There are different ways to present the sacred medicines to people. Back in the day when Lydi and I first started working with Karolina, the curandera, we knew practically nothing about the medicines she would present to us. We were academically blank regarding Ayahuasca, psilocybin, Sapito, Kambo, etc.. So these medicines were purely experiential for us. We had to put words to what we experienced with each one rather than having a sense beforehand of how to work with each one.
Karolina herself became a curandera after her husband was tragically killed about 25 years ago. She went to live with the Nahuatl indians in Mexico for a period of time to learn how to administer a temazcal sweat lodge ceremony, something she continues to do with great skill. Later, she started working with sacred indigenous medicines like Sapito, Ayahuasca, Peyote, Ambil, among others. She would administer these medicines to groups of people and Lydi and I would receive the medicines and also, after we had some experience, we would help administer them too. We didn’t receive an education about each medicine though because everything that happened at Karolina’s at that time, happened in Spanish and we didn’t yet know how to speak Spanish. So one of the sacred medicines was simply offered to us and we could either take or not take it.
Lydi and I later developed our own model for working with the various sacred medicines based off of what the medicines themselves taught us directly, but this direct, first-person education was also based on what she and I had been taught about trauma. Prior to working with the sacred medicines, Lydi and I were both certified as hypnotherapists and we were certified in constellations therapy as well. We’re certified in craniosacral therapy and biomagnetism and a number of other alternative medicines. I have a master’s in psychology which is practically useless in comparison with hypnotherapy and constellations therapy, but I have been able to repurpose some of the information that I got in this degree toward the treatment of trauma. At this point, both Lydi and I worked a great deal with multiple types of trauma-informed therapies, but the model that we use most often in in the early stages of trauma release therapy is a modified version of Internal Family Systems / IFS.
In our modified version of IFS, everyone on earth has multiple personality disorder (dissociative identity disorder / DID). Some people have severe multiple personality disorder / DID where their “parts” or “sub-personalities” are in conflict and unwilling to speak with other parts / sub-personalities. Other people have a less severe form of DID. Their various parts / sub-personalities are on speaking terms, but perhaps one sub-personality keeps secrets from the other sub-personalities. People who are functional and relatively happy have sub-personalities that are not in severe conflict with one another.
Essentially, every individual is made up of an internal family system of sub-personalities that step forward for embodiment when triggered by something in the external environment. I might have a specific sub-personality that I embody to do public speaking, for example, or a specific sub-personality that comes out if I’m in my office at work. A very different sub-personality or clique of sub-personalities might show up when I sit down in the evening with my husband to relax. Modern humans are built with multiple personalities because we have to be able to switch fluently to different social situations that demand different behaviors from us.
A person who has a clique of sub-personalities that were dissociated from the Core Self as a result of a specific type of trauma, let’s say, sexual abuse, might be triggered by a sexual abuse scene on a television show or by any aspect of of the actual sexual abuse that occurred. Let’s say, for example, that the perpetrator of the abuse wore a deep red-colored shirt with a pin on the lapel. When the victim sees a person wearing a red shirt of a particular hue with a pin on the lapel, this could act as a trigger that causes the sub-personality that experienced the abuse to be embodied. That sub-personality though, is trapped in the past when the abuse occurred and is not aware of the present-tense yet. So this sub-personality might be irritable and very anxious as the part of the psyche that carries this particular genre of abuse.
But not all of our sub-personalities are dissociated from the Core Self in order to deal with abuse. Sometimes, we create sub-personalities unconsciously to deal with different social situations. While it might be acceptable to light candles and pray on our knees at church, we aren’t generally encouraged to do such things in school or at work. What we talk about before church is different than what we talk about after church and different sub-personalities show up for us to embody based on what’s needed and what’s required in order for us to continue to be loved and cared for by the extended family and the community that surrounds us.
We don’t memorize the rules of the church or the school or the workplace. We embody the rules as a form of shorthand that makes it possible for us to easily step into one setting and be totally functional and then step into another setting, such as a workplace or a school, and be just as functional, but under a completely different set of rules. Actually, we don’t embody the rules themselves, but instead we embody sub-personalities or “soul parts” that know the rules for different social situations.
Modern families today are hard to navigate in part because of the fact that every person is a system of sub-personalities or “parts” that step forward for embodiment in response to triggers that are unknown. When I was a young woman, my mother-in-law was a cold and mystifying figure. She would speak, cut into my soul, and yet never use a word or a phrase that I could identify in my own defense to make it stop. In other words, I couldn’t call her out on what she was saying to me that was so hurtful because she never really said anything. It took me two decades of study and practice with things like Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP to figure out how she was able to slice me and dice me. She wasn’t using words at all but rather inflection and tone, body posture, and anchoring techniques to hurt me. She would anchor meaning to certain words like good and then use the word good to describe, for example, bad people. My husband grew up very confused about the difference between “good” and “bad” people because of this and even as a young 20-something, I struggled to keep up and figure out the rules that John’s mother required of me in order to stand in her good graces.
In most families in the modern, developed world, the social rules are complex and highly differentiated from person to person. There’s a lot of hypocrisy in family systems and in most modern families, there are certain words, phrases, and topics that are strictly off-limits. The mother requires this. The father requires that. So, in order to keep up with all of the hypocrisy, we develop different sub-personalities to deal with these different people in our lives. We feel what we can and cannot say in the family at Christmas dinner rather than knowing it. This ability to feel what topics, words, or phrases are off-limits, is something we experience through the “felt sense” of our bodies. Sub-personalities that have existed since we were infants step forward to manage family dinners and make sure that we say what’s required and avoid topics that have been dubbed “inappropriate”.
Children are easily broken into dissociated sub-personalities, but even as adults, we have a tendency to dissociate in response to stress or trauma. Indeed, dissociation can be used intentionally under certain conditions, but most of the time, people unintentionally dissociate into sub-personalities that were created in childhood or young adulthood.
For the most part, each sub-personality is functional in a specific setting and was created for a specific purpose. Usually, people will break into cliques of 3 to 5 sub-personalities in response to a trauma. One sub-personality acts as The Protector. This is the part in the clique that most people outside of the nuclear family get to see and interact with. The Protector guards access to the more vulnerable sub-personalities that have feelings like sadness, fear. Protectors tend to have a short fuse and they get angry easily so as to protect the more vulnerable parts of the clique.
The sub-personalities that have feelings like fear or sadness have been dissociated from the memories that evoked the feelings they carry. Protector parts are often not conscious of the trauma at all and they merely function to protect the other sub-personalities in the system. Trauma release is all about connecting the memory with the feeling of what happened, though in working with the sacred medicines, often the memory is “encoded” such that victims do not need to relive the memory of a terrifying event in order to connect the “felt sense” of the event with the actual facts of what happened.
A person can keep a secret from themselves. If you’ve never observed this sort of phenomena, it might seem far-fetched, but indeed, it happens more often than you might think. Sometimes the secret that we keep from ourselves is about something truly awful that happened. Sometimes the secret has to do with things that didn’t happen (as in cases of neglect). Whenever a person has depression or anxiety, bipolar disorder, panic attacks, psychosis, addiction, or a known diagnosis of DID, trauma is always going to be an underlying cause. These so-called “mental illnesses” are just a manifestation of a feeling that has been dissociated from its memory-content.
But what about situations where a memory is lost. Severe forms of trauma can cause a loss of memory as well as the loss of “felt sense” content. Ritual abuse or human trafficking situations, for example, can lead to temporary memory loss as well as the temporary loss of the feeling-content. People who have experienced severe or ongoing forms of abuse, for example, may not have a memory of abuse at all, but instead have violent outbursts, self-mutilation behavior, or problems committing in relationships (to name just a few possible outcomes). The reason behind these issues may be totally unclear until the memory emerges of the abuse so that it can be paired with the feeling. Once the memory and the feeling of the event are paired together, the trauma is no longer traumatic.
So beyond mental illness, there are a number of odd behaviors that a person might have as a result of severe forms of trauma. A man may cheat on his wife and it may seem like cheating is a senseless act of poor willpower or a lack of morals, but what if the behavior that we call “cheating” is based on an issue that can be resolved (namely trauma-release)? The cheating is just the tip of the iceberg and if you look beneath the water, this behavior is connected to much deeper issues, usually situations that happened in childhood. Couples who wish to overcome the problem of cheating need to look at what lies beneath the water and address that material which is often a convoluted and revealing rabbit hole of information.
But let’s back up…
Let’s say that a man (or a woman) cheats on his or her spouse and doesn’t reveal the cheating. This man or woman is aware of the cheating, ashamed of it, and trying to keep the cheating a secret. If his or her spouse asks, “Are you cheating on me?” and the man or woman says, “no”, then he or she is lying, correct?
Some would say that it is the lie that damages the relationship, but although I’m not a fan of lies in relationships myself, a lie can, in fact, play a role in maintaining relationships, particularly in situations in which there is a spiritual contract that involves some form of human ownership, for example. In the day-to-day life of an average modern person in today’s world, spiritual contracts might seem like total fluff until you start looking more closely at people who have suffered ritual abuse or people who have been sold into slavery.
Truth exists along a spectrum and this spectrum exists inside of us in our internal reality and it also has to interact with the outside world. Sometimes, the people we’re speaking with in the outside world don’t want us to speak any form of truth or they require us to alter or manufacture something untrue for their benefit. Within our internal cosmology though this untruth still sits with us like a lie. The extent to which our internal cosmology is “bent” or “contorted” by the external milieu would depend on the level of desperation that warrants its creation. Do you bend or contort yourself for food because you’re starving to death? Do you bend or contort yourself in order to have a bed to sleep in at night and some semblance of “safety”? What do you have to do in your life and how much money do you have to pay to be “loved”? If you’re one of the lucky people in the world who was not sold into slavery or laid on an altar to be “sacrificed” (either theatrically or in real life), then the idea that this kind of thing is happening all the time might seem hard to believe. The harder it is for you to believe it though, the harder it becomes for a person who has suffered through this kind of thing to tell their story to you.
A lot of the behaviors that are labeled “secret” in our closest relationships are merely part of the contract that we have with the other person in the relationship. “I’ll pretend to be this, if you pretend to be that,” is one way of putting these types of relational contracts into words. The need to pretend to be one thing, namely “this” or “that” is a sign that the two people involved in the relationship have reached critical mass in terms of their “trauma-load” and they’re no longer living beings, but rather objects (this or that). In the Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP view of things, we would say that humans should generally be this-ing or that-ing because when we remove the sense that we’re beings that are in the process of living, we objectify ourselves. Or rather, we turn into objects that are no longer living, breathing, or acting. We’re stuck.
Attachment disorders are relatively common and people who are “diagnosed” with an attachment disorder are also told that their disorder can never change and can never go away. But this hasn’t been Lydi’s and my experience, particularly when working with the sacred indigenous medicines. The process of changing from a person who has an attachment disorder to a person who does not have an attachment disorder inevitably involves discovery and digging. People often arrive here at our facility because of a straw that broke the camel’s back, often a behavior or an emotional-health issue that pushed the limits of a relationship. Perhaps there was cheating, gambling, addiction, abuse, or any number of other relationship issues. Often, when people get to the bottom of what was actually causing those issues, the underlying trauma was severe and those behaviors (the cheating, the gambling, etc.) that cause relationship issues pale in comparison.
It often looks like, “Oh!!! Now I understand why my husband had anger management issues…” If you find out that your husband had to hide underground from his own violent father as a child for sometimes days at a time, but he never told you about this because he himself did not remember that it happened, it’s easier to feel compassion for a man who has angry outbursts.
Within our family and within the overall model of the work that we do with the sacred medicines, we talk about Harry Potter-style “port keys” that people can use to find their own memories that have been lost – the part of the iceberg that’s deep under water. A person in a family system who has lied, cheated, gambled, stolen, been addicted to a drug, or committed other relationship-crimes that damages their family will find that the process of discovery and the port-keys into their memories open up when their loved ones become people who can receive Core Truths. In other words, when a couple arrives in a state of turmoil, considering separation, often there’s a Core Truth that needs to be unearthed. One member of the couple has the Core Truth and the other member is not able to receive the truth and process it and release it. If, for example, one member is cheating on the other person, the other person in the relationship may not be able to gracefully and peaceably receive the news that there has been cheating. I mean, cheating is a “deal breaker” for a lot of couples.
A man who loves his wife (or a woman who loves her husband) may not be able to feel his wife’s pain empathically when he cheats on her or gambles the paycheck away. A wife who lives with a husband who lacks empathy lives a difficult life indeed, but I would argue, based on my own experience, that cheating or gambling, etc. happens when the Core Truth underlying the behavior is hidden from everyone involved. The hidden memories and emotions that function as the root cause of these behavioral issues, once accessed, can stop the behavior, but always this process of healing requires both the one telling the Core Truth and the one receiving the Core Truth to be open in a very particular way.
Truth can get clogged up, after all, and like a drain, it has to be unclogged or else the truth won’t flow.
The liar lies because the truth is not palatable to his or her listeners. Liars are created from social situations that lack the emotional resources to contain the Truth. If, as a society, we can’t fathom cheating (for example) as anything other than poor moral character, then couples that live under this idea and believe it fully will suffer tremendously if one or the other member of the couple cheats.
I remember having “deal-breaker” rules that I applied to my own marriage back in the day. John was sometimes a violent man. He was occasionally suicidal and sometimes he’d drive away in a fury and not return for several days. He didn’t pay our taxes for 10 years and lied to me about it each year in April when I asked him about making tax payments. I didn’t know back then though that John was one of those children who had been placed on altars in Masonic Lodges as a sacrifice. He remembers his Uncle Boney jerking off while Aunt Roma held him around the shoulder reassuring John that Boney would finish soon, “Just a second…he’s almost finished,” Roma would say encouragingly. I didn’t know John had witnessed the murder of a child or that he’d been blamed for that murder. I didn’t know how many men had sexually abused John (one of them killed himself) or just how unprotected John was as a child.
…but I say that “he remembers” and I need to say, “he remembers it now.”
John’s mom, Sharron–the woman who could cut through my soul with just a few words that I talked about earlier– was certainly also abused as a child, thus her coldness and her tendency to deny anything that was not perfection and brightness. Who knows what Uncle Boney did to her. In order to understand John’s family, I had to know about Uncle Boney and the fact that Grandma Edna was most definitely involved in what happened to John. Knowing about Uncle Boney explains the tense relationship that Sharron had with Edna. It also explains why Sharron was triggered by me, as someone who would say what I was thinking without regard for the rules about not treading on her triggers.
A memory that’s hidden and then that is no longer hidden, still feels like a memory. It easily knits itself into the overall narrative of the person’s life.
Anyone who endeavors to work with the sacred indigenous medicines will end up confronting themselves. In other words, they’ll confront the different parts of themselves, each one holding a key and some vital piece of information about that person’s story. These medicines work with a currency of Truth – not some absolute Truth, but the sense of knowing what’s right and what’s wrong for any given person. Couples and families who are working together with the sacred medicines to try to overcome something that challenges them are always managing the push-and-pull of Truth-and-Lies. Whatever one partner can’t stand to hear due to a lack of emotional resources sets the couple up for a situation that requires secrets and lies. Essentially, no one is actually to blame for the secrets or for the lies, but nonetheless, in relationships, the goal is always to work through the material that blocks the truth so that secrets and lies are no longer necessary.
A person can lie to themselves and they can keep a secret from themselves. The difference between a lie or a secret that exists externally between two different people and a lie or a secret that exists internally between two different sub-personalities, hinges in both cases on what the other party can tolerate hearing.
Of course, in day-to-day life without the sacred medicines, we can’t blame one member of a couple for secrets or lies held by the other member. That doesn’t make sense in day-to-day life or in rehab settings where the sacred medicines are not being administered. Outside of this work with the sacred medicines, people have to work with issues like secrets and lies in whatever manner the culture sets forth to do so. The results are often grim in the outside world where it simply isn’t possible to get to the bottom of bad behaviors to find out why the behaviors exist and how both parties in a relationship contribute to a lack of flow in regard to the truth.
Individuals who have issues finding love or attracting a mate are often suffering from underlying, unconscious issues that contribute to a lack of authenticity in dating as well as a lack of empathy. We act out secrets and lies that we haven’t told ourselves, after all, and strangers (read: potential mates and dating prospects), can easily see that we have a lot to hide. Our facial expressions, the posture and gesturing of our bodies, and our tone and inflection when we speak can alert potential mates or love interests to our underlying issues. We don’t become aware of our own secrets and the lies we tell ourselves, but other people can see that we’re not being authentic.
In summary, context matters when we talk about secrets and lies and also when we speak about “remembering” and “memory. In everyday life, a secret is a secret and a lie is a lie, but when working intensively with the sacred medicines, secrets and lies don’t belong to just one person. They are cultural artifacts and family heirlooms. They belong to the group and not just to one person. In any relationship involving love, the secrets and the lies as well as the memories (conscious or unconscious) are the responsibility of all involved. So if one person in a relationship was in a situation involving human trafficking, for example, that person’s spouse or their parent(s) (if the trafficked person were an adopted child, for example) would have to be able to receive and process the secrets and lies (as well as the unconscious memories when they become conscious) that were born out of that situation. In order to become a person who can receive the information about what’s been hidden in a balanced way that doesn’t shame the person who carries the secrets, lies, and unconscious memories, you have to work with something (i.e. the sacred medicines) that can expand the cultural container beyond its current limits. While the day-to-day world requires blame and fault in relationship transactions, along with punishments and rewards for one or the other member of the relationship, when you work with the sacred medicines, divorce, separation, custody issues, blame, and fault are not necessarily necessary. Essentially, if you and your partner are still alive, problems can be solved and resolved in a manner that allows life to go on and families to stay intact.
If you live in the day-to-day world and you’ve never worked with the sacred medicines, you won’t be able to understand how and why these medicines can produce such radically different results from what happens in Consensus Reality. You’ll only be able to understand if you work with these medicines for a time and slowly change your own point of view and expand your own thinking. It takes time to do this, but thankfully, the sacred medicines know when to unpack information and how much to unpack at any given time. They know if you’re working solo or with a partner or with other family members. They know your intention and the level of motivation that you feel or that you want to feel in regard to the ones you love.
Most people don’t want to think that there are secrets or lies or unconscious memories that might come up while working to overcome emotional issues that are impacting their relationships, but if there are issues like this that you need to work on, the sacred indigenous medicines can help you navigate through these issues. If you want to overcome cheating, gambling, addiction, mental health issues, or anger management (among other issues), and if you know there are secrets or lies that cause you to feel shame or fear in regard to your partner, just know that most people have to contend with these problems in one form or another. Shame is almost always a symptom of trauma and certainly a symptom of being blamed according to cultural norms. Expand on the cultural horizon and the shame and the blame go away. Problems get easier to solve and resolve. Families and relationships that would’ve otherwise dissolved then have a chance to heal instead.