Drugs and Psychic Injury

Her sister had been a client of mine a few years back and had wonderful success with her issues with food and bulimia. She was very young and her mother recognized the signs before it became a fixation. She went on to USC and graduated with honors. She now lives in Africa doing wonderful work and is healthy and happy. Because of her sister's success she asked for an appointment. Her issue wasn't food related.

Ms. T. has also graduated from USC but her experience there wasn't quite the same. She experimented with Ecstasy. In fact, to call it experimentation wouldn't be accurate. She abused it and regularly. During our initial session she estimated she took it over 80 times in 18 months. She had a mental breakdown complete with hallucinations and hospitalization. The experience was so frightening she stopped using the drug but has suffered symptoms not unlike PTSD. She had a job with a great company but her work is not anything she can feel proud of. She said she's afraid she has permanent brain damage. She's depressed, lethargic and has been unsociable. Her boyfriend has been understanding and her family is very supportive but she was afraid of some of the thoughts she'd been having. Her mother referred her to me.


Ms. T. seemed eager to work through the issues but when it came to doing the work of recovery she stumbled. Something about being a victim kept coming up. She always had an excuse or reason for not completing the exercises I gave her and she often called at the last minute to cancel her appointments. After two months of little progress I changed course.

Past life regression is a tool I use rarely. I've had success with people who have specific phobias like fear of closed in spaces or fear of driving. Usually when a client can relive an experience and see for themselves the episode that created their fear it is a simple thing to move through it. I suspected Ms. T. may have had such an episode. I wasn't entirely accurate.

She closed her eyes and started her deep breathing exercise as we did with every session. This time I asked her to look back to a time when she experienced a similar feeling and reaction to her life. A belief of being a victim of life circumstances instead of a creator of experiences. Where she went was back to college. She described what she was seeing. She was upstairs in a bedroom. There was a big party going on downstairs. She was a naive freshman, an inexperienced and sheltered young girl. In the room with her are several shadows. At first she thought she was sleeping but she remembered being downstairs having fun when she suddenly blacked out. The shadows were touching her, having sex with her. She couldn't move or fight them off. She had been drugged. The next morning she had no memory of it but when she went to the bathroom there was evidence of a gang rape. She was afraid to tell anyone. Her girlfriend tried to persuade her to go to the authorities but she was embarrassed and didn't want her parents to know. Her symptoms of depression began a few months later. Anxiety at parties grew and the need to drink alcohol and take drugs that made her feel happy was born. She showed no emotion while telling me this memory.

It isn't what I expected to hear because I can usually see things like that. For whatever reason I wasn't allowed access to that information. It was for her to remember and not for me to suspect.

We spent the rest of the session going back again to earlier times when she felt out of control. It turned out her father was very controlling. From the way she described his rules and expectations it sounded like he may suffer from OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Towels had to be hung a certain way, food in the cabinets had to be facing forward with labels showing and in a specific order. I'm not a licensed psychotherapist so I would never attempt to diagnose someone with a specific illness or condition, but, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck....

She remembered when she was five years old and she was taking piano lessons. Her father insisted she practice for one hour a day. He came home from work one day and she was under the piano. She wouldn't come out to practice. He lost his temper. She was dragged out and slammed down on the piano bench. She had to sit there until the timer went off, passed dinner time. She showed no emotion while remembering this incident either. It didn't seem to her to be unusual or extreme. I, of course, didn't add my two cents about it because that's not how it works. I had to keep my energy from adding to her experience.

She regressed further, to her birth. She was due on Christmas Day but that was inconvenient for the doctor and her family. They induced labor a week early. At that, she cried. She felt it, finally.

Birth trauma can take many forms. I have a friend who likes to say that cesarean births are the only civilized way to have children. It keeps your bits and pieces nice and tight and there's no sweating and screaming involved. She chose to deliver both of her children that way, not because of any medical need, simply for aesthetic reasons.

Ms. T continued our sessions up until the point of reaching her personal power and suddenly she stopped coming. For her to accept her personal power would alter her relationships, all of them, and I suspect that was more than she was ready to do. I hope she returns some day to complete our work or finds another way to reach her true nature. Maybe she already has.