Mycology Psychology with Dr. Victoria Sterkin & Rome Shadanloo

Dr. Victoria Sterkin is a behavior analyst focused on therapeutic learning with individuals, couples, families and organizations. Rome Shadanloo is a psychedelic therapist specializing in complex PTSD and attachment injury. Together, they are the co-owners of Mycology Psychology – an alternative health community empowering people to heal themselves through the intelligence of nature.

Vivian Kanchian: To start off… Victoria, can you please tell us a little bit about yourself, and share what a behavioral analyst does for those who may not be familiar?

Dr. Victoria Sterkin: Sure, yeah. I'll start with what a behavior analyst does. Behavior analysis is the science of learning and so, it's a newer school of psychology. It's more of a harder science of the soft sciences because behavior analysts study observable behavior. And then there's the school of radical behaviorists that believe in the behaviors that are unseen beneath the skin, so thoughts and emotions become lumped into that category.

When I was studying applied behavior analysis at Columbia during my doctorate, I was working predominantly with children and adolescents. I found it to be so powerful in terms of the speed and efficiency at which we can really create behavior change and change patterns in people's behavior.

We typically think of behavior as going, "Do this, good job, here's the M&M." But really what it's about is inducing capacities that allow people to learn more independently. So I just got super-jazzed by the science. When I was an undergrad, I was trained by a behavior analyst and saw such incredible results that I wanted to take it further and get the doctorate. And I've applied it in a lot of different ways. I'm not a traditional behaviorist at all.

I had a lot of training with another woman who I call my fairy godmother. She's a traditional psychoanalyst, but not traditional in her practices. So she opened up my heart, she opened up my sense of energetic realms and understanding the world from many different forms of consciousness. So, my practice greatly changed as a result of meeting her and starting to work with all different kinds of people.

VK: Thank you so much for sharing that. Rome, could you please share a little bit about yourself, your background in psychoneuroimmunology, and how that ties into the work that you're doing now with pain, emotion, and psilocybin.

Rome Shadanloo: Well, I think like many other people, for me, it started out with something I was personally struggling with. I grew up with a lot of health problems, and occasionally, those health problems will pop back up.

I remember always being really interested in psychology and spirituality. And then, two things happened in succession. One was [that] I had this really life-changing psychedelic journey where, in the medicine, I decided to go back to school and study psychology again because it's something that I had abandoned. I was doing more artistic stuff at the time, and I came out of that journey and quit what I was doing. I applied to go to school in Boston, majoring in holistic psychology.

Once I got there, in my very first class, the professor started talking about something called psychoneuroimmunology. And as she started talking about it, all these things inside of me started clicking. Suddenly, I understood where some of my symptoms were coming from and how your body can store trauma, what it means for inflammation, specifically neuroinflammation, which leads to inflammation in the gut because of the mind-gut axis.

I also began to explore some of Bruce Lipton's work on how your cells are listening, and the realization that telomeres can grow back, which was huge for me. It gave me a lot of hope that we can heal and that we're not stuck in our circumstances, and in our bodies. Our bodies are simply trying to communicate to us.

Illness can be such an incredible teacher in ways that feel psychedelic, actually. Because you're sitting in this soup of truth, and there's really nowhere to go. You just have to face yourself. I personally just had a wonderful session with neurolinguistic programming (NLP).

Also, the psychedelics can really open up your perception of what's happening around you and give you flexibility in your mind [around your belief systems]. Opening your eyes up to possibility and connecting you with truth. And these things are extremely healing. I think part of the reason why trauma makes us ill is because we get disconnected from our bodies.

So, between the NLP and the psychedelics, and going where the love is, which is really, really important, I've been able to heal a lot of my own illnesses. And I've seen a lot of people improve their illnesses, as well.

I had been to so many doctors in the Western world and was just told to get on medication. Sometimes, that's fine. But there was no looking at the root of why these things were happening.

So, I'm really excited because I feel like the paradigm is shifting. And a lot of people are getting sick, by the way. It's our environment, it's our food, it's our thinking, it's social media. It's the trauma that has gotten passed down through the lineages.

But it's almost coming to this crescendo at the same time as psychedelics, and I don't think that's an accident. I think that as a collective, we're going to start really getting to healing instead of just covering up and discarding. [Of course], I understand that it's not a one-size-fits-all solution for everybody.

However, I will say that [doing this work] is the only thing in my life that has felt right. And everything else was just sort of me training myself to have a goal and have a purpose.

VK: Thank you. What a beautiful, vulnerable share. I think people often come to psychedelics through a personal experience. So, you both shared with us a little bit about what brought you down this path individually, but tell us what brought you together in creating Mycology Psychology? What was the gap that you were trying to fill?

RS: That's a story, right, Victoria? To answer your question, I had been doing my thing.

And Victoria had been doing her thing before we knew each other. She was doing wonderful work as a behavior therapist, and still does. And I was holding space for medicine throughout the pandemic, which was really tough for a lot of people – myself included. But the pandemic kind of gave us Mycology Psychology.

I had to come back to LA from Boston because of the pandemic. I wasn't able to finish [school]. I [only] had a few elective courses left, so I was feeling a little down. I thought I'd just start some sort of psychedelics education page. I was just sitting there thinking mycology rhymes with psychology. Shortly after, I met someone who helped me [more fully develop this idea]. And they brought Victoria in.

Then, Victoria and I further fleshed Mycology Psychology out into a beautiful collective of therapists and coaches, where we would get together every week and talk about the language of the medicine and share insights and new discoveries with each other because we are really learning in real time. The way [the two of us] work together is such a wholesome and loving, co-cheerleading relationship with a lot of understanding.

Of course, I feel that the studies should be done on this medicine, absolutely. But I also understand that it's not enough to ever quantify its wisdom, which is so beyond our understanding. [It is] so sentient and so deep.

VS: I mentioned my fairy godmother, Mama Joycey earlier. And one of the gifts that she gave me, among many gifts, was really teaching me to look into the consciousness of our biology, that when there's something that we're wanting to learn or something that we're wanting to evoke, either in ourselves or in a client… there's a place within us that already holds the wisdom.

The body's already doing the thing that you're trying to evoke psychologically. And so… can we connect with that part of ourselves, right? And it comes into a little bit of that Maria Sabina line, “You are the medicine”. There's wisdom there.

I was actually very hesitant to start working with Mycology Psychology because I was so deeply immersed in the huge influx of clients during COVID, who were all of a sudden open to receiving therapy… and everyone was just flooding in. I was getting a little overwhelmed. And a part of me was probably unconsciously calling in a technology to help manage all of the healing that needs to take place. [I thought], how do we do this? There's one-to-one work. It's so taxing, right? This isn't sustainable.

We need better systems. When this was presented to me, I originally said, “No, thank you”. [But] I couldn't stop thinking about it. So, I actually came in as a client first because I wanted to feel into what this is about. [I thought], let me feel into microdosing and how this works. I had done some [previous] work with plant medicine.

And, you know, I think some experiences that I had in my personal life that weren't plant medicine-related were very psychedelic and opened up my world in tremendous ways. So, I was open to it. But I didn't understand what microdosing was all about.

So I came in as a client with Rome. And I was blown away by how powerful it was to feel the flexibility in my nervous system. I immediately was like, okay, we gotta create systems, we gotta bring in other practitioners, because this is a way people can actually heal themselves with this helper that comes in to help you edit your thoughts, help you be aware of your thoughts, bring in deeper, more subtle sensation to who you are.

There's much more awareness of who you are, and this robust sense of self that comes in when you're working with mushrooms. And knowing that we can microdose, that it can be in the day-to-day, was a tremendous, tremendous gift that I couldn't turn away from.

So, it felt like a really powerful way to answer the question of, How do we manage the needs of so many people on this planet who are struggling so deeply, psychologically, biologically, spiritually, you know. We heal in connection. And this medicine is a connector, a robust connector. So, I feel like I was really handed a gift in meeting Rome and getting to do this work.

VK: I love it. I always wonder what a therapist’s world was like during and post-pandemic.

What about the therapist themselves, right? There's only so much a human being can take. So, thank you for explaining that so eloquently. Huge gap to be filled.

So, you talk about [mushrooms] being very safe substances that can dramatically improve a person’s quality of life. For those who may be curious about microdosing, but are wary of trying it, and maybe think of it as a drug… could you please shed some light into your own experience and how that was for you? Was there fear? How did you approach it? How did you prepare yourself? Can you tell us a little bit about these things?