Psychedelic re-imprinting
What happens when guides take advantage of 'critical learning windows'
Jessica lives in San Francisco and works as a medium in a consciousness centre. Three years ago, she was approached by Roy, a charismatic psychedelic guru with a sizeable following on the internet (I’ve changed his name to protect Jessica). Roy seemed certain that he and Jessica were meant to be together. She tells me:
I wasn’t attracted to him initially, he’s rather awkward with women, apparently he always has been. But he swept me off my feet with all this hyper-romantic, mystical stuff – he said he’d received a download during ceremony that we were meant to be together, I was the Divine Feminine, it would be a sacred pairing, etc etc. Now, having read up on narcissistic personalities, I realize it was text-book love-bombing, but I was intrigued.
Roy was insistent that Jessica needed to ‘drop in’ to his medicine stack, which he calls Love Magic. It’s not enough simply to serve people psilocybin or ayahuasca these days, every wannabe guru needs to develop their own specialized ‘stack’ . Love Magic is a stack containing MDMA and some other substances. Jessica wasn’t sure if she wanted to do it as she prefers plant medicines and this seemed like hard drugs to her. But Roy was ‘very persuasive’. So she let herself be injected by him with Love Magic.
it felt like a huge gift that he was giving it for free, like this very elite luxury thing that usually costs thousands. So I accepted it.
Jessica found the MDMA and other drugs very erotic.
And he definitely took advantage of that. He came into bed with me, and we were making out, and then he went down on me and gave me oral sex. I was stoned out of my mind. He was high too. I think he still feels awkward with women so he almost always takes something when he has sex with them. I don’t think he ever made love sober. And the women are almost always high as well, usually on his Love Magic.
She adds:
I really haven’t met a medicine man who is not tempted by lust and who is holding medicine with integrity. It’s just human nature. People are so surrendered and vulnerable when they’re on these medicines, and for some guides, it’s a golden opportunity to get into their psyches, get into their heart, get into their soul, and extract as much narcissistic supply as they can.
Narcissistic supply
Narcissistic supply refers to the attention, admiration, validation, and emotional energy that people with narcissistic traits or Narcissistic Personality Disorder seek from others to maintain their self-esteem and sense of importance.
Narcissists need a constant supply of attention because they lack stable internal self-worth. When they’re getting supply, they feel powerful and important. In this case, Roy gets his ‘fix’ through being seen as a spiritual guru/healer, through participants’ adoration and being viewed as a ‘god’ figure, through social media validation, and through sexual conquests.
Jessica says:
In psychedelic culture the shaman-figure is elevated into a god. You worship your healer, because you’re seeing God in them. Roy’s getting tons of praise, tons of love, tons of adoration, tons of narcissistic supply. People are wide-open channels. MDMA is an aphrodisiac. It’s really sexually-stimulating. So people are so turned on, and then he’s right there as a god.
So how did it play out for her and Roy, after that first night together?
For me it really confusing, because my nature is, I want pair-bonding, I want sacred union. I want a husband. So I then went through this spiral of anxious attachment - I just bared my soul, we did this whole ceremony, he promised me so much. But then he’s just out, he just detaches, and he’s on to the next one - he didn’t provide the masculine containment that I was seeking. So that was really confusing, and I felt a lot of grief and heartbreak.
A few weeks later, however, ‘spirit moved’ Roy to get back in contact with Jessica. She was thrilled, still in the afterglow of their previous encounter where he had made a deep impression on her during her psychedelic experience. Once again, he love-bombed her with mystical-romantic language, and they had unprotected sex. Jessica warned him she was not on contraception but he nonetheless ejaculated in her. She conceived.
I got in touch with him to say I was pregnant and planning to abort the embryo, but he begged me not to, and said he would step up and be a father and we would be together.
But that’s not what occurred. She has since been bringing up the child on her own, with minimal interest or interaction from Roy. Occasionally, she has confronted him and demanded more support. But she now sees a different side to him, of violent rage, entitlement, addiction and mental instability. He says her karma is not his responsibility.
She says:
It’s crazy because on his platform he’s preaching about how to be a good man, a good father, a man of integrity, he preaches all the right things, but he’s a total hypocrite. It was so confusing – how can someone preaching love and ‘honouring the sacred feminine’ be so intentionally cruel? I went down the rabbit hole of studying narcissistic abuse, and understood he’s a textbook ‘covert communal narcissist’, one of these gurus who are super charming and have huge followings, but behind closed doors they’re abusive monsters and, in his case, a drug addict.
She reflects:
When I first met him, I didn’t feel a big spark of attraction. He seemed painfully awkward and nerdy. It was really the medicine that got him under my skin. When you’re on MDMA and your heart is wide open and whoever is there tending to you, you can fall in love with them. It’s almost like baby chicks. When they hatch, they’re supposed to imprint on their mother. There’s this deep, primal bond. And with these ceremonies, it’s like our spirits hatch out of the shell of the ego, and whoever is there, we’re going to imprint on them, whether it’s our mother, or some fucking wolf or snake.
Konrad Lorenz, Timothy Leary and ‘imprinting’
Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) was an Austrian zoologist and one of the founders of ethology, the scientific study of animal behavior in natural settings. He was also a Nazi sympathiser. He became famous in the 1930s–50s for his work on imprinting, a form of rapid, early learning in which a young animal forms a powerful attachment to the first moving, responsive being it encounters, usually its mother. In his classic experiments with greylag geese, Lorenz showed that if he was the first figure the goslings saw after hatching, they would follow him everywhere as if he were their parent. Lorenz argued that imprinting happens during a brief critical period early in life and creates deep, long-lasting effects on social bonding, mating preferences, and group identity.
Animals are typically stuck in these early imprints. However, in the 1960s, Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary argued that humans could re-open critical learning windows and re-program their imprinting using a variety of techniques – most notably, psychedelics.
In the 1980s, a life-coach called Robert Dilts saw Leary lecturing, and was enthused by his theory of re-imprinting. Dilts brought the idea into the world of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) where it still enjoys prominence.
More recently, Leary’s theory of critical learning windows and psychedelic re-imprinting has come back into vogue in psychedelic research – it’s now one of the leading theories of how psychedelics ‘work’, thanks to the research of Dr Gul Dolen, Professor Robin Carhart-Harris and others.
Here’s Gul Dolen on a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast:
Critical periods are windows of time when the brain is especially sensitive to its environment, and it can learn really well from that environment…It’s imprinting behavior in geese. Konrad Lorenz noticed that, within 48 hours of hatching, a little gosling will form a long-lasting attachment to whatever is moving around in their immediate environment. Typically this is their mom, but if the mom isn’t there, it could be another mom. Or if it’s Konrad Lorenz, it could be a scientist. Then after that 48-hour time window is over, they can be exposed to all kinds of things in their environment and they won’t form that lasting attachment. So that little window of time where they’re so sensitive to their environment that they can form this lifelong attachment - that’s what he called the ‘critical period’.
Dr Dolen continuued:
People describe psychedelics as like it was 20 years of therapy in one day. I think that our critical period idea really provides an explanation…Ketamine keeps the critical period open for two days and then by a week, it’s closed. Psilocybin and MDMA keep it open for two weeks and then it’s closed by three weeks. LSD keeps it open for three weeks, closed by four weeks. Ibogaine reopens the critical period for at least four weeks.
Dr Dolen tells me: ‘I only became aware of his idea that psychedelics may enable imprinting recently. It is gratifying to me that we came at the same idea from very different perspectives, and I talked about this at the Aspen psychedelic conference when I was being interviewed by Zach Leary, Timothy’s son.’
Re-imprinting, guruism and cultic dynamics
Psychedelics, according to Leary and now Gul Dolen, may open a critical window in which people go into a very vulnerable, infantile-like state and became acutely sensitive to environmental cues. Their normally rigid psyche turns into hot wax, and they can be re-imprinted, they can learn new ways of responding to the world.
That’s very exciting and creates the possibility of change and healing for people stuck in habitual psychological problems.
But what happens if you open a critical learning window and there’s an immature, power-hungry, ego-inflated, asshole-guide there, sucking in your adoration and eager to imprint their ego-desires onto the hot wax of your psyche? You’re going to imprint onto that asshole and follow them around like one of Konrad Lorenz’ goslings.
This happens
all
the
fucking
time.
Dr Gul Dolen tells me:
We need to be careful about administering psychedelics because they put people in a vulnerable state similar to childhood, especially since, based on our research, this open state lasts days to weeks. I usually give the example of Charles Manson.
More after the paywall, on critical learning windows, gurus and the risk of narcissistic imprinting. Come to our free online event on this topic next Wednesday.
