How MDMA Highs Can Declutter Your Hoarded Brain—and Help Cure PTSD
If you’ve ever seen one of those “hoarder” shows on television, you’re ready to take MDMA. You know the shows I mean, right? There’s a person who has collected crap for years—decades, sometimes—and their house is piled so high with old newspapers and detritus that you can barely navigate the hallways. There’s a narrow path to the toilet, another to a single burner on the stove (if you’re lucky) and behind each tightly closed door there’s an avalanche of personal shit ready to cascade out.
In other words, their hoards are a 3-D model of the human brain, complete with well-worn neural patterns, piles of distractions everywhere and the terror of knowing that behind every door (and underneath every tower of junk) are scary things not dealt with.
These shows always unfold the same way: there’s an intervention by loved ones—Please mom, let us throw the cat pee yarn balls away!—and the ensuing days of unloading the hoarder’s house and putting all their stuff out onto the front lawn and into the sunshine. There’s resistance, anger and pain, but there’s also, often, some real progress. “Why was I afraid of opening this door?” people say. “Why was I carrying all this around all these years?”