Will Van Derveer

your soul is irredeemable from the things that you witnessed or that you did yourself.

So this particular young man went to the VA and did the things that people often do when they get home, they go and seek services.

And often they get prescribed a thing called the combat cocktail, where every drug under the sun

antipsychotics, anti-anxiety, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and so on, often in combination with essentially no benefits.

So Charles is just a good example of, you know, many of the young people who come back from war.

So he decided to sign up for the study and

On the effect of MDMA, he got to have a conversation with his maker.

He's a Christian young man and got to have a conversation about his soul and presented the view inside of his state that he was in to God of, I believe I have a mark on my soul and what does this mean?

What happens with MDMA that's very interesting is that people sometimes can access states of self-compassion and a capacity to see the events of their trauma from a sort of 30,000 foot view.

And what he learned in that conversation inside of himself was that as a human being, it wasn't his role

to make that judgment about his soul.

He remembered and accessed the teachings of his religion, that it was up to God to decide what was gonna happen to his soul, it wasn't up to him.

And from there, he was able to forgive himself and what his role was and the things that he saw.

in combat, and he stepped into something that I wanna mention, because it's really important here, is that he began to see that everything that he had experienced in his life, including combat experiences, shaped him to be the person that he is today.

And he reflected on, do I love who I am today?

Am I acceptable as a flawed human being?

Can I accept myself and my flaws?

And the answer was yes.

And so he began this journey into what we call post-traumatic growth, where you haven't just gotten to a place where you don't have symptoms anymore, which he did get to that point, but you're going into a place of

Who am I?