Welcome to Back from the Abyss. I'm Dr. Craig Hecock.

Today's storyteller Kate reached out to me after last season's episode with

Jenny and her powerful story of living in the hazy protective fog of chronic dissociation,

and then coming face to face with the reality of a horrific childhood trauma. Kate also lived

for many years in a hazy delusion, thinking that her life was, quote-unquote, perfect,

but also having this vague and gnawing sense that just under the surface that something was deeply, terribly wrong.

This is a story of forgetting and remembering.

This is a story of finding a therapist who was willing and able to sit through years of hateful negative transference and let Kate work through her parent-child wounds.

And finally, this is a story of MDMA and psilocybin, helping someone move forward through the minefield of trauma.

I was someone who was perfectly fine.

I was just fine.

I had a life that looked good and I felt that I had had a really perfect childhood better than everyone else's.

I definitely felt kind of like a little bit superior. Like I have everything kind of dialed in.

I also felt like something was wrong,

but I truly had no real way of explaining to myself why.

I felt empty.

And so really all of the,

all of the, you know,

anything that I felt that felt off,

I just sort of attributed it to the fact that I was like an empty person.

Like I was not somehow not real. Like I looked like lovely and I looked like I had this, you know, things figured out in a good career and all of this stuff, but

I knew inside that I felt like there was just nothing there. And I had a lot of shame about that.

...