How to Improve Your Sex Life With Psychedelics with Tommaso Barba
Alisa Nappa
Today we sit down with Tommaso Barba to chat about how we can improve our sex lives with mushrooms and psychedelics. Did you know making love and doing a psychedelic ceremony are wildly all too similar, from set and setting, integration/aftercare, to altered states of high emotions and breakthroughs. Tommaso studied the sex lives of those who take psychedelics and found it's probably a great thing to do to spice up your life in the bedroom and increase your overall satisfaction, pleasure, and connection with your partner(s).
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TRANSCRIPT
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Alex,
Unknown Speaker 0:11
welcome, welcome. You are listening to the mushroom revival podcast as your host, Alex Dorr and we are absolutely obsessed with the wonderful, wacky, mysterious world of mushrooms and fungi. We bring on guests and experts from all around the globe to geek out with us and go down this mysterious rabbit hole to try to figure out what the heck is going on with these fungal beings. And today, we have Tomaso to talk about really interesting research at Imperial School of London and how psychedelics and sexuality intersect. So Tomasa, how you doing?
Unknown Speaker 0:51
I'm doing great. Thank you so much for getting me on the podcast, and I'm glad to finally have matched the time to be on it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for Thanks for coming on. So for people who don't know you and your work, what are you up to? So I'm a PhD candidate at the Center for psychedelic research at Imperial College London, and my research broadly spans psychedelic neuroscience. I've been involved in trials of psilocybin for depression with Professor deli nut and Robin Carol Harris, then I worked on psilocybin for chronic pain, and now I'm slowly moving into more like DMT and five me or DMT research, and particular interest of mine while I am doing this research as understanding the intersection between psychedelics intimacy and sexuality. And we published the first scientific papers on the facts of psychedelics, on sexual functioning and well being, a few months ago, on nature scientific reports, and I was the lead author on the one. And now I'm still continuing to trying to understand this intersection with further research that I will introduce further.
Unknown Speaker 2:03
And how did it start with mushrooms or psychedelics in general? How did you get intro to this field? It's an
Unknown Speaker 2:12
interesting question. I like, I started, like, with a background in psychology and neuroscience, and I used to study in Milan, and my interest produced banned psychology, and I slowly started to be quite fascinated by psychoanalysis and the way in which psychoanalysis was describing the mind and our unconscious mind. And from psychoanalysis, I went into Freud and Jung, and from Jung, I got familiarized with what was happening with psychedelics, because by writing like about Jung and dreams on Google, I found out about what Robin Caro Harris was doing at Imperial around 10 years ago, using psychedelics as a key to access the human unconscious. And from there, everything kind of made a click. And I was like, Oh, wow, this is something that I would really like to dedicate more of my time in. And I started reading more books about it and being more fascinated about about what was happening around. And then I decided to first train myself to role in neuroscience by moving to Maastricht University and understanding how, like, the brain worked better. And then I tried to, like, apply to London. I came to London as a an intern, and I spent quite a year over here. Then I got hired as working as a resources assistant, and around a year ago, I started my PhD at the central psychedelic research so I'm really glad things went in the way they went, and that I've been having the time to develop a lot of different angles into developing and expanding psychedelic research. The interest in sexuality, I think, like has always been there. It's always been something that I've been interested and fascinated on more as a topic to understand myself. I am a gay man, and I come in in a in quite like a complex background from a small town in Italy, very religious, and I spend a lot of time in trying to understand myself and who I was and how my sexuality was intertwined with my overall life. And from there, has always been something that stayed into my mind and always been fascinating on and
Unknown Speaker 4:27
I'm glad I kind of now can merge this true interest into psychedelics and sexuality as a work topic, in a way
Unknown Speaker 4:38
that's great. I loved your latest paper, and for people who haven't read it yet, can you give kind of a brief elevator pitch on on what you're examining, maybe key findings? Yeah. So basically, what we try to understand, what was how having a psychedelic experience, either in naturalistic settings like for example.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
People going to mushroom ceremonies in the Netherlands or Ayahuasca ceremonies in South America already, other countries where this was legal, as well as people getting psilocybin therapy in control settings at Imperial in the trials for depression, were doing with their sex life before and after. And we were curious about this for mainly two reasons. One was because there's been always a strong cultural connection between psychedelics and liberal sexual attitudes. People have always been fascinated by the movements of free love that happened in the 60s and the 70s, and there was some anecdotal evidence that linked psychedelics to liberation from sexual repression and better sexual satisfaction. And we wanted to see if this connection was actually translating into modern psychedelic research, because no one ever did that before. So this is where the aim of the paper
Unknown Speaker 5:59
came in. And what we found was that, basically, people
Unknown Speaker 6:03
were the people that were having psychedelic experiences, were reporting improvements in their sex life from four to six weeks after the psychedelic experience. And these benefits might appear to last as long as six months after it. And with benefits, we talk about improvements in sexual pleasure, improvements in communicating one's sexual desires and interests with one partners, in sexual satisfaction and satisfaction with one bodies and so on. So it's just not about the physical components of sex, but as Overall, about a more holistic approach, approach to sexual well being that we found was impacted by psychedelics.
Unknown Speaker 6:42
So I'm curious
Unknown Speaker 6:44
if you could define sexual dysfunction, and you know, what are the common causes or different blockages that people might have from medication to taboos to traumas?
Unknown Speaker 6:58
Yeah, what's preventing people from having amazing sex? Yeah, I think, like, the topic of sexual dysfunction and sexual functioning has been definitely, like, a bit misinterpreted and a bit like reduced to biology. Like a lot happened with mental health too, because if we think about depression, has been long conceptualized as a biological disorder of the brain. And of course, it has a biological underpinning, but it's just not a chemical imbalance. And the same happens to be for sexual functioning or sexual desire, if we want to call in that way. Indeed, sexual desire has a lot of different layers and components that spans from individual to interpersonal and societal ones. Indeed, like individual like we have our biological component, of course, that are around, like the capacity of having an erection, a capacity of having an orgasm, physically. But those are also, like intertwined with more psychological aspects, like, for example, attraction to one partners, the ability to focus on one sexual sensations in the body. How is your self esteem? How are you capable of giving yourself to someone else? Then, of course, this biological components are affected by stress and fatigue. A couple could have a very strong sexual connection. But then, if life gets too stressful and complicated, maybe with kids with other life duties, this could definitely impact sexual functioning. And this then goes into this other layer that is more the interpersonal aspect of sexual desire, that is around the capacity of communicating your sexual desire and interest to your partners how compatible you are. Because sometimes, like sexual dysfunction comes from just sexual incompatibility. Some people can be both sexually healthy, and then they end up in a relationship in which they're just not compatible. Another variable is relationship length, and there is a lot of research that shows that the longer the relationship, the more the decrease in sexual desire naturally. And it's something you need to work and you need to, like, understand in order to keep it like high in long term relationships, like more like a fire that needs to be like, constantly renewed in order to keep it up. Then there's, there's the capacity of just, like, responding to a partner where communicating what the your consent and your concern for certain for certain attitudes, attachment is another really important one. Indeed, there is research that people that have an anxious attachment style, so that they are really like emotionally needy towards their partners, and people that are avoidant in their attachment, so that they are really scared of intimacy, they also tend to have some of these components that are reflecting on their sexual satisfaction and later on, the bigger layer is around like societal expectations around sex and sexuality. Indeed, there are gendered expectations. There are a lot of women that maybe grow up with a lot of shame and repression around their sexuality. The same happen.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
To gay men, sometimes women saying that they just have to give sex to their partners whenever they need it, without really thinking about what they like and what they desire. And this is a big cause of sexual dysfunction in long term relationships. The religious shame, as I mentioned before, is definitely another big component. So sexual desire is really multifaceted concept, and that's why dysfunction can be related to a lot of different causes. And I think this is also one of the reasons why psychedelics could be really interested, interesting in approaching sexual desire, because they seem to impact a lot of different layers of this construct, if we just stop and think about it for a second.
Unknown Speaker 10:43
Yeah, and you've you focused a lot in the paper on specifically the side effects of SSRIs, and one of the side effects being
Unknown Speaker 10:53
sexual dysfunction in people. And
Unknown Speaker 10:57
there's been a lot of research of psilocybin being a great alternative for a lot of people who are on SSRIs, and this seems to be another benefit for for people. And I'm I'm curious for for people on SSRIs that are having sexual dysfunction as a side effect. Are there any current treatments or protocols and in place, or is it a kind of situation like tough luck, you know? Yeah, yeah. So, like, usually, the most common approach is trying to switch to non serotoninergic antidepressants, like, for example, Bupropion or mitrazepain, that they have a different effects on our nervous system, and so they have lower rates of sexual dysfunction, and they're usually effective in doing so because they act more on the on the dopamine system in the brain. Sometimes what happens is that the dose of SSRI is adjusted in trying to see if there is a dose that can still give antidepressant effects without causing uh, sexual side effects. Another very common one is adding some other medications, like, for example, Viagra or Chalice, that can be used to treat erectile dysfunction, linked to antidepressants. Sometimes people are trying to, like, get some times when they get off the medications and see what happens. What happens with that, to see if that was more like the sexual dysfunction was more linked to the depression or just to SSRIs and psychotherapy and psychedelic occasion, sometimes can also help, but it's not easy, because there's a lot of
Unknown Speaker 12:39
evidence that shows that sometimes people have to kind of decide between their sex life and between managing depression, because sometimes one comes at effect of the other, and it's not clear where the answer stays for all the people.
Unknown Speaker 12:55
And it's crazy how linked they are. Yeah, I would feel like, if you're not having a healthy sex life, your depression would increase significantly, yeah, but that's the problem, like, yeah, and it's, it's crazy how similar
Unknown Speaker 13:12
the whole psychedelic experience is with making love with someone or even yourself, like, from Preparing for the experience, right? And and the importance of set and setting, I feel like it's, it's almost identical, right? If you're, yeah, not taking care of yourself, if you're
Unknown Speaker 13:32
not present, if you know, like you're talking about with stress, and your mind is all over the place, and you show up for an experience, either psychedelic or making love. It's you're not going to have the best time, yeah, but if you have a great set and setting, and you're coming in and you're present,
Unknown Speaker 13:52
it's really a gateway to some very psychedelic experiences and and like you're saying, there's both are so interconnected with taboo and trauma, and
Unknown Speaker 14:07
really, in every tissue of our body, it's, it's whether we're having a psychedelic experience or making love, it's, yeah, we're confronting, kind of our deepest demons and traumas and taboos and in social conditioning and and everything. And if we're not able to confront that, then there are blockages, right?
Unknown Speaker 14:29
Yeah, yeah. How was your experience growing Do you grew up in Milan or outside? Outside Milan in a small town in in Italy. So that was your experience, you know, growing up and
Unknown Speaker 14:46
dealing with both religious and cultural stigmas and taboos with your sexuality and and experimenting with with psychedelics and,
Unknown Speaker 14:57
you know, yeah, how.
Unknown Speaker 15:00
In your sexuality and your use of psychedelics intertwine.
Unknown Speaker 15:04
Yeah, like this, this is the sexuality aspect is, is definitely an interested one. Because definitely, by, like, growing up gay, I think, like, I kind of realized it relatively early in my life, and for a very long time I completely, like denied it, like was something that stayed in the back of my mind. But I started dating girls, and I went on and on, and this, like, continuously having this short term relationships in which I was just kind of trying to, like, forget about about it. And it worked quite well for a relatively long amount of time until I ended up like falling in love with my first boyfriend, and of course, the first relationship was a massive mess because we were completely unprepared. Families were not supportive, and that started a very, very complicated period in which I it took a lot of time to slowly trying to understand myself and my sexuality. A lot of like sense, oh, I'm doing something that is wrong. And when you feel that you're doing something that is wrong and you shouldn't do, how can you enjoy it? How can you like, just like, feel comfortable with it? And I think a lot of gay men end up like, in a very similar direction that is interesting, because it appears that maybe like leads to less repression. That what that would, that would woman do? Because I definitely know a lot of people in the gay world, and maybe are not sexually repressed in a way, but at the same time, they are completely emotionally disconnected from it. And I think that's the avoidance aspect that comes in that is more characteristic of guys, that they might end up still being comfortable with the physical aspect of it, but it ends up just being a sort of like mechanical act between two people that is not really connected to any emotions. And this definitely stops developing like, be like, beautiful and comforting relationship in the long run. And I wouldn't say I found the answer yet. I am still learning and developing, and
Unknown Speaker 17:12
definitely, like psychedelic can help in it.
Unknown Speaker 17:16
Yeah, that.
Unknown Speaker 17:18
It's really funny. You were talking about how sexual satisfaction goes down, if the longer that you're in relation and,
Unknown Speaker 17:28
you know, it's, it's very easy to get into, like a routine, and, yeah, and it's almost like performative, right? And that's the same that I see with psychedelics as well. Is
Unknown Speaker 17:41
there's so many people taking a ton of psychedelics for maybe many years, but not integrating it. Or it becomes a it becomes a performance, rather than actually being present for every second of the experience. Yeah? And that's the same with lovemaking as well. It's like, it's so easy, knocking escapism, yeah, yeah. And it's like, you and same with, you know, doing yoga, it's like, yeah, sure, you might look good from the outside and you're doing all the poses, but like, are you actually doing yoga, right? Um, yeah. It's so funny how interconnected all these things are, and, and really, just the lesson that boils down to everything in your life is like, show up to be present and and,
Unknown Speaker 18:24
yeah, otherwise you're not there, yeah, and we will get there. But I think that's where the key around, like, the link between psychedelics and sexual satisfaction is coming from.
Unknown Speaker 18:35
So I've had this experience. I've done
Unknown Speaker 18:39
legal ceremonies in other countries. And something that I've noticed, both in personal experiences and then talking with other people, is this concept of sexual abstinence,
Unknown Speaker 18:53
even, like a couple weeks before the ceremony, and then during the whole time that you're there, and then, you know, even, like, a month afterwards, they they a lot of times they'll ask you, or a couple weeks after, depending on who, who you're doing it with, or whatever, but they'll ask you, you know, no touching anybody, no, you know, having sex for this amount of time, and It's almost like taboo in in a sense. And on one hand, I get it
Unknown Speaker 19:25
because it's creating a safe space for people.
Unknown Speaker 19:29
But on the other hand, I'm curious your thoughts on it. Of
Unknown Speaker 19:34
well, what if you the main thing you're showing up for is sexual trauma and and that's the work that you're showing up to do. How do you approach that? And kind of like, what, what is your stance on? How do you safely heal
Unknown Speaker 19:52
your sexuality, or anything to do with sex in a psychedelic space that also creates.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
It's a safe space, not only for yourself, but for everyone around you. Yeah, yeah. I think that that's a very interesting question, and I will give you some insights. But by being like not a therapist, but more like neuroscientist, I hope, yeah, I'm coming from a generally naive approach to it, but yeah, it's not something we have currently in any of our studies, like, we don't advise a sexual abstinence to anyone, and we try to stay out of it in that direction. I think the the approach that it surrounded is definitely around like creating a safe space to people, and also maybe like avoiding them to experiencing too much of strong emotions in a time when they are already vulnerable. Because if you think about it, like if you go to an Ayahuasca experience and you are maybe allowed to have sex, maybe you can end up like having sex in a very open, open, emotionally up space with another person and in the retreat, and maybe like you will feel, you will feel that this person is the love of your life, or someone you're really connected with, while At the same time, it might just be the emotional opening up that you are experiencing together with the other person that then creates this bonding. And so maybe it's good to wait a little bit and to see if that connection was was actually there. I know that, like many shamans, try to, like, keep couples separated, also during psychedelic experiences that I find, I find it interesting, and I would love to talk more with someone that does it, to understand reasons for doing so. It's, I think it has a an element in just avoiding too much of emotional contagion between two partners that are already attuned to themselves, but afterwards, I think that just coming back together and integrating the experience together with your partner can be a massively beautiful and rewarding experience. So yeah, I would love to know more. It's not something that is happening in like Western medical research. But yeah,
Unknown Speaker 21:58
if anyone wants to hear this and knows more and wants to contact me, I would love to get more insights into the reasoning. What was that? Something that you asked the participants of the study, like if
Unknown Speaker 22:12
they had sex, no all on psychedelics, or how long after things like that, we didn't. We are now doing it in the follow up study that we are doing. But people that took psilocybin in control setting for the trial for depression, they were not having sex under under the experience for sure, and they still found the benefits. So yeah, it's not always linked to just having, like, intimate encounters with your partner. I think it has more to do with the psychological shift that people get right over the experience.
Unknown Speaker 22:48
And what was there a common or a standard dose, and how often was this administered? Yeah, so over the clinical study, there were two high doses of psilocybin, around 25
Unknown Speaker 23:06
milligram combined with psychological supports, and they were separated by around three weeks between one, between one and the other, while people in the observational study we just looked at before and after a Big psychedelic experience that was mainly done with high doses of psilocybin, ayahuasca and LSD, with a minority that did five amine or DMT. We don't know the exact doses, as the study was observational and not controlled, but we know that it was not about microdoses, it was about macro doses that
Unknown Speaker 23:40
open people up. So
Unknown Speaker 23:44
what were the different categories that you were curious about, and how did you measure both the baseline and the results? Was it a questionnaire? Or how did you go about
Unknown Speaker 23:57
measuring people's satisfaction? Yeah, it was a questioner that was focused on different aspects of sexual functioning and well being. And it has some components around the more physical aspects, like pleasure, arousal and so on. And then it has some more like psychological aspects about communication and satisfaction, as well as more exploratory aspects that we included there were around how open were people to try new things in their sex life, and how they were seeing sex as possibly something more spiritual or sacred. So it compri, it compromise. It has different components around like sexual well being, and we try to get quite a comprehensive approach into it, and we asked the questions before and
Unknown Speaker 24:44
four weeks and six months after the experience.
Unknown Speaker 24:48
So there's two categories that, and maybe I read it wrong or something, but it
Unknown Speaker 24:54
both for the sexist, spiritual category and the importance of sex category.
Unknown Speaker 25:00
Okay, it seemed like the I'm going to try to pronounce this, the skit to low Prem ranked higher in the sexes spiritual category. And then it looked like the importance of sex actually went down for psilocybin over time. So can you talk about those two categories?
Unknown Speaker 25:21
So the
Unknown Speaker 25:24
direction of the line in the paper is possibly not the most important thing, but is more to look like the before and after change. So basically, what we found is that importance of sex, despite there were some variations in the two groups that were not statistically significant, so people did not report to feel that sex was more or less important before and after psilocybin. And this was quite interesting, because we think it speaks to the fact that it's not the psychedelics made people hypersexual or like prone to have to always think about sex and having sex with everyone, but they just change the way in which you relate to sexuality and your own body, and that is then related to improvements in sexual satisfaction later on, and the sex as a spiritual it improved in both groups, in both studies, for people taking psychedelics, but not for people taking SSRIs. And we think that feeling sex as a more spiritual experience is probably linked around people, possibly feeling more connected to the partners, understanding that maybe sex is just not a mechanical act, but involves the story of two peoples that comes in with their vulnerabilities, and so is about who you are, how you grew up, and so on. And maybe this dimension was more in the mind of people, but of course, I'm just speculating, because we actually didn't ask about this later on, but we found the psilocybin made
Unknown Speaker 26:53
sex being more spiritual than what was before.
Unknown Speaker 26:58
Yeah, yeah. I noticed that psilocybin before and after definitely increased. But I thought it was interesting that the
Unknown Speaker 27:08
the
Unknown Speaker 27:10
is get to load Prem, yeah, the baseline was way higher than higher in the gap that. So, yeah, that's interesting, and we really know why that was the case. It's likely linked to like, the small sample sizes of the two groups. And, yeah, but it was an interesting point that, at the same time, limits our results, because we found that people inside in the psilocybin group felt sex to be more spiritual from baseline, but at the same time, is not that the end point was higher for psilocybin because of the differences in baseline, right, right? So it kind of shows how these results are preliminary, and we need much more research on this. And that's always what I say when I'm talking about this paper, that the intention was not to, like, make spectacular claim, like saying, oh, like, if you take psychedelics, your sex life would be much, much better. But it's just trying to, like, throw a first stone in the lake and see if other people captures it and and stimulate more research in the stereo that has never been done. So I know we were talking about this before we jumped on, but there's another part of the the paper that was talking about how partner satisfaction at six months
Unknown Speaker 28:28
for for women went back down to baseline,
Unknown Speaker 28:33
but not for, not for men. And I'm curious if you had any insight about that any hypotheses on why that was?
Unknown Speaker 28:44
Maybe because sometimes, like, guys are not as good as treating girls as vice versa. I don't know. That's an interesting point. And I would say we do not really know that there wasn't a clear explanation around it, and that was the only result that changed. So yeah, it could be that maybe, like,
Unknown Speaker 29:06
yeah, in the sample overall, like, when the facts change, and maybe because just one of the two partners took the psychedelic together, there was like, a coming back to baseline. We don't, we don't know, and I think we'd absolutely need more research to understand this better.
Unknown Speaker 29:23
Yeah, and, you know, I wish psychedelics were a magic bullet and it was the, you know, people could just pop a magic pill and instantly get better. But it's, it's a very interconnected
Unknown Speaker 29:37
life, and there's many different aspects of what goes into even just a psychedelic experience, but just showing up day to day.
Unknown Speaker 29:44
I loved how in the paper you were talking about, I think his
Unknown Speaker 29:50
name is chiimplatz. I'm probably butchering his name, but he was talking about eight major components that contribute to an optimal sexual experience.
Unknown Speaker 30:00
Being present, connection, deep sexual and erotic intimacy, extraordinary communication, interpersonal risk taking and Exploration, Authenticity, vulnerability and transcendence.
Unknown Speaker 30:15
And so I'm just curious, like, how can psilocybin therapy be be combined with these eight major components, and what are some tangible ways that either individuals or couples can can optimize these in their life?
Unknown Speaker 30:31
Yeah, that's a very, a very good question. And I think like, yeah, this was quite a groundbreaking work that was done by Peggy kamplat that as a psychotherapist and researcher that basically interviewed couples that, after years of being together, still reported having great sex, and she identified these components that somehow still resembles, as you said before, elements of a psychedelic experience. And this light thing was one the thing that started making me reasoning around how there could be some inter intersections between psychedelic experiences and possibly shared psychedelic experiences with your partners and improvements in in one sex and intimate life,
Unknown Speaker 31:16
and how do you like cultivate this in in A long term relationship? Is another, another very good question. And I think, like very interesting and basic and overlooked point around this, is that possibly you should, you should be quite conscious of what you like and what you don't like, and pick a partner with which you already have great sex, at least at the beginning, in which it develops, like sometimes it's awkward at the beginning, but when you've been with someone for a few months, you get a sense with it. And in a funny way, I think it's important to start like the relationship, maybe from the fundamentals, and if that work, you can move on to other aspects of it, because it's way more difficult to create a satisfying sexual relationship with someone that you do not have it from the beginning, than trying to work on with the parliament, that you start to be in a really good place like boredom and routine are ones, are the ones that lie impeded more in the long run, there are definitely other aspects life evolves. Kids come and work, stress come in, and a lot of techniques in the realms of sex therapy that I am not an expert with, but I try to understand it more help couples try and trying to find times, sometimes it's just
Unknown Speaker 32:34
allocating sometimes to it in order to like, take out the some elements of like the psychological pressure, or not knowing when something is happening. And also, like trying to give time in the day to make to make it come up, because you can't just expect to be ready for sex in a second. You need to prepare yourself, like, mentally, psychologically, as it is, in for a psychedelic experience. And if you just try to like, make it happen randomly. It will likely not be, not be the west the best one. And I'm a strong proponent that like quality sometimes is better than than quantity, especially in long term relationships in which it would definitely be different than than the beginning. There are a lot of interesting approaches that focuses on like prioritizing mindfulness. Mindfulness is a key to all sex therapy approaches, and I think is also key in why psychedelics might improve sexual satisfaction, because psychedelics boots, yeah, increased mindfulness and mindfulness later on, can have a downstream positive effects on sexual satisfaction. So, yeah, definitely cultivating like mindfulness practice in your everyday life can help prioritize sometimes with your partner, can help and
Unknown Speaker 33:50
then get deeper into it, gain more knowledge and try maybe to be a bit exploratory, understand you and your partner better.
Unknown Speaker 34:00
I love that. And you know, like you said before, just even having a psychedelic experience and working on
Unknown Speaker 34:09
traumas that you might not think are inherently connected, are connected, right? If you're, yeah, if you are working on different blockages that you might not think have a direct impact on anything to do with sexuality, it really does. And,
Unknown Speaker 34:28
you know, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you're not a therapist, and it's not your field, but I am curious,
Unknown Speaker 34:38
after you've written this this paper, and thought a lot about this. I'm just curious. There's so many reports of sexual abuse, both in the therapy space, but but especially the psychedelic therapy arena. And you know, we touched upon this before. You know, people are so open and and.
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Vulnerable,
Unknown Speaker 35:02
both in therapy, but especially under psychedelics.
Unknown Speaker 35:07
How do you see this healing work being done
Unknown Speaker 35:14
while keeping everyone safe? Do you think it should be separated? And you know, if you are in a psychedelic therapy space, then maybe talk about sex later, when, when you're when you're sober. Do you think like it is possible to to work on these things while, uh, on psychedelics? I'm just curious, like, where, if you thought about this, and where you stand? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's a very complex and tricky point to make, because, of course, like the abuse reports like, are coming more and more. And I think there's definitely an element around psychedelics that can attract people that have, like, maybe higher narcissistic tendencies, in a way, but and at the same time, sex can be a very complex thing to work on, but like, I don't think there's, like, it should be repressed in sessions, because the sexual feelings come up, and especially with psychedelics like five me or DMT, sexual feelings are really, really common. And I was talking with some friends working at Tandava retreats in Mexico, and how they were saying that dealing with sexual trauma and repression and sexual feelings under five year DMT is so common and making people feel ashamed for it could be absolutely horrible for them, and it has the risk of re traumatizing them. But at the same time, it really depends on the players that are linked to this field, and sometimes there are bad players that I think are also related to the fact that most of this work is still happening in the underground. And maybe when these treatments will be approved medically, it is going to be more safe for safeguarded and possibly changed. I wouldn't say it's going to be resolved, because it's not that by regulating something, all these issues will go away, but there's going to be a system of accountability that down does not really because if a shaman is abusive towards his clients, there's there's not really lions or a regulatory body that he needs to respond to. While if these drugs become integrated in our medical system, this could definitely end up more safeguarded, and bad players could be punished in a way that now is not really possible outside maybe the realms of social media and
Unknown Speaker 37:32
an awareness around there that sometimes is also excessive and badly directed. So yeah,
Unknown Speaker 37:40
if you had unlimited funds and team, and,
Unknown Speaker 37:46
you know,
Unknown Speaker 37:49
and any regulatory loophole was lifted, and you had all the permits, and, you know, all the equipment and XYZ, all the volunteers, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, what? What work would you want to do in, in, you know, immediately, then, you know, in the next 510, years, yeah. So, yeah, I will first, like, maybe mention which work I am actually doing now in this realm. And then I mentioned what I'd love to do in in some years. So now we have, like, a big, uh, online study of couples taking psychedelics or MDMA together, and we are basically trying to understand how the relationship is impacted by these experiences. This study is open to everyone who is planning to do this in their own settings, and we have the link accessible on the survey study link on the Imperial College website. And couples can pick a date, and then they receive questionnaires about the quality of their relationship before and for weeks and three months after the experience, as well as some questions about the quality of the psychedelic experience. And we are trying to understand what happens in couples taking either psychedelics and in pathogens together, and how is the relationship or the breakup impacted later on, and this, I think, was going to gain a lot of insights into this, into this topic. And at the same time, we are collecting data from couples that are going into a psychological support program combined with psilocybin, cyben and the Netherlands, together with this retreat center called beautiful space, and we're trying to understand how
Unknown Speaker 39:24
psilocybin could be used, combined with a form of psychological support that includes sex and relationship education in order to improve relationship and sexual satisfaction, with possibly getting some data on how psilocybin assisted couples therapy could Look in the future and this from where from this it comes, maybe my longer term interest that would be, I don't know, maybe doing a study on couples therapy and MDMA in an otherwise healthy couple that no one ever did it or with psilocybin, and trying to understand the brain markers of social connectedness happening in.
Unknown Speaker 40:00
In these people, because there are brain markers that we can look at, one of them being brain synchrony, that is the way in which people are processing information similarly with their brain that we know is associated with relationship satisfaction. So I'd be curious to see what happens to couples taking psychedelics together to this neural synchrony, and how is that linked to their psychological feelings afterwards? And yeah, let's see if this becomes a reality in a few years. I'm so curious about
Unknown Speaker 40:35
where some people experience sexual feelings and thoughts coming up during psychedelic experiences. But I'm hoping that you can elaborate on the science around,
Unknown Speaker 40:48
you know, the serotonin system and how some science says it's not supposed to come up. And I'm hoping that you could elaborate on that, yeah, no, it's very, very interesting. And the main reason is because the limited research that exists on the serotonin through a receptor agonist on sexual activity and functioning in animals, it suggests that it inhibits sexual activity, especially in males rats, possibly improving it in female rats. However, there's definitely qualitative reports of people having this strong sense of sexual feelings coming up during their psychedelic experiences with psilocybin, with DMT and so on and so like, this is still very unexplained by by normal research. And I think like, it's something that I wish it would be like investigated more. There could be like, if we think more from a psychoanalytic point of view, in a Freudian sense, it could be that your libido or your energies, when you can access your unconscious under psychedelics, they get liberated, and they the suppression feeling stops, and sometimes people have these energies that just come up in their bodies and in their mind as a consequence of maybe unlocking the unconscious. But of course, this is relatively esoteric as an explanation, and still not very mechanistic, but there might be something interesting there, and I think it should definitely be investigated further is that all psychedelics or or certain ones that that have, I think it's still too like anecdotal to really say anything about it. We had it happening with psilocybin, with DMT and with fademyo. DMT is really, really reported around retreat centers. So it sounds that it comes with
Unknown Speaker 42:45
several psychedelics, but it doesn't happen to everyone. Sometimes it happens to people, and that's why I'm saying that it could be something related to this inhibition on some energies that are in your body or so on. But again, very esoteric and not very scientific explanation, but we don't really have a good answer on this yet.
Unknown Speaker 43:09
Well, just like personal experience, I feel like it depends on the psychedelic like MDMA, for sure, like that. I feel like that's the point for a lot of people, to be connected with other people and to feel all the love and all this stuff and
Unknown Speaker 43:25
but also dosage, right? So, like, on a microdose of maybe mushrooms for me, definitely, for sure. And I, you know, I feel like it, yeah? Because, for me, I feel like I definitely have a Bigfoot in reality and connecting with other people, whereas a large dose of psilocybin, for me,
Unknown Speaker 43:49
I'm in it, like, yeah, yeah, no, yeah. Working through my traumas, I might get nauseous. I'm like, not interested at all. Like, yeah, but afterwards, hell yeah, because, you know, I've had cathartic experiences, yeah, yeah. And this is our clearing worked on, yeah, yeah. Like, the study was really not focused about acute feelings and but what acute feelings I was saying, and maybe that's was, like a little misinterpretation, is that it's not that people are having sex or they're having anything that happens outside, but their mental experiences can resemble, maybe some like esthetic orgasmic feelings that sometimes can happen. But it's not that they're doing anything physically. It's just something that happens internally and mentally and in themselves that could resemble, like, yeah, some feelings of extreme pleasure and so on that happens every while. And then, right, yeah, yeah. Actually, I mean,
Unknown Speaker 44:50
I don't know how to phrase it in a in a scientific way, and I don't really know what exactly is happening, but I've done.
Unknown Speaker 45:00
There's a concept of, like Kundalini awakenings, or just like Kundalini energetic awakenings, where
Unknown Speaker 45:06
I've had it, and I've seen people have it, and where you're literally having like, full energetic convulsions on the ground, or wherever you are, and it's like energy rising
Unknown Speaker 45:18
and, yeah, that can feel really, really good. And it's almost like, not, I mean, it can be sexual, if you view it that way, but it's, it's almost just like, how good it feels for energy blocked energy to to be at least, yeah, you know, similar, I guess that's, you know, similar to an orgasm, but it's more energetic, right? And it's more like a clearing, a cathartic clearing, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I was saying Yeah. It's not really like yeah, it could be interpreted as sexual, but it doesn't need to be. And
Unknown Speaker 45:55
yeah, I'd be very curious to understand that phenomenon more
Unknown Speaker 46:00
cool, and what?
Unknown Speaker 46:06
Yeah, where can people follow your work? It sounds like you are doing a lot of different things and some I'm just curious.
Unknown Speaker 46:15
You know you're wrapping up your PhD right now? No, I'm in the middle of it. I wish we just started a new study, like focusing on the neural correlates of the famino DMT experience, and that's the core of my PhD. All this stuff that I've kind of like, Yeah, I've been populated around. It's just being a bit of like, yeah, an interest project. But I my PhD is more focused on psychedelic neuroimaging than this work that I am doing, but I'm glad I'm still allowed to do it and develop it while I'm in academia. So yeah, I'm full blown into it. It's going to be near with a lot of like guiding secondary sessions and acquiring a lot of data, but gonna be for the for the greater, for the future. And I'm really exciting, and I love doing this work, so it's stressful, but it's not,
Unknown Speaker 47:04
yeah, it's not heavy from Yeah, bigger picture perspective and following like, I am doing a lot of science communication on LinkedIn and x under my name Thomas Barbara. I also have an Instagram page that
Unknown Speaker 47:21
people can follow me on and yeah, like I regularly update about psychedelic research. So if you're interested about Neo science coming out, it's definitely a good place,
Unknown Speaker 47:32
cool. And if there is a couple listening or an individual that wants to participate in their study, can they in a study that you're doing? Can they reach out? Yeah, the link is publicly available on the Imperial College website, and I'm happy to give you a link, but I don't think Spotify can actually click on anything. So if they write the Imperial College, they go into survey studies, they can just sign up and study if they're planning to have an experience together.
Unknown Speaker 48:01
Fine, awesome. Yeah, thank you so much. Sounds exciting. Well, thank you. Yeah, send me the link. I'll put it in the bio.
Unknown Speaker 48:10
I don't know, we published a podcast in many different Okay, streaming services, so I don't know which ones can have the link and which ones can't, but definitely on our website we can have links and we'll put that there,
Unknown Speaker 48:23
but yeah, thank you. I mean, this is such a
Unknown Speaker 48:27
interesting conversation. There's so many different arenas, is so
Unknown Speaker 48:31
intricate and interconnected in so many aspects of our life. So thank you. You know, it is a very taboo conversation. I'm glad that we could have it and and talk about your work, about it. Really happy. Thank you so much. Yeah, congrats on doing and
Unknown Speaker 48:49
hopefully, in a few years, I'm going to have way more insights into the emotional aspects of things, and just like, see what happens to couples in a more emotional level. Because I think probably where psychedelics really help, and sex side. It's more of a downstream effect, right, right? Well, I'll bring you on in a couple of years. Thank you so
Unknown Speaker 49:10
much. Well, thank you everyone for tuning in and shrooming in for another episode of the mushroom revival podcast. Couldn't do without you if you liked the show, we don't have a direct way that you can
Unknown Speaker 49:25
donate financially, but we do have a mother company, Mother mushroom revival, where we have a whole line of functional mushroom products from organic gummies, capsules, tinctures, powders, and we have a special coupon for for listeners of the show, it's VIP, and that code is pod treat. If you don't want to spend any money, we have a giveaway going on. Link is in the bio where we pick a winner once a month to win some mushroom goodies. We also have a bunch of free things on our website from free.
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Ebooks that you can download to a ton of blogs that we write every month for all things mushrooms, and we have my newest book on there as well, the little book of mushrooms. You can find it in bookstores all across the country, in the United States, and, yeah, leave a review that goes a long way, but also just spread the word about mushrooms. And you know, anything that you thought was an interesting conversation starter for in this episode, talk to people about about mushrooms and and psychedelics in general, and nature and,
Unknown Speaker 50:36
yeah, so as always, much love, and may this bores Be With You. You.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
