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# Telepathy in Psychedelic Therapy
- URL: https://ghost.psymposia.com/telepathy-in-psychedelic-therapy/
- Published: 2026-05-10T15:20:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T01:01:55.000Z
- Description: Psymposia board member Dr. Neşe Devenot’s presentation at the Ohio State University “Religion and Psychedelics” conference, recorded March 28, 2026. In this talk, Dr. Devenot presents their research on the reliance on unscientific telepathic attunement in many popular schools of psychedelic therapy.
- Author: Mike Elliott
- Tags: Videos, #youtube, #youtube-transcript

Psymposia board member Dr. Neşe Devenot’s presentation at the Ohio State University “Religion and Psychedelics” conference, recorded March 28, 2026\. In this talk, Dr. Devenot presents their research on the reliance on unscientific telepathic attunement in many popular schools of psychedelic therapy.

## Transcript

*This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.*

[\[00:00\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=0s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Hey, I'm Nache with the Psymposia podcast. This episode is a live recording from a conference. It was originally presented on March 28th at the Ohio State University at their conference on religion and psychedelics critical cross-cultural cross-disciplinary approaches. Since some of us at Psymposia came forward to the FDA to highlight our concerns about the dominant underground schools of psychedelic therapy, there's been a lot of misunderstandings about what our concerns are and whether they're even actually real or happening. So, this presentation, I think, may be helpful for our audience to understand that our concerns are very well supported. that many of the most prominent training organizations in psychedelic therapy are explicitly training their guides to believe that they can telepathically tap in to what their clients need in a non-verbal way and to use that telepathic connection to push their clients into reenacting traumatic experiences and that has a very high

[\[01:01\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=61s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Risk of harm and no evidence that it's actually necessary. This presentation should be clarifying about some of these concerns and also how well documented these patterns actually are. Thank you. Our final pres presenter is Devono. They're the senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. offered authored or co-authored several pieces on psychedelics. Thank you. \[applause\] \[cheering\] Thank you all so much for listening. I'm really happy to be here today. And today I'm presenting on felt sense or false signals, the challenge of implicit bias for embodied presence in psychedelic therapy.

[\[01:54\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=114s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And I wanted to mention at the outset that anecdotally psychedelics can produce experiences of non-verbal communication and telepathic connection. And I have personally had many of these experiences myself. I've had experiences with friends where I knew that they knew exactly what I was thinking and they knew that I knew that without having to say a word. So I'm not denying that phenomenological experience can happen, but I would like to caution that there are real and underexamined risks in basing a healing modality for the public on the presumed validity of these features and the ability for facilitators to discern telepathically what is best for their clients. And as two big or three big caveats at the outset, I wanted to mention that first of all, the concerns that I'm describing will be shared by many people with traditional training in research and medicine.

[\[02:48\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=168s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So, it's important for the field to be able to discuss these issues if only to re reassure those who have concerns. Number two is I'm not saying that any of the people who I will quote today are bad people. I would wish that if I were engaging in practices with vulnerable people that could unintentionally lead to harm that someone would raise this concern with me. And third, I personally experienced sexual assault in the underground 10 years ago based on the dynamics I'm going to describe today. And please understand as you listen that I my concerns are sincere and I'm motivated by a desire to prevent more people from experiencing what I went through personally. I've been working in this field for 15 years and I helped build the academic humanities side of it.

[\[03:35\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=215s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So I'm coming from a deep love of psychedelics and a desire to hold the field to a higher standard. My hypothesis currently is that widespread belief in facilitators spiritual capacity to discern the innermost needs and experiences of participants through relational sematic resonance which is often described using an analogy of an embodied tuning fork that through the non-dual relational field that connects all of us a facilitator can tap into what is best for you. I argue that's driving patterns of abuse and harm in psychedelic therapy and it's also reducing the validity of findings in psychedelic therapy research. This is a quote from Martin Ball who u my colleagues at Psymposia worked with me in calling attention to especially when Martin Ball was working with then head of maps Canada to put out his guide book for facilitators.

[\[04:36\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=276s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So I'm going to read this and then kind of keep this in mind as I go the rest of my presentation. when and he's speaking to facilitators. When the energy is ready to release, it may come out of either you your or the client's body in initial sessions because you are more energetically clear, open, and grounded than clients because you've done so much work. You've taken a lot of substances yourselves, medicines yourselves, the energy will most likely release through your body rather than theirs. In rare cases, the energy may be so demanding that you are required to purge or vomit directly onto the client. You can trust that if it occurs, it is what the client needs in that moment and will be appreciated. The client will feel progressively better and clearer with each of your heaves. Depending on how much the client is allowing to release, such a purge can be more superficial or full emptying of the stomach.

[\[05:27\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=327s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Though the client may feel nauseous as all of this is taking place, you are more likely to simply feel it as an energetic necessity rather than personally feeling nauseous. And he's used the same rationale that the facilitator can read the energies that want to emerge to also justify touching the genitals of clients. My argument is that intuition used in this way can be a vector for implicit biases that are putting the most marginalized clients coming to psychedelic therapy at the most risk of harm. Because people who are of a lower class, of a different culture, if you're using a vibesbased telepathy to establish what they need, you're more likely to interpret this person's resisting, this person has a demon in them.

[\[06:16\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=376s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) There's something in them that is causing their problems. And this is accentuated, I would argue, in the psychedelic field by confirmatory feedback loops, which have been known since the earlier wave of research. This is a quote from Sydney Cohen from 1964 who says, "It is curious how under LSD, the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by the patient. Freudian symbols come out of the mouths of patients with Freudian analysts. Those who have Yungian therapists deal with the collective unconscious and with archetypal images. The patient senses the frame of reference to be employed and his associations and dreams are molded to it and without self-reinfor without vigilance self-reinforcing beliefs can result as strong beliefs of the facilitator influence the patients and the clients and then what they're doing and saying is confirming the strength of the belief in the prior assumptions.

[\[07:17\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=437s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And part of the issue here is that pseudoscientific ways of doing research can actually fan the flames of true beliefs in ideas that might not be the most valid way of looking at the situation or might that might have unadressed risks. So just it's important to distinguish science from pseudocience. So broadly science is a systematic approach to knowledge that specifically helps shield against errors and inference. So we know that there are a lot of cognitive biases and heruristics that can influence what we're measuring and what we're doing and what we're seeing and interpreting. And so science at its highest standard is trying to anticipate that those can be factors and design what we're measuring in a way that prevents those factors from influencing the data.

[\[08:06\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=486s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Whereas pseudociences lack the methodological and procedural safeguards against confirmation bias. So it creates pipelines for these types of biases to influence the data. And I also argue that pseudo psychedelics may amplify the risk of psyched of pseudocience because pseudocience can be persuasive without being valid. And so if you're having this big meaning-making experience and something is persuasive, you can buy into that. I at least I've seen that happening. I think there needs to be more research, but I've seen it occur that people really can believe in things that are not necessarily the only way of looking at it. And this can happen, this can influence both the facilitators and the clients. So on the client or patient side, leading questions combined with expectations to satisfy a clinician can result in a patient elaborating the details.

[\[09:00\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=540s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) The mind fills in the blanks. This can feel like a real memory. So there's a lot of discourse happening right now about recovered memories of abuse in psychedelic therapy and the possibility that some of those might not actually be biographically real experiences, but kind of the context of expectation around abuse in the distant past is generating at least some of the experiences that people are starting to report. And then on the facilitator side there's they can reinforce the pseudoscientific beliefs through motivated reasoning which is an unconscious tend tendency to make information fit in a way that justifies a desired belief. And so you begin with a conclusion you want to believe and then unintentionally and unknowingly reason backward to convince ourselves that it's correct.

[\[09:50\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=590s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And anyone is potentially vulnerable to this and that's why having safeguards against it is so important. And this is just a list of some of the warnings of pseudocience that come up a lot in psychedelic therapy contexts. So emphasis on confirmation rather than reputation of hypotheses weighing hits more than misses. Overuse of ad hoc hypotheses or after the fact escape hatches or rhetorical loopholes for explaining away negative findings. Absence of self-correction in the face of repeated negative findings or repeated harms. over reliance on anecdotal evidence or anecdata and evasion of systematic peer review. And these all come up in the context of the maps MDMA assisted therapy model which is a model that emerged from the underground.

[\[10:41\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=641s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So a dominant school of underground therapy was went into the clinical trial context and that dominant underground therapy model is a constellation of ideas that contradict established norms of ethical therapeutic practice each of which can magnify the errors and inference that I referred to earlier. So, diffuse and non-existent therapeutic boundaries, over reliance on facilitator intuition, normalization of touch, an excessive self-disclosure by the therapist, including expressions of mutual love and intimacy. It can turbocharge people feeling producing some of the, you know, experiences that you expect the facilitator wants them to have without in consciously doing it. And so here's an example of what I would refer to as evasion of systematic peer review.

[\[11:30\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=690s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So masses therapy, you know, they've published technically in a peer-reviewed context, but a lot of the features of the therapy model were never publicly acknowledged until my research uncovered them. So, and that's part in part because the way they would describe the therapy was often euphemistic, using terms that if you weren't in the know, you wouldn't interpret in the way that they were actually meaning it. So, this is the sort of very similar to what David Eden showed earlier with the MA with a slide of therapy on the screen. This is what people expect where it's like people sitting by just kind of smiling and supporting the individual. So I most people expecting that would not anticipate that this sort of interaction would occur in the therapy.

[\[12:17\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=737s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So, I found through my research that there were actually uses of touch that were reenacting traumatic encounters where the facilitator would play the role of a facil of a perpetrator in a scene of past abuse and that they built in a safeguard of using a safe word to ensure that when a client is screaming, "Don't do this to me. Get your hands off of me. I'm dying in some cases to know whether they're talking to the scene that they're enacting or actually mean no. And because this had never been publicly discussed, there was no conversation about the actual safety of relying on a safe word in a context where people are potentially having trouble verbalizing and in a very panicked potentially type of experience.

[\[13:08\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=788s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) I also found the correlations. This was actually euphemistically described in the MAPS therapy protocol itself creating the terms using the safe word and having this reenactction of traumatic encounters directly in the therapy model. Other people didn't recognize it because it was described so euphemistically and the absence of selfcorrection. This is my friend and collaborator Megan Busan who was sexually assaulted and otherwise assaulted in the context of a phase 2 trial of MDMA that MAPS was running. She tried to warn the FDA many years ago that what happened to her was a direct result of the therapy model that was used. She was assaulted and it was presented to her as exposure therapy by her therapist.

[\[13:56\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=836s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And so in my research I when I uncovered that they're actually training people to do this and no one had talked about it and math specifically kind of described it as a stat as a statistical inevitability. You know people will get hurt sometimes. There was no conversation about whether we could make the therapy model safer to make it less likely that this sort of experience would happen. And describing some of the broader underground therapy model where this comes from. There are features of pseudoscientific principles driving this assumption. So one of them is the idea that amplification of trauma purges the distress. This comes from Stan Grath. There's a quote here. The full expression of an emotion is its spiral p.

[\[14:43\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=883s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) This is a quote from psychedelics today who also train a lot of facilitators saying so we want to encourage people in this method to make it the trauma for example bigger and therefore this thing is less and less energy and therefore less influence over your subconscious process through having it dissipate energetically. So the logic is that the facilitator is acting as a midwife, able to attune to and sense traumatic imprints that are wanting to emerge or stuck in the body. And just as a midwife might help, oh, here's the head coming out, here's the shoulder, and help the baby be birthed, it's described as nondirective because they believe that the facilitator is attuning to this traumatic process that is able to unfold when people are in this altered state of consciousness.

[\[15:35\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=935s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And then within this model, there are two in the maps therapy, there are two uses of touch. Focused body work, that's expelling distress through amplification. So the traumatic struggles, but then there's also nurturing touch, which is providing corrective emotional experiences. Comes from a history of reparing in psychedelic therapy back to the earlier era where people would sometimes rock their clients and feed them with a warm bottle to kind of give them a good parenting experience. But those are driven by this telepathic attunement to the relational field with the logic that we're all connected and through having a lot of psychedelic experiences themselves and training under a expert facilitator that facilitators can cultivate that spiritual capacity to discern this telepathic field.

[\[16:25\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=985s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And here's just some quotes. So one of them says, "As sematic resonance refers to the therapist's ability to feel, sense, and respond to the inner experience of another through their own bodily and emotional awareness." Another quote describes cultivating at the bottom, cultivating our capacity to discern what belongs to us and what belongs to the process. So there's a belief that you can actually distinguish those two things clearly and know when something is part of the process that you're helping to unfold. And then there are built-in post hoc justifications. So kind of rhetorical escape hashes that that reinforce confidence in the model and prevent things like what happened to my friend Megan from leading to updating the assumptions that underly the model. So in this case there's an overemphasis on training people to expect a vulnerability hangover experience.

[\[17:19\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1039s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So saying you know when you're in this experience if you have cultivated that capacity to discern you can trust that whatever is coming up and emerging is consented to by the client and if afterwards they're saying what happened I'm not okay with that. It primes people to interpret that as their ego is reconstituting they're resisting because they're having trouble hanging with how open and consenting they actually were. And in that way there's people aren't going to ask like maybe I did cross a boundary, maybe I did something that I shouldn't have done, maybe I should reassess my operating assumptions here. And just as a last example on this, the again with psychosex today, they emphasize there are encounters where people facilitators are trained because of graphian assumptions to expect traumatic birth experiences.

[\[18:11\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1091s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And because of that training leading to kind of help that process by coddling the client and trying to push them through the birth canal because they think that they're knowing what's going on in the inner experience. And afterwards, sometimes people do say, "Hey, in my own experience, I was a Viking dying on a battlefield. It had nothing to do with a birth experience." But rather than update the assumptions of maybe this is not a safe way to heal for the general public, the answer to this was that's why you have to do the work to be able to sharpen that tool, sharpen that intuition, train under a expert facilitator. And this last thing I wanted to talk about is the connections to facilitated communication.

[\[18:58\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1138s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) This is a so if there's a non-verbal individual who's assisted with typing, it's been portrayed as a miraculous solution to enable communication with non-verbal individuals. But all blinded empirical research has demonstrated that messages actually come from the facilitator without the facilitator realizing it. And this is called led to abuses where this is a philosophy PhD who ended up sexually assaulting one of her clients because she believed they were in a mutual relationship. And there's indications of biased rejections because suddenly the assisted typing she insisted that the black client actually had preferences that aligned with her own culture, including a preference for classical music instead of gospel music and red wine instead of beer.

[\[19:48\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1188s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) The stakes are especially high right now because people are desperate for healing and vulnerable. And maps themselves acknowledge that participants may be likely to comply with any suggestions because they're told these are the experts and you have to be willing to do the work that's necessary to heal. And just as a last I wasn't sure if I had time for this but as a last point to end on. This is a recent 2026 maps bulletin article by Yanda Julie who is you know leading conversations around ethics in the field and she describes how your nervous system tells you when you're out of ethical alignment. So you can just learn to cultivate this sense of does this feel right and good and base your ethics on that.

[\[20:33\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1233s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) But when a vibes ba within a vi vibes-based epistemology, the most powerful and charismatic figures are the most credible and ethical. And it's hard to be charismatic when you've been hurt on purpose. Thank you. \[applause\] Well, thank you for fantastic presentations. We have time for discussion. Any questions? I have a question. Yeah. I'm curious nay what why this model is so persuasive. I think some of it comes from there is a there's a sensible judgment or like initial seed that you know the tools of the standard practices of psychiatry are inadequate. you know, we have high despair, high vulnerability.

[\[21:34\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1294s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) There is something here that people are glomming on to and saying, you know, yes, there's something here. What do you think about this model has found such sort of salience? And were there are there other settings where this kind of approach would be appropriate rather than as a clinical trial? Yeah. Well, so for the first question, I think that there's a lot of this kind of thing happening in the world where there are real failures in the existing dominant systems. Like we see this come up a lot with the maja movement like make America healthy again and the whole wellness kind of like industry where like there are and but it's like the bigger problems in many cases from my perspective are capitalism. like if we didn't have the \[laughter\] if we didn't have the for-profit health care, there wouldn't be so many desperate people who are left behind searching for something else and then there wouldn't be such a risk of people falling into

[\[22:34\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1354s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Situations that are not as safe as they could be if they were done in a different way. So I find it really important to emphasize yes, there are problems with the existing way of doing things, but that doesn't mean that we should just completely stop thinking critically and go with whatever else is available. we can hold ourselves to a higher standard. And then as far as what context it would be appropriate for, part of why I have been so critical of this is because it's in the context of medicine that is represented as an evidence-based science. And to me, it's another form of consent violation where it's like we have an agreement of like the kinds of things that we do in science like being open about what our methods are, being transparent, and not relying on euphemisms. But there's a lot of people that believe strongly in it and don't think that people will understand.

[\[23:21\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1401s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And so it justifies the euphemisms. So if we were to approach things differently, like I think in a religious context, if people wanted to kind of consent to this and they had an awareness of what they were doing, that would be a more appropriate avenue to explore it. But frankly, I think that we still need to have a broader conversation about what's actually going on because so many people don't understand. And I've had a lot of experiences this past year and a half coming forward and trying to talk about this and people it's so shocking to hear it conflicts with what they think is going on in this field that then I become attacked and that's why I had so many caveats at the beginning because I really am approaching this from a really genuine place and as a result of many years of research that I was motivated by trying to understand what had happened to me personally.

[\[24:10\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1450s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) \[applause\] I also think one of the things that contributes to this seems to be the kind of expanding presence of the underground where there's like literally no regulatory apparatus. So people bring experience from the underground in my experience like into a regulated space and have this expectation that they approach facilitators as guides not understanding. So then we have to be very clear like there is no sense of guiding her. Your journey is your own. You know we will not assume that we understand what's happening in your journey. Right? There's a whole list of assumptions but you have to dispel those because in the underground those agreements are not often there.

[\[24:57\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1497s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And so the movement back and forth between those spaces is really difficult. Yeah. And if I could just say jump on to that, I think part of what's so harmful about the euphemisms is that what they're doing they describe in the same way that you just described it because they do say we are sitting back. We have cultural and epistemological humility. We're allowing whatever is coming through, but they have the added on assumption that they are actually reading your unspoken inner consent in a way that they're listening. And so it's confusing a lot of people because they're end people are ending up in dangerous situations hearing exactly what you just said but meant in a different way. And that's part of why it's important to be really clear about what's really happening and to be able to distinguish those differences. And just as a last point about the regulated environment, a lot of people have made the argument that because there's no regulation in the underground, we just have to quickly bring the underground above ground and create legal context for it.

[\[25:53\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1553s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) But without actually addressing the dangerous components of the underground model, that's just creating it's giving the public an impression that this is the safe way to access psychedelic healing without actually having addressed the problems that are causing acute harm to the most vulnerable people who are seeking this out. I'm going to overstep my boundaries as moderator for a moment and participate if that's okay. \[laughter\] the dynam my research focuses on religious indigen sorry right sorry the religious use of psychedelics and the dynamics you're describing are rampant and in the religious communities and this is one of the this is one of the dangers of the religious model it's less regulated part of keeping the government you know part of the religious freedom is keeping the government out of it and you know I mean just point in case Santo diamond is having an enormous right Sammy the Iaska church from Brazil they're having an enormous me moment and it appears that in certain circles this type of abuse is is I don't know if rampant is the right word.

[\[26:53\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1613s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) I don't believe that it's the wrong one. But this is not just limited to the medical model. It's unfortunately common as well. Thank you so much for your talk. was really informative as a longtime social worker and it brought to mind I know Dolores and the shock that all of us are feeling about Caesar Chavez right now. This idea that power is rarely handled well by anyone. And despite my deep training in ethics, a teacher explained to me that the history of the world is domination without consent. This person also taught in the underground of do sub culture and spoke about very specific upfront agreed upon consent.

[\[27:51\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1671s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And I don't know that much coming from my background, but would this be a place where instead of assuming that the person in the room is a guy, they're there as a backup support and there would be an upfront written consent form sort of outlining what is and isn't okay. whereby both the participant and the guide have stated you know this touch is you know so that it doesn't become this upside down power but two people who have agreed upon in advance you know some sort of communication that would allow for the protection of the person who becomes so very

[\[28:52\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1732s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Vulnerable while they're on a substance. Yeah, thank you for all those points and if I could just yeah quickly respond. So I think a lot of people are moving in that direction of trying to be like very explicit at the outset and not having changes to consent happen during the session because there have been people writing about the ethics of the maps therapy model who have said in writing in bioeththics journals saying that people are more able to consent during an altered state because their ordinary egoic self is mired in mental illness. And I think that's a very dangerous assumption because it's not acknowledging the extent of potential suggestability that can occur during these experiences. So I think there are people who are trying to make this more transparent and more consentbased.

[\[29:38\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1778s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) I do think that a lot of people are very uncritically promoting the idea that you this I've referred to it as like the psychedelic guide industrial complex that you have to trust a guide. And many of the people who are drawn to that role are people who have ego inflation issues, who had a personal psychedelic experience and have the sort of telepathic beliefs that I was describing. And right now, it's like we're creating a system that is ushering the most vulnerable people in society into the hands of the people who are least equipped to ethically and responsibly navigate those spaces. So from my perspective, many of the average people who I encounter in life, not everyone, but I think most people that I speak to would be better off having psychedelic experiences in their own communities with people that they have pre-existing caring relationships with who are more likely to be able to read your body language and to know where your comfy sweater is and what song always puts you in a good mood.

[\[30:38\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1838s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And that that is something that we are underemphasizing because of all these hierarchical models that we are building. And most of the abuses and harms that I'm seeing in psychedelic therapy are coming from that power imbalance. And I don't think it's necessarily the case that people can't wield respon power responsibly. I think we exist within systems that promote people to power who are the people who cannot wield that power responsibly. And that's part of why I speak up because I think there's a lot of broader societal systemic issues that are intersecting with psychedelics right now. And we have an amazing opportunity as a field to do things differently in our spaces to not target and send death threats to the people who are trying to raise attention to abuse because it's a threat to the movement as I have been experiencing, but who really uplift the people who are making tremendous sacrifices to help make this community safer.

[\[31:25\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1885s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So, thank you for raising all of that. I also want to add that in the at these in the regulated model in Oregon, there is actually you have to fill out a form. It seems ridiculous, but there's a zillion forms for but one of those is literally about informed consent and it's for a touch and it's very limited touch. You can hold a hand, you can put a hand on a shoulder, you can hold someone's feet for you can offer a hug or they can ask for a hug. So there's that form. When we practice before someone journeys, we sit down and again go through that and say, "How are you feeling today? Which of these do you think would be helpful for you?" And then there's also the explicit understanding that one, once you're altered, you cannot give consent to touch of any kind.

[\[32:16\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1936s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And on our facilitation team and this is what's different I think about our model is we assume that the ultimate sovereignty lies with the person in their journey and we do not offer a touch. We respond when someone says, "I would like to have someone hold my hand." Right? Then we offer that if it's within the bounds of what's offered in the regulations, but we don't assume that we understand what's happening in the journey. And we assume that the sovereignty of the person is the important thing. If they need something, they can ask for it. And if we are able to respond, we will respond. But that again, that sense of in believing that you can intuit it what's happening in somebody's journey, I think is very dangerous. So there are ways of trying to structure this.

[\[33:01\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=1981s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) That Yeah. Yeah. I guess just to clarify the clinician myself. Do you so just trying to gather my thoughts. Do you is there a level of training that's already been of how many years, what's covered, how many hours of supervision, you know, thinking from a as a therapeutic clinician completely mental health, but we learn our ethics, we learn our, you know, the transference. We have our, you know, exploring our impartial and explicit or explicit and implicit bias. And then what would be your suggestions of what that training you know that's just on the that side but thinking on the energetic side that you referenced that sometimes the facilitator or the is projecting energetically their own onto the person too.

[\[34:00\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2040s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So I'm interested in what would be your best, you know, gold standard of what a training would look like for those who would be facilitating that like would it be better to that we then start training and I know this is occurring training clinicians who already had some of that background to then be the facilitator and someone that just takes a and if you could explain what is the length of time to take to facilitate these experiences. It varies by state actually because at least in the legal regulated model and I don't know what happens for the facilitators who are working in clinical trials but in the legal regulated system it is controlled by the state.

[\[34:46\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2086s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) So Oregon took a very an approach that was trying to prioritize safety in the training and in the regulations. But Colorado went a step further and Colorado requires supervision and consultation groups in addition to that. So that assumption that once you've gone through a year of training that you're not ready that you also need to have supervision, need to be in conversation. But new states are coming online. I don't you know New Mexico I think is figuring out their regulations and every state that comes online will have its own set of regulations and you know it's up to the state and if I could also jump in so as Paul mentioned the psychedelic syndicate that u me and my colleagues including Brian Pace who's here wrote recently that's for free up on Psymposia's website Psymposia with a P and in that we explain that and we show extensive evidence that a lot of the training kind of certificate programs and standards across Ross the

[\[35:48\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2148s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Industry have been funded by a wealthy group of millionaires and billionaires who do many of them buy into the telepathic attunement model that I have been describing and that has been built into a lot of the state training. So in Colorado, for example, they created a pipeline where people in a lineage that's known to have a pattern of assaults associated with it where you only need like a few days of in-person training to be licensed by the state to work with the most vulnerable people in society who are desperate for healing. And that system has been built because we have not had a democratic open conversation about what the standards should be. And so I'm not feeling very confident.

[\[36:35\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2195s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Like to me the standards must include talking about the stuff that I raised today. And so far that same group of millionaires and billionaires spent millions of dollars in targeting me in retaliation for my research and scapegoating me. There is a hit piece in the New York Times connected to these funders that is filled with complete lies to that, you know, essentially tried to make an example out of me to prevent this conversation from happening. So I don't have a lot of confidence in the existing models until we're o able to actually deal with the field's own shadow around these topics and really integrate everything that has been happening up until this point. If you had to, you know, smash, how would you what would you how would you create your own training model?

[\[37:24\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2244s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) What would that look like? Well, I think being aware of what's going on in the underground in order to develop nuance because people practitioners who don't have an experience of the underground end up saying the same lines that are used to launder the underground beliefs and the public is put at risk by that. So I think for people that have a robust prior training in awareness of power dynamics and maintaining boundaries and awareness of the potential to influence and keeping your own stuff to yourself so that that doesn't become a factor where your clients are feeling the need to protect you and to make you feel better. someone who has that background understanding where this field comes from and then being able to actually research and sort through wheat from chaff to understand what is actually helpful for people and what is causing unnecessary and unjustified risk.

[\[38:16\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2296s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) I will offer one suggestion. I don't know what a program should look like but I think one model that works is the relational spirituality model especially for clinicians who are interested in working with spiritual material. It comes out of BU's Danielson Institute which is a psychotherapy research institute. And it is the basis for Roman Pitzky and his colleagues attending to CR dynamics paper. It doesn't seem to have really broken into the training world a whole lot this relational spirituality model but I think it's well well suited. I think we're almost out of time here but I think we have time for one more question. Yeah.

[\[39:01\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2341s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) Are you always talking about one to one person? It's always one individual who are going through. You don't have any community several people like is the traditional model. You don't have that. I mean it's always one to one. I think there's a lot of problems coming because it is Yeah. Well, both of you because I think No, no. Our group is No, our group is it's actually a group. It's a diet group model. Yeah. So it's in relation several people taking giving the secondary to several people at the same time or only one to one. So the dominant underground model and then the version I showed the maps therapy it's actually like two facilitators often in one yeah which creates so that the one person is like numerically like ganged up on there because there's more of the facilitators who agree with each other than the client.

[\[39:53\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%5FIawxp2wKMQ&t=2393s&ref=ghost.psymposia.com) And but there are attempts to research more group containers for these experiences including the witnesses. Yeah. And yeah. So so as a safety mechanism. So Sue Sisley is is doing a study FDA approved clinical trial involving group therapy and also using a therapy dog instead of human touch in an attempt to still have some grounding happy energy but without the risk of abuse. And so there are people that are grappling with these topics. But you're right, it's mostly not that communal community- based experience. Well, I am sorry to end this, but this is a fascinating conversation and we can discuss it for the rest of the day over lunch. Thank you. Thank you. \[applause\] \[music\]