MDMA and the End of Shame

How I learned to hold myself

I found my husband in the garden, watering the tomato plants. This was the lockdown period of the pandemic, and he had made a small piece of earth his own. For a man whose work had long been measured by others’ praise, it was something else entirely to watch him take pleasure in a thing that asked nothing from anyone.

Like the rest of the world, we lived those early days of the pandemic inside a suspended reality—watching the death count and staring down a future that had no shape. The uncertainty was compounded by the fact that neither my husband nor I knew what our future as a couple looked like. We had recently separated, but in the midst of society’s great unraveling, it felt important that our family be together under one roof. So, with the girls, I had left New York behind, left the new life I had only just begun to claim, and flown to California to join him in the cottage behind his parents’ house. It was a decision made in a panic. Whatever truce we had managed was thin, and the strain showed, no matter how carefully we tried to hide it from our daughters. I thought often of the apartment in New York, just as I had left it when we fled. Still. Orderly. Waiting. Some part of me waited there too.

As weeks stretched into months, the feeling of displacement wore on me. The world was stuck, and so was I. Ketamine-assisted therapy, which I’d been doing for several months by this time, had opened a door in me, but beyond it were more doors, all of them closed. I could see them now. I wanted to open them—or more truthfully, to reopen them. I wanted to recover something precious I'd lost, even if I couldn’t yet name it.

“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” I said to my husband. Haltingly, I shared my plan to try MDMA-assisted therapy. How might this sound to a recovering addict, early in their sobriety?

“You mean like molly? The rave drug?”

“Well, yes, but no — it’s a whole different experience in a therapeutic setting,” I explained. My ongoing research into psychedelic-assisted therapies had uncovered a wide array of drugs currently being employed toward therapeutic ends. I learned about the unique effects and applications of drugs like psilocybin, ayahuasca, 5-MeO-DMT (sometimes referred to as “The God Molecule”), and even cannabis. But it was the promise of the “heart-opening” effects of MDMA that appealed to me then.

MDMA is classified as an empathogen. Unlike classic psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin, it floods the brain with serotonin and releases oxytocin, the bonding hormone. In therapy, MDMA can soften defenses and heighten trust, helping individuals, especially those with PTSD, access and process traumatic memories without becoming overwhelmed. Some call it a bubble bath for the amygdala—that part of the brain that scans for danger, even when there isn’t any.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“If you think it’s going to be helpful, I think you should try it,” he said.

That night at dinner, I told my teenage daughters about my plans. I kept it clinical; this was therapy, not recreation. Their mother taking psychedelics was a strange turn of events, but perhaps just one more in a year of global upheaval. Since they were old enough to know about drugs, I’d been warning them about the dangers of addiction—given their father’s history. Now I was the one experimenting. I didn’t feel like a hypocrite, though—I felt freed, willing to question my own assumptions, ready to change my mind.

“So I’ll be gone all day Saturday,” I said, passing the salad. One daughter nodded. The other looked at me and said, "Good luck."

* * *

A pitted switchback road led to a small bungalow on a hillside in Marin. I was meeting a licensed therapist of 30 years named Ava, who discreetly provided MDMA-assisted therapy outside her standard therapeutic practice, as these were still Schedule I drugs, technically illegal. The risk to her license underscored how deeply some professionals believe in this work.

Ava embodied what people mean when they say “mother goddess.” Long gray hair, open smile, beaded necklace. A welcoming warmth that said: I know, Child. How different she was from my therapist back in New York.

Judith was a Fifth Avenue psychotherapist with a ground-floor office across from Central Park, the kind of place that seemed to belong to another era. I always felt I should show up for my appointments in a pillbox hat and pastel gloves, ready to recline on the divan. I continued to see Judith remotely after fleeing west. But everything shifted once I started the Ketamine work. I had visited a new landscape where I had learned a new language. Psychedelic-assisted therapy made talk therapy feel, by comparison, like taking out the garbage. So I quit.

Though I’d been in and out of therapy for much of my adult life by that time, some part of me still resisted the idea. As a kid growing up working class, nobody I knew saw a therapist—or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. You didn’t let them see you sweat. You didn’t let them see you cry. You certainly didn’t let them see you scared. Even among my closest friends, I understood: keep your underbelly covered.

But over time, especially since the ketamine treatments, I had become less afraid of being flayed for my weaknesses, more comfortable admitting I needed help.

Ava’s house had wood-paneled walls, a mountain view framed by a wide window, sunlight pouring in. Everything glowed. As I was learning, the concept of “set and setting” is gospel in psychedelic therapy, and this setting felt luminous. I felt comfortable there. Ready was my mindset.

She measured the pure, unpressed MDMA in its crystal form onto a scale and then slipped it into a small cup of something sweet and bubbly. I gulped it down as Ava reminded me of what we had discussed during our pre-session call: no need to dig, no need to chase anything down. Just stay open. Let the heart lead.

When the medicine began to take effect, she invited me to settle into a couch piled with soft blankets. A steady percussion played from large speakers as she struck a massive brass gong with a large mallet. It vibrated through my chest.

“You don’t have to do anything,” she reminded me. “Just lie back and relax.” I closed my eyes. I don’t have to do anything? What an idea! I’m a chronic do-er, always tending to someone else: kids, husband, mother, colleagues. But something in me softened. I felt moored in a quiet harbor, a boat rocking gently.

For some time, I drifted in a state of euphoria, revisiting the brackish marshlands of Cape Cod where I spent long, solitary days as a child in a kind of enchanted boredom.

Ava was a silent presence I could feel but not see, as my eyes were shaded.

“Can you describe what you’re feeling in your body right now?” she asked.

I took a breath, relaxing into the flow of a warm stream rushing through my body, both inside and out. “My body feels warm. My chest is loose. My breath is easy. I can feel my heart beating.” I couldn’t think of anyplace I’d rather be.

But just as I was sinking even more deeply into this state of relaxation, an intrusive thought descended on me, swift and sharp: Now I get what addicts are chasing. A flash of recognition, like catching sight of something familiar out of the corner of my eye. The exquisite relief, the sweet loosening—of course they would chase it. Who wouldn't? Then, almost immediately: Oh no. Is this what I’m up against? Fear gripped me. I saw it then—the long, gnarled branches of my husband’s family tree, reaching back through time. Generations who had turned to whatever they could find to dull the ache, to escape themselves. Trauma handed down like an heirloom. Will it ever end? I wondered. This was the legacy I had married into, one I had recognized but pretended we could outrun.

I must’ve muttered something aloud, because Ava gently said, “Allow yourself to enjoy your bliss, Juliette. Hold on to it. Don’t give it away.”

But I must worry! I thought. I’m the wife of an addict, mother of young girls, and parent to my parent. If not me, then who? Tender moments with my daughters flashed before me and then sank to the river's bottom, sacrificed to fear.

“Let’s take a few breaths and come back to the body,” encouraged Ava. She coached me through some breathing exercises until my racing thoughts eased and I returned to my mooring.

At some point later, with me still deep in the medicine, Ava touched my shoulder and softly asked, “Is there anything you feel called to share with me?” I sat up with the wide-eyed eagerness of a ten-year-old at a sleepover party, ready to trade secrets with her best friends into the wee hours of the night. I wanted to tell Ava everything.

I recalled a recent Sunday walk in the park with my friend Ivan and his daughter Rae Rae. Holding her hand, listening to her sing to the daffodils and poke at anthills with a twig, I thought of my daughters when they were young, roaming the woods like magpies, building forts and fairy houses.

“It can be so pure, if you let it,” I said. How had I become so overwrought?

"What do you think got in the way?" Ava asked.

I saw myself back in New York, standing at the kitchen sink, exhausted and dejected. I had just returned from a business trip, where the familiar roles awaited me: family commander-in-chief, accountability monitor, rule enforcer. What burned in me wasn’t just the dirty dishes or missed soccer practice. The daily grievances only gave shape to the deeper wounds—my need to stretch and grow, his fear of abandonment—raw and untouchable. But they infected everything, especially each other. I withdrew quietly, without announcement, while wishing I were strong enough to leave him. And I went on like that. Afraid to break the family apart, knowing it was already breaking. Knowing our daughters were breathing the air we had poisoned with things we barely understood ourselves, and calling it home.

“I think the girls often got the worst of me,” I told Ava. She said nothing. Just listened. Her presence, the feeling of our connection, was in itself a medicine.

Just then, what I can only describe as a moment of grace washed over me. My mind flashed back to that beautiful afternoon in the park with Rae Rae, and I realized that the love I felt for her that day was an extension of my love for my own girls. Rae Rae could feel it, and so too could my girls. They knew they were loved, as I knew I was loved.

Suddenly, everything seemed clear. My dysfunctional marriage made me question the loving core of me, but I was still in there. I was love. I sat with this novel idea for a few minutes, turning it over in my mind. It pleased me. I was pleased to be love.

“I am enough,” I told Ava.

“You are enough,” she replied. And I was as certain as I’ve ever been in my life that it was true. She smiled warmly and moved closer to me with a look of purposeful intensity. “I want you to remember this feeling. We’re going to lock it in.” Lock it in? I wondered. She folded her arms across her chest, like a hug, and repeated one word: “This.”

I mimicked her, repeating, “This.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Any time, anywhere, you’ll be able to return to this exact feeling. Trust me when I tell you, you don’t need the medicine. Just close your eyes and come back to ‘this.’” We sat in stillness for a long moment, mirror images of each other smiling in self-embrace.

“This.”

* * *

Five years have passed since my MDMA-assisted therapy with Ava. "This," however, is not a moment that passed. It is a place I often return to, as real as stepping into the next room, as immediate as my own crossed arms. Over time, the shape of “this” has shifted—widened, deepened—but the core holds true: I am love.

I love you.

Juliette

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