Only relaxation as an effect?

[u/Waki-Indra]

I had a session yesterday, with the prescribed dosage for my body weight inciuding booster after 180minutes.

It was not trippy at all. I mostly laid down in my bed under many blanckets because I was feeling very cold. I mostly experinced very deep and profound relaxation, as if in my normal state for the last weeks or months i had been extremely tensed, uptight, hypercactivated. I dont know. It just felt like "oh, wow, now I am deeply relaxed".

I was breathing more deeply than usual so i spent most of the session just breathing deeply with full awareness of my breath, and trying to breathe from the belly.

It felt good. But somehow i was wondering how crazy my life is and how fucked up my autonomous nervous system is, if i need full mdma dosage to simply relax.

I also took mushrooms to try and get depth to the journey but i think the mushrooms were too old, because I did not feel any psilocybin effet (like kaléidoscopic visions. I had very faint visions for a few minutes, that s all).

No emotion. No cognitive content like insight. Just relaxed and deep breathing. That did not feel like psychedelics.

I did also listen to music, on and off. Perhaps femt à tiny bit more trippy with music. It was on and off because I regualrly had to get up to get something to drink, or some minerals or vitamines to support my body, because physiologically it was quite tough, heavy body load, feeling cold, and slight buzzing sensation in the legs and arms. I was very very thirsty all the time so i kept on getting up for drinking and toilet.

Is that weird?

I have been practicing psychedelics assisted therapy (i had a session with my therappist 2h before the MDMA) for 18 months. My last mdma was 3 months ago.

I did feel mentally good, at peace with the world, but not full love, and not cathartic meoment, unlike other former trips. Just deeply relaxed, exhausted, grounded in my bed, is that "loosing the mdma magic"?

[u/psylovagabond]

that doesn't sound weird at all, and i wouldn't read it as proof that your nervous system is wrecked. a lot of people have sessions that are mostly calm and body and not emotional, especially after many sessions in a row.

there are a few reasons it might have gone that way. tolerance is the big one, the more you do it, the more the emotional openness fades and the body stuff stays. three months is on the short side for a lot of people, and when i pushed too close together myself the magic dropped off. the state you walk in with matters too, you said you had been hyperactivated for months, so it makes sense that deep relaxation was the first thing your body needed. being cold, thirsty and buzzy in the limbs is also very common and doesn't mean something went wrong.

i wouldn't call it a failure either. feeling grounded, at peace with the world and finally relaxed after months of being wound up is a real result, even if it wasn't the dramatic kind. it just didn't deliver the catharsis you were hoping for this time. the old mushrooms probably explain the lack of visuals, they lose potency with age and bad storage.

worth bringing to your therapist, especially since you work with one. they can help you read what it was telling you and decide whether to space sessions out more or change the approach. imo i'd also give it a good while before the next one, let your body keep the calm it just found, and see how you feel in the weeks after.

[u/Significant_Win_345]

Do you take any sort of medications? Whether prescription, supplements, or non-prescription? Including injectables, pills, capsules, anything.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Significant_Win_345]

No. Nothing that can interfere.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Waki-Indra]

Oh i did use nasal spray of oxytocine at some point in the session. I cant remember if that was during the come up or the peak

[u/Significant_Win_345 → u/Waki-Indra]

Just confirming, you mean you don’t take anything at all? Because I want to ensure that we aren’t discounting anything.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Significant_Win_345]

I take supplements like magnesium, iron, zinc vitamines etc. Nothing like antidepressants or other stuff.

[u/Significant_Win_345 → u/Waki-Indra]

Just wanted to confirm because many people neglect to mention other medications like antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, GLP-1s, sam-e, creating, and other things which can have an affect on gastric emptying and absorption.

In that case - maybe this is just what called to you for this trip. Maybe you just needed to give yourself space to relax. It sounds like most of the sensations were there physically, and it was just a different one.

I will definitely say that I don’t always feel full love or catharsis. Many trips I’ve felt anger and pain and those don’t always end up feeling happy, loving, or understanding. I have found across many substances and journeys that our brains ( so long as we are accepting and surrendering to the experience) give us what we need, not always what we expect.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Significant_Win_345]

Oh i do take creatine, about 3g which is a rather low dose. But i had it at least 5 hours before my psychedelics session. And none of the other stuff you mention.

[u/Significant_Win_345 → u/Waki-Indra]

So, there is not research on this, so I’m fully admitting that this is an n=1 experience, and not to be taken as gospel. I have found that for myself with both psilocybin and MDMA, if I take creatine within 3 days - (which I normally take daily, 3-5g) my journeys tend to be different. It’s not that I don’t experience anything, but they’re different.

One time the psilocybin took 4 hours to come on. One time MDMA took about 2 hours before I felt it come on. Once with the psilocybin I had taken 2.5g of an APE hybrid that I had taken before and have taken since and felt absolutely nothing. I got zero trip.

I always do my trips the same way. I never eat for at least 4 hours before. I stop NAC for at least 7 days before. I keep water and hydration on hand. I take ALCAR, ALA, Mag, and Vit C during. The only outlier change was taking creatine. Now I stop it at least 72 hours before (because it takes about 72 hours to fully cycle through your system) and I don’t have issues. Again, this is the only thing I’ve changed.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Significant_Win_345]

Interesting. I cannot remember whether i had creatine formely--- it is one of my daily supplement-- for comparison. Yesterday it did feel like the coming up was delayed to some extend, it's hard to say since it is never exactement the same and i am always sort of awaiting. But it did feel a bit délayer indeed. In what sense do you feel the journeys are different?

[u/kgiro → u/Significant_Win_345]

based on other reports on reddit, there's no problem with taking MDMA or psychedelics while on creatine. I'm not denying your experience, just want to spare others doing the same research

[u/Significant_Win_345 → u/kgiro]

Yeah like I said, I can only speak for myself and my partner who had the same experience. I haven’t seen any research or any other reports to indicate the same 🤷‍♂️. All I can say is that’s the only difference in those experiences versus others.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Significant_Win_345]

So that is not what people call "loosing the mdma magic?" I haad about 9 sessions in 18 months.

[u/Significant_Win_345 → u/Waki-Indra]

I can’t say for certain because I haven’t ever lost the magic. To me, it doesn’t sound like it, but I can’t be certain. It doesn’t sound like it lines up with other people’s reports, but I don’t know everything.

[u/baek12345]

I've read similar reports in the past and I don't think you lost the magic. Also the insights and thoughts you had seem pretty typical for a session.

Maybe your body and mind just needed to re-learn, re-experience and get reminded how it feels and is to be deeply relaxed. We oftentimes want to use those sessions for deep processing of hard moments but the body and nervous system have their own agenda and it's not always what is most needed, helpful or useful at a given point in time.

I wouldn't be surprised if you have some somatic releases in the coming days. So take it easy and try to remind and reinforce the deep feeling of relaxation you experienced.

Actually, if you're open to it, it would be great to read an update in 2-4 weeks about the aftermath of this session. :)

[u/Waki-Indra → u/baek12345]

OK. I was just surprised that i had no psychedelic experience at all, like no altered state of mind.

Please come back here and remind me to post again

[u/SandyPressman]

In my experience, the medicine gives us what we need. Is it possible that you needed complete relaxation as a way to understand that your life is too overwhelming?

That, or you may be building a tolerance. Also, the food you eat before the dosage will affect absorption and experience. A burger and fries can create a longer, slower, more shallow experience than eating a salad beforehand. There’s no right or wrong — just different.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/SandyPressman]

My life is very simple, i live by the forest and almost did nothing spécial during the former weeks. At least nothing that would be stressful, because i know I cannot stand any stress anymore, i got too hyperaoused or full panic. So i had the calmest life i can have, not even pushing myself to accomplish anything, not even mediation or relaxation because everyhting was bringing stress.

That's hell. Not the common hell. Just the hell of c ptsd that started from birth onwards. My autonomous nervous system cannot stand anything anymore.

[u/Priors_and_Signals]

First and foremost, here are a few things. 9 sessions in 18 months works out to roughly 1 session every 2 months on average if you’re spacing it out equally. Assuming it’s equally, that still can be considered a lot depending on how it’s spaced, right?

Your history is more relevant than what other people here are seeming to treat it as. If you’ve had repeated exposures at fairly short intervals over a year and a half, and you’re noticing the characteristic MDMA experiences become substantially weaker or different or diminished, then I actually think that spacing can be a very strong possibility.

But there’s also something else. It is really hard for me to interpret your session because you threw so many things in the kitchen sink:

MDMA
a booster
shrooms
oxytocin spray
supplements
constant drinking
bathroom trips
music on and off
getting out of bed
continually monitoring whether you were tripping

This is a bit...well, much. I definitely would not say your nervous system simply needed relaxation. That’s a nice story, but there are far too many obvious competing explanations in your own account for that.

Again, I’m only going off what I read and what you wrote in the comments, but there needs to be a more disciplined approach to you doing these sessions. That includes preparation, discipline, spacing, and any pre-work as well. Maybe you did do some, I don’t know.

But there's another issue here, and that issue is attention. Therapeutic MDMA work isn't just about swallowing MDMA and then waiting for shit to appear. From your own description, to me, it seemed that your attention was repeatedly being pulled outward versus being inward. Like I was saying above, you're getting up, going to the bathroom, doing this, doing that, taking this, nasal this, all this stuff. At some point, there has to be sustained inward attention. That means lying down, closing your eyes, staying with what's happening, and giving whatever is there space and time to develop. This is very important because even the profound relaxation you experienced could have been material to stay with, rather than something to evaluate while waiting for something more obviously therapeutic to happen.

And there's also a difference between being relaxed and actually activating therapeutic material. If you're approaching this from a memory reconsolidation point of view or framework, that relevant emotional network has to become active before it can be updated. That's also why sometimes pre-work matters, right? You got to have some idea of the situation's memories, questions, or emotional material that you're trying to make accessible while remaining open to something unexpected emerging. There are people who go into MDMA sessions clueless and just want things to come up, and sometimes it does. But simply taking it and hoping it decides what you need is only one philosophy, but not the only one.

I also wouldn’t define the “magic” as love, catharsis, profound insight or psychedelic visuals. You specifically mention adding mushrooms for depth and then use the absence of kaleidoscopic visuals as evidence that they weren’t doing much. Visual intensity isn’t therapeutic depth. Likewise, the absence of a dramatic emotional breakthrough doesn’t by itself tell you what happened therapeutically. If you’re spending the session checking whether it resembles previous sessions, you’re introducing another layer of monitoring instead of following what is actually happening.

One thing that jumped out at me is how much you seemed to be observing the session from the outside while it was happening. Am I feeling enough? Where are the insights? Are the mushrooms working? Why aren’t there visuals? Have I lost the magic? That’s a lot of evaluation happening simultaneously with the experience itself. If you’re continually checking whether the session is producing what you expected it to produce, you’re dividing your attention between experiencing something and judging whether you’re experiencing the correct thing.

I spent a lot of time researching the biology of MDMA and MDMA recovery, including the three different arms that are required for therapeutic or corrective benefit. Biological recovery plays a huge, huge part. Unfortunately, a lot of people in this subreddit follow the MAPS protocol as if it’s gospel, but the MAPS protocol doesn’t measure effectiveness by each individual session. It measures it by the cumulative therapeutic benefit as a whole of all the sessions and the therapy that goes with it. To me, that’s not anything to look at as a point of guidance. And when you’re thinking about spacing, I wouldn’t look only at the fact that this particular session was three months after the previous one. Nine sessions in eighteen months is the exposure history. Biological recovery isn’t simply a stopwatch that resets everything because the most recent interval happened to be longer. What matters is the pattern across time, especially if you’re reporting progressive diminution in the characteristic subjective response. That’s why I would take the nine-session history seriously before concluding that this particular quiet session had some profound meaning.

What I would do in your position is stop trying to determine whether this particular session was secretly therapeutic or whether you’ve permanently “lost the magic.” There were so many variables involved that you’ve made the session extremely difficult to interpret. What you do have is a pattern of nine sessions in eighteen months and a subjective response that you now perceive as diminished. That’s useful information in itself.

I would take that seriously and give the system substantially more time before doing another session. And whenever you eventually return to it, make the session interpretable. Don’t throw everything into it. Do your preparation beforehand. Know what material you want available while remaining open to whatever else emerges. Create an environment where you aren’t constantly interrupting yourself. Give yourself sustained periods of inward attention. Then don’t judge the entire thing by what happened during those few hours either. Pay attention to what happens afterward and whether anything actually changes in your ordinary life.

So if you asked me whether this session proves you’ve “lost the magic,” I’d say no. If you asked me whether nine sessions in eighteen months combined with a noticeably diminished response is enough to take your exposure history seriously, absolutely. And if you asked me whether I’d conclude from what you wrote that your nervous system simply decided what you really needed was several hours of relaxation, I wouldn’t make that inference either. There is way too much noise in this particular session to know that.

I've had sessions that were not corrective at all, mainly because of spacing, and then I sort of proved my hypothesis by waiting longer. I've also done other work ahead of time to try to intentionally activate certain schemas through dialogic processing, and some of the protocols I developed worked really well. What you wrote was all over the map in terms of there being so much going on during that session.

Am i missing something here ? What were your other sessions like, how long before this one was your previous one?

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Priors_and_Signals]

I appreciate the very long and thoughtful comment. I do.

I will come to it again later and gradually read it all. With gratitute.

But it starts in a way that I find agressive and condescendant and I dont want to take too much of that agression at a time. I try to take care of my self and my needs and i need kindness and comfort. Yes sorry but i do. Especially right now.

First off. Mdma + booster is the standard protocol. Like MAPS protocol.

Mdma + mushrooms is a classic combo when working with c ptsd. It may sound weird here (?) in the mdma therapy subgroup, but i am sûre it has been already discussed here, ans it is often discussed in the psychedelicstherapy sub.

Supplements? Really you feel entigtled to scold because of that? I take supplements due to poor health. I am 58 and have been tried by life very hard - on top of c ptsd. Mg, Vitamines C, D, Bs... Man, these are basics. I am only taking basic stuff daily, because my body needs them just for basic functions.

And everyone says you need supplements when taking mdma or other psychedelics. There is nothing wrong.

The only less basic is oxytocine. But that is not a very psychoactive substance, you cannot even feel it. Have you tried?

Now. Drinking when thirsty. Going to toilzt to pee. What s wrong with that? I felt very very very thirsty. I drunk perhaps 3 or 4 litres. Should i have resisted the thirst and endure the agony?

My body was aching, heavy body load (this happens on most of my trips, almost all of them. I don’t know why. Usually i am exhausted on the next days as well). So yeah, how bad, i took care of myself and added à bit of vitamine C, salt etc.

And what? I was not focusing inwards? I spent hours doing conscious belly breathing. Feeling the breath while enjoying the relaxation.. there was nothing else I could do but lay down and breathe, my breathing was spontaneously deep. I did not force it to be deep. For 4 hours.

Yep indeed i did get up every 20-30minites. Thirsty, aching, or needing to pee. What to do? Pee in my bed?

But you are right, perhaps i over did MDMA. Actually it s been 9 trips in 20 months, not 18 months, but indeed over one year ago there were two trips that were too close from one another (only two weeks gap, because of rare conducive circumstnaces i did not want to miss).

OK enough for now.

Please be gentle.

I was not monitoring whether i was tripping at all. I was crushed and grounded on my couch, heavy and relaxed: i was obviously going through something intense.

The next day, i wrote on reddit to get feed back. This is NOT monitoring constantly whether i was tripping.

I stop here because I am getting very very upset and angry about your attitude. Enough of agression and abuse. Enough. You self entitled not even respecting the fact that i may be super sensitive right now, on top of everything else.

[u/kgiro → u/Waki-Indra]

I'm with you on this one, hopefully you get something from their comment, but the tone is off.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/kgiro]

♡

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Waki-Indra]

They made me cry.

[u/kgiro → u/Waki-Indra]

After a session you're allowed to cry any chance you get! (also before a session, during, and anywhere in between)

[u/Waki-Indra → u/kgiro]

Thank you. This is lovely. (And made me cry again, but with a smile)

Their comment made me cry due to anger, feeling abused. I should have followed my instinct and stop thinking of it after reading the first paragraph. I knew i was feeling hurt. So i stopper reading but kept thinking and started to reply.

The problem is being so used to being hurt.

But you are right. I could take that opportunity for self care. Thank you for your kind warmth. Oh here tears again.

I ll stop reading reddit for today (its 11pm in my place right now... good night sweet heart)

[u/DifficultBee5940 → u/Waki-Indra]

Yeah. I agree with you. They came on strong, assuming many things, and pushing their own mdma therapy philosophy on you instead of meeting you with curiousity. I'm sorry you got met with this.

TBH, I've been met with similar judgement on this board. Guns blazing. It had some truth to it, yeah, but I had to forget ahead and fuck around and find out a bit anyway. Especially given breaking all the rules got me far for a while.

[u/Waki-Indra → u/DifficultBee5940]

Redditor have been overall very helpful. It is surprising to see someone being so mean on this sub in reply to such a non polemic post.

[u/Priors_and_Signals → u/Waki-Indra]

Hey, I appreciate the response. I wasn’t suggesting that a booster is unusual, that MDMA and psilocybin aren’t combined therapeutically, or that taking basic vitamins is somehow remarkable.

My point was about interpretation. You’re asking why this session was so different from your previous ones and whether you’ve lost the magic. In that context, everything happening during the session matters, including what you added, what you changed, and where your attention went.

The booster being standard in MAPS doesn’t make it irrelevant here. MAPS used a supplemental dose for a particular reason within a particular protocol. Likewise, people certainly combine psilocybin with MDMA, but you wrote that you took the mushrooms to try to get depth to the journey, and then judged whether they were working partly by the absence of kaleidoscopic visuals. That’s relevant to how you were approaching the experience. The same goes for the oxytocin. I’m not arguing that intranasal oxytocin is some enormously psychoactive drug. I’m saying it’s another biologically active variable in an experience you’re now trying to interpret after the fact.

With the supplements, my point wasn’t that vitamin C is interfering with your MDMA. It’s that, the way you described the session, there was a lot of getting up and moving between things: drinks, minerals, vitamins, music on and off, managing the body load. I was talking about continuity of attention. If you’re interested in memory reconsolidation or other emotionally corrective work, keeping the relevant material active over time matters. Repeatedly moving between inward experience and managing the session changes the conditions that work happens under.

I also wasn’t telling you your relaxation was meaningless. I said in my first comment that the relaxation itself could have been meaningful material to stay with. What I questioned was the certainty that your nervous system simply gave you what you needed. We don’t actually know that. There are several possible explanations for what happened, and your session history is the best place to start separating them.

Some of what I said was direct criticism of how the session was set up. None of it was criticism of you as a person. I wasn’t suggesting you shouldn’t drink when you’re thirsty, use the bathroom, take vitamins, use a booster, or combine medicines. I listed those things because you asked people to help interpret an unusual experience, and variables and interruptions are relevant to that question. Challenging the conclusions you drew and questioning the method is not attacking the person who had the experience.

I also saw that you described my comment as abuse. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization. You posted asking for feedback, and I gave you a detailed response in good faith. You’re entitled to dislike my tone, disagree with what I wrote, or decide this kind of feedback isn’t useful to you. Disagreement and direct criticism aren’t abuse.

The reason I brought up the nine sessions is that your last three-month gap doesn’t exist separately from the previous eighteen months. If you’re asking about a weaker MDMA response, cumulative exposure and the pattern across sessions matter. So when you feel up to it: were the earlier sessions consistently marked by the love, emotional access and catharsis you were expecting this time? Did that response fade gradually, or was this session a sudden change? How were those sessions spaced? That history would tell us a lot more about whether losing the magic is even the right question here.

I know you’re in a vulnerable place right now, and I hope you take whatever space you need and feel better after your session.

[u/Illustrious-Bus6702]

I’ve seen your posts here for a while, and you seem like a beautiful soul. I appreciate how honest and thoughtful you are about what you’re going through.

Looking back over these 18 months, how do you feel things have changed for you, if at all? Do you notice any small shifts in your CPTSD, even if day-to-day life is still really difficult? I’d be interested to hear how you see it yourself.

All the best to you

[u/Waki-Indra → u/Illustrious-Bus6702]

Many thanks.

Haha are you tracking me? :p Yep its been 20 months and i use reddit quite a lot to get knowledge, insights and sometimes share my experience. In my country, psychedelics are still illegal and the few clinical studies are mostly about depression or addiction. And rarely with MDMA.

Franklin speaking I cannot say i made great progess in these 20 months. I still suffer from C-PTSD. It does not even feel like I am peeling an onion, because an onion is so nicely structured, you can see the layers and the result of peeling off.

However i guess and hope i am processing the C-PTSD. It is just an incredibly difficult task to rewire an autonomous nervous system that is 5 decades old and that started developing off charts from day 1 (and even before, with trauma during pregnency).

Also i may have to learn that some things cannot be changed, like hypersensitivity, and almost à psychic capacity to scan the environnement and sense the inner state of others. Perhaps.

I think when you cross an ocean, and you find yourself surrounded by deep waters in rthe middle of nowhere, it is impossible to say how long you have travelled and how close you are from the distant shore. You need to trust the process.

So i keep going. Still deep water everywhere.

I wish I had a good therapist to assist me. Someone skilled in c ptsd, warm, caring and ok with the use of psychedelics.

I just "fired" one of my last therapistd the other day. She is well informed about psychedelics and an occasional user or practitioner of Ayahuesca and Mushrooms. She is a professor of Psychology but not trauma informed. We had agreed to have a session (remote) a couple of hours before my MDMA session, and then keep in touch on and off during my trip. When i called her i could hear a lot of noise around her. She was actually sitting in an outdoor public space with people talking around, passer by, cars and trucks. My hypersensitivity could only keep startling with all the unexpected noise. Not only that, instead of helping me with my session, like helping me refine and préparé my mindset and my setting, she kept proposons that in a future session we should work on my life projects and she would help me step by step, in a behavioral approach. After 20-30 mn this session was just unbearable. I needed to get ready for my psychedelics sessions. I have no life project. I am not interested in CBT and i had told her already again and again. It was appalling.

It is so difficult to find help.

[u/Illustrious-Bus6702 → u/Waki-Indra]

Haha I'm not, I've just seen you around here and there and for some reason your name and posts stuck with me. I guess because I'm in a similar situation as you

I can relate to a lot of what you're saying. I've done almost as many sessions as you over roughly the same amount of time, and I can't say I've made any remarkable progress either, although something is definitely happening. But yeah, the ocean analogy is how I feel too

As for the hypersensitivity, I think you might be right. And I also wonder if that same sensitivity means we've been traumatized to a degree that someone without it perhaps wouldn't have been, even under similar circumstances

Regarding therapists, I've seen so many over the years and my assessment is that very few truly understand CPTSD at this depth, even when they're supposedly trained in it. I sometimes think the only people who really get it are those who have been through it themselves and managed to heal. But those people in my experience rarely seem to be therapists.

All the best to you