Introducing Other People’s Problems from CBC Podcasts
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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Northampton isn't just a place, it's a promise. A promise of safety, identity, and belonging. Stick around until the end of this episode for the story of how one drag king found home there.

Hey, dear Sugar listeners, this is Anne-Marie Sievertson, host of WBUR's Beyond All Repair and co-host of Endless Thread. And I'm here to share something special with you this week. It's an episode of Other People's Problems from our friends at the CBC.

Now, normally, therapy sessions are totally confidential, but this podcast opens the doors. On this season, the host, Dr. Hilary McBride, explores the transformative power of psychedelics in a therapeutic setting. With her psychological expertise, Dr. Hilary leads clients through drug-assisted therapy, guiding them to new heights on their healing journeys.

In this episode, you'll hear from Donovan, who has lived in fear and anger ever since he told the truth about being abused by his mother's boyfriend, and then felt betrayed by social workers who were supposed to help.

Now, after several ketamine therapy sessions, Donovan can finally look back upon his child self with care and calm, and he works to be the kind of adult he needed for his own children. I hope you enjoy the episode, and if you do, you can find the full season of CBC's Other People's Problems wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, Hillary here.

This season of Other People's Problems is about therapy using psychedelics and other psychoactive drugs. Research on psychedelics for mental health is compelling and promising, but there is still so much more we need to know about how well it works, why it works, and how it should best be done. I'm a registered psychologist in my home province of British Columbia, and everything we've included is legal and I am licensed to do. We think it's one of the first chances for you to listen in on real therapy sessions using drugs.

But please listen with care. These sessions, including the one you're about to hear, which deals with childhood sexual abuse, can be very intense. Am I putting this stuff on first? We'll get you to roll over first and put it on. Okay. I wore my chucks for good luck. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And then we'll sort of see what happens here. Yeah. With you all the way. All the way. Okay. Okay.

I'm Dr. Hilary McBride. This is a special season of Other People's Problems. We're letting you hear sessions with my clients who are using psychoactive drugs to go deeper into their healing. This is a session with Donovan and he is using ketamine. About two years ago, Donovan was referred to me by a therapist who knew that he needed some extra support.

I mean, he was not functioning at home, at his work. The relationships were falling apart. There was just so much that was happening for him, which when he explained his trauma history to me made perfect sense. I'm Donovan. I'm an engineer and I'm in my mid-40s and I have a young family with a two and four-year-old. I started seeing Hillary...

specifically inside of a anxiety attacks I was having and not feeling the function day to day. We started doing ketamine-assisted therapy. One of the very first sessions we had, almost as soon as the ketamine hit his body, he became completely overwhelmed with terror. I mean, I don't think I've seen terror quite like this in an adult maybe ever.

and I knew he was showing me exactly what it felt like when he was a kid. I was trying to support his system to orient to the present, to realize that the fear again might be a memory from the past, but in the here and now he wasn't being abused. I was getting him to look around the room and notice things that might support his system to feel in the present, grounded and safe. And of all the things in the room, his eyes landed on my white Converse All-Stars. So as we're heading into this session,

I'm mentioning that, my chucks for good luck, just right off the top, because I want him to know that I know exactly where we've been together. And I'm also wanting to signal to his nervous system, whether it's through playfulness or the memory of that tiny little pocket of safety, that no matter what we face in this session today, that he will be okay. If you were in the room with us, what you would have seen is Donovan reclining on a

And in the background, you're hearing the nurse practitioner, Leanne, who's getting ready to administer the injection. We're also making use of music and eye shades and some of the traditional elements that you hear in more of the sitter approach to psychedelic psychotherapy. Right here. Right here. Yeah, right here. I'm right with you. I'm with you. I'm right here. Here's my hand if you need it.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, do you want to tell me what's happening for you? Oh, I don't think I'm supposed to be here. Just notice where you are. You have the sense you're not supposed to be here. Notice. Go inside. The monkeys are rewiring the brain. Do you have a sense of what they're rewiring right now? No.

I don't know, no, not really. Okay. You might also think about what you want them to rewire. What I want them to rewire. Okay. Yeah. Let me talk to them and I'll say, hey, what do we want to rewire? Yeah, yeah, good thinking. When you're listening to this audio and you can hear Donovan, a couple things that are important to know are one, Donovan's neurodivergent. So that's definitely at play in what's happening for him in his mind today.

The second thing is that when people are on high doses of psychedelics, they sometimes say and conjure all sorts of unusual imagery and might say funny things and use funny examples and things that might seem a little abstract or strange. But because this is not just meant to be a recreational drug trip and we're doing work to process his trauma, I'm wanting to see if I can actually make use of what he's offering me

as a point of agency. So when he's saying the monkeys are rewiring my brain, my thought is, okay, great, let's go with it. Is there something that we can do to join with the monkeys and see if we can rewire something inside that's been stuck? - This was quite a few ketamine sessions in, and some of the initial ketamine sessions were quite scary. And it was actually that particular session with rewiring the brain was actually quite fun.

It was enjoyable. So, I mean, for me to hear it again, it makes me smile and feel good inside and go, oh, it was a fun experience. It wasn't a scary experience like I've had in the past with ketamine. Hey monkeys, what are you wiring? I don't know. Let's rewire some things. Huh. What do you rewire? Ha ha ha ha. Let's make him have a happy childhood. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

That'd be funny. Boop. Happy childhood, done. Rewire. Two, one, go. Yeah. Right with you. Right with you. You know, when I was a kid, there was, it was just a lot of moving. So I was moving every year, pretty much.

When I was six years old, I was sexually abused by the man that my mom was living with at the time. And then going through the court process, you know, with him and them to get him prosecuted. And then, you know, working through family services after that was challenging. And then, yeah, moving out at 16, still in high school and

living on your own and working full time and still going to school. Just no sense of stability, no sense of love, no sense of family support whatsoever. Would now be an okay time for me to give you a prompt, something to think about? I thought we had been. I mean, we've been doing wonderful work. I've been doing a lot of thinking. Yeah. Do you want to tell us about it? We can do that later if that's too hard.

Yeah, you've been doing a lot of thinking already. A lot's happened already. After me, put words out. Yeah. So we can leave words for another time. Okay. Right now, I'm wondering if you might want to take us, Lee and me and Adel, you back into one of those places you flash back to sometimes. It started going dark. Yeah.

Okay, pull us into the dark if you can. The reason why we decided to do this particular Academy session is because leading up to it, he'd been having a series of flashbacks. They were happening in session, in his day-to-day life, in couples therapy, in interactions with his wife. Flashbacks are one of the core features of trauma. They can happen in a bunch of different ways and we characterize them as intrusions.

So sometimes they happen as nightmares or they can happen in other ways. But it means that a person is all of a sudden taken back, back to a moment that has been horrific for them. And instead of just remembering it as if it happened a long time ago, they're all of a sudden experiencing themselves as being inside the memory again. Yeah, I think the flashback there was around this experience at the family services or something after the court case happened.

It was quite shocking to have the flashback like that. Like, I'd forgotten, I think, a lot of that portion. I remembered a lot of the legal stuff and the actual sexual abuse, but that portion was completely blanked out. The court case and all the legal lawyers and judges were all amazing, but this experience at Family Services was horrific.

They were making themselves out to be people of trust and that they were there to help me when in fact it was felt like an interrogation. So they were making me out to be the monster. They were making me out to be the bad person. So at this point in the session, the ketamine is definitely in his system, but it's settled a little bit and I can start directing him back to those particular places.

And what happens as I do that is he starts to have it go black. And I think that black for him means that it's hard to access. There isn't vividness. There isn't, you know, narrative richness. And the beauty of flashbacks is really that they're our brain's way of trying to bring something to the surface to say it needs to be healed. Oh, it doesn't seem scary like this, man. Yeah, that might make it easier to talk about then. Make it easier to talk about. Again, it's...

It's not like it's hard to talk about because it's challenging. It's hard to talk about because there's not much memory. Yeah. That's the challenge, not the... Not the details. I don't know. It's like a room of counselors, a room of... It's a room with a whole bunch of people. It's like everybody's asking me questions and I can't answer them. And they're coming from all different...

and places. I don't know. I don't even have a vision. If you ask me a color of a wall or if you ask me anything, it's nothing. There's nothing there. It's more like interrogation. I guess I'm struggling because I don't understand. It occurs to me this is all after the court case. I guess like family services or something or...

They're trying to figure things out and they're asking a lot of questions you don't know how to answer. Well, I don't know how to answer, but they're leading questions that are like pointing at me that I'm to blame for everything. You feel like you're in the younger you who's experiencing that or are you adult you remembering it? A bit of both, I guess. Yeah.

I'm asking Donovan to tell me about if he feels like his adult self or his child self, because it helps me figure out which move I'm going to make next clinically. And this is such a beautiful moment in clinical work when a person can get access to both. And then we can actually start to integrate and build together these two neural networks. This is a really key feature of reprocessing trauma memories.

It's the ability to feel enough of the charge of what was without getting completely sucked into it and enough of the present moment where we know that we survived and we're safe and we're all grown up and we can actually offer back to younger us everything that they needed at that time. I guess I thought it was over. Then it wasn't. Then it wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. Then it wasn't. Then it wasn't. Yeah. It got worse.

Feel our hands bring us right into this. You still have contact with the adult you who's remembering? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm thinking about adult you as being a really loving, protective, wise dad. Someone who knows what kids need. I'm wondering if adult you has any sense of what younger you would need. Yeah. Yeah. It was bad. It was bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can say that again if you want. It was bad. Mm-hmm. And as you remember how bad it was, see if you can be aware that we're with you as you're remembering. As for them, I guess. Good. Good. You can feel both. It's dull. It's kind of like yesterday it was a day, today it's dull. Mm-hmm.

If it's hard to hear him, hear Donovan saying that yesterday his pain was an ache and today it's dull. He's got my hand and Leanne's hands and he's holding us tight and realizing how the pain is changing. It's hard not to sort of become numb to it, though. Yeah. Let's see if we can actually bring something into that memory. Really cold. Really cold. You needed a blanket. You needed arms around you.

I got you. I got you. You're all grown up and you're remembering how bad it was. Yeah. Yeah. They were mean. That wasn't okay. You needed something different. I'm speculating that maybe that's actually the younger Donovan that's saying that to us. But what's so cool about it in the midst of it being so painful for him is

is if you remember him talking about what was happening at that time, he was made to feel like he was the bad guy. And all of a sudden, his interpretation has shifted. Instead of him being made to feel like the bad boy, he's able to see that these people were mean. And that is everything for him. I mean, what a profound shift in perspective to realize that he didn't do anything wrong, that he wasn't to blame after all, but that he was actually just being treated poorly by the grownups around him.

Yeah, bring us in, bring us in. Just like that. That's the way. I'm curious if you might want to pull that younger you out of that room. I don't know if you want to send one of us in to talk to those adults and smarten them up. If you want to do that. I was wondering what younger you needs or what adult you wants to do. I don't know. It's all fucked up. It's like...

every piece of it was fucked up yeah like it was like it was additive fucked up not like yeah yeah notice the feeling notice what it's doing yeah yeah you get to have that that's the right feeling for that situation nobody ever said enough like yeah yeah that's what you needed

Someone should have said that's enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Would have been the exact right thing. Can you imagine saying that to them? On behalf of your little boy self. Can you say to them, it's enough. It's enough. You stop it. Yeah. Yeah.

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Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. In a place like Northampton, Massachusetts, the freedom to be yourself is not just celebrated, it's embraced. For one drag king, it's where he's found the space to live his truth. I really do think about it all the time. Like, I don't think there's anywhere else I could have lived my lived experience and do what I do besides Massachusetts. Stick around until the end of this podcast for his story.

Feels like I'm getting far away. From? I know you guys. Yeah, okay. See if as you go, wherever you're going, you bring us with you. Or if you try to stay connected to us here. You can go far away. Just bring us along if you can. Things were feeling uncomfortable and I was sort of, felt like I was disassociating, disappearing. All of a sudden, Hillary was like hundreds of feet away.

When he says that he thinks he's going away, at first I'm trying to figure out like, oh, is he getting out? Is he getting out of the memory and going away from that? But as he starts talking, it becomes more clear that this is his way of dissociating from the memory, that he's kind of making it foggy. And there's a bit of space between his felt experience and where his conscious awareness is. We'll come with you wherever you go. You already survived. You already survived.

It's never going to happen again. You had to go really far away then, but you made it through and you're here. You have a beautiful life that you've built. A life that's okay to be in. A life that's safe for you to be in. So if you need to go, we'll come with you and I want you to know it's okay to be here. It wasn't then, but it is now. It's so fucked up. Yeah, it was so fucked up. I wonder if the little boy you can hear adult you saying that to him too.

Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's right. That's right. That's right. You know his story and you see it so clearly. It was so fucked up. Every bit of it. I have no... I mean, the visual is like, you know, imagine crossing a fish line of a race and then being beaten by baseball bats. Yeah. Yeah. Enough. Enough. Enough.

No more. You leave him alone now. No more. Can't you see what he's been through? This is enough. The fucked up part is that the lawyers and judges were my... It's the fucking counselors and family services people that fucked it up. Yeah, they did. Yeah, they fucked it up. Yeah, when she said, that's enough, I mean, it was triggering for me and not...

It felt angry and that wasn't what my younger self needed. My younger self actually needed somebody just calmly, confidently coming in and just removing the younger self from that situation, not adding some intensity to a situation that, from my perspective, needed to be de-escalated. And so there's some sort of reaction around that.

I love what Donovan's saying here for a few reasons. The first is that me saying enough, enough, enough, right, was me doing, I think, what I actually wanted to do. But in doing so, I was replicating the pattern of the entire experience for him. I was an adult doing what I wanted to do when really there was a kid in the room who needed nurturing.

right he he actually knew exactly what he needed in that situation it was that no one was giving it to him that was the problem and i unknowingly participated in that as i got into what i thought would have felt really good for him i don't in any way want to posture the clinician as the expert i mean this entire memory of his is people who were clinicians who were completely missing him in a way that was creating a traumatic experience so

I really think that it's important to hear people, have people hear me say, I got it wrong. But that doesn't mean I'm unskilled or don't care about him or that this wasn't a therapeutic experience. In fact, it's us being able to negotiate that that makes it so therapeutic. So much anger. Good, good. Every bit of that deserves to be here. Can your little boy self feel how much anger you have because of what happened to him?

Can you feel your protectiveness? Or is it his anger? I guess it occurs to me as like his anger has been coming out for years. Of course I can breathe through my nose. I thought you were going to say something else, but I also wish you could breathe through your nose. Can I give you a story that you could just kind of play out in your mind like a movie just to consider for now? Something to think about?

Just to replace my story or what are we... Well, yeah, yeah. I was thinking, I wonder if there's a way that we can really honor the statement of this being enough. And if we can go get your little boy self out of that room, wherever it is. I know you don't really have the visual, but... Oh, I sort of do. You do? Oh, okay. I sort of have like this... Yeah, I have somewhat of a visual, like an office building or whatever. It was sterile. Of course, yeah. Mm-hmm.

I'm wondering if adult you can walk in those doors, right into that room, and you get to have the full power of all your anger. And you get to say, enough. And you grab your little boy, and you pull up so close to you. And you hold him the way you hold your baby boys. And you get to say, it's over. It's over, and it's never happening again. And you're coming home with me. And I'm never, ever leaving.

ever gonna let any of this happen none of it when you walk him in the front doors of your home your beautiful home yeah i don't know if i'm ready for that one yet yeah which part we'll take any of that that you feel ready for and we'll come back for the rest later i mean i can do it now yeah oh okay where do you want where do you want me to pick back up i don't know i don't i don't need more anger

Can you feel or imagine holding your little boy's self in your arms? I guess my little boy doesn't want more anger, right? Yeah. What does he want? Yeah. Yeah, I guess just like he felt a little too angry and I don't have enough anger. Yeah. Just confident love. That's right. Yeah. So let's give him that and see if you can access in your adult, grown-up body the confident love.

that he's been looking for. I guess there's a piece like with your anger that you're diminishing somebody else versus just giving the right baby for the little boy and showing what confident love is, not anger. I don't think the world needs more anger. But he needs love. He needs your love. Confident love. That's right. That's it. Haley was asking me what that boy needed.

And that's what sort of, that's what came out in the moment was that calm, confident, loving. You know, I have to, I wanted to, and I want to be the loving dad. And, you know, I've got to do a lot of work on myself for me to end that cycle. That is not an easy thing to be a dad when you've got your own trauma and you don't really have good models, role models either.

I wanted them to have a stable household, a household where they weren't moving, a household where there was love and connection and support for them and safety. Yeah, definitely safety. That's one of our last little things we'll do here. And we're going to come back to this over and over and over again in our work. But can you find a way to extend that to him? Like if there's a word or a color or a emotion or...

sound, like something that could come from adult you. Yeah. Okay. Nice. I'm going to use it to visualize it. Yeah. Okay. Let's go for it then. You just get that visual going and you ride it all the way. I got it. I'm obsessed with how easy that was for you. It just came so quickly. That's amazing. Well, I'd already sort of done it, right? Yeah. And look at that. It counts. It's in you.

Yeah, so we'll just stay with that for a few minutes. You sending that to him, that calm, confident love. And see what it does to him as he takes that in from you. I guess I sort of, I mean, I guess, well, I'll share and then you see if, I guess I sort of vision that, yeah, I don't know, he walks into the room. You know, I'm calm, I'm confident, I'm loving. And I just pick him up and pick him up. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what I need. That's all I need. That's perfect. That's perfect. That's perfect. I'm seeing it too. It's exactly what he needed. He didn't need to be interrogated. Nope. He's in such good hands with you. And that gets to be over now. He doesn't have to ever go back to that room again. It felt like relief, I think would be the right word. I mean, it was even prior to the academy, I think we were sort of working on connecting with the younger self and I couldn't really...

So I mean, there was a sense of relief that I could actually do it and proud that I did it. Relief and pride. I'd done this work 10 or 15 years ago where I was trying to connect with my younger self and it was like not happening. So the fact that fast forward 10 or 15 years and I can actually connect with my younger self, see what he needs and then actually provide what he needs was a huge breakthrough.

Can you feel us with you as you are doing this work with him? Can you feel us here? Somebody's hand is walking.

Somebody's hand is warm. Let's guess. Let's guess. I'm going to guess Lisa's hand. And I'm going to guess Hillary's hand. We're busted. Oh, my gosh. You're on top of it. Yeah, not only do you know we're here, you know who specifically is here. That's what I do. You do. You know us. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm feeling so proud of you. To understand how big of a deal this is, it's helpful to understand how memory works. Often when we think about memory, we think memory is, it's the thing that happened. But actually the way that memory works in our brains is that memory is not only the thing that happened, but all the times we remembered it after it. So here what's happening is we're actually fundamentally changing how this story lives in his body.

Because now he has the memory not only of feeling trapped in that room with all of those support workers and clinicians, but he has the memory of caring for himself, intervening, and being in his wise, grounded adult body while remembering. That's all getting packaged together in a way that's going to change what this feels like moving forward for him. And what I know happens, right, spoiler alert, is that when he looks back on this memory,

in the future after this session that it feels radically different than what it was like leading into the session where he was having flashbacks and overwhelmed and stuck and feeling terrorized. It's almost like it's gone to bed. It really happened, but his body knows that it's over. Part of the reason we looked at doing ketamine or psychedelic-assisted therapy, I guess, as an option was I think I had done

a bunch of therapy work leading into this. And I could actually, there was a point where I could feel myself mentally and physically build up like walls. And, you know, when I got to the sessions, we wouldn't end up accomplishing anything. So I think the, with the ketamine, that it really broke down a lot of my ability to set up physical and mental barriers. I couldn't do that with the ketamine. I mean, if you saw me

whatever, before that session, my wife walked into the room, I would be like startled or scared or, you know, there's constant hypervigilance right around the house even. And it's gone. Like there's zero hypervigilance now. I mean, I'm not like, I don't get startled. I don't get scared. I go, okay, there's somebody here. It's just, there's no, none of that is there anymore at all. Right. So that's been probably the biggest thing

The biggest breakthrough is just not having that hypervigilance every second of every day. Other People's Problems is produced by Jodi Martinson, mixed by Julian Uzielli and Leigh Rosevere. Jeff Turner is our senior producer. Emily Cannell is our coordinating producer. The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager. And Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

For more sessions, there are five seasons of Other People's Problems available right now in our feed. I'm Dr. Hilary McBride. Support for this podcast comes from It's Revolutionary, a podcast from Massachusetts 250. Listen on for the story of one drag king's self-expression, pride, and transformation in Northampton, Massachusetts. ♪

You're listening to It's Revolutionary, a podcast celebrating 250 years since the shot heard around the world was fired right here in Massachusetts. I'm Jay Feinstein. From revolution to revolution, we're exploring the people and places in Massachusetts that shape America.

Today we found ourselves in Northampton, Massachusetts, home of some pretty rad rainbow crosswalks. They're nothing small. They're pretty, it's a pretty chunky, very obvious rainbow. That's Ross, better known as the drag king Victor Evangelica. I

I carry the spirit of Victor everywhere I go. He spreads the good word. I met up with him at the Cafe T-Roots on Main Street, the city's main drag, to talk about how Northampton might be revolutionary as an oasis of queer life. I want to make sure they know that they can bother us for food. Of course, after we ordered some delicious food. Oh, thank you so much.

Oh, that looks so yummy. And he said revolutionary doesn't even begin to describe Northampton. You know, this is a place where Sojourner Truth lived, Frederick Douglass visited. There is a long history of people who have been critical to our understandings of the human experience and people's struggles that have found refuge in this area.

Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, best known for Shays' Rebellion, lived around this area too. And today, Northampton continues to be an oasis for artists, queer people, and anyone who might not have somewhere else to go. You know, it's a very zany population here, I'm very proud to say.

It's a place he feels he can really be himself. The queer joy and honestly like self-expression that I can have here is something that I genuinely feel it's some of the best in the world. This is like one of the best places in our world to be queer and I think

I think about that and I think about the struggles I still face and sometimes it's disheartening, but it's also, it brings me so much joy that there is such a resilient group of people around here who are very friendly, you know, want to help you. If you talk to somebody about confusing parking meters in this area, somebody's going to help you out. If you talk to somebody about where's this thing or that that's a local, they're probably going to know where to point you and what's the best place to be.

And he's right, it was Victor's suggestion that brought me to T-Roots in the first place. But I was also in town to see Victor perform, where he dressed up in a costume made of wires and chains and Super Nintendo cartridges. One of the parts of the big reveal is I take off this, like, inhibiting jacket made out of wires, and I shed these things, and I'm able to move more freely throughout this number, and...

show people that act of transformation and freeing yourself from that kind of personal bind you might have. I mean, it just sounds like it gives you a level of joy. I'm just watching the smile on your face as you describe the character. Yeah, I kind of do a lot of 80s riffs that are nostalgic for me, just based off of what my parents were into a lot growing up. And that's really what makes me

feel the most at home I feel and it's the easiest for me to fit into. It's a lot of fun. So that night we joined an eclectic crowd in an arcade called The Quarters to see some drag.

Before the show, we caught up with a few audience members. Yeah, what are you hoping to see tonight? Craziness, fun, queer love, joy, you know, that kind of thing. Most of the time, there's usually a drag show happening somewhere. So whether it's like here, a couple towns over, there's usually like some place to go to see it. I just love drag as an expression of...

like individuality and what people can do with their craft and their skills. It's fun to see how creative people get with it. I mean, the way people do their makeup and what they wear, it's amazing to see people just go up there and just be their authentic selves. And being authentic is what it's all about, says Victor. The best drag that people see is truly reflective of people who know themselves and

reflective of people who are so proud of the person that they are that they're able to go on stage and serve a fantasy.

And he sees drag like that and art like that all over the Northampton area. I think when you get people who can live as their authentic selves as an area, you get better art. You get people who are doing things for real. And I'm, you know, I really do think about it all the time. Like, I don't think there's anywhere else I could have lived my lived experience and do what I do besides Massachusetts. I like that.

It's Revolutionary is a podcast from MA250. For more stories, check out massachusetts250.org or wbur.org slash ma250. ♪