Dear Maven,

I’m relatively new to this forum and have just now read your thread. How are you doing at the moment?

I do hope your physical symptoms were just temporary. Sometimes a high heart rate may be a result of a panic attack or anxiety. Have you been to a doctor since?

The marijuana was also a core part of the healing process too, as strange as that sounds. It felt as if getting high would activate an old bridge between the left and right hemispheres of my brain, as I was suddenly experiencing a flood of different emotions that I never noticed while sober. Even simple things like worrying about my job, feeling accomplished, worried about what I said to someone, or my unhappiness with my then girlfriend – all of that was revealed to me while high. I suddenly had to acknowledge long held emotions that I was never consciously aware of sober. My emotional flashbacks only ever occurred while high.

From what you’ve shared about your healing with the help of marijuana, it appears to me that marijuana did indeed help you feel a range of emotions, which you weren’t able to feel before. You probably have the tendency to suppress your emotions, and marijuana helped you unlock those stifled emotions. However, I don’t think that you actually healed and processed your painful memories while being high, even though you believe you did:

Crying and reconnecting with my inner-self happened while high. I was able to process a lot of painful memories and realizations while high.

I don’t think it’s possible to properly process emotional wounds while high, because in order to heal, we need to be in touch with our wounded inner child, as well as our inner good parent (the opposite of the inner critic), and then put those two – the inner child and the inner parent into a dialogue. I don’t think this is possible while being high.

My guess is that you might have applied a shortcut to healing, and I get this impression because of this what you’ve said:

“I’m in the process of reframing my past traumas from specifically targeting me (why me?) to understanding that I am just a node in a complex casual web of traumas being spread from individual to individual.”

It’s true that trauma is trans-generational, and that we shouldn’t be stuck in the victim mentality (“why me?”). However if you generalize and diffuse your own experience, saying “trauma happens to everyone, not just to me”, and you don’t pay a closer look to your own particular trauma, in which particular individuals (your parents or care-takers) took part, you can’t really heal. So when you say that trauma is spread from individual to individual, yes it’s true, but it doesn’t spread among random individuals, but within families. And it’s caused by the child being physically or emotionally abused or neglected by its parents or care-takers. So a very concrete person (or persons) cause us trauma, and we need to process this very particular trauma (or traumas) in order to heal.

From the way you’ve described it, this might not have happened completely for you. You might have jumped from feeling a lot of emotions and having certain flashbacks to sort of processing it all in one fell swoop, which isn’t how healing happens. That would explain why you were still feeling a lack of joy and pleasure, and experienced depression again, even though you’ve accomplished a lot on your healing journey in a relatively short amount of time.