This is a thread to share experiences and knowledge in regards to using psychedelics to explore and enrich ones emotional life.
I can't relate my observations without context, so here is my story. This is the abbreviated version, I swear
In my own case, emotions were never easy. I was born with mild asperger's syndrome, which means emotions in myself were always very mild and difficult to understand and I had trouble relating to the emotions of others. Asperger's is ordinarily said to be incurable. I never smiled as a child or a teen and I eventually simply memorized the significance's of emotional cues from others without being able to empathize. I had a hard time with jokes and metaphor. Nothing was beautiful and I had no idea what love was.
The first glimmer of hope came in early high school. I had tried alcohol and cannabis and they produced some drug effect but nothing of any real note, they just slowed my brain down. The thing that changed the direction of my life came when I took LSD. For the first time I was just astonished by beauty. Before, I could have looked at pictures of fractals and appreciated the design but on LSD it was like I drank in the spiraling morphing orgy of color and form and
became beauty.
I took LSD many more times in high school and brought that beauty into my core, developing an ability to appreciate art and classical music.
Time went on, life happened, I left college after three years to care for my sick father. I had been sick all my life, he was sick now, all I had was monotony, depression and a perpetual habit of hiding under a fog of cannabis smoke. I decided something had to change but I didn't have the framework to know how. I remembered back to the aesthetic awakening LSD provided for me. I decided psychedelics could help me transform, if anything could.
Twice in high school/college I had taken mushrooms. They had mostly caused fear but that was at least an emotion and I had the sense that they could do more, and I could grow them. That was a big factor, as my village isn't a psychedelics mecca by any measure, so I grew several crops of psilocybes and used them when circumstances allowed. As one could imagine, I had numerous wild and powerful trips. They were never my favorite psychedelic but each time I used them I could feel a potential in there, something wanting to happen, so I kept trying. Eventually I took an ordinarily low-moderate dose that just totally rocked me, one of those trips so complete that I was visited by a female forest spirit
That's when the strangest thing happened, something that had no precedent, I felt very strong and very clear love for my father. I was over 20 and it was the first time in my life I had felt love for anything or any one. It was well timed, too, as one month later he was dead.
That experience was unequivocal proof that I could progress more, but my life and health was still a mess so I took the next year changing some fundamental things about my life so I could actually become a respectable person that might actually deserve someone else, if ever that became possible. At the least, I radically improved my health.
With my sudden acquisition of health and strength, and with some self respect developed I decided once again to explore psychedelics to see if they could help me into further development. I got a kilo of ACRB, some syrian rue, and began intensively growing cacti and syrian rue. For two years I worked with confusahuasca and pharmahuasca as time permitted, always feeling like I was on the verge of revelation just like when I used mushrooms. The trips were tough at times but it was wild and I could sense that I was close. The break came when I made a batch of THH. I began taking a reasonably low 150 mg dose of THHβ’HCl an hour before pharma and it changed the trips markedly. One thing that stood out was a very powerful emotional reaction to music while peaking, the kind where you're just laying there crying in a good way for an hour. At first I thought it was in reaction to beauty like a more powerful version of what I got on LSD but it wasn't just the beauty. It was a new emotion I just couldn't identify, something totally alien, it could be almost debilitating in strength but I liked it. And the effect was permanent. I could be listening to music over a month after my last dose and I would still sometimes start crying in joy. But I couldn't understand what it was. It took a year for the missing piece to fit into place.
I had never in my life been into romance books or romance movies. I knew sex, and sex is great, but I simply couldn't comprehend or relate to romantic love so I just ignored the whole subject. After enough time of being confused over this happy crying emotion that sometimes hit when music [by female musicians] was played I got an idea. I watched a good sounding romance movie. That emotion was there in the romance scenes! Not the sex scenes, the girly love parts!
I had never had girlfriends because I knew I wasn't able to reciprocate those kinds of emotions, and as such I never expected to be more than half of a man, but to my astonishment I can now feel emotional empathy to romantic love and to me that means I'm capable of someday finding a person I can love. It's difficult to explain how much this blows my mind.
So now I'm continuing on with THH pharma and romance films, crying like a hopeless romantic, and I've been taking mescaline now that my cacti can produce a sustainable flow of alkaloid. Each time I take mescaline I can feel something wanting to happen, just like I did with mushrooms and pharma. I really look forward to seeing just what that might be.
Perhaps, with luck, I'll eventually be able to smile naturally and have an ordinary sense of humor. In fact I've already begun learning to smile, and to laugh
Emotions are a strange and wonderful part of life to explore.
Especially to someone not born with them!
So how have psychedelics changed or guided how you experience or relate to emotions?
Are any other aspies trying to break through into the world of 'ordinary' emotions and empathy?
Are any girls now plotting to find a way to get their boyfriends to try THH?