CONTENT WARNING: This post discusses experiences of trauma and includes descriptions of  sexual violence that some readers may find disturbing.

While MDMA therapy has been studied extensively for its use in treating PTSD, it is currently not legal in the United States outside of controlled clinical trials. Lykos Therapeutics is attempting to bring this modality through the FDA approval process and has shown remarkable efficacy in their trials. However, in 2024, the FDA rejected their new drug application, despite 71% efficacy, requesting a new phase 3 study. While this has set back MDMA therapy from formal federal approval, there is still optimism that it will be approved within 3-5 years.

There is also some research suggesting psilocybin therapy can also be effective to treat PTSD. The VA’s National Center for PTSD is a great resource to learn more about these treatment modalities, along with summarized findings from clinical research.

Niko – Okay why do you want to share your story?

Jerry – Because I think it’s important. I think it’s important that people know the truth. For years I was scared to death. Truly I was. I’m going to share a little history on me.

Jerry’s Background

I’m considered one of the pillars of our community. I’ve been in my town for 44 and a half years. I’ve been in I’ve spent 20 years in local politics. I was sign board chairman, I was the board of adjustment chairman, I was planning and zoning, I was, you know, I was in it because I was making a difference in our local Community.

I was pre-programmed with “drugs are bad” and I’m not saying “all drugs are good” don’t misread that please because I don’t think there’s any benefit to heroin or cocaine or methamphetamines. There’s some things that just will never be okay with me and I’ve never tried them nor do I have any desire to.

But I also know, Niko, that I was broken.

I grew up in the deepest darkest ghettos of Detroit. My brother and I were the only white boys in our school we used to get beat every day until we learned how to fight back. My dad was a workaholic and my mother was an alcoholic. She would start drinking and take her rage out on me because I was the oldest child and it was all my fault yeah. 

All this baggage and I didn’t realize how broken I was. The more successful I became, the angrier I became. It makes no sense at all for any logical rational human being. But the more money I generated the more success that I had, the angrier and the more unsettled I was. I mean I got to the point where I was truly a high functioning alcoholic. 

A Chance Encounter with MDMA Therapy

So I was in a business meeting in Arizona in February of 2018 and this man stood up. There were about 50 of us in the room, and he stood up and started talking about MDMA therapy for PTSD.

Niko – was this on topic what sort of business meeting?

Jerry – No it had nothing to do with MDMA had nothing to do with, I mean, we were there networking, everybody in the room paid $25,000 to be there. This was the furthest thing you could ever imagine hearing. I’m like who is this jerk getting up and talking about this crap when we’re supposed to be here doing business? 

Niko – And until this point you hadn’t you hadn’t done any drugs?

Jerry –  Oh never! I never even smoked marijuana. I mean I my drug was alcohol. So this guy starts talking about MDMA therapy for PTSD. He talked about all his experiences and how it’s changed his life and how he’s a better person etc etc. I was fascinated. I was completely riveted. I was enthralled. So after the meeting I got his phone number and I said can I talk to you about this? He said absolutely and between two phone calls, he gave me three hours of his life. I am eternally grateful. 

I told him I don’t know the first thing about it. I don’t know what to expect. 

What I knew is it wasn’t normal for me to be successful and be so angry. It wasn’t normal for me to go out to a restaurant and if there was a loud crash like someone dropped plates I had to leave the room. I had to leave the restaurant. “Get your stuff to go, we’re leaving now, I’ll be in the car.” I couldn’t be there. It just wasn’t normal if there was a woman getting drunk and getting loud, I had to leave. For whatever reason I was given the wisdom to realize that it was not normal. 

I’m a researcher by personality and so that was in February of 2018. I spent literally 18 months learning everything that I could about MDMA, I learned everything I could about PTSD. I learned everything I could about MAPS.org. I learned all I could about Rick Doblin. I learned about how many universities have been working with MDMA for decades all over the globe and all over the United States and they’re not telling anybody anything about this. And I learned how MAPS (Lykos) has taken it through phase 1, phase 2, and phase 3 studies. 

In December of 17 I spent five days in the ICU and I almost died. So I was hyper-concerned about taking anything of any sort. It was very expensive but I found an underground MD that was kind enough to sit with me and I did that when we decided to pull the trigger and do this leap of faith. I wanted to make sure, because at that time I was in stage two of heart failure and a virus had attacked my heart and my lungs and I had lost 50% of the use of my lungs. I couldn’t breathe, I had a weak heart and I’m getting ready to jump off and do MDMA. What in the world was wrong with me? I had this amazing leap of faith with everything that I read. 

There’s a guy by the name of Dr Dan Engel uh who wrote a book called A Dose of Hope. He has treated 4,000 people for PTSD and depression with MDMA. There was only one contraindication out of 4,000 people. So those are pretty good odds; I’ll take that as a plus. 

The Journey

So we did this journey. I did my journaling beforehand. I did my exercise, which is my normal routine. I went for a nice walk, that was about all I could do at the time. Then I showered and put on comfortable clothes and laid down. We did a guided meditation while the medicine was taking effect. We played really nice music and made sure my intention was clear. 

The medicine took over. I will tell you, from my experience, MDMA is Magic. I think at some point it will probably, once they reschedule it, or figure out what they need to do to make it available to people, it will probably go down as one of the greatest inventions next to penicillin. It’s that transformative. I believe that it’s life changing on every single level. 

The medicine goes and it shows you what you need to see. It’s absolutely fascinating. I mean and let me tell you that I spent years with talk therapy. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars with psychiatrists, psychologists, trying to help me clear my stuff. And one session with MDMA changed my life. MDMA will show you your past trauma and it fills your body with dopamine and serotonin so you feel safe, you feel loved, you, no matter what happens you’re safe. 

You’re laying back with an eye mask on and the medicine is repairing the neural pathways in your brain. If you have suppressed memories, it helps you to reconnect with those. It shows you, in your mind’s eye. You get to re-experience your trauma. 

Niko – That sounds kind of scary?

Jerry – I’ll tell you that the concept scared the living and spit out of me. I thought I had dealt with all of my stuff and yet I’m still angry? So there was a huge disconnect. 

When you’re revisiting your trauma, if 0 is no-trauma, and 10 is you’re-going-to-die trauma, if you get to 7, 8, or 9, literally what you do is you sit up, lift up your eye mask, look around see that you’re living in the present day. It’s like it pauses the movie. Then you look around, re-evaluate, and settle yourself. “Okay I’m cool, I’m just remembering.” And you put the eye mask back down, you lay back down and you’re right back in it like you unpaused the movie. You can take a second bite at the apple from a cleared mental state. 

In my case, I was about four and a half or five years old. I’m right back in that moment and I’m experiencing this through the eyes of my 5-year-old little boy. I’m experiencing it like I was looking from the corner, up in the corner of the room, looking down. And I also experienced it looking through the eyes of my uncle as he sexually abused me, all at the same time.

When you’re five years old and something horrific like this happens to you, you feel like you’re going to die. And so all of a sudden it made sense to me that 56 years of my life I have been in fight-or-flight mode. That trauma was still in my body for 56 years of my life. So now I’m looking at it as a 61 year old man. It was absolutely amazing to me that this could happen. 

Instead of being traumatized, instead of being hurt, instead of fight-or-flight, I looked at it and I said “what in the hell is wrong with you?” talking to my uncle. “Why would you do this to this beautiful innocent little boy? What the hell kind of human being are you?” 

I got to reframe it. I got to look at my trauma from an adult viewpoint as opposed to a five-year-old. I got out of that experience and I saw a number of other things that were not traumatic, they were just beautiful. I remember calling my wife into the room and telling her that “I love you, I want you to know that I’m appreciative of you. I’m grateful that you’ve hung with me all through all this stuff and I really have a beautiful life and I love my life and I love you and I’m grateful you’re a part of it.” I mean I remember that like I just told it to her today. 

My wife is going to be canonized when she dies. The Catholic church is going to make a saint out of her because she put up with a bunch of stuff that most normal people would have bailed on me. I was a tyrant. I was a horrible human for a husband, probably a horrible father. But I can honestly say I did the best that I could with what I had at the time. The knowledge that I’ve gleaned since then is absolutely amazing. 

I’ve had a number of MDMA sessions since then. I’ve learned that it’s like peeling back the layers of an onion. You keep finding more and more stuff that you need to heal.

Trauma isn’t what happens to you at all. Trauma is the story you make up about what happens to you. You can have three people experience the same thing and they will each have three different stories about what happened. So trauma is the story you have, you create a narrative about that event and that narrative runs your life until you learn how to change the narrative.

Niko – What you described about going back and replaying your trauma and seeing it from different perspectives, that was you rewriting the story? As a 5-year-old you probably couldn’t help but think it was somehow your fault or something wrong with you? 

Jerry – Yes, what did I do to deserve this? How did this happen? Why? Ouch. As a 61 year old man, you look at it totally differently. You think you effing pervert. You know I mean? I was angry for a different number of reasons.

Integration – The Real Work

I crashed pretty hard that night. The work is exhausting. I got up the next morning and started journaling. I found myself getting angry and I was seething. I remember thinking to myself “what the f is going on? This medicine supposed to make me happy?” I remember literally writing how I was going to go and assassinate my uncle. I mean I was getting specific. I was going to rent a car, get a burner phone. I’m writing “I know where you live. Just pop into your house, three rounds the back of the head. Easy peasy and I’ll be the world will be done with you.” 

Somehow, for some reason, I literally slammed my pencil down on the table and I said “no”. I yelled “No, that’s not who I am!” 

When I did that, from about my navel up to about a foot over my head and about a foot and a half outside of my body just felt cold, empty, and vacuous-like. I had the thought, “What are you going to fill that with now?” Love. All of a sudden, as soon as I thought the word love, I just felt warm and I felt complete and I grabbed my pen. I started writing how I forgave my uncle. 

I’m telling you, life-changine is an under statement. They say that only 20% of the healing happens in the medicine, 80% happens outside of the medicine. That’s the key to it. The medicine opens the door and you have to be able to integrate it. You have to know what to do with it. I’ve been on a healing course since 1984. I’ve been on this program trying to figure out what the heck is wrong with me literally for 40 years. Because of the training that I’ve had and the education that I have, I knew enough to ask myself the right questions. 

That’s why it’s so important that talk therapy with MDMA, talk therapy with psilocybin is critical. Most people can’t do this on their own. You need someone that will help you to integrate the new way of thinking into your life so that you can change your way of being and your way of thinking into what you want it to be. You’re rewriting these stories, the stories of the trauma. The way you rewrite them determines if they still traumatize you. That happens outside of the medicine.

My wife and I do some of this work, we help each other through this. Occasionally, we help friends when they go “Hey, what the hell? What’s happened to you? You’re a different human being.” We’ve lost a lot of friends talking about this stuff because it’s not alcohol and no we can’t even talk about that stuff.

Niko – When you said you replaced that void with love, when I first met you, when I walked into the room and shook your hand, that’s what I felt from you. I felt that that’s what you carry with you and that’s what you exude and that’s why I was attracted to you and to your wife. As you described yourself before, angry and broken, that wasn’t resonating. I was like, that’s not the Jerry I’ve met. So when you said that you replaced it with love, that’s the guy that I met. That’s the guy we’re talking to today.

Jerry – That warms my heart my friend because that’s who I am. I learned that I come from a place of Love. 

I run an automotive repair shop and I tell my employees, every one of them, that I love them. Imagine that relationship that I have with these people. You’re telling another man you love him? Yeah they get it. They understand. They’ve seen the change in me. I’ve got people that have worked for me for 31 years and they’re like “you’re so different.” 

Implications for Running his Business

Niko – How did it change your approach to business? You had been running this business throughout. 

Jerry – I was I don’t know if it’s okay to say this but I was a son of a bitch. I was a son of a bitch to work for and work with. Even as customers! It took a special person to want to come back to our business. I mean, I was tough. I was very angry. I started the day off angry and pissed off because someone didn’t do something right. I would look for things people were doing wrong. It was a tough tough environment to be in for everybody. 

I’ll tell you what I’ve learned today. People ask “Are you ever angry anymore?” “Oh hell yeah, absolutely.” But anger is a tool. It’s another arrow in my quiver. It’s human nature to get angry at times but that’s a normal way of being. It’s not my normal way of being anymore. It used to be. If my pants were on I had an attitude. 

Niko – How do you use that tool? When you feel angry, what do you do with that? 

Jerry – For example, I’m in the process of construction. We’re wrapping up a 10,000 foot building we’re building out here. My contractor has said repeatedly to other people “I’ve never seen him angry, you don’t want to.” I’m really good with that. I don’t have to be. They can feel that you don’t want to push that button. I’m quite content with that. 

It’s really funny, Friday night the contractors all want to sit around here. I have a couple picnic tables on our patio here at the ranch and they all want to sit around and listen to me tell stories. I’m like, “It’s 8:00pm, don’t you guys need to go home to your families? You have an hour and a half drive!” “We want to hang out with you for a little bit more” It’s like okay, well I’m tired, I want to go be with my wife. Please go home. It’s such a different life I live.

From my experience, each medicine shows you different things and in different ways. I certainly recommend that if you’re going to work with any of these, you find a guide. Someone who’s experienced, someone who can help you through any issues that may or may not come up, or at least help you before and after to prepare. Then figure out what to do with this new information or new way of thinking.

80% of us have unresolved trauma in our body. 80% of the people walking up and down the street right now, today, in America, driving down the road. 80% of us have unresolved trauma in our bodies. That means 80% of us could benefit from a single MDMA experience. 

I think it’s horrible for the human species that this medicine is being withheld from us. It’s more than horrific. We have more than 22 vets take their lives every single day in this country. More than 22 vets take their lives and they could be cured with as little as one MDMA session. Why is this being withheld? It makes no sense. 

Keep up the good work you’re doing man. If there’s anything I can do to help or promote please let me know, I’d be honored. 

Niko – Thank you Jerry. I can see why your contractors want to stick around, you’re fun to talk to. I so appreciate you sharing your story. It’s going to do a lot of good. Thank you.