A Bad Mushroom Trip Resurfaces
I’ve written a little bit previously about some of my early experiences with mushrooms as well as about at least one recent experience. I’ve also written about my struggles with smoking. I’m currently engaged in my second attempt to quit smoking with the help of hypnotherapy. [I’ve tried to quit a thousand times using other techniques.]
My hypnotherapist is fascinating. I find her technique instructive, useful, inspiring, and encouraging (and, beautiful, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing). Maybe someday I’ll write more about her. For now though, I just want to write about that early bad mushroom trip which came up in a recent hypnotherapy session. And which, to be honest, I’ve thought about lots over the years.
The Spring of 1988
In the spring of 1988, my mom died. And in the weeks before and after her death, I engaged in a somewhat manic, frenetic flurry of ‘shroom trips. On one of these, the last, because of reasons that will become apparent, was a horrific experience.
There were all sorts of elements to the horrors of this trip. But the salient ones, the ones that have stuck with me for almost forty years since then, had to do with the fundamental delusion I developed while tripping that, a) I was carrying around an enormous armload of precariously stacked twigs and sticks. That the pile in my arms was constantly in danger of toppling. And b) that somehow, in ways I can’t really explain now, were they to topple, the world, or at least my world, would undoubtedly come to a crashing end.
I genuinely thought I was warding off Armageddon as I walked through the woods with this imaginary pile of sticks. I tried to persuade my companion to get an ambulance. I couldn’t imagine not requiring lifelong hospitalization to protect me and the world from this circumstance.
My friend was wise enough, notwithstanding his own shrooms, not to call an ambulance. Rather, simply to remind me that I was shrooming. That this was a hallucinatory, delusional experience.
A Hallucination—and a Truth
The thing is, on some level it was hallucinatory and delusional. On another though, it was utterly perceptive. I was, at that time, carrying an unimaginable burden. Not the burden of my mom’s death, although that, too, was in the mix.
No, the burden I was carrying was something familiar to many. The burden of a false self.
Somehow, I managed to emerge from childhood and into late adolescence without real knowledge of who I was, but with an acute knowledge of who I was supposed to be. And with a mounting sense of shame at the knowledge that that person I was supposed to be was someone I wasn’t. These were the sticks.
Now, I’ve played with that mushroom journey a lot over the years. Talked about it in therapy, written about it, discussed it with T, with friends. There’s no news in any of this. I’ve even engaged with the origin of the delusion, with the ways my parents needed me to be in order to feel okay about themselves, with the magnitude of those demands and the urgency of them.
Each of them, in their way, desperately needed me to be a particular person. I’m not talking about my name, of course, or anything so straightforward as sexuality or gender. I’m talking about an overall understanding of the world, of my place in it, of the roles I had to play, of the characteristics I had to embody, the personality I was required to have.
Some of these requirements were mutually incompatible. For example, my mother needed two things of me. She needed me to be fiercely independent, not to need her if she wasn’t available, not to miss her when she was gone. At the same time, she needed me to be ecstatic to see her, and utterly dependent on her when we were together. I dutifully produced this, and so her death was particularly crushing.
I engaged with all of this in my recent hypnotherapy journey, and it was… fascinating.
