Why Mushrooms, Part 2 “Why am I still talking about this?”

Disclaimer: I am not a healthcare provider of any kind. I am the owner of some very strong opinions based on my own personal experience.

Today in Why Mushrooms, I want to talk more specifically about the limitations of talk therapy and how psilocybin is different.

Maybe this sounds familiar to you…

I’m in a therapy session, and realize that I have wandered down an old path. It’s a familiar route, and I’ve walked it countless times with friends, paid professionals, and in my journals. The way is littered with events and experiences all leading towards some big, formative, almost always painful experience. I move through them, recounting each because I tell myself they provide necessary context to understanding the depth of the hurt at the end of the road.

Sometimes I stop myself on the way, but sometimes I get all the way to the end before stopping to wonder. I ask my therapist and myself at the same time, “why am I still talking about this?” 

Damn, I hate that.

I just hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. I don't think it's “wasting” my therapist’s time, they’re getting paid, but it doesn’t feel good to realize that the investment I've made in healing this thing has not paid off. Insult to injury is that instead of healing, I appear to just be re-hurting myself.

Of course, if I’ve told the story before (especially to my therapist), then chances are good that we “did the work,” at the time. She’s great at helping me think more clearly about things that are emotionally charged.

Sometimes a thing will take a couple of sessions to untangle the spaghetti, but why am I covering familiar ground on my way to pain that we’ve already untangled? I understand what happened, I understand what part of it belongs to me, what is left to process? If I'm still talking about it, that's the surest sign that it is not healed.

This can happen in a fight with my partner, too. We think we’ve worked through whatever it is that initiated the conflict, we’ve sorted out all of our responses and reactions and somehow find ourselves back at the beginning of the rift.

In both cases, I think the questions “what do I need?” or “what do you need?” can be so helpful in getting us off the road, away from the path, and getting the healing integrated into our hearts and our bodies. The answer usually sounds like, “I need to be reminded of X,” or “I need to understand Y.”

But what happens if we don’t know the answer?

It’s totally normal, probably quite common, not to be able to answer that question. And in the absence of a clear answer, we grab for something easy: Retelling.

We are natural storytellers, and we use stories every day to make sense of ourselves and the world. There’s just one problem with this: Our brains are making up those stories, and our brains are famously unreliable narrators.

We think we can trust the voice in our head that says we deserved it, or we didn’t. We think we can trust the voice that tells us it was our failing, and our fuckup. We think we can trust the voice that tells us we are victims, that we are being rejected, and that we did do the right thing.

I’m sorry to tell you, friends, we cannot trust our own brains. Our own brains have been positively polluted by outside influences, explicit lessons, and implicit expectations. My brain is constantly telling me things that I absolutely know are not true.

I’m unlikable. I’m lazy. I’m unworthy. I’m unimportant.

I know, on an intellectual level, that these things aren’t true but my brain has been deeply committed to these stories for as long as I can remember.

Someday I’ll tell the whole story of the mushroom trip that changed my life, but today my story is about how psilocybin therapy can do things that talk therapy cannot do.

My experience of magic mushrooms is that they basically wash my brain with self-awareness and self-acceptance. All the lies and stories don’t get rinsed away, they get exposed. I can see where they came from, what role they play in my life, and (most importantly) what’s the actual truth. 

The way our physiology works (more on this in the future), the medicine simultaneously protects your brain from fear, anxiety, and negative self-talk while also accelerating the rate and diversity of new connections. This means I can think and feel much quicker than normal, more clearly, and without judgement.

It’s one thing to know you can’t trust the voice in your head, but it’s a world away from understanding where that voice comes from and having the grace and perspective to accept it and not be moved by it. 

Rather than helping us think more clearly, like talk therapy, mushrooms have the ability to allow us to feel more clearly. They show us why we cannot trust our brains and invite us to learn to trust our intuition.

In those moments when I feel like talk therapy has gotten me as far as I can go, mushrooms have proven tremendously powerful in helping me continue to move forward.

Have you hit a wall in your talk therapy? Interested in an opportunity to safely try something new? We’re hosting a psilocybin healing retreat in April. Learn more here.

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