April Pride

A psychotherapist and his wife discuss 25 years of using MDMA together, testing it safely in today's drug supply, and what it taught them about grief.

🔵 Episode Summary

Is MDMA safe after 70? Charley and Shelley Wininger have used it together more than a hundred times over twenty-five years, and they joined me to make the case that it belongs to midlife and beyond at least as much as it belongs to a festival crowd in their twenties.

Charley is a licensed psychoanalyst and mental health counselor in Brooklyn, practicing since 1989, and the author of "Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA." Shelley is a retired critical care nurse. Neither of them treats this casually. We get into how they source and test MDMA, including a newer complication in drug checking that most listeners haven't heard of yet, and why the medications most people over sixty five are already taking change the entire experience and need a doctor in the conversation.

We also talk about what it's actually done for their marriage, a chapter Charley reads aloud from his book about mortality, and what happened when Shelley used MDMA with a group of forty people in a park nine days after her son died.

We are living through what public health researchers call an epidemic of isolation, and the Winingers' argument is a simple one: the antidote they found was not a program. It was each other, said plainly, a few times a year, for twenty five years.

🔵 Key Takeaways

• Testing isn't one step anymore; it's two, maybe three. A reagent kit confirms MDMA is present. A fentanyl test strip checks separately for fentanyl. A newer class of synthetic opioid, chemically different from fentanyl and in some cases far more potent, won't show up on a fentanyl strip at all.

• Roughly one in five women in their forties and fifties are on an antidepressant, and that share keeps climbing after sixty (CDC/NCHS, 2015–2018). These medications don't clear quickly, and timing MDMA around them is a conversation for a prescriber, not a solo decision.

• A serotonin-recovery practice some people use after MDMA carries a real risk of serotonin syndrome if timed too close to the dose itself; harm reduction guidance calls for a minimum 24- to 48-hour wait.

• Grief, not a diagnosis, is often what actually brings people to this medicine. Shelley's story is offered as one data point on that, not a treatment claim.

• A twenty-five-year, 200-person community built on sober potluck dinners is the throughline of the Winingers' argument that MDMA's real value for this age group is connection, not escape.

🔵 Timestamps

0:00 Welcome and tonight's topic: MDMA after 70

0:00 Charley and Shelley's origin story, and the "useless medicine" years

2:00 The isolation epidemic and sourcing MDMA through community

3:00 Testing MDMA safely: what's changed in the drug supply

4:00 Why Shelley tried MDMA, and what it gave her that nothing else had

5:00 Charley reads "Senior High" from his book, and the mortality conversation

7:30 Medications, contraindications, and talking to your doctor first

14:00 Community, chosen family, and 25 years of potlucks

15:30 Shelley's story: a grief circle in the park, nine days after loss

19:00 The closing question every couple should bring into the room

🔵 Guest

Charley Wininger is a licensed psychoanalyst and mental health counselor based in Brooklyn, in practice since 1989, and the author of "Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA" (Park Street Press). Shelley Wininger is a retired critical care nurse. Together they've used MDMA more than a hundred times over twenty-five years. Follow Charley on Substack.

Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle: 2026-27 Schedule

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Psychedelics & Trust is a 12-week Substack series created and written by host April Pride, who is microdosing psilocybin while writing. In this episode, she reads her Week Two dispatch, which happened to be the week of her first 5-MeO-DMT experience, which she approached with the intention of exploring where her self-trust broke down, the brain science behind why distrust can feel like knowing, and why distrust is a prediction that can be revised.

Topics include how 5-MeO-DMT differs from N,N-DMT, synthetic versus toad-derived 5-MeO-DMT, what the StepWise protocol is, and how fear conditioning, extinction learning, and estrogen may shape the way we trust.

Additional Resources

Who was Amanda Fielding?

From the Mac to the Mystical Bill - from The Pattern Project

Read the full Trust Series and show notes on Substack: https://aprilpride.substack.com

Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle - 2026-27 Schedule

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Can psychedelics help with grief? This is what we explore in the audience Q&A from Psychedelic Salon on grief, recorded live at Town Hall Seattle with Dr. Sunil Aggarwal. It picks up where last week's main conversation left off, and the questions that night ranged far wider than a single loss: grief on scale, watching genocide unfold on a screen, a bereaved parent talking through her own research, a retired nurse asking about her own brain, a psychologist 25 years into practice still figuring out where the guardrails are.

Two threads run through the whole hour. The first is that psychedelics don't reduce grief's pain so much as expand someone's capacity to hold it. A mother who traveled to Jamaica for a psilocybin retreat after losing her son put it more precisely than either of us could: she still misses him every day. What changed was room, for meaning and joy alongside the missing, not instead of it. The second is that the details matter enormously: brain injury history, medical risk factors, whether someone is in a clinical setting or a festival, whether the substance under discussion is MDMA, psilocybin, or ayahuasca, and Sunil is careful never to flatten those distinctions into one answer.

We also get specific: on dosing, on the early and mostly preclinical evidence for psychedelics and brain injury rehabilitation, on how facilitator training is being built in real time with no single accredited path yet, and on whether grief is something science can actually measure (it is, and researchers like Holly Prigerson at Weill Cornell have built the scales to do it).

None of this is medical advice, including the parts where Sunil and I get specific about dosing. If you don't have a Dr. Aggarwal to call, the takeaway that closes this episode is the one to hold onto: start with your hospice's bereavement line if you have one, or a grief-informed therapist if you don't.

Subscribe to April Pride on Substack for weekly conversations on psychedelics, nervous system health, and integration.

0:00 Introduction and what this Q&A covers

2:00 Grief witnessed through a screen: genocide and collective loss

4:30 Training the next generation of psychedelic facilitators

8:00 Does psilocybin make grief hurt less, or just more bearable?

9:00 Grief and psychedelics with a brain injury history

15:00 A therapeutic psilocybin dose for grief, and the fear of losing control

18:30 Processing grief with psychedelics outside a clinical setting

21:30 Choosing between MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca

24:30 Is grief scientifically measurable?

🔵 Additional Resources

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller. Referenced by an audience member; lays out the five gates of grief beyond death.
• "Psychedelics for Brain Injury," Dr. Aggarwal's 2023 open-access review in Frontiers in Neurology, for anyone who wants the fuller preclinical picture.

This episode is about psychedelics and grief, and it starts from an unusual place: not death, but everything else grief actually is. Loss of a future you thought you had. Loss of an identity, a marriage, a body that no longer works the way it used to. That's the frame Dr. Sunil Aggarwal and I set for this final Psychedelic Salon of last season, recorded live at Town Hall Seattle.

Sunil isn't a hospice tourist to this topic. He's a physician at Seattle's AIMS Institute who has spent years fighting, in federal court, for his own terminally ill patients' right to try psilocybin. He was the first doctor to petition the DEA for Right to Try access on their behalf. We talk about the neurobiology of why a guided psychedelic experience can shift a story you've carried about a loss for years, a bereaved-parent retreat in Jamaica that's now the subject of a real qualitative study, and the distinction Sunil keeps returning to, containment versus integration.

Containment is what most of us default to. Put the loss in a box, keep functioning, call it managed. Integration is slower, and it's the only version of the two that actually changes your relationship to what you lost. Not less pain. A different relationship to the pain.

We also get into what the research does and doesn't support, from the fast-tracked synthetic psilocybin analogs now moving through the FDA to the early, mostly preclinical evidence on psilocybin and brain injury. And we close on the one resource almost nobody uses: every hospice in the country is legally required to offer 12 months of bereavement support, to anyone in the family, whether or not you were ever a patient there.

Subscribe to April Pride on Substack for weekly conversations on psychedelics, nervous system health, and integration.

0:00 Welcome, disclaimer, and the topic of this Salon: grief 0:45 Meet Dr. Sunil Aggarwal: hospice, palliative medicine, and medical geography 2:20 The Right to Try fight to get psilocybin to dying patients 5:00 Who controls psilocybin's Schedule I status, and why the FDA's fast-tracked analogs won't change access for most people 6:30 April's own experience with grief, and the parents who come to her after losing a child 8:30 How Sunil recognizes grief in a clinical setting, and what anticipatory grief looks like 11:30 Containment versus integration 12:20 Inside the Jamaica grief retreats for bereaved parents 17:20 The neurobiology of psilocybin, the default mode network, and reframing a loss 19:10 How to integrate a psychedelic experience afterward 22:20 The bereavement benefit almost no one uses 23:40 Key takeaways and what's ahead this season

Dr. Sunil Aggarwal is a physician at Seattle's AIMS Institute, where he leads an integrative oncology and palliative care practice and directs the clinic's psychedelic-assisted work with ketamine and psilocybin. He holds an MD and PhD from the University of Washington School of Medicine, where his doctoral work was in medical geography. Aggarwal was the first physician to petition the DEA for Right to Try access to psilocybin for terminally ill patients, litigation that produced a Ninth Circuit ruling finding the DEA had erred in denying that petition, a first for the agency. His clinical and legal work sits at the center of the current fight over who gets access to psychedelic medicine, and under what conditions, before federal rescheduling catches up.

@sunil1007 @aimsinstituteseattle

🔵 Additional Resources

• Jamaica Grief Retreats, led by Dr. Dingle Spence, the group retreat program for bereaved parents discussed in this episode. Findings published as "Relief for Grief: Report from a Psychedelic Retreat for Bereaved Parents in Jamaica," Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 2022.

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, Francis Weller.

• AIMS Institute, Dr. Aggarwal's Seattle clinic.

133. What If Nothing Happened During Your Trip? Someone in the room had done everything right. Careful preparation, a trained guide, two booster doses of psilocybin. Nothing happened. No altered state. In this episode, learn what that means and what to do next.

This is the audience Q&A from the Psychedelics and Seniors Salon at Town Hall Seattle, the companion to episode 129, with Abbie Rosner, Scott Paul Wright, and Dr. Emily Whinkin.

What you'll learn

- What a session that produces no visible shift does and does not tell you

- Why expectation is treated as a clinical variable in psychedelic medicine, not a soft one- Why microdosing protocols build in days off, and what those days are for

- How much psilocybin content varies between mushroom varieties and within a single grow

- What a legal psilocybin session in Oregon costs and what the price actually covers- What Seattle's 2021 psilocybin resolution protects, and what it does not

About the guests

Abbie Rosner is the author of Psychedelics and the Counterculture of Aging, based on interviews with 36 older adults, and writes ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack.

Scott Paul Wright is a filmmaker and screenwriter and the director of the documentary The Next Chapter, who took his first psychedelic journey at 68.

Dr. Emily Whinkin is a naturopathic physician and integrative mental health specialist licensed in Oregon and Washington, and a board-certified Fellow of the Psychiatric Association of Naturopathic Physicians, who runs a monthly virtual integration circle for older adults.

0:00 Introduction 1:30 Should family members journey together 2:20 Medical disqualifiers and cardiovascular risk 3:30 Intergenerational trauma and encounters with ancestors 5:30 Grief that does not resolve in one session 8:00 What microdosing does, and how many Americans are doing it 9:40 Microdosing for creativity, and the pause 10:40 Psilocybin research for Alzheimer's and dementia 11:40 Microdosing, decision making, and why protocols include days off 13:40 Adjusting a microdose for mushroom potency 14:50 Cardiac conditions, atrial fibrillation, and valve issues 17:50 When a journey feels unimpactful, even with booster doses 19:00 Expectations as a clinical variable 20:00 What a legal psilocybin session costs and what it covers 23:00 Seattle, cultivation, and what decriminalization means 24:00 Integration circles and the isolation data 25:20 LSD compared with psilocybin, and the MM-120 anxiety trial 27:00 Mental health contraindications 28:20 SSRIs, SNRIs, and psilocybin 30:00 Ketamine compared with psilocybin 31:00 Cognitive benefits, neuroinflammation, and telomeres

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Rosemary Woodruff Leary sat in a jail cell for a month rather than testify against her husband. While she was inside, Timothy Leary gave a ten page interview to Playboy about what LSD does to a woman's body and did not mention her once.

She was his editor, his translator, the person who read the room for him, and the organizer who coordinated his 1970 prison escape across the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. She called herself The Computer. Then he turned on her, pointed the FBI in her direction, and she spent twenty four years underground as Sarah Woodruff, running an inn in Provincetown with a go bag by the bed.

Susannah Cahalan found her the way forgotten people usually get found. She was working through four hundred boxes of Timothy Leary's papers at the New York Public Library when she noticed a much smaller collection almost nobody had opened.

Key Takeaways

• Rosemary Woodruff Leary served a month in jail rather than testify against Timothy Leary before a grand jury investigating Millbrook, and the Playboy interview that made him famous ran while she was inside.

• She was the coordinating point between the factions who organized Leary's 1970 prison escape, working with the attorney who also represented the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. She called herself The Computer.

• Leary later decoded their letters for investigators and offered her mother money for her location. She spent twenty four years underground and could not hold any job requiring a Social Security number.

• She died at 66. Cahalan connects that directly to going without health insurance for the years she was a fugitive, which is the harm reduction point of the episode and has nothing to do with the drugs.

• Rosemary told students explicitly that psychedelics are not for everyone and that there is a shadow side, a position Cahalan argues is more relevant to the current renaissance than anything Leary said.

• LSD remains a Schedule I substance under the federal Controlled Substances Act. The April 2026 executive order directs faster federal review of psychedelic research; it does not reschedule anything.

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction 2:38 Ketamine, the NMDA receptor, and the sense of self 3:18 Humphry Osmond, asylum architects, and where set and setting came from 4:38 Finding Rosemary in the New York Public Library archive 5:38 Signs, synchronicity, and the I Ching 6:38 What Rosemary changed in Susannah 9:26 The women who carried the archives while the men made headlines 10:26 Millbrook, the grand jury, and a month in jail 13:06 The Playboy interview she was in jail for 14:41 The prison escape, the FBI, and the letter that ended it 16:05 Twenty four years underground and what it actually cost 18:47 Cape Cod, a new name, and a secret affair 20:47 Invisibility after a certain age 22:32 A contradictory woman 24:32 The warning Rosemary gave about psychedelics 27:32 The Robot, overuse, and why integration matters

Guest Spotlight

Susannah Cahalan is a journalist and the number one New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness and The Great Pretender.

Her third book, The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, was published by Viking in 2025 and named a Best Biography of 2025 by The Guardian. She spent years in archives at the New York Public Library and in Rosemary's family's hands to reconstruct a life that survived mostly in other people's footnotes.

Additional Resources

• The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary by Susannah Cahalan (Viking, 2025). [LINK]

• The 2026 to 2027 Psychedelic Salon season [LINK]

  
  

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131. Can psilocybin help with menopause? A live audience of 300 at Town Hall Seattle asked Dr. Trish Singh and Kelly McGinty, C-FNP, co-authors of Mycelopause: Uncovering the Magic of Menopause with Psilocybin, the questions that don't come up in a doctor's office: whether psilocybin is safe after hormone-positive cancer, how it interacts with SSRIs, whether hormone therapy can start after 60, what's actually legal in Seattle in 2026, and where a sensitive beginner should start.

This is the full audience Q&A from the Psychedelic Salon on psychedelics and menopause, with host April Pride adding current research, legal updates, and corrections throughout, including New Mexico's first-in-the-nation psilocybin treatment equity fund and King County's 2026 entheogen motion.

The expanded written answers, with sources, are on Substack: aprilpride.substack.com

The Psychedelic Salon returns to Town Hall Seattle October 8. Tickets and all resources mentioned are in the show notes at the Substack link.

This episode is for listeners 21+ and is not medical advice. Questions about your own medications or medical history belong with your provider.

What you'll learn:Why psilocybin's serotonin mechanism matters for women with hormone-positive cancer histories, and what hasn't been studiedWhat decriminalization actually permits in Seattle and King County in 2026, and where regulated legal access existsWhat current research says about combining psilocybin with SSRIs and how often high-dose sessions are spacedWhether hormone therapy can start after 60, and why psilocybin can't replace HRTWhy a quality dose sometimes does nothing, and where sensitive beginners should startAbout the guests: Kelly McGinty is a certified family nurse practitioner and Dr. Trish Singh is a licensed psilocybin facilitator in Colorado's regulated program. They guide therapeutic psilocybin experiences together and co-authored Mycelopause: Uncovering the Magic of Menopause with Psilocybin.Timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 2:00 Psilocybin after hormone-positive cancer 4:00 Legal access in Seattle at any age 6:30 Psilocybin, menopause, and the restructuring metaphor 9:00 Access, equity, and who research leaves out 13:00 SSRIs, dose frequency, and serotonin syndrome 16:30 Fear of a first psychedelic experience 18:45 HRT after 60 and whether psilocybin replaces it 21:00 When mushrooms don't seem to work 23:30 Developmental trauma in guided journeys 28:00 Beginner varieties for sensitive systemsResourcesMycelopause: Uncovering the Magic of Menopause with Psilocybin by Dr. Trish Singh and Kelly McGinty.The Next Chapter, September 13. A thirty-minute documentary following men and women over sixty through a psilocybin retreat in Mexico, with a panel afterward featuring Kelly McGinty and Dr. Trish Singh. RSVP here: https://kinema.com/events/The-Next-Chapter-jaazqeWomen in the Wild, April’s micro- and low-dose gatherings. Apply here:https://form.typeform.com/to/ZW4Pq1ikListen on Substack: https://aprilpride.substack.com Visit April Pride: https://aprilpride.com Instagram: https://instagram.com/aprilpridecreates Psychedelic Salon: https://www.aprilpride.com/psychedelic-events-for-women/psychedelic-salonSubscribe to April Pride on Substack for weekly conversations on women, midlife, psychedelics, nervous system health, and integration: https://aprilpride.substack.com

130. Psilocybin and Menopause: Two Clinicians Reframe Midlife for Women

Episode Summary

Estrogen regulates the serotonin system, and psilocybin reaches the same receptor. That is where this Salon starts, and it is the most specific version of the psilocybin and menopause conversation I have heard in public.

Kelly McGinty, a nurse practitioner, told a full room at Town Hall Seattle that the drop women feel in perimenopause is physiological rather than imagined. I asked whether that means psilocybin replaces estrogen. She said no, and that she would like more research. Her co-author, Dr. Trish Singh, added that research on menopausal women barely exists at any phase of the transition.

Two clinicians describe what they see in their patients, then draw a line at the point where the evidence ends. Most people selling a reframe of midlife will not draw that line on a microphone.

What sits on the other side of it: anxiety as a knock on the door rather than a malfunction, why women microdose intuitively instead of on a protocol, and the archetypes we inherit about aging women. Kelly's oldest client is 85, and she says the younger generation is watching to see how the older one heals.

A woman in perimenopause deserves an explanation for what is happening in her body. Psilocybin is not what delivers that. A provider who knows the full symptom list is.

🔵 Timestamps

0:00 Introduction

2:15 Why these clinicians reframe menopause as a rite of passage

6:20 Estrogen, serotonin, and what psilocybin cannot replace

10:10 Anxiety and brain fog in perimenopause

14:55 Why women microdose intuitively instead of on a protocol

18:10 What the microdosing research actually shows

19:20 Consciousness, unnaming, and identity in midlife

21:35 Ending the shame around menopause

24:25 The FDA hormone therapy warning change, explained

25:30 Goddess, crone, and the archetypes of aging women

30:35 Elders, psychedelics, and the wellness industry problem

🔵 Guests

Kelly McGinty, C-FNP, MSN is a family nurse practitioner accredited by the American Academy of Nurse Practitioners, with a master's in nursing from Gonzaga University. She spent more than a decade as an emergency department NP before training in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and she now works with first responders, people at end of life, and patients with treatment-resistant conditions. She is the clinician in this conversation who names the physiology and then names its limits. Kelly's website

Dr. Trish Singh, PhD, LPCC is a licensed mental health counselor in New Mexico and California with twenty-five years in behavioral health. Her doctorate is in mind-body medicine with a specialization in integrative mental health, she is certified in psychedelic-assisted therapy through CIIS, and she founded A New Awakening Counseling, which serves people reentering society after incarceration. Her current research is on holistic weight strategies for menopausal women, and she is the reason this episode ends up talking about archetypes rather than symptoms. Trish's website

Together they co-authored Mycelopause: Uncovering the Magic of Menopause with Psilocybin.

Original Substack post: ⁠⁠https://aprilpride.substack.com/psilocybin-and-perimenopause

🔵 Resources

Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle - ⁠2026-27 Schedule⁠

⁠⁠SetSet Psychedelic Cards⁠⁠

⁠⁠Women in the Wild application⁠⁠

The Next Chapter virtual live screening - RSVP here

More about Mycelopause on Substack + Instagram

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129. Psychedelics for Seniors: Aging & What's Next

Episode Summary

The psychedelic renaissance gets covered like a young person's story: executives microdosing before board meetings, twenty-somethings on retreats. But the fastest-growing population interested in this medicine right now is confronting retirement, widowhood, the death of parents, the question of legacy. This episode is a live Salon recording built around psychedelics for seniors, with filmmaker Scott Paul Wright, writer Abbie Rosner, and naturopathic physician Dr. Emily Whinkin. We get into set and setting, medication contraindications, ketamine versus psilocybin, and what integration actually looks like once the journey is over. Abbie's research on 36 older adults turns up something worth sitting with: most of them called later life the happiest, most meaningful stretch they've had.

🔵 Key Takeaways

Set and setting, not age, is the biggest predictor of a safe psychedelic experience. Older adults often prepare better than younger users because they're less inclined to wing it.

If you're on an SSRI or SNRI, expect a blunted psychedelic experience. The evidence on whether that blunting reduces therapeutic benefit is still mixed.

Ketamine and psilocybin are distinct molecules with different legal statuses and safety histories. Neither is automatically the safer choice for an older nervous system.

Integration circles are the antidote to isolation, which among older adults carries measurable health costs, including a documented rise in dementia risk.

The questions shift with age. Younger clients tend to ask what can I fix. Older clients tend to ask what my legacy is and how I can give back.

🔵 Timestamps

[00:00] Welcome and introductions at Town Hall Seattle [00:01] Scott Wright on his first journey at 68 and how the documentary began [00:02] Why older adults report fewer bad trips: preparation and set and setting [00:04] Contraindications, health history, and working with SSRIs and SNRIs [00:06] Ketamine versus psilocybin: different molecules, different legal paths [00:08] Meaning making in later life and what psychedelics surface [00:10] What integration actually is, and why the work starts after the journey [00:13] Integration circles as community and clinical infrastructure [00:17] The questions older adults ask that younger clients don't [00:18] Aging, elderhood, and the Buddhist "three messengers" [00:20] Intergenerational journeys and psychedelics within families

🔵 Guest

Abbie Rosner is a writer and cultural observer exploring how the modern psychedelic renaissance is reshaping our understanding of aging—individually and collectively. Psychedelics and the Counter Culture of Aging | website ELDEREVOLUTION on Substack

Dr. Emily Whinkin (she/they) is a naturopathic physician and integrative mental health specialist blending psychedelic and entheogenic medicine with mental, reproductive, and generative health. Dr. Whinkin is licensed in Oregon and Washington, provides global consultation, and is dedicated to research, education, and individualized integrative mental health. emilywhinkin.com

Scott Paul Wright is a filmmaker and screenwriter based in Paris and New Orleans. He took his first psychedelic journey at age 68 – resulting in his new documentary – The Next Chapter, which is now in post-production and scheduled for release in June 2026. The Next Chapter documentary

Original Substack post: ⁠https://aprilpride.substack.com/psychedelics-for-seniors-aging-salon

🔵 Resources

Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle - 2026-27 Schedule

⁠SetSet Psychedelic Cards⁠

⁠Women in the Wild application⁠

Hosted by April Pride

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128. Ancestral Trauma & Psychedelic Integration

A 45-year psychedelic guide on ancestral trauma, Internal Family Systems, and why integration, not the ceremony, is the real medicine.

Episode Summary

Most conversations about psychedelics stay at the level of the ceremony: the dose, the visions, the breakthrough. This episode goes somewhere else. Sand Symes has spent 45 years supporting women, first as a social worker, then as what she calls a modern medicine woman, and she doesn't talk about psychedelics as a fix. She talks about them as a way back to parts of yourself that got buried decades ago and never fully addressed. In this live recording from Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle, Sand walks through Internal Family Systems, the neuroscience of fear memory, the "trauma of overdoing" that hides inside high-functioning women, and why psychedelic integration for women is the part almost everyone underestimates. If you've ever wondered what actually happens after the journey ends, this is that conversation.

🔵 Key Takeaways

Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by therapist Richard Schwartz, treats the mind as made up of protector parts, exiled parts carrying old pain, and a calm core self underneath. It's a mainstream therapy model, not something invented by the psychedelic space, though psychedelics often make those parts easier to access directly.

The amygdala stores fear memory and drives the fight, flight, or freeze response before conscious thought catches up. Sand's description of medicine "lulling it to sleep" tracks with established neuroscience on how old memories can be revisited without the same emotional charge.

The "trauma of overdoing" doesn't look like trauma. It looks like competence: the woman managing her career, her household, her aging parents, and everyone else's emotional temperature, who gets praised the entire way for never stopping.

Integration, not the ceremony itself, is where the actual change takes root. Early research on post-psychedelic neuroplasticity is strongest in animal studies so far, but the pattern across integration therapists is consistent: the days and weeks after a journey are when new behavior is easiest to install.

Community and ancestral wisdom show up as recurring threads for women in this work, both as ways of processing suppression carried across generations and as safeguards against re-entering ceremony without adequate support afterward.

🔵 Guest

Sand Symes is a psychedelic guide and integration therapist who has spent 45 years supporting women, first as a social worker and now as what she calls a modern medicine woman. She has sat in over 150 ceremonies, assisted in 70, and facilitated more than 60, working primarily with psilocybin and her own ancestral Celtic lineage rather than ayahuasca, MDMA, or LSD.

Follow Sand Symes: website | Instagram

🔵 Resources

Ask April: How Do I Find a Psychedelic Guide? — column on legal access, licensed facilitators, and the Oregon versus Colorado distinction

Internal Family Systems

Psychedelic Salon at Town Hall Seattle

Women in the Wild | small in-person gatherings in Seattle on September 12th, October 3rd, and November 7th

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Visit aprilpride.com

Original Substack post: https://aprilpride.substack.com/sand-symes-ancestral-trauma-psychedelic-integration

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