Diagnostic labels, meds to bring us up or down, fads to fix our bodies and our minds, and platitudes that pass for wisdom: current western approaches to healing and fulfillment often cause more dis-ease than they cure, robbing us of our ability to innovatively forge our own paths of mending and enlightenment.

Sadly, psychedelic practices are increasingly following the disempowering trend of one-size-fits-all care, promising miracle cures and spiritual transformation with the finger-snap fix of one substance or another. Some are even proclaiming that a single psychedelic dose is “the equivalent of 10,000 hours of talk therapy.”

Nonsense.

At Cardea, we see the renaissance in psychedelics as an opportunity to create new modalities of change in ourselves, and maybe even in the world around us. But it is dishonest to “medicalize” psychedelics and talk about them as “quick fixes” because this is not how they work. And the reason they don’t work that way is because human beings don’t change that way.

Change & Growth

Extensive research on therapeutic change supports this point. Only 15% of the factors that facilitate change have to do with specific treatment interventions.

On the other hand, a hefty 40% has to do with the unique social and psychological strengths and impediments of the person who comes for help, while a whopping 45% of change is facilitated by a combination of the person’s faith in the care provided and the qualities therapists bring to their work: a focus on collaboration rather than intervention, emotional warmth and a commitment to shifting what they do in response to what is happening at the moment with their client.

Remarkably, this same lesson from the research on change also comes from our forebears in the psychedelic community and in the psychotherapeutic professions– a lesson lost at times in the current marketing of psychedelics as pharmaceutical cures.