Have you ever had a difficult psychedelic experience?

A challenging psychedelic experience can affect us long after the actual event. For many who experiment outside of therapeutic or controlled settings, there is often insufficient support afterwards to help integrate the experience, which can leave you feeling anxious, scared or confused.

Most of us have heard about bad trips. The social narrative often dismisses them as simply unlucky, weakness of the mind or an inferior batch of drugs, but this is not the case.

What’s really happening

Classic psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin, temporarily disrupt normal brain connectivity across several areas of the brain including the default mode network and the prefrontal cortex. Amongst other functions, these areas are involved in creating your reality, sense of self, memory and identity.

Instead of being random or unlucky, the psychedelic experience often mirrors the nervous system and emotional state. You can feel expansive, free, loving and connected to a higher state of consciousness, or you can feel terrified, scared and destabilised as the foundation of your perceived reality collapses.

In the latter scenario, once your brain interprets the change as danger, it shifts your nervous system into a heightened fear state which starts a chain reaction of somatic and emotional responses such as increased heart rate, body temperature, stress and anxiety. This is why trips feel like they turn bad so suddenly, it's like a flick of a switch.

Unlocking suppressed emotions

By changing brain connectivity patterns, psychedelics lower our internal defence mechanisms. Things that are usually buried and protected deep in our subconscious, can start to rise to the surface. Unprocessed grief, trauma, phobias, shame, existential fear, can all flood into awareness at the same time with vivid visuals to match. No wonder it feels overwhelming!

Simply put, we could say that a bad trip is the result of too much exposure, too quickly, with too little protection, overloading the capacity of our nervous system.

Psychedelics can be a great tool for accessing hidden or blocked parts of our psyche, but for the same reasons you wouldn’t bring up every single one of your traumas at the exact same time in a single therapy session, you certainly don't want to unleash all that just for fun and entertainment with no support.

Integration through dreamwork

Experiential dreamwork and psychedelic integration modalities share trauma-informed approaches that work with images, visuals and imagination to understand the psyche and create understanding and meaning. As a dream therapist and registered counsellor, I use experiential dreamwork techniques to explore hallucinations in the exact same way I would explore a dream.

The process is safe and gentle, it does not involve taking any substances or losing your autonomy. We simply talk about the images and visuals you experienced while you are fully conscious, relaxed and completely in control. I guide you through questions, explorations and reflections to uncover the subconscious links or connections that have been hidden away, so that integration can begin.

The bad trip / good trip fallacy

If you have ever had a bad experience with medication or drugs that have distorted your sense of safety or reality, just know you are not alone, I believe it is much more common than we realise. It’s just not talked about as openly because the profound, euphoric and expansive experiences often get idealised, whereas the frightening experiences get labelled as disappointment, weakness or failure.

I don’t agree that trips are either good or bad. In the same way that nightmares provide a huge opportunity for transformation, I also believe the scary, terror-inducing psychedelic journeys are equally as important. They have the potential to lead us into deep healing, empowerment and an opportunity to integrate exactly what we need at that time.

By revisiting your experience, it gives you an opportunity to reframe it away from something that was trying to terrorise you, into something that can end up being helpful and empowering.

The content provided in this blog article is for informational and educational purposes only and not intended as a substitute for professional counselling or medical advice.

If you have had a similar experience that you are interested in exploring through dreamwork, online sessions are available Australia-wide, as well as in most international countries. Bookings can be made below.

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