June 11, 2024

Living the dream with award-winning strategic thinker and educator and founder of the journey sage Jill Sitnick

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In today’s episode, we dive deep into the transformative power of psychedelic-assisted therapy with award-winning strategic thinker and educator, Jill Sitnick. Join us as Jill shares her journey of overcoming childhood-induced PTSD through MDMA therapy. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in mental health, trauma recovery, and the future of psychedelic treatments.

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> Curveball>Welcome, um, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. Um, if you believe you can achieve Chee Chee.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today we're going to be talking about PSD and psychedelic assisted therapy, as I am joined by award winning strategic thinker and educator, Jill Sidnick. Jill has over 25 years of experience in educational technology, and she was able to cure her childhood induced trauma, PSTD with psychedelic assistive therapy.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So we're going to be talking to her about how she did that and exactly what happened, and maybe we could help somebody else. So, Jill, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Jill Sidnick>Oh, my gosh. Curtis, thank you so much for the opportunity to chat. I appreciate it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Jill Sidnick>Uh, yeah. So, the reason that we are chatting today is that I am an advocate for MDMA therapy for PTSD, and MDMA is a psychedelic, and I used MDMA therapy to heal my own PTSD in my late forties, uh, because of some childhood trauma. And I'm currently an advocate for this therapy. It is supposed to be FDA approved in August, and my goal is to share with people what this therapy is, demystify the fact that it's a psychedelic, and basically make people a little bit more comfortable with the whole concept.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, before we get into that, let's start off. As much as you would like to disclose about your childhood induced trauma that got you to have PSTD in the first place.

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> Jill Sidnick>Yeah. Um, so my parents were very clearly not equipped to be parents. Uh, there were some huge red flags. I didn't know. They never talked about their childhood. There was not a lot of affection. I think the ultimate sadness is that my parents were very traumatized and didn't get help. My mother, throughout her entire life, was clinically depressed and attempted suicide multiple times. My father was a domestic abuser who liked to beat me and my mother and was certainly verbally abusive. And so, from the ages of one to five, uh, we were a family dealing with my father's abuse and my mother attempting suicide multiple times until age of five, where she attempted to shoot herself to commit suicide to basically escape my father.

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> Jill Sidnick>She was not able to get away from him before then. Uh, she didn't have a bank account. She didn't even have her own credit card, so she was kind of trapped, and it was the only way she could think of leaving, basically. And so, from five to about eight, I lived with different relatives. I was shuffled around because my mother was recuperating. My father, I guess, couldn't take care of me. From like eight to ten, I live with my father and a, uh, woman that he was seeing and a step sister. And then from about ten to 16, I lived with my. My father threw me out when I was ten. Then I lived with my mother and there was some deep poverty and food insecurity there. She threw me out. When I was 16, I went to go live with my father again. And from 16 to 18, I was very aware that there was no buffer. I was the one getting the verbal and physical abuse. And, um, once I finally left when I was 19, because I went to college for a year, and when I came back, my father thought that he could continue to hit me the way he had before.

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> Jill Sidnick>So leaving at 19, I kind of thought that, oh, brand new life, you know, I leave that behind me. I wound up having a wonderful long term relationship with a man that I love deeply. So it wasn't until my late forties, with the passing of my partner, that I had some pretty horrendous PTSD attacks that I, uh, learned were basically from, uh, a childhood of trauma that I had never resolved.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, so what made you decide to dissolve or resolve this, this, uh, childhood trauma and how did you come across the therapy that you're currently talking about now and an advocate of?

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> Jill Sidnick>Well, I almost really had no choice. Um, PTSD attack is pretty brutal. Your entire body is on high alert. You are not sleeping well. Uh, it can have other symptoms.

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> Jill Sidnick>My stomach was upset, my neck was always hurting because my shoulders are very tense. And ultimately I became suicidal because I had this constant vigilance that something awful was going to happen. And not feeling safe leads you to really not want to stay around too much. This happened 18 months after my partner's passing. It was a work email that set it off, but ultimately something was going to come along to set it off.

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> Jill Sidnick>And when I went to my therapist, who had helped me with my grief work, because once my partner passed away, I needed some help with grief. When I went to her with these other symptoms because I was befuddled, I was confused, I did not know why I was in this doom spiral.

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> Jill Sidnick>I was just 1000% sure the universe was completely against me and my life was going to be destroyed.

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> Jill Sidnick>I just knew that was what was going to happen.

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> Jill Sidnick>And so after a few months of talk therapy, talking about my childhood, because we hadn't really covered that content before and not getting better.

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> Jill Sidnick>So this is months of talk therapy and still feeling suicidal. That's when my therapist mentioned that she was in a program to become a psychedelic assisted psychotherapist. She told me to go look at the research@maps.org.

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> Jill Sidnick>comma. That's maps, m.org, comma, the multidisciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies. And at the time, they had their clinical phase two trial results up on their website.

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> Jill Sidnick>And I'm an english major, so I just always round numbers. Basically, three quarters of the people who were in their clinical trial, after three rounds of MDMA therapy, no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis. And so knowing I was going to work with my trusted therapist, her mentor in the program, who was a medical doctor, and seeing this research, all of those factors contributed to me agreeing to the therapy and the fact that I wasn't getting better with just talk therapy.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell the listeners what MDMA is and how it helps the patient heal from PSTD.

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> Jill Sidnick>Sure. So, MDMA is, uh, the letters that are used to describe a word I cannot pronounce.

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> Jill Sidnick>It has, I don't know, about 50 letters to it. It is a synthesized chemical that was, uh, synthesized in the early 19 hundreds. It is most commonly known by the street names of ecstasy or Molly.

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> Jill Sidnick>Unfortunately, ecstasy in Molly can be cut with anything. There's really no, um, regulation saying that if you get ecstasy or molly from the street, that it's actually MDMA, or at least medical grade MDMA, to be used in therapy. But that's how most people know of MDMA. And MDMA is used recreationally, uh, in raves and dance clubs and things like that, because it makes you feel happier, it makes you feel more connected to people. It increases your empathy, your compassion in a trauma environment or in a therapeutic environment is probably the better way to say it. What MDMA does is it calms the body. It calms that fight or flight response. That is what is created during a PTSD episode. And so by calming the body down, the patient or myself, in this case, I was finally able to share just how scared I was of my father without my body kind of taking over in that PTSD response and preventing me from even talking about it. And so that's the main mechanism. It's the calming of the body so that you can connect with the therapist so that you can feel more compassion for yourself, some more empathy for yourself. And that fear element, uh, is gone during, or the fear element for me was gone during that first, during my MDMA journeys.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So, what's the difference between MDMA, um, and magic mushrooms, per se.

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> Jill Sidnick>Oh, so magic mushrooms. That ingredient is psilocybin. And psilocybin has much more of a visual component and much more of kind of a whole body feel to it. We actually used a little bit of psilocybin in my third journey because the MDMA calmed my body down, but there was an absolute subconscious blocker. And my, uh, therapist had actually said during our preparation times, because we took five months to prepare for that third journey, that, uh, you know, if we come up with a blocker, if the MDMA doesn't allow us to release this block, I had. I was literally, like, I had a nightmare. I was trapped in my childhood home.

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> Jill Sidnick>Then we would go ahead and use a small dose of psilocybin or magic mushrooms, and that's actually what we did. And the psilocybin allowed for a visual in my head of my childhood home just kind of disintegrating.

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> Jill Sidnick>So very, very different substances.

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> Jill Sidnick>When you're using MDMA therapeutically, some people don't even really feel high.

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> Jill Sidnick>Uh, your voice is not, uh, slurred like it would be like if you have one too many margaritas. The only way I really even knew I was in an enhanced state was that, you know, if I had to use the restroom, I needed a little bit of handholding, uh, to make sure I was sturdy.

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> Jill Sidnick>Whereas psilocybin, if you're taking a therapeutic dose, you absolutely know you're in that experience with the visuals.

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> Jill Sidnick>And, uh, we definitely need a little bit of help if you're getting up.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>So what can the listeners go to learn about the clinical trials for MDMA? Is it the maps.org dot?

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> Jill Sidnick>Yeah, maps.org is where you can go look at the clinical trial data. They just put their, um, phase three clinical trial data out on the nature journal, which is an established journal. And just because you asked about psilocybin, a, uh, lot of the research out of Johns Hopkins University with psilocybin and depression is, uh, published, and I believe they're actually. I just saw a thing on LinkedIn. They're actually running a couple of other clinical trials that they're currently, uh, recruiting for. But there's a lot of.

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> Jill Sidnick>A lot of research going on about mental health struggles and these compounds.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, tell the listeners, uh, a little bit more about yourself. You know, you got 25 years of education and technology experience, so let us know about that.

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> Jill Sidnick>Well, you know, becoming an advocate for this therapy was not as difficult as maybe people think that it was.

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> Jill Sidnick>I started my career as a teacher. I have a master's degree in instructional technology. I started working in technology in my district. I was a k through twelve gal for 20 years, and then I was recruited to Big Tech. I worked at Microsoft for seven. I worked at Amazon for a little under a year. And so I'm very accustomed to using technology in a way to reach people and to help explain concepts and adult learning.

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> Jill Sidnick>And so when it came to trying to destigmatize this therapy, I immediately I wrote a memoir detailing the two steps forward, one step back, how hard this therapy is. It's not turnkey, you're the one healing it.

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> Jill Sidnick>Isn't the medication just kind of flipping a switch for you.

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> Jill Sidnick>Then ultimately, uh, TEDx rejected my talk about this therapy, and that basically motivated me to m make my own YouTube channel and to make the kind of content that I wish had been around when I was going through the therapy. What is this therapy? How does it work? What are some tips and tricks? What do you look for in a guide? What should you expect? Like, all of that content is available for people, and it's my hope that my instructional technology background all kind of comes together and helps other people with that content.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that the listeners need to be aware of.

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> Jill Sidnick>Well, I'm, uh, continuing my MDMA content, and then after August I will be sharing how other compounds work with trauma. So you just mentioned psilocybin, and I was able to give an answer as to how psilocybin feels. Psilocybin works with trauma in a really interesting way.

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> Jill Sidnick>Also reframing your perspective, seeing things from an adult perspective versus a child perspective, which is also what MDMA does. But I've also explored other. I mean, I had this therapy in 2020, so in the last couple of years I have enjoyed exploring how other psychedelic compounds also work with trauma. So people, uh, on my channel will be seeing content about not only MDMA, psilocybin, but Bufo, which is five Meo DMT. I just went on an iboga retreat. That content is going to be out there because I think it's important for people to kind of understand how the different medicines work. And then in addition, starting July, I am jumping into third wave psychedelic coaching program so that I can have an additional credential, uh, by my name so that when people reach out for help, I'll be able to help them out.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Okay, well, so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Throw out your contact info.

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> Jill Sidnick>Yeah. I'm Jill at the journey sage. My, uh, website is the journeysage, and the journeysage on YouTube is where you'll find all that educational content.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>All right, we'll close this out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to touch on, that you would like to talk about it. Just any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

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> Jill Sidnick>I would say that if you know anybody who is experiencing PTSD symptoms, you know a veteran, somebody who has experienced an attack, somebody who feels like they are constantly, constantly vigilant against something that could happen, have them look at the maps. Uh, research. This is life changing therapy. People with PTSD don't have to continue to suffer with it. There's a lot of information online with veterans organizations, working with psychedelics to help that population. So I would just say that any of your listeners, uh, get curious because there's millions of people who suffer from PTSD, and we now have some real viable options.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Absolutely, ladies and gentlemen, and make sure you share this episode to as many people as possible who this can help. It's gonna be. It's gonna be August pretty quick here, so please be sure to follow rate review share jump on your favorite podcast app. Give us a review.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Follow us if you have any guests or suggestion Topics different email address Curtis Jackson at Curtis Jackson 1978 att.net dot Curtis Jackson 1978 att.net send it there. As always, thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Jill, thank you for joining us and sharing this groundbreaking therapy.

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> Jill Sidnick>Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me, Kyrgyz. I really appreciate it.

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> Curveball>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurvefall.com.

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> Curveball>until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Dream.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Our.