Your Tango
On the Open Relationships podcast from YourTango, hosts Andrea Miller and Joanna Schroeder talk with Matt about the healing he never went looking for. He begins with grief, a use case that gets less attention than depression or PTSD, and the loss of his mother at 49.
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Episode summary
On the Open Relationships podcast from YourTango, hosts Andrea Miller and Joanna Schroeder talk with Matt about how psychedelics opened up healing he had not gone looking for. He begins with grief, a use case he says gets less attention than depression or PTSD. His mother died at 49, when he was 22, and he was left unmoored for more than two decades. In his first guided psilocybin experience he felt her presence again and sensed her carried forward through him to his children. That same experience brought a feeling of being deeply loved and safe, which made him notice how rarely he felt that way in ordinary life.
Much of the conversation sits with the gap between saying "I'm fine" and what a closer look reveals. Matt describes growing up with an alcoholic father and a mother he loved who could not always keep him safe, and how these medicines let him hold both truths at once without judgment. On the science, he explains how psychedelics quiet the default mode network, the inner narrator telling people they are not enough, and let the brain form connections it has not made in years. He is careful with language, calling these compounds risk-reduced rather than safe, and framing them as a catalyst rather than a cure, with the real change happening in the integration work afterward.
He and the hosts cover what the research is actually looking at, which Matt sums up as repetitive thinking patterns that can show up as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, or compulsive behavior, including the socially celebrated kind like workaholism. They discuss the limits of long-term antidepressant use, the consumer questions worth asking about source, setting, and consent before any session, and the three paths people take toward access: medical, decriminalization, and religious freedom. Fitting the show's focus, Matt describes how MDMA can help couples talk without the usual defensiveness, and how some families have used these medicines together around end-of-life care.
The conversation closes on veterans. Matt cites the more than 30,000 veteran suicides since 9/11, far above combat deaths, and the bipartisan support that figure has drawn. He describes the Heroic Hearts Project, a nonprofit that funds and supports veterans through ayahuasca and psilocybin work with therapy before and after, and the clinical MDMA results showing a large share of participants no longer meeting the criteria for PTSD. He also mentions the resource he built with the organization, The Veteran's Guide to Psychedelics, designed to help veterans prepare, take notes during their experience, and integrate afterward.