Running on Dirty Fuel? Why a Psychiatrist Traded Prescriptions for Psychedelics
You know that guy who absolutely loses his mind when someone cuts him off in traffic? Maybe you are that guy. (I'll admit my own horn-honking reflex is a bit hair-trigger lately.) We write it off as stress, or just being a driven, high-achieving person. Will Van Derveer calls it trauma. And honestly? That shifts the whole paradigm.
I just finished listening to Tripp Lanier's interview with Dr. Van Derveer on The New Man, and it kind of blew up my assumptions about what psychedelic therapy actually looks like in practice. Van Derveer is a psychiatrist. He went to med school. He did the residency. He was fully prepared to spend his life prescribing SSRIs and doing talk therapy—until he realized a massive chunk of his patients simply weren't getting better. His toolbox was just a hammer.
Let's talk about the 'T' word. Trauma has become so trendy it almost hurts to type it. Someone gets your Starbucks order wrong and suddenly you're 'traumatized.' It makes a lot of people cringe, especially the hard-charging guys Lanier usually coaches. Suck it up, buttercup. That's the default setting. We don't want to admit we're damaged goods.
But Van Derveer breaks it down in a way that strips out the victimhood and makes it purely biological. It’s not about your identity or claiming a tragic backstory. It’s about how your nervous system handles Tuesday.
The Biology of the Freak-out
- Big T vs. Little t: Combat veterans and car wreck survivors have Big T trauma. That's obvious. But Little t trauma? That’s the accumulated weight of a thousand tiny childhood papercuts that leave your nervous system chronically hijacked.
- The Numb/Flood Seesaw: You're either overwhelmed and feeling too much (flooding), or you're dead inside and jumping out of airplanes just to make sure your pulse still works (numbing).
- The Traffic Trigger: When a cardboard box on the highway looks like an IED to a vet, we understand the trigger. But when your coworker’s passing glance subconsciously reminds you of your hyper-critical dad and ruins your entire afternoon? Same exact mechanism. Just a different scale.
I think the part that hit me hardest was their discussion on using success as a sedative. So many people are sprinting toward some imaginary finish line—enough money, the right title, the perfect house—believing that then their nervous system will finally relax. They’re running their lives on terror. And they don't even know it.
Golden Nugget "I like to think about it in my own life as trying to convert my engine from one fuel that burns really dirty to a fuel that burns clean... running your engine on fear and scarcity versus inspiration and creativity and joy." — Dr. Will Van Derveer
It’s a messy process, swapping out that fuel. The fear is real—if you stop running on pure, unadulterated anxiety, will you lose your edge? Who's going to pay you to be joyful, right?
Psychedelics aren't a magic bullet. Van Derveer makes that abundantly clear, sharing his own stumbles and doubts along the way. But they might be the only mechanic capable of opening the hood so you can see the smoke pouring out of your own engine. If you've been white-knuckling your steering wheel lately, you need to hear this one.
Listen to The New Man: https://podranker.com/podcast/the-new-man