#65 - Courtney Barnes: Four Years After Ibogaine#65 - Courtney Barnes: Four Years After Ibogaine
Root Medicine
Courtney Barnes reflects on her intense ibogaine journey, the difficult years of integration that followed, and how quitting Vyvanse and healing childhood wounds reshaped her life and legal career. The conversation focuses on preparation, support, and spiritual connection as key elements in making ibogaine-related change sustainable.
36:50•7 Aug 2026
Courtney Barnes on Ibogaine, Inner Child Healing and Life After Vyvanse
Episode Overview
- Ibogaine can bring up deeply repressed childhood and family trauma, so emotional preparation and support are crucial.
- Having an integration coach, a small supportive community, and time off work after treatment can ease the difficult early months.
- Stopping long-term medications like Vyvanse may be possible, but often requires patience, new skills, and a willingness to rebuild confidence from within.
- A strong spiritual connection and sense of guidance can sustain people through the disruptive changes ibogaine may initiate.
- Future ibogaine access in the United States, such as Colorado’s pilot programme, hinges on pairing medical care with robust integration support.
“Your soul would not give you any experience that you were not more than equipped to handle.”
What drives someone to seek a life without numbing, performance-enhancing substances and finally listen to their soul? This conversation between host Talia Eisenberg and psychedelic policy attorney Courtney Barnes centres on exactly that turning point. Four years after her ibogaine treatment at Beond, Courtney looks back less at the medicine night itself and more at everything that happened afterwards: quitting a 14-year Vyvanse habit, facing buried childhood wounds, and reshaping her relationships and career.
She came to ibogaine as a high-performing lawyer, heartbroken and asking, "What is wrong with me? Why am I not lovable?" Ibogaine responded not with easy comfort, but with an intense replay of early abandonment and family pain, plus an introduction to her inner child who "screamed at me for attention". Courtney is clear that her experience "wasn't pleasant or fun" and that the integration period was brutally hard.
Yet she calls it "the most important experience I've ever had in my entire life". You’ll hear her stress preparation and support: lining up an integration coach, choosing a small circle of trusted people who understand ibogaine, and taking as much time off work as possible afterwards. The episode also speaks directly to anyone wrestling with medication dependence or burnout in professional life.
Courtney explains how she rebuilt confidence without Vyvanse, learning to focus and perform as a lawyer at her own pace, and how ibogaine shifted her legal work into a more heart-centred mission around safe access to psychedelic healing.
For people afraid of what ibogaine might show them, her message is simple and reassuring: "Your soul would not give you any experience that you were not more than equipped to handle." If you’ve ever wondered whether facing the hardest truth about yourself could actually be the start of real healing, this talk might be the nudge you need.
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