You’re Not Broken; the Container Is: Transference, Trauma & Misunderstood Resistance in Plant Medicine Healing

1. Introduction

Anaïs Nin once said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

This includes plant medicines, and indeed, plant medicine facilitators.

We may begin our relationship with plant medicines like ayahuasca by projecting onto her the only frameworks we know—family, religion, education, and any other societal relationships.  Over time, if we’re supported well, this relationship evolves beyond the personal and into the archetypal, animistic and transpersonal.  But that path is rarely linear, especially in group settings.

Likewise, ceremony facilitators—those who hold space—often become mirrors for what we haven’t yet healed, and what is still hidden in our subconscious. They can become blank screens on which we project the images of the parents we never had, our heroes, our perpetrators, our teachers, the ones we fear, the ones we lost. And so I beg the question: What happens when the retreat container unconsciously mirrors the very wounds people carry from their own families?

In the modern Western context, where many arrive with complex trauma, motherland displacement, attachment wounding, and intergenerational burdens, the ceremony space can inadvertently become a stage where these unresolved dynamics play out in very subtle ways, often under the radar of the facilitator's awareness.

Instead of healing, some people leave retreats feeling more confused, believing the medicine “didn’t work” or that they “weren’t ready.”  This is a faulty narrative, and provides an easy out for facilitators who don’t actually have a coherent answer as to why a guest’s process is left incomplete. The truth is: medicine is only as safe as the container that holds it—and the structures around ceremonial work in the modern age are often built without the scaffolding of trauma-informed care, cultural awareness, or acknowledgment of family systems and history.

This article is an offering to name what often goes unnamed—not to center Western problems in Indigenous traditions, but to illuminate the very real intersections emerging as plant medicines reach broader audiences. This insight comes from walking with thousands of people through their healing journeys, and witnessing the patterns that repeat—not because something is wrong, but because something very important is ready to be brought to light.

2. The Container Is the Medicine

Ayahuasca does not act in isolation. Her intelligence unfolds within a relational field—between participants, the land, the facilitators, through time, through lineage, and the often-unspoken expectations of the group.

In Indigenous contexts, ceremonies happen within kinship networks. The medicine is served in a cosmology rooted in intergenerational relationship, with clear roles and inherited meaning. The container is a family system. There are elders, accountability, and a living tradition that binds participants into a coherent structure.

In these settings, transference is less confusing—because literal family members may be present. The psyche is met by familiarity. The behavior of individuals rarely violates the shared expectations of the group. The field is strong. The mythos is intact.

This isn’t to suggest Westerners are wrong to seek healing through traditional means—it’s simply to point to the disconnection between two worlds. In modern retreat settings, strangers from multiple cultural backgrounds arrive with different spiritual frameworks, different belief systems, different needs, different nervous system sensitivities, and different expectations. They enter a shared field—but without a shared roadmap.

What results is a kind of psychic improvisation. The deep, archetypal longing for healing activates—and looks for a place to land. When it cannot find attunement, that energy often gets pathologized or buried.

Facilitators become stand-ins for parental figures. Group dynamics mirror family configurations—rivalries, competition, fusion, exclusion.  None of this is inherently wrong, but these are, ironically,  the very blueprints we aim to dismantle by coming to ceremony in the first place. 

When these dynamics go unacknowledged, they become dangerous terrain.  What could be fodder for our healing can become a reenactment of an old wound.  What could be integration becomes confusion.

3. Trauma Replication: Family Systems & Psychedelics

One of the most profound—and often misunderstood—aspects of group retreat work is the unconscious reenactment of early life dynamics. Ayahuasca opens the psyche, yes—but so does the space between ceremonies. And in that space, the group becomes a living constellation of each person’s unfinished stories.

Inner images activated by the medicine are rarely random. They are often shaped by early attachment wounds, survival strategies, and the nervous system’s earliest blueprint for love, safety, and power.

What might look like resistance or ego is often a trauma defense:

• A guest who avoids eye contact may be bracing for disappointment.

• A guest who dominates sharing may be shielding against invisibility.

• A guest who lashes out may be testing the container: Will you stay? Will you shame me?

Facilitators can be unconsciously cast as the nourishing mother, the withholding father, or the abuser. Group dynamics become charged—mimicking sibling rivalry, abandonment, or alliance-building.

These reenactments are not flaws. They are doorways to healing, but only if the container can recognize them.

Trauma replication can be explicit—emotional outbursts, power struggles, withdrawal. But more often, it is implicit:

• Who gets asked first to share?

• Who is consistently bypassed or interrupted?

• Who silently watches the room and never speaks?

These are subtle, powerful indicators that often mirror developmental wounds and require deep attunement, not just passively “holding space”. 

4. Explicit and Implicit Layers of Retreat

The truth is: retreat has two layers.

• The explicit layer is the advertised structure: ceremonies, yoga, workshops, sharing circles, integration practices.

• The implicit layer is everything else: the way people move, speak, opt in or out, how they take up space—or don’t.

Our retreat containers are not just schedules. They are living theaters. When a guest chooses not to attend a group session, is that resistance—or is it individuation? When we offer advice, have we gained consent? Are we aware of the ways we may unconsciously re-enact dynamics from a person’s family of origin?

At Sacred Counsel retreats, we intentionally build in optionality to all activities (including ceremonies) to highlight this foundation of personal sovereignty. We offer silent tables. We frame activities as invitations, not mandates. Because often, the most healing act is being empowered to choose what to engage in—and feeling safe to choose differently.

These design choices may seem small, but they hold enormous psychic weight. They are what allow the unconscious to surface safely. They are what allow someone to begin rewriting their story.

5. What Facilitators Must Understand

It’s not enough to have experienced the medicine even a thousand times.  It’s not enough to have certifications, or to believe yourself to be most “conscious”, “trauma informed”, or “alternative” facilitator.  It’s not enough to truly believe that the medicine herself has chosen you to be her steward.  All this self-identifying does is create hierarchy, differentials in the relational field, and a giant blind spot that says: because I’m outside the problem, I can’t replicate it.  What matters is your ability to deeply listen and attune to the unspoken cues of those you care for, this invaluable ability is a delicate blend of talent, humility, and years of practice. 

If you are holding power in any space, you are in the field of projection, and if you do not know how to work with projection, rupture, repair, and reparenting—you will cause harm, even if unintentionally.

Facilitators must ask themselves:

• Am I aware of how I’m being perceived?

• Am I clearly perceiving the people in front of me?

• How might my energy, voice, or behavior be confirming someone’s old beliefs?

Guests are not just engaging with ayahuasca. They’re engaging with you—as symbol, archetype, mirror. And the healing is not just in the brew. It’s in the field.

This is why trauma literacy, family systems knowledge, and cultural humility are not extras—they are essentials. If you don’t know how to track themes like abandonment, control, neglect, or enmeshment—if you’re not comfortable holding your own projections and responding relationally—you may not be ready to facilitate in this way.  It’s not about coddling, its about being fluent in the unspoked language of the human psyche, and being able to work on that plane with precision, care, and confidence. 

Relational Perception: A Mirror for Growth, Not Perfection

Someone once asked me during a retreat, “How long have you been vegan?”

I smiled and said, “Never.”

She received my answer with a blend of relief and surprise, which then became a teaching moment for us both.  I explained that many people assume plant medicine facilitators are vegan because, for one reason or another, people conflate veganism with spirituality.  We keep a vegetarian diet on retreat to create a more hospitable environment for the medicine, but I thought it was surprising that this guest assumed I ate this way all the time.  

I explained that there are hundreds of ayahuasca traditions with widely varied methods of preparation.  The Shipibo-Konibo do practice strict dietas: no salt, no animal protein, no sex.  But in other traditions—like some Colombian tribes—there’s actually very few guidelines around diet, and in some cases they intentionally eat lots of meat before the ceremony to call in the protective spirits of the animal.

It’s all about context, and cultural cosmology, not doctrine.

I then gently asked, “Are you thinking about changing your diet?”

“Yes, but I don’t know if I could go fully vegan.”  

And from there, a doorway opened where we both got to explore what this person was really looking for.  What appeared on the surface to be a simple question about me was actually the beginning of a thread into her own self-inquiry.

This is what we mean by process over content. The question isn’t just “Are you vegan?”—it’s “Can I trust my intuition? Am I allowed to do it differently?”

As facilitators, our job is not to provide the right answers.

It’s to midwife the right questions to help guests reclaim their sovereignty through reflection, not performance.

6. Misinterpretation of the Process

In many Western frameworks, when a guest struggles, the narrative becomes:

• “They weren’t ready.”

• “They didn’t surrender.”

• “They had a challenging process” (I want to encourage digging below the surface of this statement and find out why, and how).

But readiness is not just will. It's the nervous system capacity. It’s relational safety. It’s cultural conditioning. And sometimes, a guest’s “blockage” is the same defense mechanism that’s kept them alive in the past. 

I once worked with a guest, a single mother from a strict monotheistic background. Participating in ayahuasca was not just spiritually threatening—it risked her custody rights. To be in that space required more courage than most will ever know.  The medicine came on strong for her, and she hesitated to fully surrender, but it wasn’t resistance - It was reverence. It was protection. It was maternal instinct. It was a lineage.

Upon sharing her experience in the integration circle, the facilitators reflected back to her that    perhaps she was “resisting the process”, and perhaps “wasn’t ready” to surrender.  Their feedback, while probably good intentioned, was baseless, without context whatsoever of her homelife, religious affiliation, or tenuous custody of her son.  This is spiritual bypassing of the highest order. 

I share this example to pose the question - If someone leaves a ceremony feeling ashamed or unseen, we must ask - Was there a rupture in their process—or in the way their process was held?

7. For Those Who’ve Left Ceremony Feeling Confused

If you’ve walked away from a retreat with more questions than answers—if you felt unseen, dismissed, or overwhelmed—please know:

You are not too much.

You are not broken.

You are complex—and that matters.

Let this be the call.

Let the place that carries the most charge be where we begin. Because that’s where the thread to healing lies—not in abstraction, but in this specific experience.

If you feel safe, and if you feel called, I would be honored to walk with you—one-on-one—to retrace, reweave, and reimagine what’s possible.

As Anaïs Nin said: “We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

So if something is arising, it’s not random. It’s relational. It’s revelatory.

Please reach up. Please reach out.

We are here to walk beside you—so we can begin to see more clearly, together.

8. Closing

We don’t need perfect facilitators.

We don’t need flawless containers.

We need humble ones.

Listening ones.

Relatable ones.

Real ones.

This work is sacred,

And your soul knows the difference between performance and the truth.

Let us honor the field—not just with songs and structure, but with presence and precision.

Let us remember: the medicine is wise.

And so is your pain.