Ibogaine for Personal Development

Ibogaine’s oldest and most traditional use has been for cultivating awareness of the self and its relationship both to the human collective, personal ancestral roots, and to nature. Even outside of traditional practices, there are a number of ways that ibogaine treatment can be a useful process for some people in respect to personal growth or facing some mental and emotional challenges.

At Anzelmo we work with some of the most experienced medical professionals and therapy providers in the field to provide the most comfortable, natural and humane treatment possible. We also provide a number of supportive modalities including psychotherapy, integration coaching, body work, yoga, nutritional planning, and others so that you can make the most of the beneficial time following treatment.

The journalist Johann Hari said, “The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” Regardless of whether or not you are coming to ibogaine because of dependence on opioids, the use of ibogaine for addiction helps to characterize the kind of shift that it produces psychologically.

There are many ways that, through the course of our lives we come to feel disconnected. Even if we don’t feel it acutely, there may be some forms of disconnection that have become so universal throughout society, and so historically entrenched, that we have lost our perspective on what true connection has meant to our ancestors, or in other cultural contexts, and collective ways of addressing suffering and the human condition.

Whether or not we are able to identify the sources of our discomfort, it can become deeply internalized and part of our identity. The way that we learn how to see ourselves, and the ways that we learn how to behave and respond to the world can become more informed by our methods of coping than by our own values and ideals.

Ibogaine has been shown to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and the long-term effects of trauma in some people. For some people these effects can be lasting, for others they provide a temporary relief or profound insight into the conditions that contribute to their state and potential ways of living and coping with it.

At Anzelmo we work with a number of adjunct modalities, discussing other supportive strategies that can support through the acute period after ibogaine and provide access to other services such as aftercare recommendations and ibogaine coaching services that can be supportive in retraining the body and the mind in new strategies.

While ibogaine can be used to treat alcohol cravings and many of the protracted side effects after you stop drinking, particularly because of its activity on the dopaminergic neurotransmitter system, alcohol does have some effects on the GABA system which ibogaine does not address. For those who are at risk of serious withdrawal symptoms, especially seizures, ibogaine is unable to address the acute withdrawal symptoms from alcohol. In order to avoid these complications we require that our patients are able to stop the use of alcohol completely at least 5 days prior to arriving at Anzelmo.

In cases where there is serious risk of withdrawals a medically supervised switchover onto benzodiazepines should be arranged. Benzodiazepines work exclusively on the gabinergic system, relieving the risk of seizure, but avoiding any interaction with ibogaine during treatment. Either the switchover and taper can be completed prior to arrival, or the switchover can be completed and the benzodiazepine dosage continued throughout the ibogaine treatment and tapered later when the seizure risk has abated.

We can provide any further guidance about this prior to treatment, and we are happy to discuss this information with your medical professional, as needed.