Greetings!
So prior to yesterday I had little experience of how psychedelics could help someone to deal with a traumatic experience, barring what I have read. I've experienced loss in my life, like most other people, but had never previously used plant medicines to deal with those issues as I had felt that over time I had nicely compartmentalized my mind and this would do. During the last year I have been on a bit of a personal journey to try and be a better person through being more present with my friends and family, volunteering for the Samaritans, trusting intuition and synchronicities more, not being afraid to be myself and, importantly, rekindling my love for psychedelics after a decade off, as a means of exploring my consciousness (not surprisingly DMT/shrooms mostly).
Friday night I had a particularly difficult shift at the Samaritans and dealt with my first active suicide. Without going into detail I'll simply say it was something that no amount of training can really prepare you for. I finished my shift and offloaded to a fellow volunteer and went home, safe in the knowledge that my easily compartmentalizable mind would tuck the experience away and I'd be fine. Yesterday I did some work in the morning inspecting some trees for someone (Arboriculturist by trade) and got home to my secluded barn in the countryside and felt...weird. I had a bag of dried Golden teacher mushrooms in the cupboard and almost trance like, without any real thought, went and ate some and began to watch a movie (Interstellar). After a while I couldn't concentrate and just felt drawn to my fireplace and found myself staring at the embers. I was slowly drawn into it mentally and confronted by powerful visions, the woman on the bridge who I'd spoken to the night before but also weirdly other times of past trauma came up from the depths of my psyche, such as the death of my two best friends when I was a kid, which had been suppressed. I'm not ashamed to say (but was somewhat surprised at the time) that I cried, in fact crying is not really the word, I wept uncontrollably for a long time! It felt strange, deep sorrow but at the same time like a huge release...a necessary purge that I was oblivious to having needed. Once the visions had subsided I thanked the mushrooms for giving me what I had been unaware I needed, they showed me that I'm human, not invincible and that these things have to be confronted and dealt with in order to move forward. I felt a new and different kind of respect for them, I felt love! Shortly afterwards I felt lighter and today I feel like some serious baggage has been taken off me.
I'm sure many of you have experienced similar events and have dealt with things far harder than I, but I just wanted to share these observations as they were frankly a bit of revelation!
Thanks for reading and if you've experienced anything similar that you feel comfortable sharing please do.