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Recovering From PTSD Using Psychedelics With Benoit Kim

I'm joined by Benoit Kim. He's a US Army veteran and former policymaker turned Psychotherapist and podcaster. His show, Discover More, is a top-ranked podcast in the science category and is in the top 1% globally. He even serves as an aspirational psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist. I can't wait to get to know a little bit more about him with all of you. Benoit Kim, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on. I’m very excited to be on.

Benoit

We have a couple of commonalities. Many of my readers may not know, but Benoit is my maiden name. I grew up having to pronounce that correctly for people every day of my life, it would seem. I wanted to ask you, what's it like growing up with a name like Benoit as your first name?

That's an interesting question because I'm a third-culture kid, and cultural assimilation is an area of life where I had to spend a lot of time thinking about and adjusting to. I share that because I've always been too Asian for my white friends and too white Western for my Asian friends, but I'm not fully American. I'm not fully Asian because, as a Korean-American, I was born in Paris, France. That's why my name is French. Benoit means the same as Benedict. It means blessed one.

I moved to Korea for a year, then to China for six and a half years, and then I came to the United States at age fifteen. I went to a boarding school by myself with my younger sister. To answer your question, it feels interesting because I have to really think a lot about who I am in this world. I realized I'm a global citizen. I could truly say that I'm a global citizen because I spent the first half of my life in 4 different countries and 3 different continents.

You're truly at an intersection. We talk a lot about intersectionality in language and culture, and what that typically means in this day and age is it's one part sexuality, part culture, part minority or maker class or socioeconomic. There are all sorts of layers that are added in. I can tell you, as a kid, my name was always mispronounced on first blush until people understood O-I-T could be pronounced wah. Until high school, when I started to get made fun of for the last name Benoit because of Benoit Balls. I didn't know if that came into your daily life, but it did for mine for a while when I was being tormented.

Exactly right. I think that's a reference from Anchorman or one of the cartoon networks or shows. I do remember people saying Benoit Balls all the time. thinking back, they become fun and interesting, funny stories, but in those moments, I think that's a glimpse of what it feels like to be misunderstood and not have your full-blown identity respected or honored.

Remembering Kate Wallinga

I alluded to the fact that there might be a second commonality. It turns out that we shared a friendship with the host of one of my favorite podcast shows, Kate Walinga's show.

Rest in peace.

Rest in peace. She passed on in February 2024 after a long-time struggle with both brain injuries and some other physical issues that she encountered. Her show is called Ignorance Was Bliss. I was on her show, you were on her show, and then you also had her on yours. After she passed, I republished our episode, and that wasn't too long ago. That was just in February 2024. I have to tell you, it was really nice to go back in time and to listen to her perspective and interview you as part of my education around what I wanted to talk about. One of the things that you discussed together was the power of conversation and language, and some of these skills that we may have lost, it would seem, in our current era.

How we need to focus on connecting powerfully and paying attention, and how having this focused conversation is something that's difficult to do. Sometimes, as a podcaster, you might have your list of questions you want to get through but not really be following what's actually happening in the present. This is something that, on my best days, I think I do pretty well, but it also caused me to wonder, I'm like, " I wonder if he's going to be critical of our interview."

If you don't mind, I just want to share some quick tributes to Kate.

Please. I will always accept tributes to Kate.

I had her on the podcast, and then she was on my podcast as well. I'm really grateful because when she was on my podcast, it was one of the last few remaining opportunities where she was her best self. This was before she entered hospice care, and this was before her health really deteriorated rapidly. She's been dealing with health complications for ten-plus years, since her first TBI from birth and things like that. I share that because I remember, in terms of who's really thoughtful, someone who's doing podcasting for all the right reasons. I remember something she said famously. She said that podcasting is a full-time effort for part-time pay, and because of her physical disability, she was stuck in her basement most of her days.

She has a very loving and caring husband, of course, and her children. She really opened my eyes to why conversations truly can be bread and butter and a source of life for a lot of people. We often forget because we started this as a passion project, it's become part of our businesses, and sometimes you get lost and disconnected from the genesis of why we started this. I think Kate is someone who really demonstrated and displayed that. For her five or six years of doing this, she stuck to her core, and she says that you matter, and her call on every podcast was You matter.

You really matter. She's the one that reminded me, when I was feeling lost, because I've been doing this for five years, too, she said, "Please don't stop. Because you never know who's out there waiting for your episodes to be released every week. You don't know that there are so many people who are thirsty for these conversations, because we don't know people's circumstances." I appreciate you bringing up Kate in the forefront, because I was really sad. It really hit me. I was having some existential distress, using clinical terms, when I found out about her passing and her death. Rest in peace and rest in power. She really made an impact on a lot of people's lives.

I felt that her approach to the conversation was very disarming. I felt like I learned something talking to her. I always took away something from her episodes that I listened to, whether or not I was initially interested in the topic, because she always came at it from a perspective of curiosity. If I were to define a single word that I felt I always hoped to empower and embolden in myself, it would be curiosity.

I think remaining curious means that you're always coming from a perspective of wanting to learn more, and of being open, and of understanding that you don't know everything. Sometimes, I think, especially when we get experts in a field, there's almost this temptation to come to life or your perspective from the perspective of "I know better than this other person."

Frankly, that doesn't create an open dialogue, and you stop learning and you stop growing. I loved that about her, and it was something that made me always want more. I felt, too, that she embodied the principles of collaboration, that she understood that together we could have a better effect, that she was very giving and open with her community, and that that came through. While she might not have been trying to farm for likes on social media or grow in the more conventional way of a podcaster, she was growing by being so transparent in her journey. Frankly, her work was brilliant too, working as a forensic psychologist.

Hearing her come on your show and share the essence of her perspective on that was really incredible. I wanted to tell you that I reached out to her husband before I republished her episode on my show, and he granted me permission to do so. He suggested, “If anyone else you know has interviewed her or vice versa and wants to re-air it, I would welcome that. I just love the idea of her voice hitting people again now that she's gone.” Maybe I'll decide to do something along those lines, in part as a tribute.

One last comment I'll say, based on what you said, is there is a famous Japanese philosopher. I forgot his name, but he says that everyone dies twice in this world. The first death is a physical death of mortality. Your physical body decays into nothingness, but the second death is when the last person who is alive no longer murmurs your name. The last person on this world no longer remembers you.

Everyone dies twice in this world. Our first death happens when the physical body decays into nothingness, and the second when no one on earth murmurs your name.

You've forgotten entirely. In that sense, that's the ultimate death. The footprints and existence of who you were are no longer there. But with Kate, you and I are literally talking about her, talking about her legacy. In that sense, I'm sure Kate would be proud of the fact that she's still alive in a lot of people's lives. She's got millions of downloads, millions of listeners. I really appreciate you bringing her up.

Misconceptions And Myths

Thank you. As I alluded to in our opening, you've done quite a bit of work as a psychotherapist, transitioning from working in policy. This is a full pivot to something like working as a psychotherapist and then also moving into experimentation realms, I call them experimental at this phase because they still aren't broadly used, of working with psychedelics to help people heal from trauma. I wanted to open this conversation there because personally, I've had trauma that I feel psychedelics have helped me with, though I've never gone through any formal guided, I don't know what you want to call them, mind walks or journeys.

I've never done that, but I have used them recreationally on my own with the intention of working through some of these traumas. I felt like I got a lot out of that, more so even than working through just a standard protocol of being in therapy. I wanted for you to have the opportunity to talk about how you utilize these things, what you've personally learned from them, and how we might, as a greater community, think about the use of psychedelics as something that can open our minds, help us remain curious, and heal.

If you don't mind, Karina, I want to go backwards and start from the end, in terms of what are some of the misconceptions and myths around psychedelics. A lot of people call this the Renaissance era of psychedelics. I'm not a fan of that saying because Renaissance implies that it is new. We're in this open era for everything that's possible, but psychedelics have been around human civilization for eons, thousands and thousands of years. Prior to the 1960s, when Nixon declared war on drugs, psychedelics were readily available and were utilized with a wealth of research.

A lot of clinical benefits were established then, but then Tim O'Leary went a little bit too far to the far end, to the ethers, and his flight took off metaphorically and never landed. I think a lot of spiritual folks only focus on the being. We are human beings. Being is important. Spirituality is important. But we're still minds with a body. We do have to stay grounded in this world. I think Timothy forgot the human part.

He went a little bit too far, and the government, the landscape, and the culture were not ready for what he had to share. I think a lot of sustainability and progress, which is the ethos of your podcast, is contextualized and predicated on the landscape, the institutions, the mechanisms, the systems in place. With all that being said, psychedelics are not what's going to make someone go crazy. That is not true. Of course, there are some red tapes, and there are genetic variabilities that could contribute to risk factors.

I can talk more about that as part of the guidance that you talked about. Also, psychedelics are not a cure-all be-all. It's not a miracle drug. It's not something you just pop and all your problems are gone. Your life is magically improved. Rainbows and sunshines, that's not the case. It requires tremendous work. Just to preface, my expertise is specific to MDMA and psilocybin. There's a long list of psychedelics, but for me, I specifically researched and did a lot of work around psilocybin and MDMA specifically.

Psychedelic is not a miracle drug. It is not something you take and all your problems are gone. It requires tremendous work.

The best way for me to describe the efficacy or the effect of psychedelics in terms of containers of healing and trauma, like you talked about, is I want you to imagine strapping a GPS onto a rocket ship. You know where you're going, based on the intention setting. Using Johns Hopkins MAPS, the Psychedelic Research Center's instructions, we call that flight instructions to take flights quite literally. Because, as you know, psychedelics are that powerful. It is a very potent molecule with great ontological benefits. Imagine, how does it work?

A rocket ship is launching at such a pace that GPS is not going to do anything. You know where you're going, but you have no idea how you're going to get there. I say that because it's that powerful. You don't get to control the directions or the journey. You only get to control the intention that you set in the beginning. Intention setting is a prerequisite for every guided psychedelic experience by a qualified professional.

Please don't find someone off the streets on Craigslist saying, "Hey, I'm a shaman.” Please do your vetting and rigorous research because it is very powerful. I share that to close out this loop because the rocket ship accelerates at a very fast pace. You mentioned it is very effective, and the science is clear. We're on the final stage of approval with the FDA. FDA’s advisory board just shut down MDMA as a clinically approved usage as a therapeutic modality. They just shut that down. We're in the process of appealing that decision based on the research.

If you're hoping to derive and obtain ten years' worth of therapeutic effect from psychedelics versus traditional weekly therapy, one hour a week for ten years, it is possible because the insights are profound. The condition is you have to be willing to put in ten years' worth of work. You get what you put in. That's why I use the rocket ship analogy: You need the fuel, you need the conditions, you need the setup, you need the guardrails, and you need the support of a professional. The efficacy is clear.

I tell people and my patients that I'm not in the business of convincing. The science is clear. Evidence is out there in terms of the clinical efficacy of psychedelics. Please do your own research. I do want to preface that there are red tapes and there have to be some guardrails to really maximize and optimize the process.

I have to say, I heard you on another podcast talking about the use of psychedelics. One of the things that a proper guide would do is prepare the person going on that journey for the feeling of being deconstructed or going through something akin to a death, a death of the ego or the soul, or a feeling of no longer existing. This is something I was prepared for when I was using psilocybin with a small group of friends. My personal intention was to confront my own perception of mortality because I felt like I was living in fear in ways that didn’t help me, weren’t serving me, or weren't serving my growth. As fate would have it, I did fully deconstruct.

I got to the point where I felt that I was a figment of the imagination of my friends, that I no longer existed. I was up in the ether, and I had to be okay with that. I was able to observe the world around me in a different way. In this case, I found it healing because I was confronting my own mortality or the idea of a world in which I didn’t exist in this corporeal perspective. I felt like my body was bathed in a warm light. I don’t know how else to put it, it wasn’t that there was light, but I felt like I was bathed in warm light, and I came out on the other side as I descended from being incredibly high. Let’s be real, you're off in some other space, but I felt more grounded. I felt more real in my own body, and articulating that was tough to do.

I also found that I remembered more of this journey and this trip than any other I had been on prior. I had used both lysergic acid and psilocybin in the past, though never ketamine or some of the other mind-altering drugs. I had never set my intention before, which is part of why it didn’t stick with me in the same way. I’m not suggesting that people go on their own journeys without guidance because I think it can be incredibly disarming if you’re not prepared. You could end up in a situation like that of Nick Cave’s son, who ended up leaving this world by falling off a cliff.

That’s life-ending. He is no longer with us. At the age of fifteen, had he had a proper guide with him, would that have happened? Likely no. Perhaps he thought he could fly. I think understanding that psilocybin, lysergic acid, or whatever other psychedelic you might be working with has the ability to provide you with that deep of a hallucination is important. It’s real, it’s possible. That’s why I think it’s always safest to have a guide. That’s my perspective, and one I’ll probably rest with forever.

Ontological Shock And Schizophrenia

How might somebody get started if that's something they are interested in pursuing? I know the legalities are different on a state-by-state basis, and also country by country, because this podcast is available globally.

A quick preface before answering that question. I talked about ontological shock, I alluded to it. Ontology just simplifies the study of reality. That's what ontology means. Ontological shock is a mechanism for someone to experience PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. Simply put, when you come back from a battlefield or have a very traumatic experience, like sexual assault, your reality breaks.

We call that a reality-breaking moment. That’s what ontological shock is, in layman’s terms. You’re unable to reconcile with the new reality or the world you used to know based on your sense of safety. That’s reality-breaking. If that reconciliation process doesn’t happen through guidance and support, you develop PTSD over time. This is very oversimplified. Psychedelics use the reverse mechanism. They create and induce ontological shock when you take them, and they break your reality from what you used to know to who you want to become. That's what you did through your intention setting.

I share that because there are some red tapes before I answer how we can utilize this in a safe way for a global audience or whoever is tuning in. If you have heart disease in your family or if you have severe mental illness in your family history, like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and so on, you cannot use psychedelics. They will trigger your dormant genetics within you, since a lot of these schizophrenia or severe mental illness genetics are dormant. Dormant just means asleep, to use fancier words. Psychedelics have the likelihood of activating that. Once your dormant genes get activated, it's not reversible.

It is permanent. You'll have to live with medications and therapy support for the rest of your life. The risk is very high. That's the real reason why you need a medical assessment and a comprehensive approach with guidance. It's not just to guide you through this intensive and powerful experience. It's also to make sure that you don't have these genetic markers that could be activated, leading you to live with severe mental illness for the rest of your life.

This would be an example of someone with a schizophrenia issue or something to that effect.

That's a complicated question. There are a lot of contributing factors, but, for example, let's say I have dormant genetics. Let's say my aunt, father, or grandmother has schizophrenia, and I've been able to live 26 years with no issues, no voices, no visions, no delusions. I just have a very, air quotes, normal life. Normal is not a bad word. It’s just statistically in the middle of the bell curve, the norm. Stress is the biggest activating factor, and we can talk about stress, too. Stress will trigger your dormant genetics.

Remember, I talked about ontological shock. Psychedelics are extremely stressful to your neurology and your neurobiology because you're breaking your reality voluntarily. That's why they could activate your dormant genetics. Once it's been, air quotes, awakened, you cannot go backwards, you can't turn it off, it's permanent.

I didn’t know that. I think many of us who might have been a part of drug culture at any point in our lives know someone who has gone too far, as we might put it. They might have taken LSD and then suddenly didn’t seem to fully come back, which was quite frightening for that reason. It often involves young men like in their late 20s, which is also when schizophrenia typically emerges. While I should mention this podcast is not meant to treat, diagnose, or cure, none of that jazz. We're just doing this for informational and educational purposes. I should probably say that. No patient-provider relationship is provided between Benoit Kim and my audience.

I'm off the clock.

Off the clock, feel a bow around that one. I find it so intensely curious, in a way, because shouldn’t opening the mind be something that universally supports our growth? Essentially, what you're saying is, in some cases, no. That opening is actually a change in certain people, and it's like a tap that remains open, if that makes sense. I don’t know how else to put it, but I could see how something like that would make it harder for somebody to exist in what our society is if they were to venture into this space and have bipolar disorder.

First Date

I love that you said you're intensely curious about why an avenue or a vehicle that allows us to expand our minds shouldn’t be available to everyone. I just had an analogy pop into my mind. I'm a very visual thinker, if I may. I want you to think about a first date because I want to talk about trust, and I promise I'll make this fit. A lot of people say, "Humans don’t trust each other," or a lot of clients come to me saying, "I feel like my partner doesn't trust me anymore," and I ask, "Why not?" They’ll tell me a very isolated, specific example, "They didn’t want to share their entire banking and financial information with me, so they don’t trust me." I’ll ask, "Okay, are you guys married? Are you engaged?"

They'll say, "No, we've been dating for a year and a half." I’ll say, "Why do you have the expectation that they should let you into every facet of their life, including their finances, which is the most sacred, protected piece for a lot of us? This is very sensitive information." I bring that in because, let’s say, Karina, you go on a first date with a stranger. You trust that person enough that they're not going to murder you on a first date, so you go on the date. You have the basic trust that there’s some safety. I’m sure you've done your research, made some assessments, and picked a public place where there are other people around. You trust that person on a fundamental level, as human to human, that you will not be murdered on the first date, so you go on the first date.

In my smarter days, I might have actually let them pick me up when I wasn't as wise, to my own peril, but yes.

There’s a gradation of trust. There are different tiers of trust, but then you wouldn't trust the person enough to say, “Hey, I know we just met each other. This is our first date, but I want to have six children with you, and I want to show you my social security number. I'm going to bring you home to my family next week for Thanksgiving.” No one does that. It doesn't make sense.

Why am I sharing this example? That's what psychedelics are. You don't want to start at level 100. Sharing your social security information and your banking information with your significant other, you will get there if you're married, if you have this committed relationship, you share everything. That's a natural progression, but no one in their right mind will start there. It doesn't work.

I did have a first date where somebody told me they wanted to have children, and it felt like an overshare. At first, I was like, “Okay, I'm just going to let it slide.” There was other chemistry there. I thought everything was good. We go to a bookstore in downtown Santa Cruz afterward, and he’s gravitating toward a birthing book that shows all the pictures of childbirth, and he's like, “I can't wait to be a dad.” I'm like, “This is just too much. I'm 24, it's our first date, and no.” The language at the end of that interview, on that date, was, “It was nice to meet you,” not “Let's keep going.” That can be a thing. People perhaps need to guard themselves just a bit in that first interaction or that first set of interactions, and some of us don't know that.

Having some boundaries is important, but I want to make this connection where I think it's about connection, boundaries, and recognizing that this is a process. I think instant gratification has really permeated every aspect of our society. People want healing yesterday. One-day Amazon delivery? Not fast enough. “I want it within 24 seconds. The moment I purchase something, I want it to be delivered at my doorstep.” That's what people want. It’s a journey, so start somewhere.

Start with therapy. Start with a mindfulness practice. Start with a daily meditation practice of five minutes a day. Learn to see how it feels to be sitting with your own thoughts and feelings, because being lonely is different from being alone. I love being alone. I appreciate aloneness, the solitude. I'm very comfortable with who I am and the person I'm becoming, but I don't like being lonely, because, as you know, loneliness is the number one killer. It kills more people and causes more depression and suicide than any other cause. Loneliness truly is a killer.

Loneliness is the number one killer. It causes more depression and suicide than any other causes.

Learn to sit with yourself first because when you do psychedelics, this will be 5 to 7 hours of nothingness but you and your internal world, plus the insights and whatever information may flow through your mind at that time. Finally, to answer your question, this is why we cannot start with psychedelics. It is a powerful vehicle for change, insights, progression, and transformation, but just like you wouldn't share how many babies you want to have on a first date, start small. Meet someone first, get to know each other, have some small talk, share some of yourself honestly without lying to them, and then see where that leads you. Do you feel safe? Do you feel comfortable? Is this the right vehicle for you? Reading helps you grow, therapy helps you grow, and psychedelics help you grow if used safely and properly. There are many different vehicles to change, but this is the one I wanted to really highlight and emphasize.

Neuropsych Assessment

How might somebody know whether or not they happen to have one of these disorders that they should be really open to and watch for and which they might want to seek therapy to discover and confirm?

A lot of folks in the family, especially if you're from an ethnic minority like myself, I don't know about your culture, but families don't really talk about their mental illness or their situations, especially intergenerationally. If your family is honest, ask them, “Hey, do you know anyone in your family history with heart disease, with severe mental illnesses, or anything like that?” A lot of times, they're not going to tell you even if they do know, or sometimes they don't know, they have no idea. The best way is to do a neuro-psych assessment or speak to a physician. There's a lot of blood work you can do. There are a lot of neuropsychological assessments you can take. Your insurance may not cover this if you live in the United States, but that's the safest way to make sure there are no risk factors. You do this in consultation with a psychiatrist or a mental health and physical health provider, like a medical doctor.

Understanding that somebody here might have experienced PTSD in some way, mine came from sexual trauma and from living on the streets for a little bit. I ran away at the young age of thirteen because I didn't have a safe situation at home. In that period, I saw a lot of things that I did not want to repeat on this show, and ultimately, that left its mark. It took me some time to get through that. I frankly thought I had solved everything. I felt like I addressed it enough, in part working through psychedelics but also through my own journaling, connection with friends, telling of the story, and reformatting how I looked at things. I also understand that every time you retell a story, it changes.

We have this neuroplasticity in our brain, which means that memories aren't exactly completely accurate or true. I think this might be part of the reason that by experiencing something, we sometimes re-traumatize ourselves a bit, but it also can wear away the sharp edges of these negative experiences. You're using psychedelics in a way to help people really completely remap how they deal with these particular moments from history, but even just retelling the story in writing or with a friend, I think, helps to smooth it, if that makes sense. At least that's how I've felt, but it's still there, and it's still a trauma.

Addressing Trauma

I still find myself somewhat triggered from time to time. I've always hated this term triggered, in part, because it's an accurate description of what sometimes happens to me, and I don't like that. I don't like that it's possible to be triggered. I want to be able to be past the trauma. What wisdom might you offer someone in my situation, whether or not it's exactly the same, to help them potentially connect with somebody like you, to consider how they might, I don't know, address that thing that they might finally have admitted is a bit of PTSD?

First of all, Karina, I love when you use the phrase past my trauma. I appreciate you not using the word overcome. That's one of my pet peeves. I love language. Language is intricate, and as podcasters, it’s a lot of words, language, and connection. I like the way you said passing your trauma because you can't overcome your trauma.

Whether you like it or not, it becomes part of who you are. It's not who you are, but it's part of who you are and your experiences. Moving past it is the way because you have to move past it. You can't overcome it. You can't overcome a part of who you are. That's not possible. There are different ways. I like how you talked about triggering, and this is another commonality.

You talked about your sexual trauma and living on the streets since thirteen. A lot of my patients have experienced homelessness. I know the very dark and difficult reality of that. I also experienced sexual trauma myself. It took me seven years to heal through and move through my own sexual assaults. Of course, a lot of people are aware of women being sexually assaulted, as they should be, but then a lot of people don't know that sexual assault is bidirectional.

It impacts all genders, all personhood. It's not only for women. According to the latest statistics, about 1 in 7 men gets sexually assaulted. That's a very high number if you do the math, and I was one of them. I tried a lot of different avenues to heal through it. It just didn't work.

As you said, triggered. I think to get triggered, you have to have a level of self-awareness. To get triggered, you've done some work. There are different levels. There is being aware, which is where you are, where I am. There is being subconsciously aware but suppressing. There is the deepest level, which is repression. People use suppression and repression interchangeably.

They're different. Clinically, suppression is consciously pushing down your hurt, your pain. You're consciously choosing to use alcohol or different substances to forget the pain, forget the suffering, to escape. Repression is done unknowingly. You cannot access the repressed memories of the repressed trauma. It's not possible. It's unconscious.

Psychedelics allow you to get there, or EMDR or a lot of trauma-based therapy modalities allow you to move past the resistance of your guardrails, the walls psychologically that you’ve built up, the psychological firewall, so to speak. To get triggered, you have to be aware. I don't think getting triggered is a bad thing. I think, for me at least, I want to normalize what it feels like to be triggered. If you are triggered, it means that there's opportunity for growth. I'm not invalidating the hurts, the memories, the memory consolidation that you talked about.

I love it when you said memories change over time. People say hindsight is 20/20. That saying is called narrative fallacy in psychology. That's the term. Narrative fallacy means that retelling our stories from this framework of hindsight 20/20 gives us the illusion that we know exactly what happened. We knew exactly how this world works. We know exactly how the stories unfold. That's a fallacy. We think back, and everything seems rosier.

Memories are not stored. Memory recall is actually technically incorrect. We don't recall our memories. We reconstruct them based on cues, the smell, the visuals, and the words. That's why you get triggered because you're calling back or reconstructing the memories. Reconstruction implies errors. Reconstruction implies there's room for mistakes and misrecalls. I don't think being triggered is a bad thing. I want to normalize it. It means you've done some work, but there’s still some healing ahead.

Healing is not a dead end. I think it's a lifelong process. As your capacity increases, as you expand your capacity, you derive different insights. Based on different insights, you look back at your trauma or your traumatic history, and you can look through your experiences through a different perspective, too, but you're exactly right.

Psychedelics allow you to uncouple your pain from what happened to you, and it uncouples your memory consolidations of who you think you are. We are not our trauma. They're just part of what happened to us. Life is grand. Life is big. We don't get to bend life to our will. That's why it's a process. Going back to psychedelics, everything is a process.

We are not our trauma. They are just part of what happened to us because life is great.

Do you believe that psychedelics allow you to access the memory as if it were a true view of what happened at that point in time, almost like a remote viewing of the event, or do you think it's similar in that we're essentially remaking the memory?

No one's ever asked me that question before. I don't know. There's no proof. There's no machine or MRI that shows us the exact memories we're viewing, but I think it's closer to a bird's-eye view. I think you get to review the archives of what happened to you in a more unbiased, objective way. It's like watching a movie almost. It could be a first-person POV or a third-person POV.

As for whether it’s actually untainted memories when you're doing psychedelics or just viewing them through a more uncoupled perspective, it's hard for me to tell. Next time I do a guided session, or if I do it myself, I'll look into it and check for more research. I haven't come across any research or experience that tells me exactly how to differentiate what type of memories we are accessing.

Legalities And Efficacy

I got thinking about that as you were speaking in our earlier conversation about the 1960s use of psychedelics in research. The CIA, our government, was using psychedelics from a remote viewing perspective, trying to actually get people into think tanks to viewpoints in the past, future, or even in the present across the globe. They were trying to delve into the true power of the mind. The research was fascinating, though much of it couldn’t really be documented because it was experiential.

The thing I have heard and also feared when exploring psychedelics, is that people worry if they start thinking about the trauma they experienced, they will essentially be reliving it or be re-traumatized, like a new PTSD will erupt from it. I think it's almost like that same fear of, "Oh, well, if I delve into this, maybe I'll find out I'm bipolar, and my brain will never come back to center again."

I don't know. I love your perspective on that. I also want to dig into the possibility because I know certain legalities are getting looser. I'm seeing ads on Facebook for guided ketamine psychotherapies and things like that in California. I don't know how broadly available those are. I also question whether microdosing with mushrooms or taking a guided journey, like access to this, is real and if it's not laced with something. How do you even go about that? I'd love for you to provide your perspective on these two things.

Would you like for me to start with your second question, or the first, in terms of the best way to access this? You say it is becoming a little more available with loosened restrictions.

Let's start there.

I don’t know exactly where everyone is listening from. The biggest issue with legality is the limitations of access. Access is the biggest privilege, period. Access to information, like podcasting hours, access is the biggest privilege, full stop. In California, ketamine is already legalized. Ketamine is the only approved legal clinical therapeutic for PTSD, but according to research, ketamine has the least sustained efficacy. What that means is it works, but you need to reapply it every week or every two weeks.

It is a good entry point; it's low-pressure and low-commitment, so to speak. If you’re simply going off ads on Facebook or Instagram, it’s very hard. With the rise of misinformation and disinformation, even vetting has become extremely difficult to parse through what is actually true. AI has made it even more difficult, the content AI machines. I really feel that. That's why I want to preface this by saying you have to go through someone you know.

The safest way is through word of mouth or internal referral within your network, but then you might ask, what if you don't know anyone in your network or anyone within your vicinity to have that access? You can go to Johns Hopkins MAPS. It lists some resources and potential navigation areas you can look into, but the best way is, like I said, to go for accredited institutions. Psychedelics are utilized, I believe, in about thirteen countries worldwide, as in ketamine is legal and certain entry points are possible.

The first thing you want to do is look up practically accredited psychedelic treatment centers. You can Google it, use whatever browser you like. I'm sure a list of them will come up. Call them, go to their websites, look at the founders, and check their scientific backing. Do they have MDs? Do they have PhDs on their board? Are there clinicians? Are they licensed? Is this an accredited nonprofit, or is it for-profit? Who is behind this funding? All this information should be public. Do your own research and parse through that. You can call them.

Most treatment centers offer free consultations for about 15 to 30 minutes. Ask a lot of questions, and then look up podcasts hosted by accredited experts in the field of psychedelic healing. Look for some of the criteria. Conjure and create a list, and look at some of the non-negotiables you should have, as well as the guidelines. Do they offer comprehensive assessments like we talked about, the guardrails? Do they acknowledge the red tapes?

It's the same thing when you're parsing through research. Even with peer-reviewed research, I know you're starting, you're in your doctorate process, and that's also very convoluted. Even peer-reviewed research cannot escape this era of misinformation and disinformation, but you want to look at who's behind it and who’s the source. Don't go for sites or places. Let me simplify this. If any place or any group offers guaranteed results with no guidelines or limitations, disregard it, and run away.

If there is any psychedelic center that guarantees results with no guidelines but no limitations, disregard it and run away.

Any peer-reviewed research article that does not talk about limitations in their findings, run away. You can see that from the abstract because every research and control study, even RCTs, has limitations. True professional places should acknowledge the limitations, guidelines, and red tapes, first and foremost. These are some of the 4 or 5 things you can look for wherever you are. Unfortunately, because of legalities, if they don't have those places and it's really difficult for you to access, it's probably better not to go underground and seek out these molecules by yourself because the odds, the possibilities, are small, but that 1% carries a lot of disproportionate risks.

I'm glad you said that because you'll even hear horror stories of fentanyl being laced into things. College kids are buying pizza with drugs delivered with it, thinking it’s one thing, but it ends up being another, and they lose their lives over it. This is something serious, especially if you're trying to heal yourself and don’t know where to start, and you end up trusting something without really checking it out. Especially when you're talking about what's marginally legal, like, you might be able to in a particular state use something because it's been decriminalized, but it's still at risk for being contaminated or not being what you think it is.

I think that's a particular problem too in the MDMA world, or MOLLY, ecstasy, whatever you want to call it. Often there's a lot of speed in that, and that could exacerbate some other conditions you might have. It's more methamphetamine than something else. I think it's powerful that we talk about this and at least get people thinking critically before they embark on a journey, especially if they're trying to get better in the process. It's not about running away anymore. It’s about trying to get better.

That's actually a perfect segue to your first question. What if I do this powerful, amazing modality that Karina and Ben want to talk about? I'm interested. I have access in my city. I have the privilege of state legalities that allow it to happen. I'm going to try this out. If that's the case, you do all your processes like we talked about. It's amazing. You're about to embark on a truly reality-breaking, life-changing journey.

Even Steve Jobs accredited a lot of his creativity and the success of Apple to his psychedelic journey, in addition to his studies in India, of course. I want to bring back why a guide is a must. It's not a choice, not an afterthought. It's a must, and they're not cheap because we're not able to provide the supply for the demand, basic economics. They are fairly expensive, but you need a guide.

Here's why. Based on your level of awareness and cultivated practices, again, psychedelics are like a rocket ship or a GPS system strapped to a rocket ship. You're going somewhere far, but you don't know where you're going exactly. The role of a guide, simply put, is as an anchor. Your guide is the bridge between this reality you live in and the ethers you're going to enter, this alternative reality. Every time you feel lost, anytime a scary memory that you've been suppressing or repressing unknowingly gets triggered and resurfaces through this neuroplastic state, psychedelics reactivate and expand your neuroplasticity.

This just means neuropathy in your brain, and neuroplasticity is the bedrock for all habit formation. People who have bad trips, we've all heard horror stories. As you said earlier, people jumping off cliffs, people jumping off a third-floor apartment. I actually knew someone from college who jumped off a building because he did three types of acid, which is an insane amount of dosage. What if I have a bad trip? What do I do? How do I get back? How do I not get additional PTSD from trying to heal my PTSD, like you said? A guide will guide you through that.

I would typically say something like this in my own private psychedelic work with some of my clients: I would say, "Karina, what are you seeing? Do you see a door? I want you to slowly move through the door. See what that means to you. What does that symbolize to you? Have you seen that door before? What do you think it means?" It's also a guided question. I'm not telling you anything. I'm not giving you advice because when you're in a neuroplastic state, you're extremely malleable. That's what neuroplasticity is.

A lot of professionals lose their licensure and go to prison because they do sexual assaults or weird things to patients who are subdued under the neuroplastic state because you're the light in the dark. They're navigating this darkness and this new, vulnerable, and very opposing experience. You're the guiding light. You tell them, "Hey, you're fine. You're safe here. I'm here with you. Follow my voice. Be grounded and centered. You're not going to get lost." But you don't tell them anything beyond that because anything you say will get encoded.

This is the reason why your intention setting is so important. When you're in this neuroplastic state under psychedelics for the entire duration, your mind is wide open to whatever information comes in. The intention you set in the beginning gets encoded. This is very esoteric, but it gets encoded into your subconsciousness, which then manifests during your trip or your experience. That's why a guide is a must. It's the bridge between the current reality and the eternal reality you're going to traverse. You need that bridge because the journey will get rocky.

It's a good type of rockiness as long as you have a rope and a safety vest that you can rely on. That's why you need guidance. Through this guidance, that's how you prevent yourself from getting a second PTSD from your healing journey.

I could see all of that very clearly, as you described it. I was getting visuals. I was even getting potential memories. Perhaps you're around somebody who's just a ball of negativity, and you choose to go on this drug journey with them, and their negativity creeps into your world and gets encoded in how you're thinking. I've never had a bad trip. I've questioned whether I'm capable of having one because of the fact that I seem to come at hallucinogenics from this perspective of curiosity.

I've been around people who've had very bad trips and suddenly thought their bodies were time bombs and they were going to explode or something to that effect. It's an intensely uncomfortable thing to be around somebody who is experiencing that, especially if you have a mind full of LSD, too. I think dosage is important, as you talked about, as someone taking far too much.

Sometimes, if you're in the recreational world, people say, "I'm taking two, I'm taking three, I'm taking four." There's no way you would need more than maybe one or two. Not to get into dosage and all of that, because again, we're not advocating for that, but to understand what this drug can do and how much you would need for it to be a tool as opposed to something else.

Also, just to understand you've got somebody there to be your anchor. I really love that perspective. As I was thinking about this, as you spoke, I thought about some of the moments in my life where I had somebody, my ex-stepmother, as an example. She was incredibly abusive in a verbal capacity. She would tell me negative things about myself all the time. Sometimes, I would think about those moments when I was under the influence. Even thinking about those moments while I was under the influence seemed to make them more true to me.

I think having a guide to work through them helps because that wasn't somebody from the outside telling me something; it was me recalling a moment while I was under the influence, and it impacted me more negatively as a result. I think you and I come from the same point of perspective, which is that language is powerful. Words are powerful. Your experiences can be truly powerful. They can be powerful in a positive way and also in a negative way.

Having the ability and the foresight to walk through life, understanding in some cases that they're just words and you can dismiss them, and in other cases, that they're meaningful, powerful, and going to help guide you and aid you, being able to bring those into your worldview, your self-perspective, that, to me, is what therapy is about. Literally this week, for the first time since I was fifteen years old, I started therapy again. I'm like, all right, well, I'm ready to look at some of this again anew. I'm ready to go back and delve into what I might not yet have healed enough from. Perhaps you like the triggers, but I don't. I would like to be free of them.

Doing Good

I would like to be able to come at my life and my future growth and perspective, understanding the impact of these moments of my life but not being emotionally affected by them in the same way that I still am. I believe that it's possible. I think even just believing that it's possible to no longer feel like I am, in a way, the prey of those moments still, it feels like that sometimes. I want to get away from that. I just have to tell you, I've so appreciated this conversation, and I would love to continue talking to you another time.

Perhaps going a different avenue, talking about something else. I really hope that those people who have read this show have got to thinking about their own experiences, whether they be traumatic or not. How some of these things, like psychedelics, can be a tool for somebody who needs it, and it doesn't have to have a stigma associated with it. Like, oh, that's a drug, that's a negative thing. I think there are drugs that are negative things that people get prescribed and use every day.

Let's look at the things that are the right tools in the tool shed. If this is something that would be helpful to you, I hope that you have the ability to go out there and find the best path for you that could include something like this. I would like to offer you the floor as we prepare to wrap up, to go ahead and either share a question that I haven't asked that you wish I had, you could ask and answer it, or some closing thoughts and to tell people a little bit about the services that you might provide, whether or not they're, in quotes, expensive. Maybe you could also answer what that expensive perspective might be, because that could mean a number of things to different people. The floor is yours.

Before I share the question that I didn’t ask but think might be helpful, I just want to share this to close out the conversation: We are the embodiment of all the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Let’s be more intentional, a little bit nicer, and a little bit more compassionate and gracious about the words, the language, and the stories we tell, especially about ourselves. Seventy percent of Americans display more compassion for others than for themselves. According to research in 2023, 70% of us are kinder to other people than we are to ourselves. What does that say about us?

Can we be a little bit nicer about the self-criticism and our own process? Because we’re all growing in a different space, so intentionality shifts reality. I just want to really talk about the power of language and why words really matter. The question that I was hoping you’d ask, or that you didn’t ask but might be helpful, is: What does mental health mean to me as a psychotherapist? I'll answer that question. I work with a lot of male clients, all genders, all sexual orientations. A lot of male clients come to me because they feel a little bit more comfortable working with the same-sex gender, I suppose. I tell them in the very first session what I think therapy is.

I ask about their own respective experience in therapy, because unfortunately we are the vanguards of a lot of first-time therapy seekers. This is something I think very highly about. If I don’t show up to the best of my ability, then someone may never seek therapy again because of me. That’s why I give my best. That’s why a therapist is part of who I am. Mental health, for me, means knowing and recognizing the fact that none of us walk this path of life alone. That’s what mental health means to me. Because again, loneliness is a cause of depression.

If you really boil down and deconstruct, using your word, what depression is, it’s isolation. It’s the feeling of being alone. The feeling of loneliness. The feeling in the stories we tell ourselves is that no one else gets me. No one understands what I’m going through. I’m all alone. But you’re not. AA meetings, twelve steps, they’re powerful because you learn that, holy crap, I’m not the only one who left my home at thirteen.

I’m not the only one who lived on the streets. I’m not the only one who was abused by my parents and got sexually assaulted. Look at all these people with similar experiences, and they moved past it. They’re still alive. They’re still fighting for another day. If they can do it, why can’t I? That’s the possibility I think you talked about earlier.

That’s what mental health means to me. If you want to check out or have more conversations with us, I don’t offer psychedelic-assisted therapy explicitly because it’s a long commitment. I have to spend six hours with you for the session. It’s a lot of time commitment for me. I only do that for people locally, speaking. You won’t be able to reach out for that, but if you’re interested in the insights I’ve talked about, or some of my way of thinking, I have a very active and restless mind. I think about these things all the time.

If you thought, “I like the way Benoit is viewing mental health, trauma, and healing,” just reach out to me. Come to my website. You can find me on Instagram, social media. I don’t have a book to publicize yet, but when the time is right, I’m sure that will happen, too. As I said, I really think stories are powerful.

We’re all storytellers, one way or the other, so why not share some powerful stories that resonate with us? Because people forget, stories are visceral experiences we feel called to share. They’re not empty words. I find conversations very meaningful. The art of dialogue is dying in 2024. This is my effort in changing that lens. But thanks for having me on.

Episode Wrap-up

I have thoroughly enjoyed our time together, Benoit Kim. I will include links, of course, to everywhere we can find you, including your podcast, Discover More. If people have not had enough, which I’m sure they have not, they can find that as well. Perhaps I’ll also give a listen to your episodes with Kate Walinga from Ignorance Was Bliss. They were great episodes, with both of you guesting on hers and vice versa.

I thank you for that. I look forward to staying connected. I will also say that when you’re ready to write that book, I know some people who can help you with that. Please do reach out. I also serve as an ARC reader for some because I have incredible attention to detail and have been known to find errors that otherwise don’t get found or little plot lines that disappear in fiction. It’s like a, I don’t know, eagle eyes sixth sense that I have. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me on. Great questions. Honoring and spotlighting Kate Walinga. Very kind soul and rest in power to her.

Rest in power, Kate. This will take you directly to our expanded blog page, which includes not only the video version of this podcast episode but also complete transcripts and links to the other resources and past episodes that we discussed, including those with Kate Walinga.

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Important Links

• Benoit Kim
• Discover More
• Instagram – Benoit Kim
• www.YouTube.com/@DiscoverMorePodcast
• A Special Tribute Episode to Katherine "Kate" B. (Bowers) Wallinga and her podcast, Ignorance Was Bliss