Pressure-Washing the Trauma-Gunk With Psychedelics
How I moved on, moved abroad, and found some inner peace — with chemicals!
My existence was once defined by debilitating cycles alternating from depression to anxiety, and anxiety to depression, ad nauseam.
I’m nearly a year out from these miserable moods that were exacerbated by the unresolved and compounded stress of my twenties. In those years I lost myself in the attempt to move mountains. Without time to reflect and cultivate self-understanding, I conflated others’ expectations — anachronistic fantasies, regrets, and insecurities huddled atop one another in a trench coat — with my own. These adverse thought patterns, shit-gremlins I call them, were unceremoniously yeeted one-by-one from my consciousness as I underwent psychedelic therapy.
Before we get into that… I’m not providing professional medical or legal advice. I’m not a self-anointed YouTube shaman. I’ve never had any desire to paint my skin like Braveheart at Burning Man whilst wearing an assless girdle. I didn’t smoke a fat blunt on the Joe Rogan Experience and demand the producer pull up blurry footage of a levitating Marian apparition recorded with a BlackBerry Bold 9650.
I’m no guru. Just a dude, man.
Nonetheless, my life experience informs an observation: we all go through phases of people-pleasing. It’s normal.
Unfortunately, people-pleasing or other maladaptive behaviors can persist and shroud the path to fulfillment in shadow. We’re all different, so we must choose our own path. When you choose a path that’s not for you, guess what? You’ll have to trek all of the way back to the fork in the road where you went the wrong way. That’s how you acquire the tools needed to stay on your path. If you can graciously accept that going the wrong way is in fact part of your greater path, you are in the right place, at the right time.
How quickly we identify that a wrong turn was made, and how well we handle that realization, is crucial. These are the segments of the journey in which fateful plot developments occur. The outcomes are far-ranging, and can include paralysis when confronted with perceived purgatory. We’re all personally familiar with examples. It takes empathy and wisdom to discover that others’ suffering is actually our own. When you encounter someone down in the dumps, literally or figuratively, remember this…
That could be you.
Our shared consciousness: Nonlocality being what it is, I believe we’re all knitted together in a fractal dynamo of sweet, salient experience. Don’t nope out on me yet, though, as I’ll withhold further musings about consciousness for a future drunken outing with complete strangers held against their will.
Underneath the cracks of my mechanized carapace, there’s a fluffy caramel nougat within. Case in point: when presented with the opportunity, I give food to the less fortunate. No need to thank me, however — my moral compass expressed as a Dungeons & Dragons alignment is Chaotic Neutral. It’s essentially license for self-indulgent whimsy, ideally the kind that vexes those around me. So the banal truth is an altruism of convenience: I give away food when I don’t feel like carrying leftovers around, or if I notice someone lingering outside a grocery store.
Yet everybody deserves to eat. Whatever reasons culminated in their being hungry is irrelevant. Those reasons could just as easily apply to you and me, because they are systemic. I’m not making grand claims about determinism here, but it’s unclear what’s within our control aside from acceptance of things as they are and maintaining a positive attitude. On a microscopic level, rejection of self and others is the source of intra- and inter-personal friction. Zoom out to the macroscopic, and it’s everything wrong with society.
Aspirations to sainthood or transcendence are not required to vaguely locate the soul. Here in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where I moved some months ago, I’ve noticed people dining with the less fortunate outside cafes and pubs, exchanging grins and laughter. They’ve big hearts in this place. But a heart can be difficult to find when ossified trauma-gunk — so freely gifted to us by the traumatized — blocks the doors of perception.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Aldous Huxley titled his book documenting his forays with mescaline, The Doors of Perception, after Blake’s remark. Huxley rediscovered a method — refined by generations of priestesses, oracles, seers, witches, and shamans preceding him — that unlocks doors. Jim Morrison didn’t call his band The Doors for no reason. Of course, I’m not telling you to go do mescaline or anything.
And just because a door is unlocked doesn’t mean one has any business passing through it. Some doors are one-way only. Nothing quite hits like casually knocking on one of these doors, and subsequently grasping the frame that is the liminality between life and death as if an airlock burst open. Knowing which doors to unlock, and how to do so, was once esoteric. Psychonauts contemporary with Huxley performed the timeless duty of the Trickster, taking that which was coveted by the gods and showering it upon the masses with the same abandon as a fake blood cannon at a Gwar concert.
Services in the name of the Trickster don’t go without their corporeal punishments, especially for the other. That’s what the war on drugs, still waged today, has been about: punishment for the out-group, and profit for the in-group.
We’ve come a long way, in that drug profits aren’t just for the big pharmaceutical companies with budgetary allocations for buying off our “representatives.” Today, there are some legal islands of psychedelic therapy in America. These have been historically justified for tackling the mental health crisis among military veterans, but they’re profoundly effective beyond that cohort. Evaluating clinics employing psychedelic treatment requires sober discernment, although the vast majority are serious medical practices with rigorous vetting and protocols.
Not every prospective patient is a good fit, but I was good enough. At least with strict monitoring of my blood pressure and record-keeping. Quite a bit of homework, if I’m being honest. I met with the doctor often, even when I felt fine.
I felt fantastic, really.
This is coming from a guy who tried some stuff. In the years leading up to the treatment, I had exercised with a dogmatism I disdain in practically any other context. Initially, I read the work of household names such as Eckhart Tolle and the late Thích Nhất Hạnh, both of whom, to their credit, helped reframe my perspective and ground me.
Cue the montage: I deepened my study of Eastern traditions, practiced breathing exercises, meditated, and self-medicated with a variety of different compounds and supplements — all with habituated punctuality, and temporal independence so as to avoid confounding variables. No matter what I tried, the trauma-gunk — like the dental plaque of someone who couldn’t afford a visit to the dentist for a couple of decades — needed pressure washing from a licensed professional. No wonder, as I’d never been to a therapist, let alone a world-leading psychiatric wizard.
With this medically-licensed shaman’s help, I shed neuroses lurking in my shadow, and moreover enjoyed a front row seat to crazy-ass visions with transcendental implications for the nature of reality. Or mine, at least.
Not feeling perpetually terrified or like the lowest of the low has been freeing. To be honest, I was only loosely aware of my problem. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to feel horrible all of the time, and I had long forgotten my rekindled childlike wonder. The current revision of the story I tell myself about my life, to make sense of it, is not divided into conventional chapters as it once was.
There’s now only one demarcation line snuggled between two sections: pre- and post-psychedelic therapy. That’s how significantly my outlook changed following the treatment. Let me put this into perspective... While perplexing the readership of this blog is an unavoidable consequence of my being the author — the main through line is this: an American’s farcical acculturation after having moved across the Atlantic Ocean.
I’ve never been more ill-equipped to deal with a situation.
Moreover, I cannot deny the move has constituted a most considerable change in environment, but the turning point that instilled me with the self-confidence to confront the unknown head-on was the aforementioned therapy. Thus, the most important change was within — but what really changed? It wasn’t a tectonic shift so much as acceptance of the evolving visage underneath a mask, one I continuously sculpted as a guard against years of psychic transgressions. When there’s nothing left of the mask to carve, the chisel is driven into one’s core convictions. Moral injury ensues.
It’s not enough to remove the mask, but to let go of the chisel.
If you’re struggling, do what works for you, so long as it’s legal in your jurisdiction and safe. “Set and setting,” as they say. Also, a well-established meditation practice is worth trying for reasons beyond the allure of mental health improvements. By the way, if you know someone struggling (you probably do), be present and deeply listen to them, without judgment. As human beings, the last thing we can possibly excuse is not being there for someone else.
Before anyone asks: I won’t recommend any therapy or clinic. I can raise awareness about mental health and normalize discussion about it, but I’m not comfortable with recommendations. Everybody’s different. Here’s one thing I will say: avoid outfits embroiled in serious controversy, if it weren’t obvious. Your safety is so much more important than convenience.
No matter what calamity visits what you perceive as your life — and it will — don’t forget: you are loved.
Just relax, and listen to this…
"Before we get into that… I’m not providing professional medical or legal advice. I’m not a self-anointed YouTube shaman."
Oh, but you could be 😊. There's absolutely nothing stopping you from starting a shamanstic Youtube cult.