238 - The Deathbed Reckoning: Facing Unhealed Trauma and Family Wounds at the End w/ Kat Courtney238 - The Deathbed Reckoning: Facing Unhealed Trauma and Family Wounds at the End w/ Kat Courtney
Adult Child
Host Andrea Ashley talks with death doula and plant medicine facilitator Kat Courtney about childhood dysfunction, ayahuasca, ibogaine and what often surfaces on the deathbed. Their conversation looks at family trauma, truth‑telling at the end of life and why real change hinges on integration and support.
1:13:37•9 Jul 2026
Plant Medicine, Deathbeds and Family Secrets with Kat Courtney
Episode Overview
- Childhood coping strategies like people‑pleasing and compulsive lying often begin as protections when the truth isn’t safe.
- Plant medicines such as ayahuasca can introduce hope and self‑compassion, but meaningful change depends on integration, not repeated ceremonies.
- As the body weakens in dying, many people finally confront buried trauma, sometimes offering powerful deathbed apologies or confessions.
- Speaking your truth to a parent is for you, not them; it’s valuable even if their response is defensive or dismissive.
- Ibogaine can interrupt addiction and calm a frazzled nervous system, but a supportive environment and follow‑up work are crucial to sustain change.
“The truth is a gift, no matter what.”
How do people find hope in the darkest times? This conversation between host Andrea Ashley and guest Kat Courtney leans right into that question through a mix of gallows humour, raw honesty and spiritual weirdness. Kat shares what it was like growing up as the “black sheep” in a Republican, Catholic, gun‑loving family, learning to people‑please a dad who only liked her happy side and turning into a “pathological liar” just to feel safe and interesting.
By 16 she was suicidal, later diagnosed bipolar, and deep into alcohol and heavy MDMA use. Her first ayahuasca ceremony in the Peruvian Amazon didn’t magically fix anything, but it gave her something she’d never had: “hope that I could feel better.” The episode moves from plant medicine to death itself.
Kat, a death doula and psychedelic facilitator, talks about her childhood in an oxygen tent, a near‑death experience in A&E, and a powerful ayahuasca‑fuelled ego death that felt like “nothing but love”. She explains how ayahuasca helped her see her lying as a survival strategy rather than proof she was a terrible person, and how that compassion changed everything. Then it gets intense.
Kat describes sitting with dying people who finally face trauma they’ve avoided for decades – including parents confessing abuse and offering long‑needed apologies on their deathbeds. Sometimes there’s healing; sometimes there’s denial right up to the end.
As she puts it, “the truth is a gift, no matter what.” You’ll also hear a grounded explanation of ibogaine: why it can interrupt opiate dependence, how it acts like a brutal but effective nervous‑system reset, and why integration and environment after treatment matter as much as the medicine itself.
If you’re an adult child of dysfunction, curious about plant medicine, or haunted by unfinished business with family, this one might sit right in your chest – but in a way that makes you ask: what conversations am I still avoiding?
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