MDMA therapy helped oil heiress Elizabeth Koch overcome buried pain

• Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of right-wing oil magnate Charles Koch, struggles to find joy in life.
• Using MDMA therapy, she broke away from the feeling that she had to be perfect to deserve to exist.
• In her new book, I Feel Love, author Rachel Newer tells the story of how Elizabeth overcame her pain.

The organization largely responsible for bringing psychedelics into the mainstream is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

Author Rachel Newer became interested in MAPS while researching a new book about therapeutic applications of MDMA. She discovered that the group was supported by amazing benefactors.

This includes Elizabeth Koch, daughter of Charles Koch of Koch Industries, one of America’s largest private companies. In addition to their vast wealth, Charles Koch and his brother David are also known for funding conservative movements such as the Tea Party.

In his book, Nouwer explained that, although it may seem counterintuitive, many public figures with conservative ties, such as Elizabeth Koch, invest in socially liberal organizations like MAPS.

Read below to learn how Elizabeth Koch came to support psychedelic therapy in an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer’s new book, I Feel Love.

Below is an excerpt from Rachel Newer’s new book.I Feel the Love: MDMA and the Exploration of Connection in a Broken World.”

The moment I walked through the door of the loft-like space, a slender 45-year-old man greeted me with a hug, a blanket, and not one, but two L.A.-appropriate canned drinks (an “Energy Booster” and an “Premium”). Biotic Popping”). Soda’) from the office’s meticulously organized refrigerator. Elizabeth’s cheerful enthusiasm and reassuring warmth immediately put me at ease, and within minutes I felt like I was chatting with an old friend of hers.

Elizabeth’s amazing ability to make others love herself is a skill she has spent almost a lifetime developing, and is actually a symptom of her trauma. Listening to her story, the success of her MAPS fundraising efforts is not just about Doblin’s talent as a salesman, or just about her MDMA-loving wealthy people, but the fact that trauma and suffering are universal. It was found that it was summarized in

Even the most privileged people in the world are not immune to mental suffering and can face the same limitations we do to alleviate that suffering. Elizabeth’s “fall from Eden”, as she describes her own trauma, occurred when she was five years old.

The family went to pay their respects to the man in a wheelchair after a close friend of his parents jumped into a shallow pond and severed his spine. The atmosphere in the house was so heavy that Elizabeth started singing Humpty Dumpty songs to ease her brother’s mood.

However, in one refrain she had unconsciously replaced “Humpty Dumpty” with the name of a paralyzed man. Suddenly all the tension in her room was focused on her. “I can see her father looking over his shoulder and giving me a death stare,” she recalled.

When the family returned home, Elizabeth’s father sat her down. “Kids don’t understand that,” she recalled him saying. “You have everything anyone could want, but you’ll be hated for it for the rest of your life. Your job is always to be the nicest person in the room and the hardest worker in the room.” It’s a person who picks up trash.”

Looking back on the incident from an adult perspective, Elizabeth realizes that her father was trying to protect her. “He was genuinely afraid that me and his brother would grow up to be spoiled shitty monsters,” she said. But as a five-year-old, she interpreted his lecture to mean that she could only be loved if she was good.

That vital message came to influence nearly every aspect of her personality and life.

In The Myth of Normalcy, Gabor Maté writes, “Children who do not feel that they are consistently loved unconditionally may grow up to be supernaturally likable or attractive people.” ” he wrote. This is exactly the path Elizabeth took.

It started with a nightly ritual. Before she went to bed, she reflected on all her own words and deeds that day and made sure that she had been the nicest person and the most hardworking, and that she had not accidentally hurt anyone’s feelings. . If something bad happens to her, like if she trips and skins her knee, she tells herself it’s because the universe is punishing her for not being good enough. It will be.

In the classroom, during extracurricular activities, or on the sports team, she always turns to the child who seems to hate her the most, usually the one who seems to have the least money, or the one who looks the least like her. We lined up and tried it out. To win them over with a funny story about her family’s dysfunction.

Over the years, Elizabeth rose to the top of her class, won essay contests, and made many friends, but she lacked joy. “I have to do this to prove that I deserve to be alive,” she told herself every time she accomplished something.

“I have to earn my existence.”

Her paranoia about what others thought of her intensified, as did her unhappiness. Realizing she needed help, she began trying various mental health solutions, including yoga, silent meditation retreats, and short-term medication.

She read books on Buddhism and neuroscience and found glimpses of insight. However, no matter how much knowledge, learning, and practice she applied, nothing could bring her true peace.

When a friend suggested in 2016 that she try psychedelic-assisted therapy with a “conscious cowboy” she knew, a military veteran who calls himself Doug the Love Bunny, she agreed. Doug filled a silver balloon with “some kind of steam smoke” and instructed her to inhale and hold her breath, Elizabeth recalled.

She had no idea what she was getting into. He put her on 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting but incredibly powerful tryptamine. The drug that annihilated her ego completely dissolved Elizabeth. She was scary.

Doug the love bunny did not prepare Elizabeth for this harrowing and unstable experience and did not offer her any support or integration afterward. For weeks, she said, it woke her up in the middle of the night and she was “scanning to grab her body.”

She wanted to know more about what she was experiencing, so her research led her to MAPS. She attended a psychedelic conference in Los Angeles, where she was moved by first-hand stories shared by veterans who participated in her MDMA-assisted clinical trials for PTSD, and she was inspired.

MDMA seems much more user friendly than 5-MeO-DMT. And maybe Elizabeth thought MDMA might be helpful for her too. So in the spring of 2018, she found an “off-the-grid person” who agreed to perform MDMA-assisted therapy according to the MAPS protocol.

Elizabeth ultimately underwent three sessions and through the process realized the enormous amount of pain she had been carrying throughout her life.

“I was afraid of joy,” she said. “This medication has helped me see how much of the hidden stuff that was previously invisible was making me reactive, constantly feeling trapped, overwhelmed, and miserable.”

The MDMA sessions, one of which was combined with psilocybin, helped Elizabeth let go of the “intense self-loathing” she had had since she was five years old, and helped her feel compassion and love for herself, she said. Told. Since then, she has become one of her top five MAPS donors.

“MDMA is not going to save the world,” Elizabeth said. “But I think the combination of conversation and inward self-exploration experiences can be helpful.”

In response, Elizabeth founded a company called Unlikely Collaborators in 2018. The company aims to bring together people who seem to be on opposite sides of an issue and work together to uncover the humanity and commonalities they share.

Elizabeth also envisions unlikely collaborators providing community-oriented, group-integrated services if MDMA-assisted therapy receives FDA approval.

“We each have our own relative realm of hell from which we must learn to climb out,” she said. “The only way to close the gap on the outside is to close the gap on the inside.”

From “I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World”, now available from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Nuwer. All rights reserved.