How Psychedelics Landed Me on the Therapy Couch

Life often leads us down unexpected paths, and my journey from psychedelics to therapy is one that I never saw coming. For all my life, there was just one thing I knew for sure — the world is crazy, and I’m just kind of.. there. I imagined myself as a leaf blown by the wind, trying to find a safe place to land. Or a missing puzzle piece searching for home.

I believed I was the 100% sane one. No traumas, no problems, nothing that I could fault myself with. Honestly, that was my own impression of myself. That was all until my first psychedelic trip. And when that day came, I was surprised to discover the obvious truth — we are all the mad ones.

We hide beneath our masks of sanity, absolutely ignorant of our own chaos. But what we don’t realize is that the world is watching, silently taking notes of everything we reveal.

October 2019

I don’t remember the exact day; let’s say it was the 11th. That was the day I became fully aware of my own actions and how they triggered the things happening around me. I felt like I had to fight for my life, for my sanity, for my mind. The only thing I really wanted back then was to somehow make it through, to survive those 10 hours of verbal abuse all these voices inside my head were giving me. Because, I kid you not, there were thousands of them. All because some guy that knew a guy my guy knew offered us those little square-shaped papers with a smiley face on them.

Well, I wasn’t laughing. Certainly not when after approximately 8 hours, I was so tired that the only thing I wanted to do was sleep. But nope, that wasn’t an option. I just couldn’t stop hearing all these voices, couldn’t stop seeing all those connections.

Because that’s how I can describe the whole trip — connections. I saw a map of everything. I could zoom in, zoom out, and dive deeper into its individual elements. And unfortunately for me at that time, in those elements I saw exactly what I had done with my life. I saw all the words, all my actions, all my faces from a different perspective, and also what every aspect of my behavior triggered in my life. It was cruel, but hey, at least honest right? It’s that I discovered, there are things that we won’t ever hear from anyone but ourselves. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not true.

So, the fact is — for most of my trip, I fixated on how oblivious I had been to my everyday behavior. As a result, I became very self-conscious about the image people must have had of me.

But here comes the twist. I also realized that they don’t really give a hoot. Yes, they see me. Yes, they have an opinion of me, and yes, it may be a terrible one. But they all have their own demons to face, and I’m merely a passing chapter in their life’s story — and the main character in my own.

Suddenly, I realized how none of this matters to me — it doesn’t matter if they think I’m selfish, I don’t care if they think I’m stubborn. What I care about is what I think about myself.

Did that help me? Nope. I still felt bad. But did I really believe I was a bad person? Also no. I just realized that I had lost myself and acknowledged that I really needed help. For the first time in my life, I confessed that to myself.

I consider this the worst bad trip I ever had — therefore, the best one yet. It made me crumble into pieces, hate myself, and rise with the will to seek help and slowly, but steadily, build something new from those shattered pieces. Some are missing, and some are broken — but hey, that’s fine. The outcome is never supposed to be perfect, nor by any means could it be.

Since that trip, I have developed a strong relationship with myself, and also with psychedelics. Not in the sense of abusing them, but rather in the sense of respect. I know they take me down, just to help me rise back up. I respect their power and remain thankful for every emotion they make me feel. Because you see, those trips, the ones that make you hate yourself, that push you to confront your deepest fears — they hold an exceptionally valuable kind of wisdom.

Sometimes, bad trips may be the best kind of trips for you right now. Sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.