Circuit II: Emotional Territorial

The second circuit concerns a body that can move, approach, avoid, occupy space, and act on its environment. Leary connected locomotion and muscular action with territory, hierarchy, dominance, submission, and the effort to avoid helplessness. He believed that early patterns of successful or unsuccessful action contributed to an interpersonal emotional style, including habitual ways of asserting oneself or yielding to others. His stages describe neuromuscular receptivity, intelligence, and fusion-synergy. (Leary, 1977)

The historical account places these patterns inside a proposed evolutionary sequence. Contemporary practice can examine agency, emotional regulation, and interpersonal power without accepting that sequence or sorting people into fixed dominant and submissive types. A person’s response to authority may change with the relationship, the setting, and their current state.

A participant may voluntarily enter a controlled setting and then take a substance that changes perception, judgment, coordination, emotional regulation, social interpretation, and the sense of time. The practitioner remains able to manage the room, music, timing, movement, access to other people, touch, and emergency decisions. They may also become the person whose explanations seem most credible. That combination gives ordinary choices about care unusual weight. Contemporary ethics guidance places autonomy, clear boundaries, and accountability at the center of this relationship. (Jacobs et al., 2024) (McGuire et al., 2024)

Preparation should clarify authority while the participant can consider it carefully. Which safety boundaries are fixed? Which practices are optional? What happens if a preference changes, the participant wants to stand, or they ask to leave? What can prior consent authorize, and how will current assent or refusal be recognized? Explain the limits of touch, the circumstances requiring emergency intervention, and how concerns can be reported outside the immediate relationship. Earlier agreement to participate does not create unlimited permission for everything a practitioner later considers helpful. (Bradberry et al., 2024) (McHerron et al., 2025)

Previous experiences with authority can enter the room through medical trauma, coercive treatment, incarceration, military systems, family violence, abusive relationships, or other institutional encounters. These histories do not predict a single response. One person may become watchful and assertive, another deferential, and another alternate between the two. Assessment should follow the person’s actual communication rather than a story about what someone with that history ought to do.

Power also operates quietly. Compliance can coexist with discomfort, silence can reflect uncertainty, and movement may be an attempt to regulate discomfort rather than avoid psychological work. Language such as “the medicine wants you to stay with this” can turn a practitioner’s preference into an apparently external instruction. Calling disagreement “resistance” or “your ego fighting the process” can make it harder to refuse. A collaborative alliance leaves room for correction, including correction of the practitioner. The alliance literature supports studying that relationship while acknowledging that psychedelic therapy research on it remains limited. (Kamilar-Britt et al., 2023)