met her husband, Naing Naing, a native of Myanmar who was originally addicted to methamphetamines as many of the villagers in Myanmar are. Naing Naing is a truly amazing soul (I adore him), but when he first met Lydian, he was not only an addict, but he also had DID with episodes of psychosis.
When a person, like Naing Naing, starts moving around outside of his home culture, mental health issues can begin to blend into the newness of the place where he or she is living. Culture is, in many ways, psychotic. So it took time to discover the addiction and the psychosis because we were forced to live in a pseudo-refugee-state with him and Lydian for almost a year before we could get him into Mexico (some of this story took place during the COVID pandemic). And then, after we’d successfully treated the addiction, his DID and psychosis really rose to the surface. I’m abbreviating the story of Naing Naing and his integration into our family considerably. It was painful and challenging. He didn’t submit easily to treatment at times – he had to come to the medicines on his own terms. And when I say, “treatment” and “medicines” I’m talking about temazcals and sacred medicines like Ayahuasca, Sapito, Sananga, and eventually also iboga to name just a few.
He does not have DID or psychosis or an addiction anymore.
I studied psychology and I got my master’s degree in family and child psychology in my early twenties, but though I worked intensively with people, kids, families, groups, and populations like criminals, AIDs victims, addicts, and terminally ill cancer patients, it didn’t take long for me to realize that there was little that I could offer the people I was working with if I only used conventional psychology or conventional medicine (I was pre-med in my undergraduate degree and worked mostly in psychiatry and medical settings as an adult).
When Lydian was about 13 years old, my husband and I began traveling abroad with her for 3 to 6 months of every year. She and I took a hypnotherapy certification course when she was 16 years old and by then my goal was to find cures for cancer and ways to create a trance-state without using words. Most hypnotherapists use words in the form of Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP, after all, to produce a trance, but I didn’t like the fact that NLP was also being used to hijack people’s personal volition in the marketplace. Though NLP is powerful as a way to heal, it can also be used to manipulate people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do. So I was curious about trance. Lydian was homeschooled and she was very interested in health and healing even at a young age. She and I noticed early in our explorations, mostly in third world countries where shamanism was still being practiced by tribes in hard-to-reach areas of the planet, that trance-states and healing go together. We didn’t often speak the language of the people we worked with or under in the more-than-50-countries that we visited over the course of 12 years before she met Naing Naing, but we could see the results and we had our own personal experiences with shamanic and traditional medicine to treat physical and mental illnesses.
So when Lydian and Naing Naing got married and then all of these major psychological issues came to our attention, I knew that my American-focused master’s degree in psychology wasn’t going to work on a Myanmar citizen. I knew that Lydi and I would have to work with the sacred medicines to heal DID permanently. I had, at the time when Naing Naing became very ill, been studying Constellations Therapy, which is a much more powerful and spiritual version of family therapy. So when Lydian and I started to identify what was happening, we wove together the hypnotherapy-based concept of “parts” and “sub-personalities” with Constellations therapy, combining this work with psilocybin.
Again, I’m abbreviating the story of what happened in our family for the sake of clarity and brevity and to highlight the final outcome for Naing Naing and for our family which was, to put it succinctly, a cure for DID, a cure for psychosis, and overcoming addiction. We did not approach Naing Naing’s mental illness as something that belonged exclusively to him but rather to our whole family system. All of us worked with the sacred medicines to carry weight that we had been putting on him to his detriment. Before he was willing to work on himself, we had done more than 50 different trips (150 trips + collectively among the 3 of us) using various sacred medicines to release our own traumas so that we could, essentially, make space for him to release and integrate his traumas.
We didn’t know exactly what we were doing back then. We went into our “trips” with the question of how to heal Naing Naing and how to heal ourselves and our family. At first, whenever I would ask the psilocybin if there was something that I could do to heal Naing Naing, the answer was always “no”. The trip would then take shape around something that was very personal – traumas that were mine and that didn’t seem to have to do with him. At the end of the trip, I’d often have some piece of information though to help me keep going on this project of healing…some piece of information that didn’t come from a book or from some outside source. I would feel it as wisdom and not just something I’d fabricated to give myself false hope.
Lydian went on trips. John, my husband, went on trips. We listened to each other upon our return from our trips. The trips kept us from getting stuck on the end of the story and our own desire for closure. We didn’t know what Naing Naing was going to do. Would he come back? Would he be healthy and safe enough to take care of a newborn baby?
The most amazing healing took place after Naing Naing left Lydian two months before she was due to give birth to their first child. He had a psychotic break. He would “speak with different voices” (that’s what we called it to stay away from the dangerous pigeon-holing of labels and “diagnoses). He went back to Myanmar to his family-of-origin and often we did a trip (he didn’t know about the trips at first), he would get sick with a fever that caused him to slow down and think about things. These fevers weren’t bad for him though he worried that he was, perhaps, very ill (he was not). Myanmar is a country that is divided by civil war and villages near him were being bombed weekly. He was at risk of being drafted into the war. There was, needless to say, a lot of uncertainty for all of us. Lydian was sick with grief about losing him. We were all devastated and heartbroken about Naing Naing leaving and the possibility that he might die in the war. And the new baby was born into this horrible pain in our family. She would often choke and stop-breathing, so one of us held her for 24 hours of every day to keep her alive.
We worked constantly with the sacred medicines at this time. Naing Naing was not a part of the process that we were going through in Mexico. He felt it though. And, one day after he had not spoken to Lydian for 2 months, he called her and said that he was ready to come home.
It was difficult to get him out of Myanmar, but he made it safely to Mexico. And once here, he started working with the sacred medicines just as we had been doing. The entire process from beginning to end took about 6 months plus 2 months of a moratorium of integration after iboga and then another month or so of somewhat intense sacred medicine work using psilocybin, San Pedro, and Ayahuasca that addressed his relationship with Lydian. We all continued working with the sacred medicines at the same time, of course to keep our family system healthy and not bogged down with conflict or trauma from the past.
The baby stopped choking. Naing Naing immediately could feel the changes from his first psilocybin trip onward. He did no less than two trips per week with microdosing in between, but we all kept pace with him. The weight of healing was something we all absorbed as a family.
That being said, not everyone who comes to us now here in Mexico (years later, after Naing Naing healed himself) to work with DID is able to do the work of healing with their family members. Many families today (more than 25% in the modern world) are estranged from each other. Indeed, sometimes a loved one (or two or more loved ones) of the person with DID (or addiction, or psychosis) arrives to do work on behalf of the one who is ill. This approach seems strange to people in the modern world, but we believe that the one who is sick carries some spiritual weight for the rest of the family system. This person carries an inordinate amount of the ancestral trauma for the entire family tree. The sick one is The Healer who has the power to start a process of healing for the entire “tribe” on a family tree. Others who work on behalf of The Healer have to do so with humility for what the sacred medicines have to teach them until they overcome their own traumas and the weight that they too carry for the family tree.
A person with DID with a Core that is motivated to heal himself or herself can do it, but they have to be mindful of the entire family and be willing to delve into the ancestry. Being “mindful” of the family doesn’t mean that the DID person must focus on the other members or ever even relive personal traumas as this is usually not on the menu when working with the sacred medicines. People don’t generally relive a trauma when they take the sacred medicines. Rather, we work with a very detailed model for our own family tree that helps us navigate health problems for our own ancestry and for living family members who are interested in healing and we encourage the people we work with to have some curiosity about their historical family story that can help them understand why they carry this specific type of spiritual weight. The sacred medicines are not “wisdom pills”. They don’t make us into better people. They make our lives better. So we work with the medicines under this premise and we encourage other people to start the process by doing the same.
If you or a loved one has DID and you’re curious about how to cure this mental illness permanently, contact us at info@medicinassagradas.com for more information. In all cases, we begin the process of healing by setting up a 90 minute health consultation appointment through this portal: https://alivenhealthy.com/health-coaching to find out if we’re a good fit for this type of work.