In our work with the sacred medicines, particularly psilocybin, we’ve worked a lot with people’s trauma and the problem of soul loss. Soul loss is a relatively straightforward concept that’s roughly comparable in presentation to what’s known as “multiple personality disorder / dissociative identity disorder / DID” in modern psychology. It’s only roughly comparable because modern psychology has pathologized DID in a way that makes it seem relatively rare and unique, but as Lydi and I see it, everyone in the modern world is “dissociated” into different soul parts or “sub-personalities” that operate in different social spheres in our lives. One sub-personality, for example, may manage extended family and the politics involved in things like Thanksgiving dinner while a very different sub-personalitymanages our work environment, clients or customers. The sub-personality that comes out or that “steps forward” during Thanksgiving dinner may loathe the sub-personality that comes out at work or vice versa. Yet another sub-personality is likely to come out in more intimate settings with loved ones who know our most private thoughts. These various sub-personalities may get along well or they may hate each other. Different mental health issues reflect different types of dissociative relationships between sub-personalities. For example, people with depression tend to have toxic thoughts that are generated within conflicted between two sub-personalities that don’t see or experience a given situation in the same way.
But spiritual intrusions are different than the problem of soul loss and multiple, dissociated sub-personalities. One client described the problem of spiritual intrusions as a situation in which, for example, his mother held him by the nape of the neck, like he was a kitten, except that he was more like a parakeet that would say and do what she wanted for him to do in order to escape from her. He said, “My only escape from her is to agree with her. Only then am I safe and free.”
In terms of sacred medicines, Tobacco is one of the most important sacred medicines for removing parasitic energies, but the problem of spiritual intrusions is just a bit more complicated than the problem of parasitic energies. To understand spiritual intrusions, we have to first understand the concept of a Core Self. The Core Self is the part of us that has the ability to see from the perspective of all of our various sub-personalities. The Core Self can take care of the dissociated parts of us, rather like a parent…but not just any parent. The Core Self acts internally like an ideal parent that has compassion for all of the inner parts of us that acts to take care of us. When we are behaving badly toward ourselves, we’re not embodying the Core Self…we’re allowing another, younger, traumatized part of us take control over the entire system of inner sub-personalities that we’ve created throughout our lives in an effort to survive difficult situations.
Think for a moment about your own parents, dear Reader. Your parents may have been very close to perfect or they may have been criminal in their behaviors toward you, but if you imagine a situation when your parent had an unhelpful, potentially damaging response to something that you did as a child, we can then do an exercise to try to find the Core Self. Essentially, when you identify that situation when your parent’s response was less than ideal, take a moment and imagine instead an alternative, positive response to your behavior that would’ve helped you in your life. Some people come up with the ideal response immediately. Some people require some practice an effort to come up with the ideal response. It’s worth the effort to go through your memory bank and re-imagine negative situations with your parents because when you do this, you’re interacting with your Core Self. The Core Self is our most important source of energy and power.
In my experience up to this point (I’m always learning new things about spiritual problems and how to overcome them), spiritual intrusions occur when the Core Self is not invited into a major decision in order to actively choose what happens to the body. All children, for example, lack personal volition until they’re old enough to legally begin to make their own choices…their Core Self is still very much under development but even at the legal age of adulthood, many young adults are still not able to fully steer and navigate their own lives using the Core Self. Most parents don’t teach their children how to use their will and their personal volition, after all. Often, discipline in families is geared at killing a child’s personal volition in favor of adhering to the rules of society or rules that the parents have been taught when their own personal volition was killed. This type of discipline, which includes any kind of punishment that terrorizes a child, happens for lack of knowledge about how to help a child learn to choose to control themselves.
Parent-Child Spiritual Intrusion
So we might say that parenting itself is a benign type of spiritual intrusion. It’s benign as long as the parent works to give the child opportunities to control themselves over the course of many years as the child is growing up. But as a child grows into an adult, there are malignant forms of spiritual intrusion that can take shape between parents and children. The malignant parent-to-child spiritual intrusion is probably fairly common in the modern world today, but there are other types of spiritual intrusions that we’ll talk about more below. Both the parental form of spiritual intrusion and the perpetrator-victim form of spiritual intrusion can be dealt with in a similar way using the sacred medicines.
Victim-Perpetrator Spiritual Intrusion
In my dreams, a spiritual intrusion looks like any of the following:
- The 5 of cups in a tarot spread
- A Yahtzee game board
- Zombies vs. Witches
- Serleena in Men in Black II
- Jarra in Men in Black II
- The scary flower-headed creatures in Stranger Things
Victim-Perpetrator spiritual intrusions involve copies and often they’re portrayed in my dreams as copies of copies because once a person is coerced into an awful situation, all choices after the initial step forward into that situation, are limited and usually based around the initial choice. For example, let’s say that a person is in a human trafficking situation. That person may be given drugs as a form of coercion that removes the Core Self from the algorithm. Scopolamine, for example, is a drug that makes the body act like a parakeet that will do the bidding of another person without question. So for a person who is given scopolamine and who submits to taking the drug, this first choice leads to a series of other actions that are undesirable too.
Or let’s say there are no drugs involved and there’s a teenager who is offered a “choice” between doing something truly awful (i.e. rape, murder, stealing, vandalism etc.) or they can choose to die as their other option. Once the teenager in this hypothetical scenario chooses to do the awful thing in favor of preserving his or her own life, a new series of choices present themselves. None of these choices are palatable either, but the teenager acts nonetheless, within the necessary parameters in order to preserve his or her own life. These are the spiritual “copies” of the original, difficult choice. Like zombies, if you can find the original choice and deal with it, all of the copies will also be dealt with
In a Victim-Perpetrator scenario, a person develops a spiritual intrusion as a result of feeling empathy for both the victim and the perpetrator. One client that we had, for example, was part of Satanic rituals as a child. He began to see the memories of these rituals more clearly over time. In the rituals, a little girl was paired with him by the adults who were present and she was presented to him over and over again as his “little girlfriend”. This client was only about 6 or 7 years old when these memories occurred. He didn’t know who was behind these rituals or how he ended up at these rituals, but at one point, he recognized that he was sleepy in these memories and that he’d been drugged. This girl, his “little girlfriend” was eventually murdered on the floor lying next to him while he chided her to stay quiet in an effort to keep her safe. Later, on a psilocybin trip, he remembered her burial as he stood next to his dad. So he identified that his dad was involved in the girl’s death.
This client identified with his dad, a perpetrator, as well as with the victim, his “little girlfriend”. Because his dad was one of the perpetrators, the client felt some trust for his dad and he relied on his dad to keep him alive even though the events that had transpired were decidedly ugly, scary, and threatening to a child’s survival. In an effort to survive, this client tried to really project himself into his dad’s mind to understand what his dad had been thinking and what his dad wanted from him at that time because his survival was based on what his dad did. But because the perpetrator was a young child at the time, he also identified with the little girl’s fear and her vulnerability when she was killed. He became trapped in a trauma-loop, oscillating between trying to understand the perpetrator, his dad, and trying to understand the little girl, his peer.
When this man returned from his trip, he kept asking, “Where was my Core Self?” In other words, why hadn’t I done something differently? At the time, I thought that was an interesting question, but I didn’t fully understand it. I told this man that he was a child so he couldn’t have done anything differently – he lacked personal volition. But this answer didn’t satisfy him. He restated the question as, “Where IS my Core Self?”
There are many traumatic events that happen where no one is a perpetrator, per se. But from this man’s recollection of a Victim-Perpetrator event and his description of what happened to him and how he felt about it, I learned so much! At the time, I was working with the other client that I talked about earlier who was actively trying to get rid of a spiritual intrusion caused by a situation when he was part of a trafficking ring. In this client, I was starting to see something that’s been described many times as a type of psychological bond that hostages develop with their captors, but it was less in-your-face than just a straightforward bond. Rather, to me, it looked like strong empathy for his captors that came under the client’s own scrutiny on his trips. In a clinical setting, a person might talk about the feeling of empathy with their captors and perhaps feel frustration, depression, ambivalence, or any number of emotions about such a thing, but when working with the sacred medicines, the whole process of feeling slows down so that the victim themselves can analyze their own response under the tutelage of a wise mushroom, plant, or animal venom. So this client unpacked his own reaction to his captors and observed his own psychology with curiosity instead of with judgment.
Stockholm syndrome is the technical name for the psychological bond between captive and captor and it comes from a situation that occurred in 1973 in Stockholm, Sweden, when four people were held hostage during a bank robbery and then later refused to testify against the robbers. Stockholm syndrome is conveniently left out of the diagnostic manual that’s used by psychiatrists and psychologists to diagnose clients because this disorder is testament to our tendency to empathize with other humans, particularly for our own survival. Also Stockholm syndrome is all about a lack of personal volition that could theoretically be used as an excuse for criminal behavior. Stockholm syndrome really embodies the idea of spiritual intrusion and lack of personal volition, albeit without acknowledging that we can, as humans, be hijacked spiritually and be unable to act by our own will.
But I’m not going to elaborate on any thoughts regarding how a person might use a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome or a situation of spiritual intrusion as an excuse for bad behavior. Rather, my focus here is on how to overcome trauma that causes a client to empathize with both the victim and the perpetrator in a traumatic situation to the detriment of the client themselves and their relationships.
Humans are designed to understand other humans through empathy. I’m not talking about the type of understanding that intellectualizes and that causes us to go in circles when we talk about someone who really bothers us. I’m talking about the type of understanding that we feel when we really “get” that other person…when the other person makes sense to us. Essentially, when we feel empathy for another person, we don’t imagine ourselves in that other person’s situation. That’s intellectualization. Rather, real empathy happens when we imagine that we are the other person. That’s a more difficult thing to imagine because imagining is different than feeling.
When a person is in a situation (like being trafficked or being a child in a Satanic ritual) where a person’s volition has been hijacked and we enter into that situation knowing that we have to act or perhaps die (or be seriously injured, etc.), then we are, in a sense, wearing the Perpetrator Suit out of necessity. We ARE the Perpetrator (in a sense). The perpetrator stands back and puppeteers us as we wear the Perpetrator Suit. But because we didn’t choose to be in that situation and would’ve chosen to avoid the situation, we might inflict some kind of harm on victims in order to survive and, in doing so, feel empathy for the victims at the same time. In other words, while we might be wearing the Perpetrator Suit sometimes, we might also be wearing the Victim Suit at other times. The Core Self steps back so that we can be what we need to be (both perpetrator and victim) in order to survive the situation. Afterward, the oscillation between taking the perpetrator’s perspective and then taking the victim’s perspective (back-and-forth, back-and-forth) opens an energetic channel and a vacuum where the Core Self is actually meant to exist.
In order to overcome this problem of victim-perpetrator “intrusion” or “vacuum production”, the body has to undergo a sort of “defragmentation” that’s similar to what we used to have to do to computers every now and then in the late 1990s. Back then, computers had a circular hard-drive and data was stored on the hard-drive wherever there was space (a vacuum, so to speak). If you tried to store a bigger body of data, one piece of data might be stored in a completely different place, separate from the other piece of data that goes with it. Every few months back in the 90s, people had to “defrag” their hard-drives to put the various bits of information that go together in the same place and to get rid of miscellaneous data that didn’t belong on the hard drive at all. Defragmentation organized file fragments into contiguous blocks to improve the overall performance of a computer.
When defragmentating a person to remove spiritual intrusions, we usually work with Ayahuasca because the harmine and harmaline in Ayahuasca is able to restore memories that have been lost or forgotten and sort through the archives of data to find information that’s been stored in the wrong place, in vacuums, that have opened up in our body-memory.
One morning, while I was waking up when I was working on this material around spiritual intrusions, I had a very short dream where my baby granddaughter spit into the palm of her hand and then blew on the spit which became like dandelion seeds that took flight in the wind. Earlier in the night, I’d dreamt that I had a parachute and I could step off the edge of a cliff or a skyscraper and fly wherever I wanted to go, rather like a human-sized dandelion seed. That was great, but I’d awakened from that dream with a memory of being about 7 years old during harvest one summer. My grandmother had brought my brother into the house screaming and flailing around. He’d watched one of our kittens get run over by a combine and the kitten’s eyes had burst out of its head. This was similar to how my client had described the “little girlfriend” who’d been killed while lying next to him. As I lay there in the middle of the night, I re-experienced that day when I was 7 years old and how my brother’s kicking, screaming, and flailing, and the tiny bit of what I’d heard him describe about the kitten being killed became my trauma. What he’d seen with his eyes was burnt into my brain as though I’d seen it with my own eyes.
In this situation with the poor kitten and the combine, there was no perpetrator. It was just an accident, but it helped me remember that one person’s trauma can become another person’s trauma if the other person identifies with the first person in a strong enough way that generates real empathy (not the intellectual type of empathy).
Before I started working with the sacred medicines, I had a lot of intellectual empathy and I thought that intellectual empathy was the only type of empathy that existed. I’d studied all kinds of books and disciplines to try to understand people. But it wasn’t until we did quite a lot of work with the sacred medicines that I started to be able to feel another person directly. I was them or sometimes they were me. In any case, anyone can do this kind of empathy, but we’re not really socialized or taught to be empathic in this way. So I didn’t know that I could feel a person in a more direct way until I started working with the sacred medicines.
My dream content changed a lot around this shift from being a 2-dimensional being who could only intellectualize about a given problem or situation logically to a human being with 3-dimensions who could also feel and intuit things. I started being able to have dreams that could show me another person’s situation first hand. I was not me. Rather, I was them. I felt what they felt in the dream which, in turn, helped me understand what the other people were feeling. In reality, everyone can do this, but most of us are so burdened by trauma that it seems as though we can’t do it. The body-mind is fragmented and trauma causes us to lose parts of ourselves that we have to retrieve from the past.
In the developed world, the goal at this time in history, is to NOT feel. We have to think about everything logically and avoid feeling most of the time. We can feel sexual feelings and we can get angry as a socially acceptable emotion, but sadness, grief, or even apathy / depression is off-limits. Meanwhile, in reality, we all have to reference how we feel in order to make every decision that we face throughout the day. Feeling IS thinking. We can’t make decisions for ourselves at all without checking in with how we feel. If we have to make a decision and then justify that decision to another person or a group of people, we have to come up with a logical reason why we chose “this” instead of “that” even though, in real life, we made the decision using feelings and intuition.
An emotion is something that a person can unpack in order to learn something complicated and yes, logical. To learn something using the logical left-brain is cumbersome and difficult in comparison to learning through intuition using, for example, the sacred medicine. To learn through feeling is much less difficult and fast. I often compare feeling-based learning to how Neo learned Kung Fu in the movie The Matrix. Further, the trauma that we experience in our lives that hijacks and fragments our psychology, ultimately is there to teach us something that can benefit us greatly if we unpack the trauma and integrate it into the Core Self.
Spiritual intrusions are a special category of trauma that develops when our personal volition has been hijacked. The Apple TV+ series Hijack is about a plane that gets hijacked but the hijackers themselves have also been hijacked. One man on board (Idris Elba) is able to steer the whole situation to safety because he maintains a connection to his Core Self. He’s honest with the hijackers and with the other passengers to the extent that he can be, but he also maintains his own personal volition throughout the flight. This series offers a good metaphorical overview of a spiritual intrusion including its portrayal of the hijackers as people who had also been hijacked as this is generally the case in real life too.
How to Get Rid of a Spiritual Intrusion
I tend to think that a true Victim-Perpetrator spiritual intrusion also typically involves some amnesia around the situation that provoked the intrusion. Like the problem of Stockholm syndrome and empathy, memory, secrets, and lies, are problematic in psychology and psychiatry as well as in law and the legal realm. The idea that a person could not remember major traumatic events that happened to them is something that I resisted for a long time. Indeed, I was taught to resist this idea in all of my psychology classes. It was dismissed as though to think such a thing was so ludicrous that the people claiming to have such memories were obviously criminals. And then, we’d turn to page 200 and read about Freud’s id, ego, and super-ego theories. Of course, we were also taught to dismiss the likes of hysteria too.
It took me many years after I’d finished my master’s degree to realize that hypnosis and hypnotherapy was much more powerful and more honest about the psychology of humans. And many years after that to realize that trance states have been produced by shaman since the beginning of time to heal the body and the mind. The language of hypnotherapy and Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP is far more descriptive of how our minds and bodies work, but unfortunately, both hypnotherapy and NLP can be used in nefarious ways. In any case though, systems that work with the body-mind or the unconscious are much more powerful that run-of-the-mill psychology or psychiatry in terms of treating negative states of mind and also physical health problems. But hypnotherapy and NLP both acknowledge that the unconscious material that we’ve forgotten or that’s unknown to our conscious mind is what really powers our human decision-making.
Essentially, a spiritual intrusion is a type of soul loss or the evacuation of the Core Self from the body in order to survive some traumatic situation in which our personal volition has been hijacked. By vacating the Core Self and allowing someone else to control the body for a time, we can perform the necessary actions to ensure our survival. The perpetrator doesn’t necessarily require this spiritual act or have any knowledge of it. Rather, we project ourselves into a perpetrator or even sometimes into a parent to try to see their eyes. In seeing through a parent’s or a perpetrator’s eyes, we can sometimes understand what the perp or the parent requires of us. So this type of projection is designed to help us survive. Meanwhile, we identify and project ourselves toward a victim as well if we aren’t able to see ourselves as the victim for one reason or another. We try to identify with the victim, but can’t forgive ourselves for not having been said victim. And we try to identify with the perpetrator, in turn, (oscillating back-and-forth, back-and-forth) because this was a source of empowerment and survival during the traumatic experience.
Some people who have had to vacate soul in this way, end up embodying the perpetrator almost exclusively, at least in public. Other people almost exclusively embody the victim, at least in public. And then there are other people who embody both victim and perpetrator in equal doses, identifying with both in an effort to understand humanity in general, rather than simply trying to master one side of the experience. These people might be prone to martyrdom or a toxic form of self-sacrifice, self-mutilation, or even suicidal behaviors.
In any case, I tend to believe that empathy for both the victim and the perpetrator ends up getting etched in the brains of those who are in unspeakable, un-tellable situations. In the modern world, people currently ascribe to a very black-and-white way of thinking about situations involving sex and death. I mean, socially, we haven’t gotten to a point yet where people can do things a different way. We have to think in terms of black-and-white, and right-and-wrong for the sake of keeping the masses safe. But on an individual or on a family level, the black-and-white thinking can be very damaging especially for people who have experienced these difficult situations where unspeakable, challenging things happened and there were few, if any, real choices about what to do.
Ayahuasca for Spiritual Intrusions
Ayahuasca contains harmine and harmaline, two substances that have the ability to restore memory even in situations in which drugs were used to make a person sleepy or compliant. Ayahuasca might need to be administered as a microdose for a few months before memories begin to return, but as a treatment for spiritual intrusions, it’s important to get to the memories that were hijacked, modified, or lost.
We counsel people who wish to overcome spiritual intrusions to use Ayahuasca both as a microdose and also as a full-trip. On trips, the goal is to find the perspective of the Core Self, which would be like a spectator of a movie that shows the whole story of what happened. In finding the Core Self’s perspective, compassion is always a part of the picture too, but not just for the victim or victims or the perpetrator(s), but for the Core Self, itself.
For example, a person (let’s call this person, Person A) who was forced to rape another person, Person B, might feel afterward, a certain type of inner conflict that involves the feeling of incomprehensible sorrow or empathy for the rape victim, Person B and then a feeling of incomprehensible terror in regard to the person who forced Person A to perform a rape. Person A might not remember the actual rape depending on when it happened and the circumstances under which it happened. But Person A might instead have a tendency to engage in self-harm to try to identify with the victim and stop identifying with the perpetrator unconsciously, but the self-harm might be something that simply makes no sense to Person A on a logical, conscious level. Person A might ask himself or herself, “why am I doing this?” and literally have no idea.
Often, people who have undergone some major trauma that involved a victim (not the person themselves) and a perpetrator, will return from a psilocybin trip with a focus on a victim and be unable to get their focus off of that victim. For example, when my kitten was killed as I described earlier in this discussion, my visual inner-camera – the point-of-view that my brain sought out – was instantly focused on the kitten’s eyeballs. It was like I was under the tire with the kitten, empathizing with that kitten for every millimeter of movement of the tire. But the real me – my body – was in the house listening to my brother retell the story of what happened. I wasn’t even there to see what happened with my own eyes. To heal from this memory, I had to “zoom out” with my inner-camera and find my actual body and then go up a little above myself and look down on the entire situation. In those with trauma, the “zoom in / zoom out” function is often stuck and the inner camera is not able to fluently move around inside the traumatic memory to find a perspective that’s tolerable.
If the driver of the combine had been intentionally trying to kill kittens, chasing them down, let’s say, the driver would’ve become a focal point as well for me. In an effort to understand him, I might have tried to imagine myself as him, each time failing, with disgust – how could a person do that? I might ask myself, in an effort to understand this combine driver and find a way to help the kittens survive. To be disgusted with the combine driver would make me feel like I’m good and the driver is bad, but in fact, the psychology of this situation is more like I AM the driver at times and I AM the kitten at other times, but unconsciously. This is what a spiritual intrusion is made of. To be two things at the same time produces a channel and in those moments when I AM NOT ME, I vacate my body, so to speak, to leave space for some other thing (not me).
Once a situation like this becomes conscious, you can work with it, but therein lies the problem. Trauma is hard to bring to the surface. There are some traumas that can be dealt with and released using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing / EMDR or self-hypnosis and guided meditation, but if you aren’t conscious of what drives depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychosis, or any number of other mental health issues, then EMDR and hypnosis is unlikely to get to the meat of it. People can bury severe trauma deeply within the unconscious mind to make it extremely hard to gain access to it. Until your logical mind has the resources to cope with the trauma in the unconscious mind, it’s best that it stays buried. But if you’re willing to level-up and learn something new about the world, the body, the mind, and how reality works, getting your soul parts back and defragmenting your unconscious mind can completely change your life and the life of your family members. If you knew that a part of you was trapped in a version of hell that involved a looping experience of one of your worst nightmarish experiences on earth, you’d want to rescue that part, wouldn’t you?
No one is fully conscious of the material that underlies the spiritual intrusion. The perpetrator is not usually consciously producing the intrusion, though in certain rituals, the goal is to produce spiritual intrusion, albeit without any real direction afterwards about what to do with such a channel. But to get rid of the intrusion, you simply need to find your Core Self, wherever it’s located in the traumatic situation and try to see through its eyes into the movie-screen of what happened while the body was vacant. In other words, you’d imagine the Big Picture situation and focus on your own self…the way that you’d expect that an ideal parent would focus on you with love and compassion. The sacred medicines are essential in this regard.
How to Overcome Stockholm Syndrome / Spiritual Intrusion
Hostages will tend to empathize with their captor(s) particularly if they are kept together and are not physically abused. Stockholm syndrome may or may not produce an ongoing issue resembling a spiritual intrusion, but it can. But once physical abuse enters into the picture, hostages empathize with the victims and often also, the perpetrators. When there is Victim-Perpetrator identification (where a person identifies with both the victim and the perpetrator), issues involving self-harm or self-hatred can be prevalent without any sense of why the person feels like harming themselves or hating on themselves.
Overcoming Hostage Situation PTSD and Spiritual Intrusions
Children are technically “hostages” of their parents as portrayed aptly in the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. This is one reason why parent-produced spiritual intrusions can take shape so readily. Parents are rarely conscious of the production of a spiritual intrusion, but as a child, if you feel like you’ve been removed from your own life and your existence is dependent on a parent, even though you’re a fully grown adult, it might be helpful to seek out the sacred medicines to overcome this problem.
In Victim-Perpetrator PTSD, spiritual intrusions develop at moments when you are experiencing fear, a sense of helplessness, and uncertainty. Isolation from others or from the outside world creates a situation where your only hope is to identify and empathize with the captor.
As with a child who is cared for by unpredictable, neglectful, or abusive parents, a person who has been a hostage will empathize with their captors in order to try to find a way to survive. Essentially for both the child and the hostage, the goal is to figure out what the parent or captor needs to hear or see or experience in order to feel motivated to keep feeding you and providing you with what’s needed for your survival. So a person who is held hostage will unconsciously project themselves into the captor’s or parent’s mind, opening up a channel in their energy field and a spiritual vacancy or vacuum while simultaneously producing a perpetrator mentality through the identification with the perp that ultimately keeps that person alive during the hostage situation.
Going back to the client who was trafficked though…that situation took place in a country that was mostly closed to the world. In a sense, almost every citizen of that country was a hostage and life for this man was a lot like the movie Pleasantville. A citizen of a closed country where coming and going from that country is not possible has little opportunity to create a better life. Closed borders create a situation of limited opportunity, after all.
But what about the man who was drugged and forced to undergo Satanic rituals? During his usual waking routine as a child, he lived out a very normal suburban lifestyle. But occasionally, he would be drugged and then kidnapped and taken to locations for rituals that were bizarre, bloody, and sexually perverse. He’d go to sleep in a normal life and wake up into a nightmare from time to time. Though he wasn’t technically a hostage in his waking life, when he was drugged, he had been chemically restrained and the content of that reality that he awakened to on altars or on the floor or sometimes in a cage, was so strange and surreal based on what he’d been taught that this content was hidden from him in his unconscious mind.
A lot of people will argue that unconscious memories are not memories at all, but I absolutely disagree with that idea. In fact, as certified hypnotherapists, Lydi and I were both taught that we could hypnotize a person simply by interrupting any well-known cultural script. Script interruption makes people suggestible, in other words, it puts them into a state of mind that’s similar to sleep. I might interrupt a script that’s as simple as shaking a person’s hand and instead of grabbing onto the person’s hand as our hands reach toward each other, bop them on the forehead to produce a hypnotic state that lasts for several minutes. Any ambiguous situation that presents itself to you can put you into a state of trance that makes it quite easy to “forget” what happened because it defies words. Children who have no knowledge of sex who are exposed to bizarre sexual content and who then attempt to tell their parents about sexual abuse will easily forget the abuse if their parents discount what the child says. Many, many situations in the world are hard to put into words because they’re not like our everyday lives and consensus reality.
Those who study the psychology of hostages have noted that it’s easy for a hostage to lose their sense of identity as the hostage projects themselves into the mind of the captor or the perpetrator. Simultaneously, a system of denial is in place to keep a surreal hostage situation from becoming conscious and accepted. Coping strategies might include fantasies of escape or future-planning that’s totally unrealistic based on the status quo. In other words, as time goes on, hostages / captives will dissociate more and more in order to manage their mood state. Dissociation, of course, is a type of soul loss that can cause a feeling of energy depletion as well as actual physical illness if the dissociation is not corrected.
Sometimes, a person who is kidnapped will see an opportunity to escape, but decide not to take it. In situations involving human trafficking, for example, it’s extremely common for people to return to their captors at least once. If you’ve had your personal volition removed or hijacked and then you have a very short window of time to use personal volition to escape to freedom, you may or may not be able to make use of that opportunity because you haven’t had the opportunity to exercise your personal volition. The personal volition muscle gets weak. Hostages may feel angry with themselves as a result of missed opportunities because their personal volition was utterly hijacked.
But remember, not everyone who has been a hostage remembers being a hostage. Children are technically hostages of their parents if their parents were unpredictable, neglectful, or abusive. And some of us harbor memories of things that were done to us under duress that we can’t remember. The body, of course, never forgets and stores every memory and every experience that we’ve ever had. When a person has depression, anxiety, or any number of mental health problems, this is a sign that the body is host to trauma of some kind that’s causing mental health problems.
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / PTSD, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and other addictions, can all be caused by a general sense of ongoing danger unconsciously long after a hostage-situation has passed in the real world. Again, Lydi and I regard ongoing PTSD symptoms as symptomatic of soul loss and also spiritual intrusion in some cases. Spiritual intrusions are not intelligent, as a general rule, and the goal is to find the story / memory, be able to move around within the story, and seek out the Core Self at the moment when the memory occurred.
Psilocybin Mushrooms and Ayahuasca Icaros for Spiritual Intrusions
The Ayahuasca icaros, when properly applied, can remove spiritual intrusions, but the in the Ayahuasca landscape, a spiritual intrusion can be presented like fabric where a person has been woven into the fabric or where they might be sewn into a pocket. In other words, Ayahuasca can sometimes present a spiritual intrusion more like a situation in which the person seeking to get rid of the intrusion is, in fact, the intruder. The word “intruder” here suggests that the intruder is the active party, but rather, it is more like a culture (such as the culture in a particular nation or in a particular family) that knits the person, the intruding element into the weave. Neither the person themselves nor the weaver has intentionally produced this particular pattern, yet it exists.
The psilocybin landscape for soul retrievals looks to my inner eye like a honeycomb that ranges in color from a light beige to a deep purple. Lost soul parts get embedded in the honeycomb material, which is similar to the Ayahuasca landscape in which a person’s soul might get lost in the weave of some fabric. But in the psilocybin soul retrieval space, soul parts are typically somewhat visible and they respond when called by name. To find a soul part that’s buried more deeply in this soul retrieval space might take some special skill, but in the Ayahuasca world, this special skill involves the use of icaros to un-weave and re-weave that which has been woven into something too tightly.
In these other realms, you might be sewn haphazardly into a pocket on your mother’s dress. You mother’s dress might be a flag or some pattern like plaid that represents a particular clan. You / your soul part might be so tightly woven into the fabric that this part of you exists as the pattern instead of as yourself.
As we noted above, in the dreamscape, intrusions are represented differently for us than how they look when we are working with the sacred medicines.
Metaphor and Healing
In closing, for those who have a strong aversion to the idea that people can harbor unconscious memories of past trauma, metaphor is another acceptable way of looking at this issue. The clients we work with are not litigious people and they have no desire to seek retribution for things that happened in the past. Their stories have been verified, but if they were not verified, we could also look at them as healing metaphors that describe how an experience felt rather than as a story of fact. For those who are averse to excavating actual memories, we can also view the apparent memory of some negative event as a metaphor instead.
Summary
A spiritual intrusion is hard to diagnose, but such a thing can be dealt with using the sacred indigenous medicines. Ayahuasca is particularly beneficial for spiritual intrusions though psilocybin mushrooms might also be helpful in overcoming trauma. Often, in those with a spiritual intrusion, there are unconscious memories that play a role.
Ayahuasca might guide a person through the issue of a spiritual intrusion using any number of techniques. This plant is very wise and she knows what each person needs. Though hypnotherapy, EMDR, and brain entrainment might be beneficial, often, in situations involving mental illness, mood-related issues, and the sense of vacancy that leads people to reach out to us regarding spiritual intrusions, are caused by unconscious memories that have to be unearthed for integration and healing.
As a general rule, anger toward a parent or a perpetrator regarding a spiritual intrusion will only make the problem worse as anger empowers others. Blame is similar. Blame is the giving-away of your own energy and your personal power. In the realm of sacred indigenous medicines, no one is to blame and anger is a sign of self-protection and defense.
Spiritual intrusions most often involve situations where a child felt as though they were held hostage by a parent. The child may have been neglected or living under a regime in the home that was uncertain, abusive, or downright unsafe. Getting angry or blameful toward the parent or the perp actually empowers the parent / perp. While most people cannot logically come up with a way to overcome this kind of situation, the body-wisdom knows how to do it. To access the body-wisdom, sacred indigenous medicines are vital. Ayahuasca is one of the most important for spiritual intrusions with psilocybin as a close second.