Psychedelic Integration, part 4 - Narrating Your Experience
DISCLAIMER - Psychedelics are still largely illegal in the United States. I am not a medical doctor and cannot recommend any types of medication. This post is not intended to encourage anyone to engage in illegal activities or consume illicit substances, and I cannot provide the substances themselves or any help in obtaining them. The decision to try such substances should only be made with careful consideration and in consultation with your physician, as there can be an array of complications including negative interactions with other psychotropic medications. But if you are considering using these substances in your own healing work, then you should have scientifically accurate information about them, and about how to get the most from these types of experiences.
You’ve planned your journey and prepped your body-mind. You’ve set your intention. And you’ve gone and had the experience. Now the real heart of the integration process starts. And the first step here is just recalling and documenting your experience. These kinds of journeys can be intricate, multi-dimensional, and often have multiple phases where very distinct kinds of things are happening.
So it’s a good idea, as soon after the trip is done as you are able, to write down as much as you can remember about what happened. Give yourself some time to do this - depending on the substance these experiences can be quite prolonged, and as you write you will probably start to remember other parts of what happened. I would suggest also capturing as much of your in-the-moment reaction as you can recall. That is, if a part of your trip left you feeling scared and thinking about that time you got left at the mall then make note of that in your trip log.
Also, it can be extremely helpful to be tracking what your experience is like during the process of writing. If you are putting words to particular parts of the journey and you find yourself elated, or uneasy, or distracted, you should make a note of that. If you start experiencing sensations in your body as you write - tensions, tingles, movement impulses, dry mouth, and so forth - that is also worth recording. Same thing with memories or images that show up. All of these associations are information that will be valuable to you as you start to integrate the experience into your day to day life.
In fact, by telling the story this way you are already beginning to integrate what happened, and starting to weave a narrative around the experience and how it relates to your day-to-day life and personal history. Narrative is a powerful tool that our minds use to make sense of the world, as well as to create a consistent picture of ourselves. Without a sense of narrative you just have a random jumble of happenings, like a poorly scripted movie that is difficult to follow because there’s no throughline to hold it together.
But narrative is discovered and deepened through the telling and re-telling of events, coupled with the emotional, somatic, and imagistic aspects of experience. So by writing out the story in this way, even if it feels like a jumble at the time, you are starting to pull those altered-state experiences into the stories that shape your day-to-day world. And this process is EXACTLY what we mean by integration.
Once you’ve done this, you can start to reflect on the kinds of changes you might need to make in your life, which is what we’ll talk about in the next entry in this series!
Narrative, Part 2 - How to Work With Your Narratives
Most of the time when people come to therapy, it’s because some of the things they are experiencing in the present moment are at odds with the narratives they have about their lives in ways that are confusing, scary, or just make them feel like something is wrong. As therapists, our work is often to help you deepen these narratives into ones that can integrate all of these different, often contradictory and therefore confusing, experiences you are having.
You bring your existing storylines, memories, emotions, body sensations, images, impulses and so forth to the p(l)ot; then we use what research tells us about human development, our place in the natural world, and the role of social life to spice that mix, and bring out different flavors and perspectives that make for a much richer stew. In that process there’s a growing acceptance of all of these different parts of you, because those parts don’t need to be excluded all or part of the time in order to maintain a cohesive sense of yourself. Instead those different parts become part of the delicious nuanced tapestry that is you.
Indeed, much (but not all!) of therapy is a telling and retelling of these stories, a constant reworking and deepening of the narratives of our lives that start to make sense of the oftentimes confusing things we do, think, or feel. I often think of my job more as a life-story editor than anything else - identifying the parts that aren’t yet integrated and gently helping you turn your attention towards them so that they can come in from the dark and join the rest of you. This makes it sound abstract, but it’s not abstract at all - these narratives shape the import we give events, and that import is first and foremost a FELT reality. If you are talking about the narratives that shape your life and you’re NOT feeling a fair amount of emotion then you’re probably not in touch with what’s really going on.
This is also true of the excluded parts of the story - most of the time they are excluded exactly because they make us feel too much. When you touch on that material it can be overwhelming, producing a distressing amount of emotion. Oftentimes that comes with intense bodily reactions, sometimes even producing panic attacks (if that’s happening then stop! That material needs a more gentle approach). Because there is so much intensity to this material, it is outside the window of tolerance (essentially the range of intensity of emotions that you can tolerate), and part of the work here is approaching that material in a titrated way, over time, allowing you to develop more comfort with the emotions it brings, and ultimately to expand your window of tolerance. THEN it can be folded into the story of you without becoming a wrecking ball.
So how do you go about this? First, it helps a lot to work with someone who can hold this material with you, instead of doing it all by yourself. That might look like talking with friends, or a therapist, or even group therapy.
Second, with that support, you turn your attention in a curious and non-judgmental way towards the things that are happening, for as long as you can. That might be a thought, an emotion, an image, or feelings in your body, but whatever it is you put your attention on it and just notice what else happens. If it’s a thought, then as you pay attention to it does it also have an emotional tone? Can you locate the feeling of that in your body somewhere? Is there an image that comes with it? An impulse to move? Is this a familiar thought/feeling/sensation?
As you explore all of this material you articulate it. And as you articulate it it steadily becomes folded into your story. You might go over it once and it’s done, but with the really deep core material you’ll probably return to it again and again for a long while as you build tolerance, explore it, and make sense of it and the impact it has had on your life. It’s a rich and rewarding, though not easy journey. Good luck, and as always, if you need help with the process please reach out to me or another professional.
Make Friends With Your Fear
In Buddhist teachings you will often hear teachers suggesting you “make friends with your fear”. This is sometimes a startling phrase for people - who wants to make friends with fear?!? And what does that even mean?
Most of us treat fear as an enemy, an entity to be avoided at all costs. And of course we don’t want to be put into situations where we’re scared, it feels very unpleasant! But the fact is that fear is a part of life, one more bit of emotional information available to us, and that usually means something. When it comes up, many of us push it away - if you watch yourself closely throughout a typical day you will probably notice its physiological markers several times.
And much of the time we just push it away, distract ourselves by any available means - turn up the radio, turn on social media, eat, drink, shop, and so on. Anything to get away from this most unpleasant of emotions.
But would you ignore a child who was afraid? Or would you acknowledge that they were afraid, comfort them, and help them feel safe again?
Making friends with fear means taking a very different stance towards it. Instead of turning away from it, instead of dissociating or trying to distract ourselves, it means we instead turn towards it. We acknowledge it. We take it in as information, and if it indicates something we really need to be scared of we take steps to keep ourselves safe, to the best of our ability. If instead it’s part of an old pattern and there’s not actually anything for us to be scared of, we take steps to comfort ourselves, and return to a calmer baseline.
If you take nothing else from psychotherapy, take this - making friends with your fear, turning towards it rather than away from it, is THE single most important ingredient in leading a richer life. Turning towards your fear gives you the opportunity either to address the external forces that are stressing you out, or to start to rewire the habitualized emotional patterns that produce fear when it is not really needed. Either way, moving towards fear is the first step towards real growth and change.
I also want to acknowledge that sometimes people are living in circumstances where the fear they feel is both fully legitimate and largely out of their power to change. Nothing about this post is meant to make turning towards fear a moral rule - in these sorts of situations dissociation and/or distraction can be really useful tools! Embrace them, use them, be kind to yourself, and seek help in getting into a safer situation (please reach out if you need pointers to resources to help with this). And when you’re safe, and ready, THEN you can start working with your fear in a way that isn’t going to be so overwhelming.
Psychedelic Integration, part 3 - Knowing less, not more
DISCLAIMER - Psychedelics are still largely illegal in the United States. I am not a medical doctor and cannot recommend any types of medication. This post is not encouraging anyone to engage in illegal activities or consume illicit substances, and I cannot provide the substances themselves or any help in obtaining them. The decision to try such substances should only be made with careful consideration and in consultation with your physician, as there can be an array of complications including negative interactions with other psychotropic medications. But if you are considering using these substances in your own healing work, then you should have scientifically accurate information about them, and about how to get the most from these types of experiences.
Before we dig into integration any more, I want to make an important part of my perspective explicit - if you’re doing psychedelics (or any other personal growth path) right, then you will come away knowing less, not more.
I’ll say that again. If you’re doing psychedelics right, then you will come away knowing less rather than more.
What do I mean by this? Surely you’re pursuing this path because you want to learn new things about yourself, right? To become more clear on the direction and intent of your life? To get clearer on all those hidden nooks and crannies of yourself? Of course, and chances are you will come away with all sorts of insights. That is, of course, very valuable, and not to be discounted.
But the real change happens in the growing comfort with NOT-knowing. Truth time here - all your concepts, all your dearly-held beliefs about yourself and others and the world at large, they’re all just illusions. They’re all chimera that help you organize yourself and the world into perceptible forms, but they don’t have much substance beyond that. Many of them are really helpful illusions, especially the shared ones that help us move through the social worlds that we all inhabit. But they’re still illusions. And the real growth, especially the spiritual growth, comes from being able to let go of the illusions and just see the messy formless reality of things as they are in this moment.
The forms we project onto the world become so deeply embedded in our minds that they serve to shape our very perception of reality. Once we are wedded to particular ideas about the world’s forms, we see everything in terms of those ideas. (see my post about narratives for more). And indeed, this is a good thing! It’s part of how the brain operates so efficiently, by using these base-level assumptions about reality to be able to quickly suss up situations and move through them. As a way of moving through day-to-day life, perceiving self and the world as undifferentiated, formless mass isn’t very conducive to survival.
But there are also times when we want to step out of our habitual perceptions, dissolve our ideas about reality, and make space to see ourselves and our worlds in new ways. This need is why meditation practices are so immensely useful - you are regularly practicing stepping outside of your conceptual mind and seeing the world as it is, rather than as your concepts have conditioned you to see it. And in often coming back to that space you are giving your concepts a chance to evolve in response to deep reality, rather than just allowing your old conceptual frameworks to become more and more rigid and self-referential (and indeed, in our modern world, to then shape reality in accordance with them rather than the other way around).
This is the effect psychedelics have as well, but on overdrive. Which is where both their power and much of their danger comes from. In this spirit, a trick of these big growth paths, and especially of psychedelic journeying, is therefore to take your experience seriously, without taking it as gospel. It can be really tempting to treat your experience as “now I’m REALLY experiencing reality!”
But psychedelic journeys, and the perceptions experienced in them, are as much chimera as all other perceptions. Like dreams, they can tell you a lot about yourself, but they tend to conform to and follow deep and often unconscious psychic structures, often relics of how you learned to approach the world in early childhood, encoded in implicit body memory. And THAT means that, like all your other concepts, they should not be taken as truth, but as a pattern in the sand that can tell you something about the shape of the earth beneath it.
If you haven’t experienced this, then I imagine this post might sound like gibberish. And that’s okay. Just file it away, and keep it in mind as you proceed on your path. Maybe it will speak to you at some point. Or maybe not. Regardless, I wish you luck on your path, and please reach out if you need support around these processes!
Narrative, Part 1 - The Story of You
Narrative is at the heart of how we, as humans, make sense of the world (and even how we construct our own sense of self!). Sometimes this idea seems strange to people - it’s not immediately obvious how stories are related to understanding the world, or to how we think and feel about ourselves. But the phenomenon of myth - sets of stories about the personified forces that make the world go round - has been a common feature of all societies throughout time, ours included. People have always received models of the world in this form, and then turned around and used the figures from those stories to make sense of the things happening around them.
Likewise, all of us have stories about our lives that describe the important forces that shaped us, and that we then use to make sense of both the things that happen to us and the things we do in response. These stories may feature our parents, traumas, alcoholism, or hard work, but whoever the players are, the purpose they serve is to help us hold onto a consistent picture of ourselves. The one common player in all of these stories is you, and it is through this historical narrative that all the different experiences you have had in your life get woven into a felt sense of yourself.
One of the most powerful moves in therapy is to identify, in an honest and non-judgemental way, the narratives that are shaping your life. Once you’ve done this you can start to see the places where you’re unconsciously conforming to these storylines, even when there might be opportunities to do things differently.
By their very nature, stories have a beginning, middle, and end - there is an arc to them that points in a particular direction. The stories you use to make sense of the world work the same way - they contain an arc which tends to define the direction of the events of your life. Certainly the world can still throw unexpected things at you, but we’re talking about a general tendency here.
If the arc of your stories is one of beautiful successes - you see opportunities, grab them, make great use of them, and then profit from the results - then you tend to see the world in terms of opportunity and profitable work. And much of the time the world will conform to that. Not that bad things can’t or won’t happen, not that it always works out that way, but in spite of the setbacks you are primed to see opportunity and the potential for profit. And having eyes for those things gives you more chances to recognize them in the world.
On the other hand, if the arc of your stories follows the screw-up genre - you’re handed opportunity but always botch it up and then live in regret for the rest of your life - then that narrative tends to shape how you perceive the world. And rather than seeing opportunity as the first ingredient of success, it instead becomes the precursor to failure and regret. Rather than opening the door to prosperity, opportunity becomes the hook upon which all manner of failures can be hung. And with the emphasis more on the potential for failure than on the potential for success, that’s where your experience tends to go, in the same way that a bicycle will tend to follow where you are looking.
The good news here is that when you become aware of this storyline you get the opportunity to shift it and open up new possibilities. A personal example - there was a period in my life where I was working a software job that happened to have a lot of idle time, and a ping pong table in the office. I would play with my co-workers, and actually got pretty good. But no matter how well I found myself playing most of the time, I still seemed to choke at the end of most games, blowing often sizable leads. As I reflected on that (or agonized over it!) I started to notice that in the final points of these games I started to have a mental conversation that went something like “I wonder how I’m going to screw it up this time?” That talk was the expression of an underlying storyline, or deep belief, I had about myself that I was always going to lose. When I became aware of that talk I was able to shift it - when I noticed it happening I would just start to tell myself, “You’ve got this.” And it worked - I stopped choking, and started winning those matches.
In the next posts in this series I’ll talk more about working with these narratives in therapy, and then about the cultural context of them. And if you’d like help working with this material then please reach out!