Trauma Archives - Sergio Integral

How therapy can help us face uncertainty, grief, and meaninglessness.

In Before IT Hits the Fan… I wrote about how, as a therapist, I hear a version of the question that gives this article its title at least once a week; depending on what is going on, often many times per day.

Things Look Disheartening

We are living through what has been called a polycrisis: multiple crises that interact with and amplify one another. But you don’t need me to tell you that. Almost every conversation, if long enough, turns to politics, money, isolation, or the environment. Let’s face it: things look disheartening.

It is easy to lose hope when everything around us reminds us how bad things are. Crises breed helplessness, numbness, panic, and fatalism. It is tempting to disconnect through mindless scrolling, or to convince ourselves we must keep watching the news to stay informed. Cynicism and despair can feel almost rational when it seems there is nothing we can do.

Yet here we are. Do I wish things were different? Absolutely. I worry about my young daughters. I feel sad thinking they may inherit a worse world than the one I grew up in. So when clients, quietly or explicitly, ask me whether humanity will make it, my honest answer is that I don’t know.

This is not the first time things have looked grim. I find it hard to imagine how our predecessors endured wars, invasions, and upheavals throughout the ages. As a Mexican, I have tried to grasp how Native Americans must have felt when settlers and conquistadores shattered their cultures, or how European Jews must have felt during the Second World War. This is no consolation, but things have been worse¹.

The Question Beneath the Question

And still, it is hard to make existential sense of any of it. When a client looks me square in the eye and asks, “What is the point?” I understand why Camus thought life was absurd. Is there a plan? Is this some god’s test? Karma? An illusion? Does humanity deserve it? Are we doomed to follow the dinosaurs as just another curiosity in the history of this planet? Again, I don’t know.

Fortunately, as a therapist, my job is not to reassure clients or provide neat answers, but to witness and accompany them on their life path. Therapy does not solve the polycrisis, but I deeply believe it serves a purpose. This is not me justifying my profession, but trying to understand how I, and all of us in the helping professions, can help from our trench.

How can therapy help?

How can meeting privately with another person possibly help? For one, nobody should suffer alone. Crises heighten isolation and powerlessness. We may ask: Am I the only one seeing this? What can one person possibly do? It is easier to fall prey to doomsday news and despair in isolation.

Therapy offers a place to grieve together. A place to regain dignity, lucidity, and perspective; to figure out what matters and how to proceed. It offers a potential space to stay present in the face of doubt and to wonder what life is asking of us now. It also offers the possibility of reclaiming agency and deciding how to act, how to relate, and what not to become. Despair deepens when we become spectators instead of agents.

A Different Kind of Hope

It is also a place to rekindle hope. Not the naïve hope that everything will be okay. History provides no guarantees. Mature hope is a choice (Macy). The decision to keep going without surrendering is already a victory. As Václav Havel suggested, hope is not the conviction that things will turn out well; it is the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Not Becoming Cynical

When, in therapy, we face anxiety, adversity, despair, and meaninglessness together, we claim the “courage to be” (Tillich). In the presence of another person, the client confronts fear and desolation. This can revitalize us and keep us from becoming insensitive. We may not be able to save the world, but we can prevent our souls from becoming cynical, cruel, or inert.

Furthermore, as Jung suggested, evil flourishes when humans repress their shadow. The unconscious person is easy prey to fear, hatred, and mass ideology. In therapy, we stay present instead of avoiding reality; we metabolize grief, rage, and fear. Only then can we move from protection or paralysis into action.

It is in relationship that we remember we hurt because we belong. With that clarity, we can decide how to proceed, how we choose to show up in times of crisis, and how to uphold our values and the dignity of life.

When therapist and client courageously affirm life in the face of suffering and uncertainty, we connect with a deeper dimension of identity within us that is more spacious than fear. We remember that we are more than a frightened, skin-encapsulated ego.

Facing Uncertainty Together

So, are we gonna make it? I still don’t know. I hope we will. In the meantime, let’s walk together, meet our pain, find meaning amid the meaningless, and trust, not in a Pollyannaish way, but, as Tolkien suggested, with the clarity that we have the opportunity, and perhaps the obligation, to decide who we choose to be in the time given us.

Facing uncertainty with support

If you are moving through some version of this yourself, you are welcome to reach out. Therapy can help you stay grounded and make meaning. We don’t have to face it alone.

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Related reading: Why the Relationship Heals

We must remember that how we experience crises is relative to our level of privilege. Even if we are all going through this polycrisis, there are significant differences between how each group is being affected by it. Those differences matter. ↩︎

There is an ongoing discussion in different forums about the problem of abuse in psychedelics circles and the need to train guides better. I could not agree more. We all need to make a solid commitment to safety, professionalism, and accountability in the field of psychedelics-assisted guiding and psychotherapy, insisting on the importance of comprehensive training for guides. It is my hope that the psychedelic community worldwide, both above and underground, takes notice and keeps this conversation going.

– – – –

Helping others to work with expanded states of consciousness is not an easy job. Of course, every profession has its occupational hazards; still, I am convinced that due to what it attempts to achieve, being a psychedelic guide is not for the faint-hearted.

Psychedelics can be defined as unspecific amplifiers or catalysts that make it possible to take a journey into one’s psyche and explore otherwise inaccessible deep recesses of the unconscious[1]. This means that they bring whatever is hidden deep in the unconscious to the surface. As any psychotherapist can tell you, this has an incredible healing potential AND conceivably is also a recipe for disaster.

It is common knowledge that the unconscious holds all kinds of repressed and disowned material. Among other things, it includes our darkest impulses, hidden wounds, and private fantasies (often of a sexual or aggressive nature). If that was not enough, we must add archetypal and transgenerational forces dwelling in the collective unconscious.

The psychedelic guide job’s description includes the willingness and ability to work with these wild subterraneous currents, operating both in the clients and the guide, to facilitate healing and growth. A good guide must be able to engage not only at the mental-emotional level but also focus on the body, energetic, archetypal, and spiritual ones. To do this, they must become skilled in Western psychotherapy interventions as well as those emanating from the spiritual and shamanic traditions of the world. Quite an undertaking!

With such a high bar to meet, mistakes are bound to happen. In Mexico, an old proverb says: “In the soap maker’s house, everybody either falls or slips,” meaning that one should not be quick to judge others because, sooner or later, we too will make a blunder. In a way, guiding happens at the soap maker’s house[2]. But how can we reduce the risk of making such mistakes? The answer is quite simple: training, training, training. Or, more specifically, learning, doing our inner work, and staying humble (and getting plenty of supervision too!)

Being fully aware of the pitfalls of guiding, any guide training should begin by discussing ethics. Then, continue talking about it throughout, and end by reminding trainees again about the value of ethical behavior and their responsibilities towards clients. When I teach, I spend time talking about the transference (including the erotic one) and countertransference, working with shadow material (the client’s and the guide’s), teaching about working with physical touch, respecting boundaries, working with childhood and attachment wounding, appreciating the power-differential in the guiding relationship, etc. I put particular emphasis on reminding students how and why the stakes are even higher when clients are in expanded states of consciousness.

However, talking about ethics is never enough. I help students to understand why these ethical principles and healthy boundaries are needed. Experience has shown that ethical principles rarely work when presented as a list of “thou shall not.” They only function when guides internalize and commit to upholding these principles.

As it is often pointed out, psychedelics are going through a “renaissance.” Among the many aspiring practitioners who want to become guides, a few always want to do it for personal (often unconscious) reasons. There is often a guru or messiah syndrome somewhere to be found or old hidden childhood wounds crying for attention. I see my job as an opportunity to teach them that being a guide requires a profound humbleness, an endless openness to learning, and an unwavering commitment to serve others. As expressed initially, being a psychedelic guide or a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist is not for the faint-hearted. It demands standards of care, ethics, and practice well above those in most related professions. The stakes are higher, and the potential for damage (and healing) is formidable. Let us all reiterate our pledge to continue working to become guides entirely devoted to such standards. Let’s do it together.