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Elizabeth Koch, daughter of right-wing oil magnate Charles Koch, had trouble finding joy in her life.
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Using MDMA therapy, she broke through the feeling of needing to deserve perfection.
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Author Rachel Nuwer tells the story of how Elizabeth overcame her pain in the new book “I Feel Love”.
One organization was largely responsible for bringing psychedelics into the mainstream, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.
While researching her new book, about the therapeutic applications of MDMA, author Rachel Nuwer included MAPS. She discovered that the group was supported by some surprising donors.
This includes Elizabeth Koch, daughter of Charles Koch of Koch Industries, one of the largest private American companies. Apart from their great fortune, Charles Koch and his brother David are known for funding conservative movements, such as the Tea Party.
Nuwer explained in his book that, while it may sound counterintuitive, many public figures with conservative ties, like Elizabeth Koch, invest in socially liberal groups like MAPS.
Read below for the story of how Elizabeth Koch came to support psychedelic therapy in an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer’s new book “I Feel Love.”
The following is an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer’s new book, “I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Broken World.“
The moment I walked through the door of the loftlike space, a slender forty-five-year-old woman greeted me with a hug, a blanket, and not one but two LA-appropriate canned drinks (“energy booster” and “prebiotic popping soda”). from the carefully organized office fridge.Elizabeth’s bubbly enthusiasm and disarming warmth immediately put me at ease, and within minutes I felt like I was chatting with an old friend.
Elizabeth’s inexplicable ability to relate to others is a skill she has cultivated almost entirely, and is actually a symptom of trauma. As I heard his story, I learned that the success of MAPS fundraising isn’t just about Doblin’s ability as a salesman, or rich people who love MDMA, but that trauma and suffering are universal.
Even the most privileged individuals in the world are not immune to mental pain, and they can face the same limitations as the rest of us in finding relief from that pain. Elizabeth’s “fall from Eden”, as she described her index trauma, occurred when she was five years old.
After a close friend of her parents severed his back by diving into a shallow pond, the family went over to pay their respects to the man who is now in a wheelchair. The atmosphere in the house was oppressive, so to lighten the mood for her little brother, Elizabeth started singing the Humpty Dumpty song.
In one stop, however, she replaced the paralyzed man’s name with the absent “Humpty Dumpty”. Suddenly, all the tension in the room focused on her. “I see my father looking over his shoulder and giving me this death stretch,” she said.
When the family got home, Elizabeth’s father sat her down. “You don’t get it kids,” she told him. “You’ve got everything everybody wants, and you’re going to hate it all your life. It’s your job, always, to be the nicest person in the room, and the hardest worker in the room – whoever picks up garbage leaves everyone behind. You have to be above board because if you’re not, not only will everyone else hate you but you too.”
Looking back on this incident with the perspective of an adult, Elizabeth now realizes that her father was trying to protect her. “He was afraid that my brother and I would turn up to be spoiled monsters,” she said. At the age of five, however, she interpreted his lecture to mean that she could only be loved if she was good.
That vital message came through in almost every aspect of her personality and life.
In “The Myth of Normal,” Gabor Maté wrote, “A child who has not experienced himself consistently and unconditionally may grow up to be admirable or charming”—which was exactly what Élisus followed.
It started with a nightly ritual: before going to bed, she would review everything she had said and done that day to make sure she was the nicest person and the hardest worker, and that she didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings by an accident. If something bad happened to her — say, she tripped and skinned her knee — she would tell herself it was because the universe was punishing her for not being good enough.
In classrooms, during extracurricular activities, or on sports teams, she would always make a beeline for whichever kid she thought would hate her the most – usually the one who seemed to the least money, or the one that looks the least like her – and try to win them over by telling them funny stories about their family’s dysfunction.
Over the years Elizabeth rose to the top of her class, won competitions for her writing, and made many friends, but she was not happy. “I have to do this to prove that I deserve to live,” she would say to herself every time she achieved something.
“I have to earn my living.”
Her paranoia about what others thought of her made her unhappy. She realized she needed help and began trying various mental health solutions, including yoga, silent meditation retreats, and, briefly, medication.
She read books about Buddhism and neuroscience and gained insight upon insight. But no amount of knowledge, learning or practice brought real relief.
When a friend suggested in 2016 that she try psychedelic therapy with a “boy of consciousness” he knew — an ex-military man who called himself Doug the Lovebunny — she agreed. Doug filled a silver balloon filled with “some kind of steamy smoke,” Elizabeth said, and instructed her to breathe in and hold it.
She didn’t know what she was in for: he gave her 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting but extremely powerful tryptamine. The drug completely dissolved Elizabeth’s ego. It was scary.
Doug did not prepare the Lovebunny Elizabeth for this disturbing and destabilizing experience, and he did not provide her with any support or integration afterward. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night, she said, “scrambling to try to get hold of my body.”
She wanted to know more about what she was doing, and MAPS research gave her that. She attended a psychedelic conference in Los Angeles, where she was moved and inspired by the personal accounts of some war veterans who participated in the MDMA-assisted clinical trials for PTSD.
MDMA sounded much easier to use than 5-MeO-DMT—and maybe, Elizabeth thought, it could help her, too. So, in the spring of 2018, she found “someone off the grid” who agreed to give her MDMA-assisted therapy following the MAPS protocol.
Elizabeth wound up doing three sessions, and through that process, she saw the enormous amount of pain she was harboring throughout her life.
“I was afraid of joy,” she said. “The healing showed me how much all this buried stuff I couldn’t even see was causing me to be reactive and I always felt trapped, overwhelmed, and bad.”
MDMA sessions (one of which she also paired with psilocybin) helped Elizabeth overcome the “intense self-hatred” she had been burdened with since the age of five, she said, and to feel compassion and love. own. Since then she has been one of MAPS’ top five donors.
“MDMA is not going to save the world,” said Elizabeth. “But together with conversations and experience of going in and self-investigation, I think it can help.”
Following that thread, in 2018, Elizabeth founded a company, Unlikely Collaborators, which aims to bring together people who seem to be on opposite sides of an issue, and then work with them to discover their humanity and commonalities. disclosure.
If and when MDMA-assisted therapy receives FDA approval, Elizabeth also envisions Unlikely Collaborators providing integrated community-oriented group services.
“We all have our own realms of hell that we have to learn to climb out of,” she said. “The only way to bridge divisions out there is to bridge the divisions within.”
From “I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World” out now from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Nuwer. All rights reserved.
Read the original article on Business Insider
