Gwyneth Paltrow opened up about a psychedelic journey that improved her relationship with her mother, Blythe Danner.
The “Iron Man” actress confessed to using MDMA while talking with her close friend Amy Griffin on “The Goop Podcast” released Wednesday.
The longtime friends bonded over their unique experiences with what the Drug Enforcement Administration classified as a Schedule I drug.
The Oscar-winning actress and Goop founder was the first to try MDMA, and Griffin noticed a change when she saw her again a few months later.
“There was this peace about you,” Griffin told Paltrow on the podcast. “There was this calmness and I always thought of you as a calm person anyway but I think that there was this, this knowing, this calmness there was just a shift.”
That’s when the leading lady of “Shakespeare in Love” revealed she went “inward” to work on herself.
“That was when I told you that I have done the therapeutic MDMA with the therapist,” Paltrow added. “You also said, ‘Oh you, your relationship with your mom is so gentle.’ Remember? You were like, ‘What, what shifted?’ You know? You’re not annoyed with your mom anymore.’”
In a 2021 interview on the TODAY show, Paltrow said her mother, a two-time Emmy Award-winning actress known for hits like “Meet the Parents,” is “very elegant and very proper” woman who “always” is a little thrown off when her daughter introduces an unusual product.
During the podcast, Paltrow shared her “incredible experience” with MDMA and how she watched Griffin navigate the drug to uncover “deeply buried childhood memories of sexual assault.”
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“It was something that you were already researching anyway,” Paltrow said. “So it’s not like I’m taking credit for something pushing over the edge, but you decided you were going to do the MDMA, and I remember sitting with you beforehand and saying to you like, ‘Are you, are you worried about this?’ And you were like, ‘No, my life’s been so good I don’t think I have anything to worry about.’”
This isn’t Paltrow’s first time taking MDMA.
The businesswoman confessed to taking it in Mexico with her now-husband Brad Falchuk.
“It was a very, very emotional experience,” Paltrow said on Netflix’s “The Goop Lab” in 2020.
“MDMA, also called Molly or Ecstasy, is a lab-made (synthetic) drug that has effects similar to methamphetamine,” according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA).
NIDA adds that the drug can “mildly alter visual and time perception” while making the user feel “more energetic and alert” with an “increased sense of well-being, warmth and openness toward others.”
