Dismantled

Book excerpt: With the ending of a marriage, a career as a clergyman in the church, and the alluring promise of love, the author turns to psychedelics, sacred ceremony and psychotherapy to get his life back. During this process, he discovers how childhood trauma forced him to develop a false self in order to survive. His personality is dismantled as these sacred medicines reveal the truth to him. In the process, Sanguin presents evidence for the shocking prevalence of childhood trauma. Along the way, the author questions and ultimately undermines much conventional wisdom, including the sentimentalization of family, the rush to forgiveness as a cure all and dogmatic Christianity. He supports the forgotten tradition in the gospels that authentic suffering and the acceptance of reality is the key to living a full and authentic life. The book is a testament, both to the importance of conscious integration of psychedelic experiences and to the healing power of these medicines when taken in the proper set and setting. By the end, we are given a model of healing which is not a quick fix, but rather one that honours the complexity of the human experience. This is a hopeful book that supports a growing body of research indicating that psychedelics as medicine hold one key to the healing and evolution of the human being.