Introduction to Jill Sitnick: A Courageous Journey from Healing to Advocacy

When I first spoke with Jill Sitnick, founder of Journey Sage LLC, I was struck by her candidness and determination to share a story that is both deeply personal and profoundly important. Jill’s journey from grappling with debilitating PTSD to becoming a passionate advocate for MDMA-assisted therapy is nothing short of transformative.

In her own words, Jill describes how this groundbreaking therapy not only helped her confront long-buried childhood trauma but also allowed her to find healing and purpose after years of pain. Through her vulnerability, she offers a rare and powerful glimpse into what it truly means to reclaim one’s life and channel that recovery into advocacy for others.

In this article, From Patient to Advocate: How MDMA Therapy for PTSD Transformed My Life, Jill takes us through her experiences with this innovative treatment, the challenges she faced along the way, and how it inspired her to educate and empower others through her work at Journey Sage LLC. Her story is a testament to the potential of psychedelic-assisted therapy to revolutionize mental health care—and to the resilience of the human spirit.

Without further ado, here’s her story:

My journey from patient to advocate for MDMA-assisted therapy began with skepticism because I had considerable distrust of pharmaceuticals and therapy, as my clinically depressed mother never found relief through those interventions.

But then, in my late forties, due to the stress of my long-term partner’s passing, I had a panic attack that I couldn’t shake. I had weeks of feeling like there was danger around every corner. My searing neck, terrible sleep, upset stomach, and constant fears over imaginary dangers were how I knew I needed help. 

To deal with the shattering grief of losing my partner, I treated myself to therapy for a safe place to heal. But when we started to concentrate on my physical panic attack symptoms, long-buried stories of my father’s abuse and my mother’s attempted suicides quickly came to the surface.

After a few weeks of talk therapy, my symptoms worsened, and my therapist diagnosed me with PTSD from childhood trauma. I initially resisted, telling her, “Have you met me? I’m a successful career gal. I can’t have PTSD!” However, after quite a bit of reading, I finally admitted my behavior fit the diagnostic criteria.

Unfortunately, our months of talk therapy to address the PTSD and my Wellbutrin prescription weren’t working as I became increasingly suicidal. In a fantastic twist of fate, my therapist suggested MDMA therapy because she was in a program to become a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist. While initially skeptical because of my mother’s poor experience with mental health solutions, I agreed to the therapy because my suicidal thoughts scared me, and the clinical research showed that approximately two-thirds of the study participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis at the end of the trials. 

I learned that MDMA therapy for PTSD is a structured medical procedure. My therapy included three key phases: preparation, the MDMA day therapy session, and integration. For one year, I went through this cycle three times. In reflection, I saw a similar time pattern in each cycle:

My PTSD symptoms included my heart racing, a queasy stomach, terrible sleep, and constantly feeling hypervigilant and scared. In the journey session, the MDMA calmed my body down enough so I could discuss how “I knew” that if my father were in the room, he would have had his hands around my neck. After all, that’s what he did to my mother in a parent-teacher conference when I was in 5th grade. 

I learned that MDMA therapy is not a magic cure, and the real trauma work begins after the MDMA session ends. On the car ride home after my first session, I was ashamed that “I hadn’t done a good enough job and was a major inconvenience” since I walked out of the session not feeling any better. 

Suddenly, three childhood memories came to me, reminding me that between the ages of five and seven, I was shuffled among relatives because my mother had shot herself in one of her many suicide attempts. I was the extra kid in the room who never finished a full year in school and a kid without parents for a few years. I had internalized that I was an inconvenience and not a good enough kid to deserve parents. 

Sitting in the car, I realized as I looked at these memories, almost as if they were on a movie screen, that it was my parent’s situation, not anything to do with me, that caused me to be shuffled around. My adult understanding of the situation allowed me to reframe those memories and change the emotions attached to them. I was simply a child with parents who couldn’t take care of her. I was not an inconvenience by merely existing. That was my trauma healing process. 

Whenever I tried to explain this therapy, my “washing the dishes” analogy worked best. I explained that the integration process is just like doing the dishes. The dirty plates and cups were the memories that had trauma attached to them. The dish soap was the psychedelic in my sponge, and washing the dishes was the integration process. The same way I had to wipe and rinse a plate a few times to clean it was the same way I had to review memories and reframe them from my adult point of view to “clean” them of the emotions from the trauma. I knew I needed another psychedelic session or more dish soap when I couldn’t reframe a childhood memory, and I was still being controlled by fear that had been created when I was a child. 

Throughout the three journeys, my guides were usually empathetic witnesses to my childhood stories. Sometimes, they gently questioned some of my negative beliefs with open-ended questions. By the third journey, they used some reparenting techniques that were so powerful I simply used the transcript of that day to explain the process in my memoir Rescuing Jill: How MDMA with a Dash of Psilocybin Healed my Childhood Trauma-Induced PTSD.  The trusting relationships I had built with them allowed me to process so much of my fearful childhood. 

After my third therapeutic journey and subsequent integration phase, I no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis. I was no longer suicidal; I felt a sense of internal safety, and I knew I had a future. 

I share my story to help remove the stigma of psychedelic use in mental health because my results were so impressive. As a mission-driven educator at heart, writing my memoir and workbook while launching an educational YouTube channel (@thejourneysage) was my way of helping others understand this therapy from my perspective as a patient. It has been my goal to create the kind of educational content I wish had been available during my healing process. 

My journey from patient to advocate is just one story in the broader narrative of psychedelic-assisted therapies. As research continues to demonstrate the potential of MDMA and other psychedelics in treating mental health conditions, I hope to see a paradigm shift in mental health care that includes psychedelics. I will continue to demystify the psychedelic-assisted therapy process by explaining how psychedelics work to heal trauma, and, in the process, I hope to remove the stigma surrounding these substances so others can benefit from similar future medical interventions.