Episode 42: Psychedelics, Trauma and Men's Therapy
Episode 42 of M3CS’s Contemplative Science Podcast saw Liam Farquhar come on to the show to talk about the role of psychedelics in healing trauma.
For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
Why Liam thinks that ‘trauma needs a rebrand’.
His criticisms of the existing protocols surrounding psychedelic-based treatment.
Men’s group therapy: how it works and how it helped him personally.
Liam Farquhar is a London-based legal psychedelics guide, experienced meditator and expert on somatic therapy and internal family systems. His essay Trauma Needs A Rebrand... is available to read here.
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
Liam’s work encourages clients to engage with the trauma within their bodies.
”Healing, I believe, is primarily a physiological process. It’s releasing, it’s discharging that trapped energy that we all have on a continuum that gets generated in response to overwhelming adversity. That could be a boundary crossed from our history but also our environment. A big part of my work is helping people remind their bodies that they can release trauma.”
Healing trauma should encompass the whole body, not just ‘above the neck’.
”What I'm trying to do is address the root at a nervous system level, at a parts level, at a somatic level. Whereas my criticism of some of the psychedelic protocols that exist today is that they don't address the root. They're only working at a narrative level, which is an essential part of the process, but again, it needs to go deeper for me.”
Both Internal Family Systems and somatic experiencing provide essential teachings.
”Dick Schwartz, the creator of IFS, says that nothing can overwhelm the self, it's infinite. It's unoverwhelmable. So he kind of butts heads with Peter Levine, who is the creator of somatic experiencing, which is very trauma-informed... so we do everything, we're taught to do everything very slowly in somatic experiencing. And we have resources and we pendulate in and out and we titrate. And we do bit by bit, slowly, slowly. And I think both are true. If you are in self, it is unoverwhelmable. You can't overwhelm it, which MDMA helps access to, which is why it's such a powerful therapeutic tool I believe, but it's just hard to access self, right? And that's where the tools and the resources come in. So I think you need both.”
The best place to find Liam is here.
See you next week!
