Written By: Fabrizio Beverina
A case study of dissociation, somatic catharsis, and nervous-system reorganization with plant medicine.
When K first arrived, she did not arrive alone.
Nothing in her appearance would have alerted an untrained eye. She was articulate. Functional. She had raised two children. She moved through the world with the outward coherence of someone who had lived a normal life.
But coherence is not the same as unity.
It became apparent during the very first talking circle. When it was her turn to speak, she did not hesitate.
“I know hell,” she said. “I lived all my life in hell. I have never felt love since I was born.”
There was no theatricality in her voice. Only certainty.
What followed was disorienting. Her emotional state shifted rapidly, as if governed by different internal centers. One moment she spoke with bitter aggression, her words sharp and accusatory, directed at life itself. Seconds later, she collapsed into tears, her body folding inward in self-pity. Then, just as suddenly, she became gentle, almost childlike—her tone soft, polite, apologetic.
It was not simply emotional volatility.
It was discontinuity.
The fragmentation became dramatically more visible during the breathwork session that preceded her first ayahuasca ceremony with our mestizo female shaman, la maestra Alicia.
As the breathing deepened, her body began producing thick mucus. She gagged and expelled it repeatedly, as if purging something long held inside. Soon she was screaming—not words, but raw sound. Her body shook violently. Her muscles contracted and released in waves beyond voluntary control.
The emotional intensity flooded her completely.
Yet that night, during the ceremony itself, she was quiet.
She drank her first cup of ayahuasca. Then, after some time, she asked for a second half cup. She remained still for hours, sitting upright in silence while the icaros filled the space.
It was only near the end of the ceremony that the calm fractured.
Her body tensed without warning. Every muscle contracted at once, as if seized by an internal current. Then the screaming returned—deeper this time, guttural, stripped of any social restraint. It did not sound like ordinary speech. It sounded excavated.
“Get out… motherfucker… get out of me… get out…”
The words tore through the maloka, again and again, without rhythm, without exhaustion. There was no narrative in them, only raw expulsion as if something buried was being forced toward the surface through sound.
When the ceremony formally ended, and the others slowly began returning to their hammocks, K abruptly stood and ran out into the darkness toward her bungalow. Her movements were disorganized, driven, not fully under voluntary control.
But the night did not end there.
From her bungalow, the screaming continued.
It rose and fell in waves, sometimes fading into low sobs, then erupting again with full force. The jungle, usually dense with insect sound, seemed to recede around it. The cries cut through the night air with an almost physical presence.
It was clear that the ceremony had not ended for her.
It had only opened something.
The following morning, Alicia informed us that she would perform a traditional cleansing intervention known as soplar y chupar.
The ritual involves blowing mapacho smoke over the body—mapacho, the powerful Amazonian tobacco used as a diagnostic and protective tool—followed by the extraction of energetic blockages through suction.
As Alicia began, K’s demeanor changed instantly.
Her body stiffened. Her face distorted. She began shouting insults at the shaman, her voice filled with contempt and mockery. She stuck out her tongue in exaggerated gestures of defiance. Her tone was harsh, aggressive, entirely unlike the soft-spoken woman we had met only hours before.
Then, just as abruptly, the aggression vanished.
Her posture collapsed inward. Her face softened. Her voice returned fragile, almost childlike.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. It’s not me. It’s him.” She paused. “The demon.”
In the group that week was a young psychologist who had worked clinically with patients diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder. After observing these rapid, discontinuous shifts in behavior, voice, posture, and emotional tone, she approached me privately.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said. “This is consistent with severe dissociation. Different personality states taking executive control.”
Her observation did not impose an explanation.
It provided a framework.
And as K slowly began to share the story of what had happened to her at eight years old, the fragmentation we were witnessing began to make sense.
The Origin—The Event at Eight Years Old
At the age of eight, she was sexually abused by her stepfather. The abuse happened inside her own home, through invasive touch, repeated enough to leave an imprint deeper than memory. It was not a single event, but a condition—something that existed in the background of her childhood.
Her mother was aware of it.
And did nothing.
For a child, the trauma is not only in the violation itself, but in the absence of protection. The nervous system looks for rescue. When rescue does not come, something fundamental reorganizes inside.
But this was not the only violence she witnessed.
Her grandfather, a man governed by volatility and despair, once pointed a gun directly at her head. She remembers the cold stillness of that moment, the suspension of breath, the proximity of death. Her mother intervened before he could act.
Later, the same grandfather poured gasoline over his own body and set himself on fire in front of her.
In her family, suicide was not an abstract concept. It was something enacted. Rage, instability, and emotional unpredictability formed the atmosphere in which she grew. There was no stable ground, no adult nervous system capable of containing the chaos and transmitting safety.
It was not an environment in which a child could remain whole.
At that age, the brain does not yet possess the structures necessary to integrate overwhelming violation. The neural systems responsible for regulating emotion, constructing coherent memory, and maintaining a stable sense of identity are still forming. When an experience exceeds the organism’s capacity to process it, the nervous system cannot metabolize it in the usual way.
So it does something else.
It divides.
This division is not a failure. It is a defense. One part of the psyche continues forward, adapting to external reality, strengthening the ego as a functional interface with the world. This part learns to speak, to behave, to survive.
Another part withdraws, carrying the unprocessed terror, the helplessness, the pain that could not be integrated.
Both parts exist, but they do not fully communicate.
This process, known clinically as dissociation, has measurable neurobiological correlates. Research shows altered connectivity between brain regions involved in memory integration, emotional processing, and identity continuity. The traumatic experience becomes encapsulated, isolated from ordinary conscious awareness.
Psychologically, the child survives.
But something remains suspended in time.
Years later, when she tried to give language to that moment, she did not describe it in clinical terms. She said, simply, that it was the moment “something entered.”
Whether understood as a dissociated fragment of the self, a symbolic representation of trauma, or an autonomous internal presence shaped by overwhelming experience, this perception became central to her internal reality. It was not something she considered finished.
It was something she felt had continued living inside her.
The Long Silence
For decades, she lived without consciously accessing the full emotional reality of what had happened to her.
This is common in severe trauma. Dissociation does not erase memory. It isolates it. The experience remains present, but outside the reach of ordinary awareness, influencing behavior from beneath the surface.
Without knowing why, she found herself drawn into abusive relationships. Again and again, she gravitated toward partners and situations that mirrored the instability of her early life. Danger felt familiar. Chaos felt normal. There was a persistent internal tension she could not name, only escape from.
Like many people carrying unresolved trauma, she turned to substances. Alcohol. Drugs. Not as recreation, but as anesthesia—a way to quiet an internal disturbance that had no language.
Externally, she built a life.
She became a mother. She worked. She moved between jobs, between partners, between phases of apparent stability and sudden collapse. Her relationships were intense, unstable, oscillating between attachment and rupture. Within her family, she felt cast in a fixed role—the black sheep, the difficult one, the one who did not belong.
She carried shame she did not fully understand.
Internally, the fragmentation remained active.
Chronic dissociation is not only psychological. It is physiological. Research in psychoneuroimmunology has demonstrated that early trauma can produce long-term dysregulation of the stress response system, altering cortisol patterns, inflammatory signaling, and immune function. The nervous system, forced to remain in a state of unresolved threat, affects the body over time.
Eventually, her body expressed what her psyche had contained.
She was diagnosed with uterine and cervical cancer.
Medical treatment required the surgical removal of both organs.
From a biomedical perspective, this was the necessary intervention to eliminate malignant cellular growth.
From her subjective perspective, it was something else.
She experienced it as the physical manifestation of something that had lived inside her for decades—something that had taken residence in the very organs where the original violation had occurred.
From a clinical standpoint, it would be incorrect to claim that trauma directly causes cancer in a deterministic sense. But it is equally incomplete to ignore the well-documented pathways through which chronic stress, emotional suppression, and nervous system dysregulation influence immune function and tissue vulnerability.
From our perspective, having worked with many patients carrying severe sexual trauma, this pattern is not abstract.
The body keeps the score with ruthless fidelity.
When trauma cannot be integrated psychologically, it does not disappear. It relocates. It embeds itself in the nervous system, in the endocrine system, in the tissues themselves. Over years, sometimes decades, the organism continues to carry the imprint of the original violation.
The body does not forget what the mind was forced to silence.
In cases of sexual abuse, the reproductive organs often become the physical territory where this unresolved trauma concentrates. Not symbolically. Physiologically. Chronically exposed to stress hormones, inflammatory processes, and autonomic dysregulation, these tissues exist in a state of prolonged internal conflict.
The organism turns against itself.
Not consciously. Not by choice. But as the inevitable consequence of a system forced to carry an intolerable burden for too long.
Again and again, we have observed the same pattern: the organs associated with the original violation become the site of pathology.
As if the body, unable to erase the memory, attempts instead to remove the part that carries it.
As if those organs, innocent yet marked by the trauma, become unconsciously designated as the locus of the wound.
Her uterus and cervix were not guilty.
But they were where the violence had entered.
And eventually, they were where the body declared war.
The Encounter During the Yopo Ceremony
The pressure had been building for days.
What had remained contained beneath the surface began to rise, slowly at first, then with increasing force—like water accumulating behind a dam already fractured, already weakened. Everyone could feel it. Her nervous system was approaching a threshold it could no longer regulate.
The Yopo ceremony became the breaking point.
Only minutes after the administration, her breathing changed. Her chest tightened. A low growl began to emerge from her throat—not performed, not intentional, but involuntary, primal. She tried to sit upright, but her body refused to obey. Her muscles lost coordination, and she collapsed onto the wooden floor.
Then the screaming began.
Her body became the battleground.
She struck the floor with her fists, again and again, with full force. Not in an attempt to harm others, but with rage directed entirely toward herself, as if trying to expel something lodged inside her own flesh.
We moved immediately to contain her. Together with the other facilitator, we surrounded her with pillows and blankets, creating a protective barrier between her body and the hard wooden surface. Our role was not to stop the process, but to prevent physical injury while allowing the psychological and somatic discharge to unfold.
What was striking was this: she never turned her aggression toward us.
Even as we restrained her arms to prevent fractures, even as we held her through the waves of violent movement, she never attacked. Her struggle was entirely internal.
That night, I witnessed something I cannot fully explain within conventional frameworks.
As I sat beside her, I intentionally focused my attention—not on controlling her, but on sending calm, stability, and protection. Internally, I asked for assistance from the forces we invoke in this work—the intelligence of the medicine, all the spirits of the plant and of the jungle.
Almost immediately, her reaction intensified. Like she was able to read into my mind.
Her body arched. Her voice rose in pitch and volume. She screamed with renewed force, as if responding directly to an invisible confrontation. And then she started to pull the tongue to me, mocking me.
Her words oscillated between extremes.
“Motherfucker I hate you… I hate you… get out…”
Then, seconds later, her tone would soften completely.
“Oh baby… I love you… baby…”
Then again, instantly, the rage would return.
“Motherfucker… get out…”
If you’ve ever seen the movie The Exorcist, that was what I lived that night.
It was as if multiple emotional states, normally separated by dissociation, were now exposed simultaneously, colliding in real time.
The struggle continued for hours.
Eventually, to prevent severe injury, we made the decision to physically restrain her. We secured her arms and legs with cloth, carefully, without violence, ensuring circulation remained intact. We surrounded her completely with blankets and pillows to protect her joints and skull from impact.
It was not an act of control.
It was an act of containment.
Around her, the entire group was affected. Her process did not remain isolated within her own nervous system. It resonated outward, activating emotional material in others. Some began crying. Others trembled. A few screamed. The boundary between individual and collective process became permeable.
It became a group catharsis.
After approximately three hours, the intensity began to diminish.
Her breathing slowed.
Her muscles relaxed.
Her voice returned to its ordinary register.
She opened her eyes and said quietly, with clarity:
“He’s weak now. I released so much… not only mine. The karma of many women that suffered what I suffered. I work for all of them. I feed them. All my past lives…. All clean.”
Her body was exhausted. Her skin pale. Her knees already turning dark with bruises from the repeated impacts.
We carried her back to her bungalow.
Later that night, we heard her crying out again—not in rage, but in pain. The physical consequences of the discharge were emerging. We brought ice to reduce the swelling. We stayed beside her.
In processes of this magnitude, presence is essential.
Not intervention. Presence.
We repeated simple sentences, grounding her nervous system in relational safety:
“You are not alone.”
“We are here.”
“You are safe.”
Gradually, her breathing stabilized.
That night marked a turning point.
Something that had lived inside her for decades had been forced into direct confrontation.
And for the first time since childhood, she had not dissociated.
She had stayed.
The Emergence of the Wounded Healer
After the intensity of the Yopo ceremony, it was clear that continuing with strong psychedelic interventions would have been destabilizing. Together with the shaman, Alicia, we decided to pause the administration of visionary medicines and shift toward slower, stabilizing work.
Healing, in cases like hers, does not advance through force. It advances through containment.
Each day, Alicia performed the ritual of soplar y chupar. She would blow mapacho smoke over specific regions of K’s body, diagnosing through sensation and intuition, then apply suction to areas where she perceived density or obstruction. The ritual was followed by plant baths prepared from protective and cleansing species traditionally used in Amazonian medicine to restore energetic boundaries.
After each session, Alicia would say quietly, almost with surprise: “Me choca cada vez.” — It shocks me every time.
The work was not neutral. It demanded something from her.
One day, while working on K’s neck, Alicia suddenly turned away and vomited a thick yellow liquid. Immediately afterward, K’s entire body relaxed. Her breathing slowed. The tension that had held her rigid dissolved.
She fell to her knees in front of the shaman and kissed her feet.
It was not submission. It was relief.
During this period, her dreams became extraordinarily vivid.
One morning, she came to me visibly shaken.
“I saw dead people,” she said. “They were asking me for money. There was a bald man with two pupils in one eye, holding a rope. They were sitting and drinking tea with the dead. And there was a monster made of fire.”
I asked her if the figures had threatened her.
“No,” she said. “They were just there.”
I showed her an image from Tibetan iconography—the fierce, wrathful forms of protective Buddhas, often terrifying in appearance but understood as forces of liberation, not harm. She immediately recognized the fiery being.
“That’s him,” she said.
In many Eastern traditions, wrathful figures do not represent evil. They represent the force required to destroy illusion. In Chinese ancestral practices, offerings of symbolic money are burned to support the dead in their transition. What she had seen was not an attack.
It was a threshold.
The following night, the figures returned in her dreams. This time, they taught her sounds—mantras she did not intellectually understand but found herself repeating continuously upon waking. She said the vibrations made her feel protected, reorganized from within.
Something was changing.
Then came the dream of the white horse.
The image carried unusual weight, because that same morning Alicia told me she had dreamt of K as well. In her dream, the demon that had tormented K transformed first into a jaguar, then into a horse.
Within Amazonian cosmology, these are not neutral symbols: The jaguar represents sovereignty—the ability to move between worlds without fear. The horse represents freedom, embodied power, the capacity to carry oneself forward without restraint.
Transformation had begun.
I explained to her that what she had perceived as an enemy might also be understood as a force trapped in its most primitive form. When trauma is metabolized, its energy does not disappear. It changes structure. What once manifested as terror can become strength.
Carl Jung described this process as the emergence of the wounded healer—the individual who, by descending fully into their own fragmentation and surviving it, develops the capacity to guide others through similar terrain.
Rumi expressed it more simply: The wound is the place where the light enters you.
This does not romanticize suffering. It recognizes its alchemical potential.
I told her that her history did not disqualify her from wholeness. It prepared her for it.
That perhaps the depth of what she had endured was not meaningless. That those who have confronted the most extreme internal darkness often develop a capacity for perception and empathy inaccessible to those who have not.
She listened silently.
Then she told me something that stunned her.
The figures in her dream—the monk and the fierce Buddha—had given her a task. They had shown her the image of her young granddaughter and instructed her to protect her, to ensure she would never experience what she herself had endured.
For the first time, her past was no longer only a source of pain.
It had become a source of purpose.
In the days that followed, her demeanor changed visibly. Her posture straightened. Her face softened. She began smiling spontaneously, something she had not done since her arrival. She was not complaining anymore about her past traumas, she was not a victim anymore. Something new was growing inside of her.
“The demon is small now,” she told me one morning, holding her hand in front of her. “This small.”
She closed her fingers slowly into a fist.
“I will finish it.”
And later, she did.
The Reconstruction of the Body, The Reconstruction of the Self
In the days that followed, the shift was unmistakable.
Her energy, once contracted and defensive, began to expand. The daily rituals with Alicia continued, but their intensity changed. The extractions became lighter. The violent physiological reactions that had previously accompanied them no longer occurred. Alicia no longer needed to purge after working on her.
“The obstruction is leaving,” she told me simply.
Then something happened that neither of us expected.
One morning, during a plant bath, K suddenly froze.
“Fabrizio,” she said, her voice confused but calm. “Something just dropped out of my uterus.”
She paused, trying to understand her own words.
“But I don’t have a uterus anymore.”
Years earlier, it had been surgically removed.
The following night, she came to me again.
“I feel something,” she said. “Like menstrual pain. The same exact pain I used to feel. But it’s impossible. Those organs are gone.”
She placed her hand on her lower abdomen.
“It’s like they are still there. Alive. I can feel them.”
She did not say this with fear.
She said it with recognition.
“I don’t understand it,” she continued. “But I know it’s healing me. And I accept it.”
From a neurological perspective, phantom sensations after organ removal are well documented. The brain maintains internal maps of the body that persist even when the physical structure is gone. But what she was experiencing was more than a neurological artifact. It was as if her nervous system was re-establishing contact with a part of herself that had been not only physically removed, but psychologically exiled.
Her womb had been the site of violation.
The site of disease.
The site of loss.
Now, in the absence of the physical organ, its energetic and neurological representation was being reintegrated.
Not as pathology.
As wholeness.
It was as if her body was forgiving itself.
Reclaiming territory that had been defined only by trauma.
For the first time since her arrival, K began leaving her bed regularly. Until then, she had remained withdrawn most of the time, enclosed in herself, as if protected by an invisible membrane. Behind that mosquito net around the bed, it had not been collapse. It had been gestation.
Something had been forming in silence.
Now, it was emerging.
During breathwork sessions, she began feeling intense sensations in her hands. She held them in front of her, studying them with a mixture of surprise and reverence.
“They are burning,” she said. “Not with pain. With energy.”
Her fingers trembled with small involuntary vibrations, like circuits coming back online after years of disuse. She described the sensation as heat, but not destructive heat.
Generative heat.
The heat of activation.
A different fire was burning now.
Not the fire that destroys.
The fire that restores.
“These hands,” she told me, “are meant to help people.”
She spoke of her family. Generations marked by silence, abuse, repetition of the same wound moving from parent to child.
“I will stop it there,” she said.
Not with anger.
With clarity.
The final ayahuasca ceremony approached.
That evening, she came to me calm. Centered.
“It is time,” she said.
Time, she explained, to release the final structure that had protected her for decades.
Her ego had saved her life. It had built walls around her heart when vulnerability meant annihilation. Those walls had been necessary. They had allowed her to survive.
But survival is not the same as living.
Now, she was ready to dismantle them.
The ceremony began.
At first, the familiar tension returned. Her breathing became irregular. Her muscles tightened as the medicine moved through her system. I sat beside her. She asked me to place a hand on her shoulder. I did.
“Stay with your breath,” I told her quietly.
She followed it.
There is a moment in deep trauma resolution that feels like death. Not biological death, but structural death. The collapse of the identity built entirely around protection.
She passed through that moment.
Her body trembled. Then softened.
The tension left her face completely. Tears moved silently down her cheeks, but there was no fear in them.
Only release.
Later, she described it with simple precision.
“The demon disappeared,” she said.
Then she added:
“My ego dissolved. The one that was protecting me. And what was behind it came out.”
What emerged was not emptiness.
It was presence.
The hostility that had defined her interactions was gone. In its place was warmth. Receptivity. An unguarded openness to others that had been inaccessible before.
Her nervous system was no longer organized around defense.
It was organized around connection.
She looked at her hands again.
“They are different now,” she said, “the hands always reflect the changes of the mind.” She was a palm reader, she told us.
These new hands were not a metaphor but direct experience.
She had crossed from fragmentation into coherence.
When she left the center, she was smiling.
Not the fragile smile of someone pretending to be healed, but the quiet, grounded smile of someone who had re-established contact with herself.
She did not leave as someone rescued.
She left as someone who had reclaimed authorship of her own existence.
She had a mission now.
Not imposed from outside.
Emerging from within.
She had reconnected with the part of herself that had existed before the violation.
The part that had never been destroyed.
Only buried.
And had finally returned.
What Actually Happened
What happened to K can be observed through multiple lenses.
From a psychiatric perspective, what emerged during the ceremonies was dissociated traumatic material that had remained compartmentalized since childhood. The altered states induced by ayahuasca and Yopo reduced the defensive barriers that normally keep such material outside conscious awareness. This allowed the previously fragmented emotional and somatic memory to surface, be experienced directly, and gradually reintegrated into a unified sense of self.
From a neurobiological perspective, these states likely increased communication between neural networks that had long been isolated from one another. Trauma fragments experience by disrupting the normal integration between limbic, cortical, and autonomic systems. Under the influence of these medicines, the rigid separation softened. Emotional memory, bodily sensation, and conscious awareness were brought back into contact. The organism, for the first time since the original trauma, was able to complete processes that had been interrupted.
From a psychological perspective, the mind gave form to what had previously remained unformulated. The presence she experienced—the entity, the demon—can be understood as the externalization of dissociated trauma. By encountering it as something separate, she was able to confront, resist, and ultimately reclaim the parts of herself that had been split off for survival.
From her personal perspective, there was no abstraction.
She fought something that had lived inside her since she was eight years old.
And she won.
From the shamanic perspective, what occurred was understood differently, but with equal coherence. Alicia and the other practitioners recognized the process as a form of spiritual intrusion followed by extraction—what, in Western language, might be called an exorcism. Through the combined action of the plant medicines, the rituals, and the continuous presence of the facilitators, the intrusive force lost its hold.
In this framework, healing was not only psychological.
It was energetic. Spiritual. Existential.
This narrative is not unique here. Across Amazonian traditions, shamans describe similar trajectories: individuals who pass through profound fragmentation, confront internal forces that threaten their integrity, and emerge transformed. These individuals often develop unusual sensitivity, empathy, and perceptual depth.
The wounded becomes the healer.
Whether one interprets this through the language of trauma integration, neuroplasticity, symbolic confrontation, or spiritual liberation, the observable outcome remains the same: a person who arrived fragmented, defensive, and internally divided left coherent, stable, and open.
These interpretations are not mutually exclusive.
They describe different levels of the same process—biological, psychological, symbolic, and spiritual—converging toward a single outcome:
The restoration of wholeness.
The Real Outcome
The real outcome was not the visions.
Visions are transient. They come, they reveal, and they fade. What matters is what remains when they are gone.
What remained in her was structural change.
Her nervous system, once organized around defense, had reorganized around presence. The constant internal vigilance that had defined her for decades was no longer there. Her gaze was steady. Her movements unguarded. She no longer reacted to the world as if it were a continuation of the original threat.
She was here.
Fully.
The fragmentation that had divided her into separate, competing internal states had softened into continuity. Her voice no longer shifted unpredictably between extremes. Her emotional responses belonged to the present moment, not to unresolved echoes from the past.
She was no longer afraid of what lived inside her.
Not because it had been erased.
But because it had been reclaimed.
The trauma did not disappear. Trauma never disappears. It becomes part of the architecture of the self. But it was no longer autonomous. It no longer acted from the shadows, shaping her life without her awareness.
It had been metabolized. Integrated. What had once existed as an internal enemy had become history.
She stopped fighting herself. And in doing so, she became whole. Not the person she had been before the wound — that person no longer existed. But someone new. Someone who had descended into fragmentation, faced it directly, and returned with herself intact.
This is the real outcome.
Not healing as the absence of wounds.
Healing as the recovery of unity.