By Marcela Ot'alora G., M.A., L.P.C.

After working with trauma for many years, I observed that one of the greatest challenges for people with PTSD is their distorted sense of self. Repeated exposure to painful memories reinforces the individual’s sense that he or she is a victim, and the corresponding experience of guilt and shame produces additional feelings of unworthiness. MDMA-assisted psychotherapy offers a new perspective for working with these destructive symptoms.

By Tom Shroder for the The Washington Post Magazine

Before becoming the first patient treated in the flagship MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study sponsored by MAPS, Donna Kilgore had suffered from PTSD for over 10 years. Donna had been the victim of a brutal rape in her home in 1994.

“It was what it must feel like to have no soul,” she says. She followed a regimen of various antidepressants and tried dozens of different therapists and forms of therapies, but nothing worked. “I was getting to the point where it 
was either go sit on a mountaintop or go dive off a cliff.” That all changed when she received MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.