How Do We Heal From Trauma We Don’t Even Know Exists? We Dig.

A (very) personal story about Ayahuasca, meditation, and #MeToo

The mind is one wild thing. I’m still baffled at what it’s able to do. Turns out, there are parts within us that have the ability to completely wipe memories from the surface of our awareness. I’m not talking distant childhood memories, I’m talking recent adolescent memories.

As one might imagine, repression is not the most sustainable way to cope. Yes, it may be in our favor at the time, when we’re unable to process events as they happen because we lack sufficient coping skills. But repression doesn’t equal dissolution. These repressed memories don’t just turn into thin air, they get buried deep down in our subconscious and continue to live in our shadow. And from there, they amplify behaviors and reactions that are often unwanted and inexplicable to our rational, conscious mind.

Today I want to share an incredibly personal story with you. The story of how I found out that I had my very own #MeToo experience just a few years ago.

I was able to elevate this completely “forgotten” memory to my conscious awareness by working with the psychedelic brew Ayahuasca, and with meditation (specifically Vipassana) as well as Internal Family Systems therapy. It took over a year to unearth my truth, and it was painful, but it was worth it. And definitely necessary.

“Until you make the subconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.” — Carl G. Jung

So let’s start at the beginning: what was it that caused me to look in the deepest darkest corners of my psyche?

My Continued Struggle with an Eating Disorder Prompted Me to Look Deeper and Deeper

I was years into a persistent battle with bulimia, which had turned me into a pro at investigating my own mind. Over the course of hundreds of hours of therapy, I investigated my childhood, my mindset, my behaviors, and my limiting beliefs. Self-improvement and the quest for physical and mental health became the primary focus of my 20s.

I’d get better for stretches at a time — weeks, sometimes even months — but the eating disorder would always return. With every relapse, my hopes that I could live a normal life were shattered once again. After actively trying to recover for over five years, my motivation dwindled. I got frustrated. And eventually, depressed. The depression lasted for almost two years, and it scared me. I felt hopeless. Like nothing would be able to fix me.

“If this is what my life still looks like at age 30, it’s not worth living”, I told myself as I approached my 27th year on this planet.

On paper I was successful on every front: I had a high-paying job and an Ivy League MBA, a loving family, and a flourishing social life. But my eating disorder continued to pull me down into darkness and despair. Loved ones close to me were in the loop but couldn’t help me, and neither could professionals. Over the years, I worked with a variety of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and Eatings Disorder recovery coaches. Almost every person I saw eventually told me to get more help. It felt discouraging that none of these professionals had the confidence that their support would be sufficient to solve my problem.

“You’ve already done so much work. You really have tried everything”, a therapist once said.

The week my psychiatrist wanted to put me on Prozac a New Yorker article on the difficulty of getting off psychiatric drugs landed on my doorstep. I saw it as an omen to not pursue medication. Later on, extensive education on antidepressants would confirm my initial intuition: they would not be my medicine.

I considered residential treatment but quickly dropped the idea since it’s an unrealistic recovery environment, and in a sense, I felt too far in my recovery to benefit from it. Half of the time everything was completely normal and I was a well-balanced healthy and happy human. I no longer restricted my food, had learned to intuitively eat, had a healthy relationship with exercise, and had healed my body dysmorphia. I even went to nutrition school. I felt supported and the shame dwindled.

Yet, I was still periodically swept off my feet by violent binge and purge episodes that often came out of nowhere, without any triggers in sight.

I asked myself, where could I possibly get more help? Where?

Eventually, I followed another internal whisper and turned to Ayahuasca.

My First Experience with Ayahuasca Was Incredibly Difficult But Deeply Healing

Before my first set of ceremonies with the ancient psychedelic brew, I was so miserable that the risks didn’t keep me from it. Ayahuasca is a strong psychedelic and is known to produce challenging side effects. As you can imagine, the purging didn’t scare me off much. It was more so the fact that you go into the depths of your psyche — and you don’t want to mess with that.

With a lot of respect and caution, I went ahead because nothing could be worse than how I was living my life. With each relapse, I was losing my will to live a little more.

So, early last year, I went to Rythmia in Costa Rica, a resort that legally serves Ayahuasca under medical supervision. It felt like the safest option. The price tag was steep, but again, I was desperate. I wrote about my experience here, and over 20,000 people read my story and many engaged with it — which is part of why I’m so encouraged to share another raw take on my healing journey with psychedelics. If you’re entirely new to the topic, I encourage you to give this article a read first.

In summary, I had a major breakthrough reliving a childhood memory. A memory that had left me deeply hurt and with the belief that something was wrong with me. That I wasn’t enough. Healing this experience changed my life a lot. I now know that I’ve always been whole and complete, I was just a sensitive child that misinterpreted what had happened to her.

My default mode these days is self-love rather than self-loathing, and even if I still deviate from it from time to time (breaking habits is hard), I no longer feel this existential dread, the feeling that I just want to crawl out of my own skin. A feeling that was all too familiar throughout my early and mid-20s.

For some time after the experience, I thought that maybe this would be it, that I had healed what I needed to heal — but turns out, it wasn’t.

There would be more for me to uncover.

In fact, Ayahuasca had already given me a glimpse during our first encounter.

On night two, I went to bed disappointed and discouraged because I yet again hadn’t felt anything during the ceremony. Then, in the middle of the night, I woke up to the word rape. My heart was pounding like crazy, it felt like it was about to jump out of my chest.

I fell back asleep but woke up the next day scared and confused. In the morning, I spoke to one of the guides, a woman who had openly shared that she had suffered from alcoholism and bulimia for many years until Ayahuasca showed her how she was molested every day as a little girl. I thought she’d be a good person to talk to. She didn’t say too much but simply assured me that I’d be fine: “Don’t worry. Sometimes she [Ayahuasca] will just prompt things to see what you react to. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

Well, turns out it did mean something. (And in hindsight, I guess you could say my body did clearly react to it.)

But that day, I welcomed her words and pretty much forgot about the incident thereafter. It didn’t come up again that week. In fact, I wouldn’t think about it for another six months.

Until I mustered the courage to sign up for another mental surgery: a silent 10-day meditation retreat.

It Was During a Vipassana Meditation Retreat That My Suppressed Memory First Paid Me a Visit

“Sitting” a Vipassana retreat had been on my bucket list for a while. I knew it was going to be hard, but I had been meditating for years and was eager to embrace the challenge. I’ve written about the experience previously, so I’ll only highlight the parts of it that are relevant to this story.

Vipassana (aka “Insight”) meditation is a mindfulness technique focused on body scans. It’s popular for its flagship 10-day courses where you do nothing but meditate all day. You don’t speak, read, write, or move much.

If you’re thinking that sounds intense — yes, it is. I definitely underestimated how difficult it would be. But again, I was on a quest to get well.

The retreat was rewarding, after days of pain, uneasiness, and mental dread I experienced several moments of utter bliss. It was wonderful.

But one day, towards the end of the retreat, a very specific memory spontaneously rose to the surface of my awareness. I was 23 years old and on the road for my very first project as a management consultant. I suddenly remembered a colleague who was working on a different project but stayed in the same hotel as me. I was puzzled because I realized I had completely forgotten about him. All I remembered was the following: He was a surgeon by education who was dashing and charming and we became friendly and eventually flirty. After running into each other all the time and texting a little back and forth, we decided to get together. Work always got in the way of a proper date, so I invited him to my hotel room one night for a glass of wine. We worked crazy hours, so by the time we were both done with work, nothing was open anymore. I also had a big room with a separate seating area so I honestly didn’t think much of it. It felt like our only option and he seemed like a great guy that I wanted to get to know better. Of course, I wasn’t entirely naive and didn’t expect anything serious from this. But, I did expect to have a say in how fast things would move along.

He came and we opened a bottle of red wine. But that was pretty much it, I couldn’t recall how the night had ended. I found it odd that I wasn’t able to finish the memory in my head. I then also remembered telling a close co-worker that I was going to meet him, and all he said was “be careful with that one, I haven’t heard great things”.

Anyways, the fact that this came up during a meditation retreat made me a little nervous. This meditation technique specifically is known to blur the lines between the conscious and the subconscious. It’s intended to.

Why the hell was I remembering this dude now?

I honestly thought probably nothing happened and that my memory was just messed up. Most likely we just had a glass of wine, maybe made out a little, and then he left.

But why remember now? And why did I seem to recall that I never talked to the guy after that night again?

It got me thinking.

Did something happen?

I confided in my meditation teacher and she reinforced the notion that memories are a delicate thing, and our minds can certainly fabricate them. She also urged me not to focus on it too much, since I’d be able to confirm or investigate after the retreat.

And so I finished the retreat with some bliss and one big question mark.

For the following few weeks, months, the thought of that memory wouldn’t leave me alone.

Almost daily I would ask myself, did something happen?

Through A Specific Type of Therapy — IFS Or “Parts Therapy” — I Reconciled My Blurry Memory

After the retreat, I took two months off work to travel to Mexico and spend my days doing yoga. I worked with yet another ED recovery coach. I went home for Christmas and by the time I returned to LA, I’d been behavior-free for nearly three months.

It felt too good to be true. I wondered if my bulimia was finally gone.

The first Ayahuasca experience had almost completely alleviated my depression, did the Vipassana retreat heal my eating disorder?

I returned to work in January and within two weeks I relapsed.

And I relapsed hard. With full force. Like a drug addict. It was a huge hit in the face. After all this work, I was back on the bathroom floor crying my eyes out. How naive of me to think that I had “fixed things”.

So, I decided it was time to move onto the next modality. I needed a new shovel to help me dig up whatever was still feeding my addiction.

I’d been curious about Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy for a while. It’s a fairly recent therapy model in which the patient is treated by going into dialogue with their different “parts”.

From the IFS website:

We believe the mind is naturally multiple and that is a good thing. Our inner parts contain valuable qualities and our core Self knows how to heal, allowing us to become integrated and whole. In IFS all parts are welcome.

This spoke to me. Deep down I knew that if the eating disorder was still so alive, there must be some need it still served.

So I found an IFS practitioner and in our fourth session, we had a major breakthrough. Our dialogue went something like this:

(Me with eyes closed in a meditative state)

Therapist: So, let’s turn toward the eating part. Let’s have your driven parts and all those other parts that hold shame for it step away. Do you have a picture or feeling of your eating part in mind?

Me: Ok. Yes, I do.

Therapist: Just ask the eating part, “why does it feel the need to still binge on food?”

(Pause)

Me: Because it doesn’t want to be noticed.

Therapist: Why is that?

(Pause)

Me: Because it doesn’t want to receive any attention.

The moment these words left my mouth a flush of heavy emotions rolled over me. I started balling and just cried for the rest of the session, unable to put words to what I was feeling. But I knew why I was crying.

Immediately, I knew why that part of me didn’t want to be noticed.

At the end of the session, my therapist told me to get more help.

But this time, it was pretty clear to me who’d be best able to help: The plants.

Plant Medicine Helped Me Heal the Traumatic Memory in the Most Beautiful and Gentle Way

At this point, I’d been doubting my memory for the past six months. The rational part of my brain continued telling me: “Most likely nothing happened. You’re just desperately trying to find reasons for your eating disorder now.”

But that day, when the undeniably strong physical reaction came upon me and tears started pouring uncontrollably, I knew something must have happened.

Because the mind can make up thoughts, but the body cannot fabricate emotions.

As Bessel Van Der Kolk likes to say, our body really does keep the score.

And emotions never lie.

I felt relieved because I was finally getting closer to the truth. But the memory was still incomplete. Over the coming weeks, I started vaguely remembering that I had expressed my hesitation, which he countered with something like “but why did you invite me to your hotel room then?”. And instead of defending my pure intentions, I recalled thinking, “He’s right. Why did I? It’s my fault.”

Things were moving too fast for me, but instead of “standing up for myself,” I had completely disassociated from the situation. I didn’t move. I didn’t push him off, because, he was right, I had invited him to my room. I simply froze.

During my Ayahuasca ceremony, I had a vision of myself that night in the hotel room. He was lying on top of me, and I was lying there underneath him, lifeless. But I was full of life, my entire body was vibrating with love. The shame was completely gone, not an ounce of judgment was left. And I realized I didn’t need to remember all the details. I realized it was not my fault, even if I had invited him to my hotel room.

What followed was a complete rewiring. After revisiting the memory, it was now my own body in the here and now that was vibrating with love. Thoughts were coming in at a lightning speed. Almost like they were flying at me. Self-critical thoughts that were all too familiar. But as soon as one thought had come, Ayahuasca would immediately reframe it into a more positive and loving one.

This probably went on for a full hour. I was bombarded: negative thought, immediate reframe, next negative thought, immediate reframe. I remember thinking, “wow, I need to write this down, there is so much healing and wisdom in each realization I’m having”. But again, she let me know, “you don’t need to worry, you will remember what you need to remember.”

The entire experience was so loving and gentle, I kept asking, how do I deserve this? Me, really? Are you sure?

“Yes, you,” she said. “All of you.”

The next morning I awoke to an incredible lightness and joy. I didn’t remember a single reframe, but it didn’t matter. I felt rewired.

Trauma Is Not What Happens to Us But How We Interpret It

The trauma was not what happened to me or how he behaved that night.

The trauma was the fact that I felt an unsurmountable amount of shame. For freezing. For letting it happen. The rational parts of me judged the scared little girl in me for not acting more firmly. For not standing up for myself, the strong and independent woman I was. So, they took over and did the only thing that seemed to make sense: they completely deleted the memory from my awareness. It was too shameful.

While weeks later I still don’t remember any of the reframes, I have noticed something odd: It’s almost like a new part stepped into my “Internal Family” that is holding me safely and kindly as I navigate the integration of this incredibly difficult experience. It’s almost like Ayahuasca healed the traumatic event that night, and then she equipped me with the mindset necessary to integrate it once I went back to my normal waking life.

The shame that has also been an integral protagonist of my eating disorder has weakened. So much so that I’m writing this article for the whole internet to read.

As I process all of this, I realize that I forgave my abuser that same night during the ceremony.

But the one I have yet to forgive is myself.

I haven’t forgiven myself for the abuse that I put myself through over the past few years. The incident didn’t cause my eating disorder, it had earlier origins, but I was extremely close to full recovery at the time it happened. So I do think it played a big part in keeping it alive.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but at least I have clarity now. I know the path I’m walking. And I have a gentle voice inside my head helping me navigate it. I know I will overcome the eating disorder permanently, I can taste the freedom. To all the professionals who tell us that “we will always have to deal with it”, I politely disagree.

No, we are not the victims of the trauma we experienced, and living with the aftermath is not our fate. Whether we remember what happened or not, we can find true root cause healing if we dig deep enough.

Our mind is beautiful and each part of it is only there to protect us. There’s an incredible amount of intelligence in how it’s crafted.

But there’s also an incredible amount of intelligence in the plant kingdom. I’m profoundly and utterly in awe of the fact that Ayahuasca tested a year ago if I could handle the truth, and brought rise to something else when she realized I wasn’t ready yet.

I’ve never met a more gentle and effective teacher.

Disclaimer: If you’re struggling with trauma or think you may have suppressed or repressed something but aren’t sure, I first and foremost encourage you to seek out professional help. I don’t necessarily recommend a meditation retreat like Vipassana without sufficient preparation or integration support. Finding an IFS therapist or trauma specialist is the safest place to start. As for Ayahuasca: despite common misconceptions, there are no bad trips, only difficult journeys. And the most difficult ones are usually those that will yield the most profound healing. Before you seek any of these modalities out, please make sure you have sufficient professional support. 

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