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Elizabeth Koch, daughter of right-wing oil magnate Charles Koch, struggled to find joy in her life.
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Using MDMA therapy, she broke the feeling that she needed to be perfect to deserve to exist.
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Author Rachel Nuwer tells the story of how Elizabeth overcame her grief in the new book “I Feel Love.”
One organization has been largely responsible for bringing psychedelics into the mainstream, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.
When researching her new book, about the therapeutic applications of MDMA, author Rachel Nuwer dove into MAPS. She discovered that the group had the support of some surprising benefactors.
This includes Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of Charles Koch of Koch Industries, one of the largest private American companies. In addition to his enormous fortune, Charles Koch and his brother David are known for financing conservative movements, such as the Tea Party.
Nuwer explained in her book that, although it may be counterintuitive, many public figures with conservative ties, such as Elizabeth Koch, invest in socially liberal groups like MAPS.
Read below 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 Search for Connection in a Fractured World.“
The moment I walked through the door of the loft-like space, the slender forty-five-year-old greeted me with a hug, a blanket, and not one, but two LA-appropriate canned drinks (“energy booster”). and “prebiotics”). soda”) from the office’s meticulously organized refrigerator. 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 uncanny ability to endear herself to others is a skill she has been cultivating for most of her life, and is actually a symptom of her trauma. Listening to his story, I learned that the success of MAPS fundraising doesn’t just come down to Doblin’s prowess as a salesman, or that rich people simply love MDMA, but to the fact that trauma and suffering They are universal.
Not even the most privileged people in the world are immune to mental anguish and may face the same limitations as the rest of us in finding relief from that pain. Elizabeth’s “fall from Eden,” as she described her initial trauma, occurred when she was five years old.
After a close friend of his parents severed his spine diving into a shallow pond, the family went to pay their respects to the now wheelchair-bound man. The atmosphere in the house was oppressively gloomy, so to lighten her little brother’s mood, Elizabeth began singing the Humpty Dumpty song.
However, in one chorus, he absentmindedly replaced “Humpty Dumpty” with the name of the paralyzed man. Suddenly, all the tension in her room was directed at her. “I see my dad looking over his shoulder and looking at me with that murderous look,” she recalled.
When the family arrived home, Elizabeth’s father sat her down. “You kids don’t understand,” he remembered him saying. “You have everything everyone wants and you will be hated for it your entire life. Your job, always, is to be the nicest person in the room and the hardest worker in the room: the one who picks up the trash that everyone leaves behind.” back. You have to be sincere because if you are not, you will not only be hated by others but also by yourself.”
Looking back on this incident with an adult perspective, Elizabeth now understands that her father was trying to protect her. “I was absolutely terrified that my brother and I were going to turn into spoiled shit monsters,” she said. However, when she was five years old, she interpreted her sermon to mean that she could only be loved if she was good.
That fundamental message came to dominate almost every facet of his personality and his life.
In “The Myth of Normality,” Gabor Maté wrote, “A child who does not feel constantly and unconditionally lovable may become preternaturally pleasant or charming,” which was exactly the path Elizabeth followed.
It began with a nightly ritual: Before going to bed, she would review everything she had said and done that day to make sure she had been the best, hardest-working person, and that she hadn’t accidentally hurt anyone’s feelings. If something bad happened to her (for example, 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 the boy she thought would hate her the most (usually the one who seemed to have the least money or the one who looked the least like her) and try to win them over by telling them stories. funny about their family’s dysfunction.
Over the years, Elizabeth became the best in her class, won writing contests, and made many friends, but she lacked joy. “I have to do this to prove that I deserve to be alive,” she told herself every time she accomplished something.
“I have to earn my living.”
Her paranoia about what others thought of her intensified, as did her unhappiness. She realized she needed help and began trying various mental health solutions, including yoga, silent meditation retreats and, briefly, medication.
He read books on Buddhism and neuroscience and gained glimpses of knowledge. But no knowledge, learning or practice brought genuine relief.
When a friend suggested she try psychedelic-assisted therapy in 2016 with a “consciousness cowboy” he knew, an ex-military man who called himself Doug the Lovebunny, she agreed. Doug filled a silver balloon with “a kind of smoke vapor,” Elizabeth recalled, and instructed her to inhale and hold it.
She had no idea what awaited her: he had given her 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting but incredibly potent tryptamine. The ego-abolishing drug dissolved Elizabeth completely. It was terrifying.
Doug the Lovebunny had not prepared Elizabeth for this heartbreaking and destabilizing experience, and he did not provide her with any support or integration afterwards. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night, she said, “struggling to try to grab my body.”
She wanted to know more about what was going on and the investigation led her to MAPS. She attended a conference on psychedelics in Los Angeles, where she was moved and inspired by firsthand accounts shared by war veterans who had participated in MDMA-assisted clinical trials for post-traumatic stress disorder.
MDMA seemed much easier to use than 5-MeO-DMT and perhaps, Elizabeth thought, it could help her too. Then, in the spring of 2018, she found “someone out of the network” who agreed to administer MDMA-assisted therapy following the MAPS protocol.
Elizabeth ended up doing three sessions, and through that process, she saw the amount of pain she had been harboring throughout her life.
“I was terrified of joy,” she said. “Medicine showed me the extent to which all these buried things that I hadn’t even been able to see made me react and feel constantly trapped, overwhelmed and miserable.”
The MDMA sessions (one of which she also combined with psilocybin) helped Elizabeth let go of the “intense self-hatred” she had carried since she was five, she said, and feel sympathy and love for herself. Since then, she has become one of MAPS’s top five donors.
“MDMA is not going to save the world,” Elizabeth said. “But along with conversations and experiences of introspection and self-investigation, I think it can help.”
Following that thread, in 2018, Elizabeth founded a company, Likely Collaborators, whose goal is to bring together people who seem to be on opposite sides of an issue, and then work with them to reveal their humanity and commonalities.
When MDMA-assisted therapy gains FDA approval, Elizabeth also envisions Unlikely Collaborators providing community-oriented group integration services.
“Each of us has our own hellish realm that we have to learn to get out of,” he said. “The only way to close divisions abroad is to close divisions within.”
From I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World now available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Nuwer. All rights reserved.
Read the original article on Business Insider
