The Authentic Self and What It Means
Regardless of how much we feel we are living our best lives, or how confidently we tell friends, “I actually had a happy, normal childhood,” what we are mostly referring to is the fact that our physical needs were met. But what about our emotional needs? To explore this further, let’s consider the subconscious mind and its role in trauma—an area we work on therapeutically using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds at Tabula Rasa Retreat.
The often-uncomfortable truth that many of us would rather not admit—or are not even consciously aware of—is that everyone on this planet has experienced some degree of trauma, even when we think our childhoods were “good.”
At the end of this blog, we provide a process for emotional processing that will, over time, enhance your resilience and ability to tolerate discomfort, which will make you less vulnerable to engaging in maladaptive coping strategies such as substance addiction, or behavioural addictions like gambling and eating disorders, for example.
Trauma—whether emotional, sexual, or physical—often brings with it a host of symptoms, ranging in severity. These can include flashbacks, crippling anxiety, paralyzing fear, addictions, depression, obsessive thoughts about specific past events, or dysfunctional relationships. On this spectrum, people may also struggle with low self-esteem, self-harm, mental illness, addiction, PTSD, or depression.
In most cases, people don’t realize that such symptoms are connected to unresolved past experiences. While many painful episodes stem from childhood trauma, the trauma itself often remains buried, even as it disrupts daily life.
This is why using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds can be an incredibly powerful tool. Ibogaine works in harmony with the subconscious. As an oneirogen rather than a classic psychedelic, it induces a state similar to lucid dreaming. During the ibogaine journey, individuals often experience a range of suppressed emotions and feelings stored in the subconscious and the body. They may also have vivid, life-like visions of past events, including ones they were previously unaware they had experienced.
The Function of Dissociation
Dissociation occurs when the mind separates from an experience so as to avoid unpleasant emotions or the actual emotional pain of dealing with trauma. On the mild end, this might look like daydreaming or feeling numb. On the severe end, it can involve detaching from reality, engaging in addictions as coping mechanisms, to losing one’s sense of identity, or even creating new and protective identities.
This adaptive mechanism pushes painful experiences out of awareness, prioritizing survival—not just physical, but also emotional and mental. For instance, a child enduring ongoing abuse might suppress memories of the trauma to avoid overwhelming fear and maintain attachment to their caregiver, who they depend on for survival. While this suppression helps in the short term, it often has lasting consequences. For this very reason, using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds can help get to the root of the real underlying problem, and allow individuals to access suppressed memories and emotions, creating more integrative opportunities for deeper healing and self-awareness.
The Subconscious Mind
We are all born with both a conscious and a subconscious mind. For clarity, let’s say the subconscious mind controls everything the conscious mind does not. Imagine if you had to consciously think about making your heart beat, digesting food, or holding all your beliefs—you’d be overwhelmed!
The subconscious mind automates anything repetitive so that our conscious mind can focus on other more practical aspects of life. For example, when a thought is repeated enough, it becomes a belief, and the subconscious takes over. This is especially true in situations where we were given the same message about ourselves as children: if a child is persistently neglected and rejected by one or both parents, they will internalize the thought that they are unlovable. Over time, that repetition of the same thought will become what is called in psychology a limiting core belief that they, now as adults, are unlovable or unworthy.
The subconscious mind is designed to protect us. It takes over when the conscious mind is overwhelmed, such as during prolonged periods of unsafety, stress, or trauma. This taking occurs because the conscious mind—responsible for rational thought, problem-solving, and focus—has a limited capacity to process information, especially when faced with intense emotional or physical threats.
When the subconscious takes over, it shifts into survival mode, automating responses to protect us from immediate harm. This can include:
- Suppressing painful emotions or memories to avoid overwhelming the conscious mind.
- Activating fight, flight, or freeze responses to help us survive perceived danger.
- Creating defense mechanisms like denial, dissociation, or avoidance behaviors.
While these survival mechanisms are adaptive in the short term, they often become maladaptive in the long term:
1. Unprocessed Trauma: Suppressed emotions and memories don’t disappear; they remain stored in the subconscious, manifesting as anxiety, depression, PTSD, or physical symptoms like chronic pain.
2. Fixed Patterns of Behavior: The subconscious forms rigid beliefs and patterns based on past trauma. For example, a child who learns that expressing emotions leads to punishment may grow into an adult who represses feelings, leading to emotional disconnection or dysfunctional relationships.
3. Overgeneralization of Threats: The subconscious doesn’t differentiate between past
and present threats. A survival response learned in childhood may continue to be triggered in adulthood, even in safe situations (e.g., avoiding confrontation because it once led to harm).
4. Blocked Growth: When the subconscious mind is in control, it limits conscious awareness and self-reflection. This stunts emotional growth, leaving individuals stuck in survival patterns instead of evolving toward emotional health and self- actualization.
By using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds, individuals can access the subconscious and uncover these survival mechanisms, helping them reframe and release long-held trauma.
How Memories Are Suppressed
Suppressed memories are often pushed into the subconscious during extreme trauma or stress, leaving the person with no conscious recollection of the event. Trauma doesn’t always involve catastrophic events; it can be as simple as emotional distress, such as a child being told not to “be a crybaby” or “stop throwing tantrums.” While usually not malicious, even attentive parents sometimes invalidate their child’s emotions.
What We Reject Does Not Disappear—It Compounds
We are all born whole, but as children, we rely on adult caregivers to survive. That dependency often shortens our wholeness.
Society teaches parents to socialize their children in ways that suppress difficult emotions. Children quickly learn to differentiate between parts of themselves deemed acceptable and unacceptable by their caregivers. To survive emotionally, they reject the parts their parents disapprove of and overcompensate by exaggerating the parts that gain approval.
This self-preservation instinct comes at a cost. Rejecting aspects of ourselves fosters a lifelong process of self-rejection, splitting us into different parts. We grow up owning some aspects of ourselves while disowning others, which ultimately leads to deep feelings of shame and, more severely, can lead to intense self-hate.
The way plant medicines allow for emotional and visual conscious recall of events we have suppressed makes using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds a very powerful complementary tool to both releasing stored trauma and understanding the reasons behind behavioral addictions, substance abuse, or depression and anxiety.
We are all born whole, but as children, we rely on adult caregivers to survive. That dependency often shortens our wholeness.
Society teaches parents to socialize their children in ways that suppress difficult emotions. Children quickly learn to differentiate between parts of themselves deemed acceptable and unacceptable by their caregivers. To survive emotionally, they reject the parts their parents disapprove of and overcompensate by exaggerating the parts that gain approval.
This self-preservation instinct comes at a cost. Rejecting aspects of ourselves fosters a lifelong process of self-rejection, splitting us into different parts. We grow up owning some aspects of ourselves while disowning others, which ultimately leads to deep feelings of shame and, more severely, can lead to intense self-hate.
Long-Term Damage
As children, we are deeply connected to our instincts and authentic selves. But each time adults invalidate our emotions, we become disconnected from that authenticity. Over time, this consistent invalidation breeds anxiety, self-doubt, and self-distrust.
How many of us feel like we live with an enemy inside our skin? The truth is, this “enemy” is not us—it’s the inherited narratives from childhood that distort how we see ourselves, and how they make us dissociate from our emotions.
The process we share below is one that we use here at Tabula Rasa Retreat, after our ibogaine ceremonies to coach our clients a healthier way of emotional processing, in a hope that over time, as they turn into a regular self-care practice, they will begin to listen to their emotions, and allow them to appear, be processed in real time rather than stored in the body. The reason we instinctively reach for our usual coping mechanisms, or engage in forms of dissociation, is
because we don’t give our emotions the chance to arise and be tended to.
How to Process Emotions in Real Time
Part One: Understanding the Theory
Despite experiencing emotions daily, most of us lack a deep understanding of them. Society often encourages suppression or avoidance of emotions through distractions, minimization, or outright denial. Unfortunately, this common approach traps emotions and traumas in our body and mind, turning them into triggers that hinder us.
The “Feelings Wheel” below will help you identify what kind of emotion you are feeling if you are not entirely sure, and will improve your emotional vocabulary over time.
Emotions, much like a compass, provide essential feedback about our internal and external worlds. They carry valuable truths—sometimes uncomfortable ones—about ourselves, others, or our circumstances. Ignoring or resisting these truths prevents emotions from naturally passing through us, leaving them in our being. These unprocessed emotionsmanifest as stress, behavioural patterns, or physical discomfort.
The good news? Emotions are fluid and designed to move. By giving them full presence and attention, we allow them to flow through us, releasing their energy and information. This practice not only liberates us from emotional baggage but also builds our emotional resilience, making us more capable of handling life’s challenges.
A common fear is that focusing on negative emotions will amplify them indefinitely. In reality, emotions dissipate when experienced fully. Resistance—not attention intensifiesemotional pain. Emotions, much like a struck singing bowl, need to "vibrate out" fully to return to a state of equilibrium.
By intentionally engaging with emotions, we strengthen our capacity to process them, prevent trauma accumulation, and cultivate a healthier relationship with our emotional landscape.
Part Two: Step-by-Step Process
1. Create a Safe Environment Find a comfortable, distraction-free place to sit. Close your eyes and direct your attention inward. This allows you to focus fully on your emotional experience.
2. Identify and Observe Sensations Notice the physical sensations tied to your emotion. These might feel like buzzing, constriction, heaviness, or emptiness. Identify where in your body these sensations arise (e.g., chest, stomach, back).
3. Avoid Resistance Do not suppress, fix, or distract yourself from the sensations. Instead, allow them to exist as they are. Treat them with curiosity and openness, as though you’re observing something entirely new. The next step is to ask the sensation you identified in your body the following questions.
4. Anchor Your Attention To remain present with your emotions, ask yourself questions like:
“How does this feel?”
“What does this sensation remind me of? Is there any smell, texture, taste, sound or colour associated to it?”
If your mind offers answers like “It feels heavy,” respond with further inquiry: “What does heaviness feel like?”
Keep going in this manner. Remember, you are trying to elicit feeling memories from each of your five senses. What you are not looking for are mental narratives or mental stories. If they do arise, keep compassionately asking the same above questions to return to your body and the feeling signature of the emotion in question.
5. Witness the Emotion’s Evolution As you remain present, you may experience vivid imagery, memories, sounds, or insights. These are the “packages” of information stored with the emotion. Allow them to surface without judgment, as they are part of the release process.
For instance, a tightness in your chest might evoke an image of a storm or bring up a childhood memory. Simply observe these experiences without attempting to interpret or alter them.
6. Stay with the Emotion Let the emotion consume your attention entirely. It may shift in intensity, change in quality, or transform into another emotion. For example, anger may soften into sadness, or fear may evolve into relief. These shifts indicate the emotion is moving through and out of you.
7. Address Resistance If you notice resistance (e.g., impatience or fear), treat it as part of the process. Focus on how the resistance feels and explore it just as you would the initial emotion.
8. Let the Emotion Run Its Course Emotions are like waves—they rise, crest, and eventually subside. Stay present until the intensity naturally decreases or transforms into a sense of relief, clarity, or groundedness.
9. Offer Reassurance If you choose to pause the process before completion, acknowledge this choice with compassion. Affirm to yourself:
“I’ll return to this emotion later.”
“You’re safe with me; I won’t abandon this process.”
10. Integrate Insights After completing the process, reflect on any insights or messages that
arose. These revelations can guide better decisions and actions in your life.
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Our Hopes for the Future
At Tabula Rasa Retreat, we believe in a more holistic and compassionate future for psychiatry and psychology. Through our work with plant medicines like ibogaine, ayahuasca, bufo alvarius, and psilocybin, we have witnessed how these tools help untangle the stories from childhood that haunt us, enabling profound healing.
The steps outlined above complement the benefits of using ibogaine and psychedelics to heal emotional wounds by providing a practical process for releasing stored emotions and building resilience, and would be an added benefit to your aftercare, or simply as a mindfulness practice to better understand and deal with emotions.
Should you be interested in learning more about ibogaine, or other plant medicines, and think that treatment at our centre would be a good option for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team and we will guide you through the process.
