What causes cathartic release?

Duncan Riach · 4 days ago · Medium.com

All of a sudden there was a crow. It was squawking loud, rough, painful “caw, caw, caw” sounds, vibrations that grated against something inside me. The angular shape of the bird was clear to my inner-eye, with its oily, black feathers hanging off its slightly-raised wings, wings raised repetitively by the pumping of its chest. That’s all there was, just this crow, and somewhere in the distance was Duncan’s body and the guttural cries that were emitting from the mouth of that body. It was as if I was somehow making these cries, but also as if they had a deep meaning that I could not understand. Somehow I had become the crow and the crow was saying what so badly needed to be said.

Then the birth began: the pushing through into the light; the hopeful escape from safe confines of the womb, an escape into space, a place where I could spread my wings, a stage filled with potential. It was not only a human birth; it felt like the birth of a cosmos; perhaps it was an archetypal birth.

But I would never be one with my mother again. I would never feel her heart so close to mine. My birth could not be felt as anything but rejection, because it literally was, even though it was for my own good. In some way or another, I imagine that all births are traumatic, that all births represent loss.

I’m trying to conjure up a story about why the ugly birdsong transitioned into the wailing of a newborn child, how that process led to my own birth. I know that I was overcome with grief, inconsolable grief: grief that could not be comforted, ever, by anyone, not even by my mother.

The final acknowledgement, after forty-six years, of the presence of this primordial pain threw my body into a shaking fit of tears, wringing moisture from my core like a dirty dishrag. Somewhere in the distance, I felt Cindy’s hands on my feet, squeezing my toes, letting me know that she was there.

My mother loved me, and she still loves me; and I love my mother. Hi Mum. I know you did your best. I know you tried to be the best mother you could. I know your heart was in the right place. But there were also so many ways that you and Dad simply couldn’t give me what I needed. Maybe it’s like this for all kids; I don’t want to single you out, to point a finger at you, to make it all your fault. It’s not your fault; it’s nobody’s fault. It’s just how it is, how it was.

I was born into a world where, right around the time of my birth, my mother’s mother died; so my mother was grieving. My parents then divorced not many years after my birth. I have to assume that they were also not particularly happily married when I was born. Then my dad died. And, for years, my mum was preoccupied with one crisis after another, including dealing with seemingly endless abuse that was presumably painfully reminiscent of her own childhood. Her alcoholic abuser had, almost magically, the same unusual first name as her alcoholic and abusive father.

Her life-menu included being nearly strangled to death while her children listened in fear and being told her house would be burned to the ground (via molotov cocktail) with her and her children inside. The police reassured her that this was a domestic matter, and that they could therefore not intervene. Phew.

To truly recognize the plight of a little child born into all of that is almost impossible because it’s absolutely heart-breaking. So we look away, we minimize, we ignore. And then, on the sofa, next to Cindy, in the depths of a physician-prescribed ketamine hole, a boundless space in which my mind, freed from the input of the five senses, and swaddled in anxiolysis, was able to turn and look straight into the gaping chasm of that little child’s predicament.

The child himself cannot look; he must not acknowledge how it really is. To see that his parents cannot provide him with the safety and guidance that he so desperately needs is life-threatening, terrifying. “There has to be some other answer,” the little child seems to insist. “I don’t need safety and guidance, and, even if I did, I should be able to provide them for myself.”

When I returned from that journey, my voice was deeper and more resonant, an apparent physiological shift that persists many months later. Something held in my throat had been released. The Book of Symbols, page 248, claims that “… the crow or raven daemon perched in our psyches open[s] doors, steal[s] treasures for us from hidden places, coax[es] us out of our narrow, conventional shells.” I also wrote a poem-like piece that lets The Crow speak for itself.

With the relinquishment of hope that those needs for safety and guidance would be met, retrospectively, in a past that can never be revisited, my attention naturally turned to all the ways that I am now safe and guided. I am surrounded by people who take amazing care of me, including my mother, as she is now. I can now lean on others with a little more conviction. I can stop endlessly wrestling with my solvable life issues as an emotional surrogate for the inherently unsolvable conundrum of the orphan archetype.

Just a few days ago, as Cindy lay on the bed with her AirPods in her ears and a mask over her eyes, I noticed her hand reaching out, under the covers, to my side of the bed. I moved from where I had been standing, at the foot of the bed—watching the flow of emotions pass over her face, like the ever-changing ripples on a mountain stream—to slip under the covers next to her, to hold her hand tight, to remind her that I was with her, always.

As I watched from her side, her body started to shake and her face curled up from the chin, contorting with all the tiny muscles we don’t often use. Her gut rhythmically pumped tears up and out from under the eye mask, which then ran down her cheeks in thin streams, as mountains of grief were unburdened in that space of unconditional love; this is just how it is, how it was.

“I have felt unloved for so much of my life,” she told whatever was witnessing, “that it hurts so much to let love in.” These last few words were spoken slowly, with a quiet determination to wade through the quagmire of shame, each intentional step squeezing more juice from the rich, soft bog.

Later, after removing the dripping-wet eye mask, she told me that, “I thought the metallic sensation I have often felt was just the ketamine,” but after this session, she had become aware that it was the visceral feeling of an imprint she had been carrying—like invisible clothing—an imprint in the body of being pushed around by patriarchal energies.

Since that session, Cindy has seemed noticeably lighter, more playful and loving. This morning, as I awoke, she sat next to me and stroked my head, welcoming me back into the world for another day.

When Cindy manages to get enough ketamine into her bloodstream, by using enough lozenges, by swishing the spiked saliva long enough and hard enough across the mucous membranes of her mouth, when she is able to drop into the boundless space that is presumably what recreational users refer to as a k-hole, it invariably leads to one of these transformative cathartic releases, releases catalyzed by vivid visual and emotional journeys through distant lands: to become a tree in a forest in Southeast Asia or to be wrapped in the loving embrace of a gathering of abuelas somewhere in South America.

In contrast, for me, even when the ketamine is delivered at a higher dose, intramuscularly by a psychiatrist, there seems to be a tendency for my mind to resist the abyss, like a leaf caught in the eddy of a storm drain. Sure, as I slip away from the shackles of the senses, the black enclosure of the eye mask is replaced by a boundless blackness of unfathomable immensity, and my body gently sheds tears into the fabric of the eye mask, but, for many sessions, no significant catharsis came. “Perhaps I’ve integrated most of my trauma,” I remember saying to Cindy, naively.

Even so, I experienced many of the kind of things that Cindy reported, such as finding that she was a puddle of water in the street and feeling what it’s like to reflect the sky. I know what she means: you actually become a cell, become the earth, become a galaxy. Without the constraints of a human body, the sense of self is undefined; a continually shifting sequence of perspectives naturally ensues.

“I’m a polar bear!” Cindy once exclaimed, with glee. Later, I learned that she had been climbing up a steep hill of ice, the cold wind blowing through her fur; she had been both the polar bear and a little wolf-girl inside the bear.

But for me, before the crow came, my sessions invariably led to an experience with a particular kind of flavor that I find hard to describe. My bodily sensations seemed to be replaced with an overwhelming visceral sensation. This sensation would map to a continually changing, tumbling sequence of what seemed like embodied conceptual considerations of polar opposites. What is it like to be both infinitely small and infinitely large at the same time? What is it like to be perforated so thoroughly with so many holes that you are only empty space?

This same fundamental experience shows up in countless different forms. Another one is to feel ultra-embodied, solid, heavy, like a rock, like a mountain, like all of space and time; immovable, unchanging. But all of space and time has no real solidity nor weight, since there is nothing to which it can be referenced. Another of these experiences is to be trapped inside a kind of infinitely recursive maze from which it is clear that there is no hope of ever exiting. There is no escape from freedom; there is no getting out of something that has no inside.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to explain this sensation to my therapist, “I can kind of feel it now; it’s like all of reality is being held together by these infinitely large opposing forces. These overwhelming forces all cancel out and what’s left is this perfect equilibrium.” It’s like there’s this constant tension, this hum, that renders reality effectively frozen in perfect balance; nothing is really changing. It’s both utterly frenetic and totally placid at the same time. “Can you feel it?” I asked, truly believing, trusting, that she would be able to feel it too.

I think she may have responded, “Um, sort of,” in her perfectly supportive and validating way. Hi Connie.

I have wondered if this is a traumatic imprint that my body is carrying from some experiences in meditation that happened in 2001, when I had what some people call satori, a sudden awakening to the fundamental nature of reality. I have written about this in various places, including My Struggle with Enlightenment. It’s the bliss-filled revelation, when the self-illusion stops, that what is always happening is actually boundless, contextless, non-separable wholeness; from the perspective of self, it seems like unconditional love.

After that, my personality changed significantly, my marriage fell apart, and my previous life disintegrated; ultimately, though, a better life is being built upon a more anti-fragile foundation. I have wondered, however, if this recurring visceral struggle is part of the process of trying to integrate those experiences. It feels like wrestling with what some people refer to as non-duality, this fundamental truth, this unitive axiom that which, while it can easily be revealed (being hidden in plain sight), cannot possibly be fully comprehended by the limited mind.

Having no doubt about the illusory nature of separation (of self) pretty much pulls the rug out from the whole apparent endeavor of the self. It can be very hard for the remnants of self that are left behind, like flotsam once the ship has already been torn apart by rocks; even though some bits and pieces still may float, there is no integral ship left.

Prior to my treatment with ketamine, this overwhelming visceral sensation would appear in deep meditation, when the senses had been disconnected and the self floated in a contextless space. For example, I would experience this terrifying sense of being frozen, solid like a rock and as massive as the whole cosmos. I have discovered that this sensation is more reliably and consistently accessible via ketamine.

But I have also wondered if all of this is just a cover for a traumatic imprint that I cannot consciously recall. Perhaps this is a way for me to spiritualize and try to bypass a deeply painful and confusing early experience of, say, sexual abuse. After all, one of the ways I have found myself describing this is as if I am being crushed from the inside, “like an erection:” an unbearable internal pressure that is created by the tension of pressing against its own limits. How Freudian.

In a more recent session, after experiencing my first full-body orgasm, I said, “Wow, I’m shiva!” Shiva, a lingam, a dick; talk about possible spiritual bypass. By the way, in case you haven’t experienced one, full-body (non-genital) orgasms are insanely good, “So that’s what many women are so excited about!” The power that comes from total surrender is magnificent.

In every session, this overwhelming visceral experience appears at some point. I have learned to be curious about it, to let it wash over and through me, to try to enjoy it given there’s no escaping from it anyway. It seems as though my ability to do this has grown progressively with each session.

Once the overwhelming sensation has been explored enough, the session naturally moves on to some other experience, such as the orgasm above, or being a sail on a boat, and then being the boat, enjoying the wind pushing me wherever it will. Increasingly, there is more of a sense that life is a kind of game that I have no real control over (there is no real “I”), but which can be taken lightly and enjoyed for what it is.

It was against this backdrop of incremental surrender that I entered the session in which the crow appeared. I had been struggling with an immense personal issue that required a ton of my time and focus, that was scaring me, and that I believed to be the source of a lot of anxiety. My intention going into the session was to understand why the fuck this was so difficult, so terrifying, so complex. Going in with this anger and frustration, this feeling of having had enough, of wanting to get to the bottom of it inside myself, is what seems to have led me through the usual wrestling match with the non-duality-like-conundrum and then down to the crow, which led to the rebirth experience.

I wonder if the whole visceral struggle to integrate extreme opposites was merely a manifestation of my bracing against the tumble into the potentially deeper realization of the little child’s predicament. Perhaps this was a way of orbiting the psychological complex without falling completely into its gravity well. Perhaps this was, or still is, a kind of pompous surrogate that my psyche can get its metaphysical teeth into, simply a defense mechanism. “I’m sorry, I’m too busy wrestling with unifying the cosmos to deal with your childish problem of not having safety and guidance.”

Nevertheless, this apparent imprint has continued to appear in its ever evolving forms, in subsequent sessions. Most recently, there was a recognition of its striking familiarity, as if it is truly ancient, something that has been impinging on, or in some way included in, my awareness for an eternity.

I’ll include here a quick side-note on ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic with psychedelic (mind-manifesting) effects at sub-anesthetic doses. It is one of the safest and most important medicines in our modern armamentarium, considered by the World Health Organization, since 1985, to be an essential medicine. While it is used by veterinarians, it is not just a “horse tranquilizer.” It is one of the safest human analgesics and anesthetics available and is used in developing countries and in battle zones where there is a lack of equipment, electricity, or expertise needed to supervise other forms of anesthesia.

More recently, it has been found to be a highly effective and rapidly-acting treatment for depression. Several different potential mechanisms of this action have been proposed, with some believing that the psychedelic effects are significant. I recommend reading The Ketamine Papers, a collection of papers on the psychotherapeutic and transformational utilization of this substance.

But this story was not even supposed to be specifically about ketamine. What prompted me to write today was a reader’s comment about my Return From a Ten-Year Vacation in which I not only wrote about crying but also reported that I was crying while I wrote. He gave me permission to publicly share the following information, which was originally part of a non-public conversation:

“I was trying to relate to your experience of crying. I never cry for any reason, but this year I did — uncontrollably. I was climbing to the summit of Kilimanjaro and at 5700m, after climbing all night in snow and wind and cold, tears just started coming out. I still don’t know if it was due to the physical or emotional intensity of the situation or some other reason.”

This sounds to me like the same kind of cathartic crying that I wrote about in Return From a Ten-Year Vacation, about which I have written above (in the context of ketamine-assisted therapy), and about which I will write more below.

I was in a meeting at work, planning for a challenging, in-person meeting with Microsoft. I was trying to focus on what we needed to do, but my body started crying uncontrollably. I didn’t really know why it was crying and I didn’t know how to stop it from crying. With tears running down my cheeks, I left the room.

At that time, I was six months into an 18 month divorce process that was extremely distressing, an apparent fallout from the awakening, which I mentioned earlier. With respect to the divorce, I hadn’t broken down and cried for some time. I wonder if being in a different environment, and dealing with novel stressors, led to that release.

I decided to take some time off work and went for a tour around Northern California, which included spending a week in a non-structured solitary meditation retreat and a few days at the beautiful Fairmont Sonoma hotel. But those experiences didn’t move my internal process forward in a significant way; they brought no catharsis nor realizations.

Before the divorce started, but after the awakening, when my wife-at-the-time refused to return with my young son from a vacation in the UK, the country from which we had emigrated, I jumped deeply into psychotherapy. I remember sitting in my therapist’s office in Santa Cruz, California when I felt the sensation of a massive bubble of energy break loose from the base of my spine. It travelled quickly up through my body, like a mushrooming, shiny balloon of air rising from the depths. It left through the crown of my head, the place where the awakening had happened more than a year earlier.

I don’t know what the energy was, nor what it represented, and I don’t remember the utterance that either of us may have produced to trigger that release. I do know that I found myself after the session spending a long time simply looking at a rose outside the therapist’s office with tears coming out of my eyes. I had, and still have, no real idea of what those tears were about; grief, I suppose.

On the drive home, I felt inspired to stop next to a grove of redwood trees. Once out of the car, I collapsed onto my knees while looking up into their canopies, before falling forward into a kind automatic prostration; I sobbed for a long time, delivering tears to their roots.

That reminds me of a later time in nature, after I started a psychology graduate school. I went with some friends to Yosemite National Park. Soon after we arrived, we went for a short walk amongst the redwoods. I left the group to be on my own and found myself, again, on the ground at the foot of a tree, in a fetal position, crying.

Again, I had no idea what this cathartic release was about. But, as always, I felt relief afterwards and an increased sense of freedom, and I seemed to exhibit a greater degree of behavioral flexibility. It’s as if the emotional blockages that were released had been binding my neuroses and limiting beliefs to me.

Recently, I’ve been listening to a podcast called Anything Goes, where James English interviews a motley crew of British folks from troubled backgrounds. A general theme seems to be of people finding their way out of very difficult circumstances. I find these stories fascinating, heartwarming, and inspiring. It’s great to hear about people beating the odds, and it restores my faith in humanity to see the softness and innocence at the core hardened criminals.

In episode 194, James talks with Shane Taylor, known as Britain’s most violent prisoner. Shane reveals how a life of being bullied led to him developing fantasies of killing people. Following that was a long period of gaining great pleasure from the physical act of stabbing people to death. If anyone wronged him, he made a commitment to himself to hunt them down and kill them, to exact revenge through his personal form of justice. He once almost fatally stabbed a prison officer in the head for gloating over the punishments he had been given.

His life turned around when he ended up in a one-on-one prayer session with a priest in prison. The priest instructed him to pray from his heart. So he begged, “God if you’re real, do something. Please come into my life.” Note that this was an act of surrender. Then he stopped praying and sat back. As he then began talking again, he noticed a feeling of energy in his stomach that started to rise and shoot up through his body. Then he “uncontrollably sobbed and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.” He realized, “the hurt I’d done, the bad I’d done.”

“Right up to that very moment, I was still active … still planning to kill people when I got out … and then, when that experience happened, I just became a totally different person. … From that moment on my life totally changed. I was no longer seeing the prison system as an enemy. I was starting to think logically. … It’s almost like someone had just gone in there and just got a couple of [those] wires [that] were loose and just connected them back up.”

He completely stopped killing and he reformed so thoroughly that he ended up getting a job in the same prison where he had almost killed that prison officer.

I have so many stories of transformational sobbing, but I’ll finish up for now, briefly, with just two more.

The first story is from my first ten-day Vipassana retreat. After the first three days of meticulously paying attention to the sensations at the opening of my nostrils, for more than ten hours per day, I was directed to move that finely-tuned focus, that mental scalpel, to the sensations throughout my body.

As I sat in that large, quiet, dimly-lit meditation hall, I became suddenly aware of the immense discomfort that I had been unconsciously carrying for most of my life. I started to shake and quietly sob, trying not to disturb the others. I was unable to prevent the release of shaky whimper. By the way, I think that this recognition of the depth and breadth of unconscious suffering is what Gautama Buddha may have truly been referring to when he putatively said that “life is suffering.”

I have now attended four of these ten-day retreats, and I believe that they have significantly contributed to my ability to live a fulfilling life.

The second story is from a friend, actually a composite of several people, who attended a transformational retreat in the Netherlands, where she ingested a therapeutic dose of psilocybin-containing truffles (psilocybin, in that form, is currently legal in the Netherlands).

She told me that as the medicine began to work its magic, her sense of self and the context of her life began to fall away, replaced by boundless freedom. At the same time, her body began to naturally weep from the eyes, as if an animal had been released from a cage and was testing the safety of its surroundings. Before long, the weeping cascaded into literally hours of uncontrollable sobbing.

After that ceremony, the severe depression that she had been burdened with for as far back as she could remember had completely left. I last spoke with her six months after that retreat; the depression was still completely gone; she felt deeply joyful and engaged with life.

Her experience is well aligned with new discoveries in the rapidly-growing field of research into the psychotherapeutic benefits of psilocybin (a psychedelic), such as this recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which showed that two separate doses of psilocybin three weeks apart produced an antidepressant effect at least as effective as daily treatment with the selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) escitalopram. This study follows on from an earlier one, published in 2017 in Psychopharmacology, which demonstrated that a similar two-dose treatment regimen led to persistent remission of depressive symptoms six months later. Note that this is remission without ongoing treatment with a psychoactive medication, medications which are often intended to modify long-term brain chemistry and which also often produce numerous undesirable side-effects. Psilocybin’s efficacy in reducing depression and anxiety may be due to its ability, like ketamine, to occasion mystical-like experiences, as this paper explores.

Look at me: writing like I have a doctoral degree in the middle of a personal essay.

What do all these vignettes add up to? What’s the common factor here?

It seems that the sense of self in the body tries to control what’s happening, trying to make sense of everything, trying fit what’s happening into a larger narrative, a context about itself. That holding on, that bracing, that attempt to overcome reality, is what gets in the way of the body naturally doing what it needs to do. When that sense of self briefly relents, for one reason or another, the body is finally able to non-rationally release; it can cry; it can grieve; it can collapse and sob and shake.

As experts in the treatment of PTSD, such as Peter A. Levine (the creator of Somatic Experiencing), attest, there is a natural, physiological process of release after stressful situations that the more primitive parts of our brain will engage in automatically and effortlessly when, presumably, the newer prefrontal cortex, with its default mode network, temporarily goes offline. The default mode network is a coordinated group of brain regions that is currently thought by neuroscientists to maintain a sense of self and its relative context, both relationally and through time. The classic example from the observations of wild animals is the gazelle, which will lie down and quiver uncontrollably after escaping from a lion. Shortly afterwards, the gazelle will jump up and behave like normal, as if nothing had happened.

My thesis is that circumstances that confuse, overload, or simply attenuate your default mode network, and its emergent property of self, create space for the “soft animal of your body,” as Mary Oliver calls it in her poem Wild Geese, to perform its ancient and natural processes of recalibration. Those circumstances may include extreme stress (such as while climbing a mountain), meditation, ingestion of psychedelics, ceremonial surrender, immersion in a natural environment, and being challenged in psychotherapy.

I am aware of many other approaches to creating this space for cathartic release and healing, such as The Hoffman Process, Holotropic Breathwork, the Wim Hof Method, and various forms of creative expression, including, of course, writing (hello, sweet Reader). I’ll leave a deeper exploration of these for another time. For now, I’d like to hear from you. How do you get out of the way of your body’s grieving process?

More from Duncan Riach

An engineer-psychologist focused on machine intelligence. I write from my own experience to support others in living more fulfilling lives | duncanriach.com