Cohoba Voices: 3 Questions with Naomi De La Cruz Spencer, Cohoba Clinical Social Worker

by | Jan 13, 2025 | Blog | 0 comments

Hyphenated identities, multicultural populations, third culture kids – there are many ways to describe those of us born into an often contradictory patchwork of customs and beliefs. Children of the diaspora often feel like “a rose by any other name”, sensing a friction between our expansive identities and the standard census box. Naomi De La Cruz Spencer is intimately aware of how these tensions shape our sense of self. Her father’s family is from North Carolina but lived in Okinawa as missionaries, where her mother is from. Naomi’s blended cultural identity contributed to her lively curiosity about the rest of the world. She credits her background for her love of travel, and of working with immigrants and refugees.  Her clinical work is inspired by Kintsugi – the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold and understanding that the piece is more beautiful for having been broken and rebuilt. Naomi joined Cohoba in pursuit of developing innovative systems of community care where social justice, psychedelic science, and the healing arts intersect. 

Cohoba Voices: How did your upbringing set the scene for your relationship with psychedelics?

Naomi De La Cruz Spencer: The War on Drugs definitely had an impact on me. It’s taken me a long time not only to see the medicinal value in these experiences, but to grow into feeling comfortable talking about my own experiences with psychedelics. There’s the sense of general stigma, then the personal layers of family and going against those norms. I feel like I’ve come a long way in seeing the power of these medicines and what they are able to do. Maybe people who take psychedelics have certain personality traits in common – I know for me I’m fairly high in openness. I think that has to do with coming from a two culture background, and my dad is a third culture kid. We live in such a binary society, there are so many identities that aren’t being seen. Being open and curious about other perspectives feels like a part of my wiring. 

What made you want to include psychedelic-assisted therapy into your therapeutic skill set?

Daniel (De La Cruz-Spencer’s husband and co-founder of Cohoba) shared a lot with me about the framework in terms of the pre, dose, and post sessions, and ongoing integration. So I kind of had a general idea of what it looks like, and I’d heard the buzzwords like “inner healing intelligence” and “non-directive approach”. 

I think the training was helpful for me because I felt more engaged with it. Getting involved with Cohoba for me was more like, y’all are my community. Like y’all are people that I want to continue to strengthen my relationships with. So it was more in support of that, but through that desire came growth in my understanding of these medicines. I had to engage with the material and dig into the coursework, and it’s really fascinating.

How has your social work practice been impacted by your time spent in solidarity with psychedelic communities? 

I’d been holding a contradiction inside me where I wouldn’t want to be public about my interest in psychedelics. I couldn’t imagine talking about it with family members, let alone think about bringing it into my professional world. Exposure to literature that points otherwise, and then talking with other people and hearing their experiences, you start to wake up to how much you’ve been brainwashed. I think de-stigmatizing psychedelics within myself was crucial. Learning about the MDMA therapy model, I realized I already practice in a similar way – I’m pretty non-directive.

I do trauma work and generally it’s like somebody dips their toe into the trauma narrative and it’s maybe two sentences, then they’re at a SUDS 10 (“SUDS 10” refers to the clinical practice concept of “subjective units of distress”, of which 10 is the worst). In the training we watched videos of people eight hours into a trauma therapy MDMA session and processing through their trauma at much lower SUDS. That really is powerful. I wonder what it would be like to use this model to work with some of the refugee populations I’ve worked with in the past, what challenges or surprises would come up in the process. 

Something I noticed during the training was that since the model calls for two co-therapists, you have to build a good working partnership. You have to have a healthy ego and be able to reflect on how you’re showing up in that space.