“Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.” – Alan Watts
THE RECOVERY
Now realizing that I had experienced a bout with drug-induced psychosis after the accident, it was clear that I needed help, particularly therapy. But who could I turn to? I couldn’t go back to my guide because we had a falling out, but I also didn’t want to go to a therapist who wasn’t versed in the world of psychedelics. I knew that a therapist could help, but they wouldn’t truly understand what I had gone through.
[You can read all the books on psychedelics and think you have a good grasp on what they’re like, but until you do them, you’ll never realize how far away from missing the mark you actually were.
Same thing with sex, right? Right.]
Unsure of where to turn, I remembered a whopper of a book that I had bought a while back from a psychologist that I had heard on a podcast a year or two prior: The Psychedelics Integration Handbook by Ryan Westrum.
Ryan was someone that I instantly resonated with as I listened to him. He was the only lead on what direction I could take at the time and was also well versed in the world of psychedelics. Desperate to try anything, I had set up a time for a consultation to see if we were the right fit for each other. Thirty minutes into our conversation, I knew I had found my guy.
We met close to every other week, if not every week, for the first couple of months after the accident happened. Without the help and understanding from a true wizard at his craft, I’m not sure where I would be today.
Some days the sessions were extremely painful.
There was so much to process and so much to work through.
Resentment, anger, embarrassment, guilt, confusion, and shame––oh, there was shame. That was probably the hardest one. Shame for the accident, embarrassed for all my actions leading up to that, and here I was, confident as anybody when it came to psychedelics (not in a cocky way either). I thought to myself, “this was the path you wanted to go down, and you couldn’t even handle it.” That thought would eat me alive in the months to follow.
I had hit rock-bottom in my early twenties, and it changed my life for the better. But this was a new, different kind of low. I was left with what felt like nothing and slowly I had to reconstruct my world with new eyes, using a new perspective.
As agonizing as the process was, like any demons you choose to face head on, the sessions became easier. Some days I would go, and we wouldn’t have much to process, and we’d end up shooting the shit as I asked question after question. In a way, I felt that my original prayer for a mentor had been answered. Funny how things happen.
Alongside therapy, there was a lot of honest self-reflection that I had to do with myself and uncomfortable talks that I had to have with those closest to me. It was not until maybe a couple of months ago that I fully felt like I had made peace with this chapter in my life––hence why you’re reading this.
When you can truly be at peace with what troubles you most, there’s nothing that someone can say or do that will throw you off your center. We want to change the world, but we rarely want to start at home first.
I want to end this section with maybe the most important piece of advice that I can give pertaining to psychosis: While yes, there is a lot of internal work that needs to be done by yourself, without question, you should find a therapist, guide, or someone with the proper credentials to help you work through this. This one is a non-negotiable.
ANECDOTAL THEORIES ON WHAT CAUSED THE PSYCHOSIS
A major portion of the recovery process was trying to figure out why this all happened in the first place. Truthfully, I don’t think it was any one thing, but rather a potential factor of multiple things that I’ll individually breakdown:
- The cricket incident
- Overthinking
- The price of wanting to know
- Karmic debt
The crickets – There’s an important part of this component that I’d be remiss not to bring up. The reason I feel like I took the cricket incident too literally was in part due to previous solo psychedelic sessions.
The second time I did psilocybin by myself, I found myself at the edge of my bed repeating, “shit, shit, shit” like I had just found out some grand secret about the universe. And maybe I did, but the thing is, I’ll never 100% know the answer to that until I’m ashes blowing in the wind.
But it’s these “ah-ha”moments that one has while on psychedelics that feels like a Knowing. Unless those thoughts and realizations are objectively checked by someone close to you, that is a dangerous road to head down––to take one’s theories as absolute Truth’s––as I was doing without realizing.
I did have some humility to know that after the psychedelic sessions, I still wasn’t 100% certain about anything. But I think deep down, a part of me felt like “I knew.” This feeling of arrogance led me to believe that a cricket was 100% a sign from the universe showing me the cosmic order of the world at large.
Again, maybe it was, baby!
But, at the end of the day, you guessed it kids, who really fucking knows.
While I’ve settled on the notion that there’s more to the world than meets the eye, we also have the very real experience of having to wipe our asses after we shit and still needing to pay our taxes. No matter how unreal you (me) may think that all of this is or that we’re in the matrix, try not wiping your ass for a month or paying taxes for a few years and let me know how that goes for you.
(Hippies living in a commune off the grid don’t count because they’re not real.)
Less thinking, more feeling – While the cricket incident sparked a conviction of my theory of this all being a shared collective dream of sorts, the next part, in this perfect storm, came from the mantra that I had mentioned earlier.
Rather than being able to feel through what was being asked of me during the session because it felt too intense, or maybe I didn’t trust in the process of truly letting go yet, my mind went into overdrive and for, lack of better words, may have blown out my psyche.
This was a recipe for disaster because not only was I deconstructing my perception of reality without even knowing it, but I was adding fuel to that fire by the minute with my barrage of thoughts and ‘connections.’
A good analogy that equates to this is: A hard drive (our mind) on a computer only has so much bandwidth to take in information. If you load it with too much information, or junk, it’s either going to run slow or eventually, crash. Well, the amount of information that I was taking in, or as the cool kids like to say, “tHe AmOuNt Of DoWnLoAdS tHaT i WaS gEtTiNg,” mixed with the amount of connections I was making, real or not, was too much for my psyche.
Think of the “27 club,” or any great artist who has passed before their time. Maybe, just maybe, their antenna for receiving information from the ethos was so finely tuned that it became their kryptonite rather than a super power. Maybe there’s a cost of a finely tuned antenna if not managed correctly.
The price of wanting to know – Going back to my curious nature, ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always wanted to know the answers to the unknown. The way out there stuff has always fascinated me and my hunger to know the mysteries of life on a deeper level may have been more than the average seven-year-old. But maybe that came at a cost, as I alluded to with the 27 club.
As I look back on everything, there is no way to justify this theory, but I can’t help but feel that rushing the process of learning life’s greatest mysteries is something that may come at a cost. It’s almost as if the universe said, “If you really want to know, I’ll show you. But you better be ready because if you’re not, you’re going to get burned.”
Sometime after my bout with psychosis I came across a quote from Carl Jung speaking about psychedelics that encapsulates this sentiment beautifully: “Beware of unearned wisdom.”
I’ve always said that psychedelics feel like a cheat code in the game of life based on the insights they reveal to you. But what happens if these insights should just come with age? Anyone can use a cheat code to make it to the final boss in a video game, but what would be the point? Why even play the game? Plus, beating that boss through cheating never feels as satisfying as earning the win. Never.
Karmic debt – If there’s a weak anecdotal theory out of the bunch, this be it.
While I’m not 100% convinced, there is a gut feeling that part of this was also a form of karmic debt. Whether from this lifetime, last lifetime, or healing generational trauma, I can’t help but feel that this was bound to happen to me as a way to burn off some of this debt that ya boy has been building up.
Could be wrong.
Probably wrong.
But my gut says that there’s something here worth mentioning.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR PSYCHEDELIC THERAPY?
We are on the verge of a psychedelic renaissance.
There’s a part of me that couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead. As crazy as it may seem after reading my story, I still support the potential psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has in healing the world.
But as excited as I am for this renaissance, I also can’t deny that I have some trepidation when I think about what I went through.
Justin, you’re just projecting what happened to you onto the world.
You’re not entirely wrong, but hear me out.
If this could happen to me, someone who has felt extremely comfortable with psychedelics in the past and navigated the darker waters of those experiences with grace, why can’t this happen to anyone? And for those people that do find themselves in the depths of hell during this renaissance, how many people out there are qualified to talk those people off a ledge––literally.
This is why I’m worried. I feel that once we hit a stride and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is a legal form of therapy, the demand for it will become so great. It will force people to do it on the underground in spaces that quite frankly, shouldn’t be holding the space to begin with.
Who are you to say where and how people should use psychedelics?
Absolutely no one.
But man, doesn’t it feel better to know that if shit hits the fan, legally sanctioned places can provide necessary help for recovery. Compare that to your Instagram Shaman hiding in their Brooklyn apartment, leaving you alone, too worried about the legal repercussions.
At the end of the day, I don’t want you guys to think that I’m anti-psychedelics. (I mean, I’m wearing a fucking mushroom necklace as I write this.)
People taking psychedelics doesn’t bother me.
People should be allowed to explore their consciousness as they see fit.
I still occasionally micro dose with psilocybin to continue to explore that part of my psyche but in shallow waters. (This may contradict a lot of what you have read, but as my therapist likes to say, “I’m a walking contradiction,” as we all are.) But what I am saying is that even when you have your T’s crossed, and I’s dotted, you are playing with fire and you never know what can happen.
Every time that you do psychedelics, you are playing with fire––even when you think, “I’ll be fine. I’ve been here before.”
The time in which I did psychedelics in the safest set and setting that I have ever done them, I got burned the most. I can’t help but think that if I had been in a setting where the container was qualified to handle any fallout without legal repercussions, my accident could have been avoided. I don’t think the psychosis could have been avoided, but the warning signs could have been handled with more clinical intervention rather than being told to just “be gentle with myself.
I know it may feel like we need to rush the healing of the collective because the world is in a crazed state right now. But if there’s one thing that I can confidently take away from all of this, it’s this: No matter how hard we try, we can never mess things up. Everything is happening exactly how it’s supposed to happen. We are slowly waking up together, and everything we deem either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is all part of divine timing.
Know that our desire to rush this process is a desire born from the egoic mind. We rush from a place of fear rather than trusting the process of life; trusting that the universe knows exactly what it’s doing. Imagine thinking that you knew more than the universe?
Lol.
Yes, getting psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy up and running as a viable form of treatment for the public may feel like a slow burn. But this may be necessary as we work to get all the measures in place. Measures that can’t be put into place on the underground.
Never did I think I would be on the side of running psychedelics through proper clinical settings, but the potential fallout of where they can leave people, in my eyes, is too costly not to.
As much love and respect I have for psychedelics, I don’t believe they are the end all be all.
I think what they do is open doors in terms of how to adjust our behavior in a way that better serves society. I think they show us how to grow self-compassion for ourselves, and overall they help us heal from the things that trouble us the most. They are powerful tools that I know can help heal this world.
But at the end of the day, those open doors become a road map that we can always go back to even without the use of psychedelics––and that’s what I think they’re really trying to teach us.
At any moment, at any time, all the answers we’re looking for are already inside us, no substance necessary.
I can’t say whether or not I would ever do psychedelics on a macro dose again, but I know that for now, I’m hanging up the phone.
This series wasn’t made to turn anyone away from psychedelics. Go enjoy them. They’ve helped me in ways beyond what I thought was possible. But, if you do decide to do them, just have safety measure put into place incase things go sideways. Know the signs to look for and think about working closely with someone before and after using.
I’ve also done a podcast with my therapist speaking about my time during psychosis. The episode mostly goes over the safety aspect, as this series will focus more on my story. Regardless, you can listen to that episode here if you want more information all things psychedelics and safety
And lastly, I feel that many others may have had a psychotic break of sorts whether it be from drugs or something entirely different. I know that a subject like this isn’t what you go screaming to the world and is heavily stigmatized. If you have never properly talked about it with someone or have always felt ashamed, I am here to talk. Before reaching out to me I’d suggest a therapist, but after that I’m always around to talk and you can either email at jalito526@hotmail.com, or slid on into my DM’s, bay-bee.
Much Love guys and thanks for reading.
Edited by: Patricia Hendriks