Terms to know for this blog:
Psilocybin: is a psychoactive compound produced by various mushroom species, notably those in the genus Psilocybe. Psilocybin has gained interest in the medical community for its potential therapeutic benefits in treating depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders. Its legal status varies, with ongoing debates and research influencing decriminalization and medical use in some regions. Proposition 122 passed in Colorado earlier this year allowing therapists to use as a therapeutic intervention for trauma, PTSD, depression and anxiety treatment.
Trip: The term "trip" in the context of psilocybin refers to the experience of the psychoactive effects after consuming psilocybin-containing mushrooms.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): n. - A form of psychotherapeutic treatment that helps patients understand the thoughts and feelings that influence behaviors. CBT is commonly used to treat a wide range of disorders, including phobias, addiction, depression, and anxiety, and is generally short-term, focused on helping clients deal with a very specific problem. During the course of treatment, people learn how to identify and change destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on behavior and emotions.
Dude: n. Informal - A term used to describe a male individual who is perceived as obnoxious, clueless, or disconnected from real situations, often exhibiting a significant lack of awareness or concern for others and characterized by irresponsibility or immaturity.
Let’s dig in.
Recently I underwent a psilocybin-guided therapy session. It’s exactly as it sounds: you take psilocybin, and while under its influence, you have a therapy session.
Notice how the psilocybin guides the therapy, not the other way around.
I had never tried this combination before, therapy with psilocybin. I have used psilocybin (AKA mushrooms, The Medicine) before in moderate doses, with 2g being the largest dose I would commit to doing on my own. Which if you’re somewhat familiar with psilocybin a term coined “a hero’s dose” is 3g. Until this trip I had always assumed the “hero’s dose” also meant you experienced “ego-death” in which you are unaware of yourself or have consciousness dissociation. That is not the case. You can experience ego death as I have with as little as 2g or some don’t experience this until they take 5-6g.
A hero’s dose and ego-death are not the same thing is what I’m trying to say.
I’ve had fascinating experiences while self-guiding on psilocybin, but this trip was considerably different. Having someone who’s intentionally guiding you through emotions and experiences while on psilocybin vs me “floating around the universe” is different. I have had really great "trips” alone mind you, I’m not here to instill any level of fear for those interested in experiencing a psilocybin induced trip, ego-death achieved or not. In fact I think the world would be a much better place if we all just committed to a half a dozen “trips” or so. If you’re someone who has apprehension, experiencing a trip with a “trip sitter” or a therapist could be really beneficial to you. You cannot control what you experience while on psilocybin but I personally believe you experience exactly what you need to even when something is hard or uncomfortable (like you will see this last one was for me) it’s always the thing you needed to experience because it’s real medicine.
It gets to the root of the problem and doesn't treat symptoms.
This trip was different how?
Because while it was the largest dose I had taken thus far, I didn't dissolve and slip away into a dissociated state like I have in the past. This trip also wasn’t as particularly as gentle as others had been. For example: in one of my trips I met "The Diva," who I experienced as the all knowing, all encompassing, spiritual figurehead (sorry Christians but SHE was not male) in which I swam through the Universe with our collective consciousness, and lost my fear of death.
With this most recent trip I stayed “on earth” in the room in my house the therapy and psilocybin was being administered in.
I think it’s also important for me to include I’m not new to therapy. I've also done ten times the amount of therapy sessions as I have psilocybin trips, but again, nothing like this.
I started what I refer to as "real therapy" at age 25 after getting dumped by my 39-year-old boyfriend of 6 months after leaving my 41 year old BF of 2 years for the other “dude.” In case that sent up red flags for you, feel good about the fact you know what danger is and will stay away from it, versus my upbringing, in which I had no safe attachments and had been groomed as a child to self-betray, so unsafe relationships were familiar to me. Red flags for many, just like myself, are quite comfortable because it’s all we know, and fish don't know they’re wet.
So…I started my therapy journey at the age of 25, which is actually when adolescence ends. I say real therapy because before I’d gone to Christian family counselors, not therapists. Being counseled on what you should believe is very different from therapy.
For three years straight, I went to therapy weekly; I started going three times a week because getting dumped by who I attached to as my caregiver really put me in a bad place. I was living on my own and could not take care of myself. I had ZERO self-care practices in place. I had no food in my fridge, so it kept breaking because it was overworking to cool NOTHING. (The mechanic who was my landlord on repair three told me to at least put a carton of water in it if I insisted on not keeping food so it had something to cool.) I didn’t feed myself—I worked in a restaurant at the time and ate one meal a day there. I didn't clean my room or my apartment. I had a hard time showering myself and hid behind the hippie thing. So, as you can see, I really needed a lot of therapy on developing some tools for self-care and also developing self-awareness.
Somewhere in those three years, it got to a point where the self-awareness was there, but I couldn’t seem to functionally change in the ways I wanted to, what made me feel the best was actually yoga, not therapy. I knew something intuitively was there when it came to movement and me feeling better, but it still wasn't fixing my unhealthy attachment style I had come to learn I had. I got to a point where I thought this was about as good as I was going to get, awareness on what I had “anxiety and depression and trauma” how it showed up “not eating, showering and trying to get emotionally unavailable men to love me.” So I could identify the problem and the corresponding behavior and because of this, my therapist released me into the wild with a "check-in as needed" stamp of approval. While I did over the course of the next several years grow and change some - I read all the self-help books, wrote all the blogs about my new identity, and did a lot of really good work, it still felt exceedingly difficult to do things differently or produce outcomes without an extreme amount of awareness and CBT work.
While I tend to agree there are benefits to therapy, as I sit here at age 39 and reflect back on all the work I’ve done for 14 years from the beginning of this therapy, self-help, self-care movement I started on, the 3-hour-long session with psilocybin has affected more change than all the years leading up to it.
With this trip, I was in my home and with a Licensed Therapist who had over 22,000 hours of therapy under their belt. Not necessarily psilocybin-guided therapy, but they knew what they were doing nonetheless. I took 3g of mushrooms and slipped under a weighted blanket, put eye shades on and my therapist took a seat while we waited for “The Medicine” to kick in.
Now, seeing how I had taken lower doses yet had experienced "ego death" in the past I was expecting it to go there, to blast off and go learn universal truths from good ol’ Mother Diva. But experts know what they're doing, and the point of the trip is not to disaccioate but rather sit with yourself and every mother f*cking thing that comes up no matter how uncomfortable.
Yup.
Right as The Medicine kicked in I said, "Oh, this feels nice," my therapist says, "Okay then! Let’s go find your inner child and see what she has going on." I did not understand that while I felt lucid, that did not mean I was in control of myself. In fact, my "filter," or what we call a filter, was completely removed, and I opened my mouth and said, "Can't we just DROWN her?"
That was the beginning of my three-hour trip of psilocybin-guided experience. My unfiltered self would rather kill my inner child than heal her.
Or really, what I found out was that nurturing was something I resented having to give because I was never nurtured, and therefore nurturing to me meant self-betrayal and self-disconnection. Nurture was a dark, small room where I had to hide and hold my breath, be very quiet because that's what I had to do in my house at age 4 when my mother and stepfather were assaulting each other. I hid in a closet with my sister, holding my breath and hoping that it all just stopped. That’s how I had learned to “nurture” myself when things were scary. Sometimes my sister was being beaten by my stepfather as my mother screamed bloody murder at the scene but didn't stop it, and therefore I felt shame for hiding because I couldn't help her but was too terrified to help.
But right in the moment of being prompted about my inner child, little Sarah, who rarely if ever had her security needs met (your inner child doesn’t age and in fact does everything possible to avoid those experiences ever again) needed nurturing and she didn't want to nuture. Because nurturing was anything but that.
The pain of that hit me in a way that had never hit before. Because usually, I have a filter on, some kind of control. I had not ever objectively looked at it from that point of view, me the adult who logically knows that nurture is good but the part of me, the child who was still resisting it anyway she could. I had talked about those moments before but I was unaware it had defined and still controlled how I interacted with those based from my imprinting and childhood development.
Meeting my inner child was not meeting a happy, confident, loved, nurtured little human girl. She was an abused, scared, silent, and suppressed person. The fact that I wanted to drown her was... the truth. And when you are on Psilocybin, you might think about lying to your therapist, but you don't. You just tell the truth no matter how scary it is, no matter how hurtful it is. After I said it, I even laughed. So, the serotonin you feel really helps you face the truth of things. It’s like natures emotional morphine or something.
But I had opened up with a zinger - I wanted to murder my little self by drowning her.
What happened next?
A part of my therapist's protocol, this isn't a requirement but it's something they have developed and it’s optional was a pressure point release so they can assess where you are holding or storing stress so as you experiences waves of emotion you can guide your breath to release the stress. I found it to be very insightful but not in the way of finding where I store stress and trauma. The only parts of your body they touch to assess are your feet, hands, jaw and shoulders. I did give consent to be touched during in the intake process and they asked again as they were going to start on my feet. However as it was happening, I realized I wasn't involved in the process because I thought and then I quickly said out loud (remember no filter.) "I don't feel you touching my feet. I know you are, but I don't connect with it and in fact, I'm telling myself right now that this is for you. This is your protocol you need to do for science, blah blah blah, and I don't even like it, but I'm letting you do it for you.”
The reality hit.
There have been so many times in my life I have been touched by men and didn't want to be, but I shut up and let them because it's what I thought they needed and I just need to sit quietly through it. “It'll be done soon enough." Was the thought I had when the feet touching started and all of a sudden the multitude of times I have said that to mySelf flashed in front of me like a flip book and the reality of what all that was, hit.
I have not let my body be or didn’t KNOW my body was for me and me alone.
(My therapist stopped touching my feet immediately, by the way. Because it was in fact, not for them.)
That's when I realized that whenever I'm touched, I dissociate from my body. This is one reason why I hate massages and never get them. This is why I am preoccupied with "am I attractive enough and is my husband enjoying this" when we are having sex, it's why I’m disconnected with anything south of my belly button and can't brace in my lower abdomen and have pelvic floor issues. Nothing south of my belly button on my body is safe, sacred to me alone, and mine alone and therefore not attaching to it was safer. Let it be for someone else - it’ll be over soon enough.
Being able to talk through this with a PROFESSIONAL in real time - gut wrenching but I above all, priceless.
What enlightenment was I showered with next?!
I learned on this trip that I have numbed myself from strong emotions since I was 15 years old. I remembered the last time I felt extreme pain. During one of the "waves," of emotion my body was vibrating with pain, every part of me pulsed with it like it was electricity, and I was sick to my stomach and felt like what I described as “a pile of wet brown carpet” in my gut. (You tend to go through what is referred to as “waves” during a trip. Commonly at the top of a wave you’re all emotion and not really lucid yet at the bottom of the wave you can release the emotion and process it logically.) I was having another flashback. I knew the exact moment I had felt that feeling before which was also the last time I felt that extreme level of emotion.
It was when my mother and stepfather woke me up late in the night to tell me they were finally getting a divorce. I was 15 years old.
While I was predominantly non-verbal with my therapist for 3 hours when I did say something to communicate a feeling, thought or memory they would explain the developmental processing, what was happening dynamic-wise with either myself or the family unit. It was putting words and logic to emotions. Something you definitely don't have as a small and developing human - words or logic, all you are is emotions when you’re very young.
When emotions are painful or terrifying as a child from the age 0-7, and your caregivers don't soothe you and therefore don’t teach you how to self-soothe or they don't care for you thus teach you how to care for yourself - you grow up not only not knowing how to do those things, but you immaturely develop a protective mechanism which is trying to resist feeling those painful and terrifying emotions ever again. The subconscious effort it takes to resist feeling emotions you’re designed to feel because you think you cannot handle them or they’re “too scary” to deal with is exhausting and also you’re unaware of how often you’re doing it.
FYI: it’s running in the background constantly. It’s all that inner child has to do.
However you taught yourself as a child to resist those terrifying and all consuming emotions, is how you’re experiencing or more likely resisting feeling in the now. 0-7 year-olds are not good at parenting so when you make them become the parent, they kind of make up shit as they go, and who can expect that result to be any good?
I had taught myself how to self-soothe by hiding in a dark closet and holding my breath, curling up in a tight ball, getting small. When I couldn't escape and do that while I was being abused by beatings or sexually, I learned to dissociate from my body and not even be in the room. I protected myself through numbness. Disconnecting or manipulating myself by being whatever I thought the "adult" needed in order for me not to be harmed.
I started to sob.
That is some tough and brutal shit to have to sit through and if you're like, "Okay, that sounds horrible and I AM NOT GOING TO SUBJECT MYSELF TO THAT. Why would anyone do something that has you FEEL what you felt during that time?!"
My answer is this: Because you feel it regardless. You never stopped feeling it; you feel it still. You are resisting it, you are fighting it, you are protecting yourself as hard as you possibly can, but you’re not actually protecting yourself because a child doesn't know how to protect especially if they were never taught how to do it in a healthy way. That kind of resistance is what's hurting you now. The amount of energy it takes to avoid feeling those feelings ever again, the numbness, the anger, the dissociating, the silencing of your inner child, not listening to your bodies cues and denying that you’re in danger, all you’re doing is holding her head under water as you continue to tell yourself “I’m fine.”
She wants to breathe.
She needs to breathe.
She deserves to breathe.
So why would anyone choose to meet themselves in that sort of fashion? Do you want to continue to deny your Self and your experiences or learn what you need to learn now as adult so you can care for yourself in better ways? Once you see it, you cannot unsee it and I believe that taking care of myself is important. As you likely do as well.
Once you stop resisting then you can connect with yourSelf, you can soothe yourSelf the way you should have been soothed, the way you deserve to be soothed and loved, you can offer yourself that now.
My therapist then said - what would you tell your inner child? What did she need to hear but didn’t?
“It all turns out ok, we become a Queen one day. You live in a great home, with a loving husband and adorable dog, and a have great friends and have a supportive and safe community. You’ll even get a unicorn tattoo one day. It’s all going to work out, you’re safe and I can keep you safe now, you don’t need to keep resisting. The world isn’t your childhood, and you can care for yourself now. You can come out of the dark room, you don’t have to be scared or hold your breath anymore.”
I have never been so unified and connected to myself before even though I’ve had insight into my life with therapy. And now, as a 39-year-old woman who has walked this earth without allowing myself to be nurtured because I was operating with the core belief that it wasn’t safe and I don’t want to keep doing that. I want to nurture and be nurtured because that is what we need as humans. I don’t want to go another day without nurturing myself again now that I know that what I grew up with was anything but nurturing and true nurturing is safe and I’m capable of doing it.
It’s not like I was unaware of nurturing. The logic, however, isn’t what’s missing from us; it’s the connection of what we are resisting and why. Once we see it, we can’t unsee it.
Once you change a belief, your behavior will follow.
I have people come work with me all the time because they can’t change behavior patterns on their own, particularly with their nutrition. Everyone thinks they just need to be told what to eat: logical. But what we actually have to work on is changing the beliefs they have about food and nutrition because you will do what you believe every time. That is how humans work. We follow our belief systems. That becomes a problem when our belief systems were given to us by our caregivers from ages 1-7, and then our identities surrounding these belief systems were formed from ages 15-25.
We don’t really get to choose them; they are primarily chosen for us by parents and cultural influences—it’s why all of us white girls want to be “thin and tan.” (Yes you can role your eyes at that.)
My beliefs on nurture were curated by my parents (caregivers) in real-time, and I have been allowing those beliefs to make choices for me ever since, even when I know that self-care and self-soothing are big deals. So big, in fact, it’s what I make my livelihood teaching. We often give to others what we deny ourselves, and yet I knew it’s what I was missing, so I would get as close to it as I could although I never gave it to myself.
All of this was uncovered, and the emotions released; I wailed, I cried, I snotted, I growled at my therapist (they encouraged it). I needed to release the pressure I had been trapping inside my body by my resisting it.
Once the three hours were over, I knew things would be different because I had information I had been working without.
I had context for my experiences. I was connected to my body for the first time in who knows how long. My therapist later in the session asked to revisit my feet, again I said yes and actually felt them this time. I understood the touch was nurturing and it was a really healing moment that allowed me to connect and feel things again.
The reason you can do so much work and change is because of the plasticity in your brain increases like that of when you were a child, releasing the rigid boundaries and belief systems so that you can, in fact, change them.
This window is open for 14 days so this is what I am doing during the time period as was discussed with my therapist:
Speak kindly to my inner child every day by my chosen name, which is also my legal one, Sarah Lady.
Do something nurturing for myself daily, like cooking, reading, resting, drinking tea instead of coffee.
Feeding myself and not shaming Sarah for being so hungry. For years I’ve known I was under-eating but it’s because I didn’t have hunger cues (body disassociation tends to do this) so now it seems like I am hungry all the time, but my body is actually eating the proper amounts. I just make adult choices on food, meaning I’m not eating whatever I want, just however much I actually need of the good stuff.
When I feel danger or I start to dissociate I need to say no or think through more of what is happening. Usually it’s because I’m self-suppressing my needs in order to accommodate others, which leads me to be incredibly angry at 3 am when my body finally unfreezes or comes back into itself and I register the violation I have done against myself. If I find myself responding automatically; “it’s fine” it usually isn't.
Be kind, not nice. Making sure what I say yes to is being kind to myself first and realizing saying no to someone can be done with kindness because saying no isn’t being mean. I’ve had to relearn I don’t need to get mean in order to implement a boundary or maintain one, I can do it with KINDNESS to all parties involved.
Will I do it again?
I will absolutely do another session. Some people find that 6-8 weeks is a good timeframe for the first couple of sessions and then go as needed. I am in the process of finding what works for me and how I can continue to learn more about this. I am having check ins with my therapist to process what is coming up because I have observed some pretty succinct and dramatic changes to my behavior. I’m curious and want to try new things, I’m aware of old behavior patterns or things I used to do that I have ZERO interest engaging in anymore. Overall the desire to take care of myself has increased and I am very much so looking forward to where all of this will take me.
Interested in learning more? The audio on this isn’t great but this is a great 90 minute lecture done by someone who knows what they’re talking about and can be really helpful on starting your own journey with psilocybin and hopefully you’ll pair it with a therapist or a specialist who can help guide you to greater understanding and connection with yourSelf.