How Does MDMA Serve As Emotional Super Glue For Relationships?

Join us in Boulder for this very special event featuring the author of "Listening to Ecstasy: The Transformative Power of MDMA," Charley Wininger. We'll hear an excerpt from the book, host an engaging conversation with Charley and his wife, Shelley, based on their personal experiences with this medicine, and have an opportunity to ask questions and discuss together in community. Spaces are limited, so please RSVP that you plan to attend. We will let people settle in starting at 5:30 and start the book talk promptly at 6pm. See you there Boulder!

Charley Wininger has been a psychotherapist in private practice the past thirty years, and a psychonaut the past fifty. Licensed as a psychoanalyst as well as a mental health counselor, he specializes in relationships and communication skills, treating couples and as well as individuals.

Although he doesn’t use MDMA in his  practice, he continues to benefit from personal experience with this medicine as it informs and improves his performance as a therapist.

He completed his post-graduate training at the Gestalt Associates for Psychotherapy in New York, and has continued his professional development the past fifteen years at New York’s Soma-Psyche Institute, where he learns intuition and empathic attunement skills.

Charley has often been featured in The New York Times and Newsday as "The Love Doctor,", and has appeared several times on TV.

For the past 20 years Charley has been a member of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (www.maps.org), which funds research into the use of MDMA for treating PTSD, social anxiety and other ailments.

As a former hippie of the ‘60s, he’s lived through multiple eras of psychedelic culture and carries with him the same spirit of peace and love today. “I’ve lived through it all,” he says. “And now it all lives through me.”

These days, Charley, who lectures on “Psychedelics Across The Lifespan,” is considered an elder in New York’s psychedelic community.  When he met Shelley, his second wife, back in 2000, he found a woman who was new to these medicines but eager to try them. Together, they discovered that MDMA could serve as a kind of emotional super glue for their realtionship, adding an additional layer of intimacy and joy to their bond. Moreover, it has helped them transition from middle age into their senior years.

During this time, they ventured into a (at the time) forbidden world of psychedelic drug users, and found it to be enchanted. As a result, they’ve been instrumental in building the psychedelic and MAPS communities in New York for the past fifteen years.

Now in his early 70s, Charley uses psychedelics as tools to gain better perspectives on aging, love and relationships, community building, masculinity, and mortality. He is intrigued by the potential of these substances for, as one researcher puts it, “the betterment of well people” – in other words, to help people live a more optimal life.