Bad Trip: The Worst Experience of my Life

It will take some time to create a fully concise thread about this. I am going to do it in order to try to heal myself from the psychological trauma my Mushroom trip has caused me.

The event: Approximately one month ago I consumed about 5 grams of Psilocybin mushrooms (called shrooms or magic mushrooms). I had tried a gram prior to that and thought I felt absolutely nothing so I took a much larger dose to ensure that I was not burnt by the dealer I bought it from.

What resulted was one of the most horrific experiences of my life, and though after a few days I thought the long-term effects of this were over, I am only now realizing that it will take longer to heal my mind which has now been traumatized by it.

I had done a lot of research, as I always do, about anything I consume or experiment with. One of the main things that is known about mushrooms is that they have no toxicity so you cannot overdose on them physically. As well, there are no long term physical effects.

As well, all of the long term effects I had read about were generally positive - from an enhanced sense of well being to a positive or more phenomenal outlook on life.

It was based on this research that I had decided to experiment with them. My life was depressing and highly stressful at that time, and I thought it could only improve it.

I am going to write about my experience, prior, during, post, and anything related to it in disjointed manners as they come to my mind.

I recently began researching other people's experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, and as I read about bad trips specific to the way I feel, I am starting to find very similar reactions in people.

During the bad trip, the feeling of being trapped can be very strong, and then thoughts of suicide to escape this entrapment can follow. I was about an inch from that psychosis during my trip, a fact I feel is now certain given how petrified I am of being back in that state.

One common characteristic I have discovered many people share with me on their bad trips is generally explained as "being terrified that you will never resume being who you are, thinking as you normally do".

I believe this is the central trauma that haunts me right now.

One woman described her fear in day to day life perfectly as "if my mind is at all different... at all altered, I get panic attacks. If I drink alcohol, smoke weed or even drink coffee I become paranoid that I will lose who I am".

I am extremely similar. If my mind does not operate exactly as it should and I even sense it at a subconscious level, the same paranoia I felt while on mushrooms kicks in and I start having panic attacks.

Now, many people seem to suggest that this is natural, and one must give into the trip to fully experience it.

However the argument for this, true as it may be, is kind of like saying you should be comfortable with something uncomfortable before you are ready for it.

This is why it is strongly recommended, generally, that when you try any psychedelic drugs you start off with very little and work your way up to where you are comfortable.

My error was not a stupid one, because though I consumed about 5 grams it was based on the effects the one gram had on me, and therefore was a logical action to take, even though it ended up being very, very wrong. There is insufficient clarity about the exact potency of these mushrooms, and every batch also has variable potency. In addition, I have read that with shrooms you can take a certain amount, feel nothing, then take a little bit more and completely lose your mind.

Accordingly it may not entirely be a linear escalation of high and accordingly it would be nearly impossible for someone like me to accurately predict it.

(yet another caveat of these drugs being illegal - had it been legal, I would know exactly what to expect and take the right amount, etc)

I do not believe that it is a positive experience to take more than your mind can handle. I was obviously not prepared for how little control and access I would have to my thought patterns and vision of reality, and accordingly, the trip I had has traumatized me into being constantly afraid that I will resume being that fucked up (even though that simply cannot happen)

When I was high I was convinced that I was a danger to myself and anyone around me. I believe this is the result of subconscious conditioning I have suffered throughout my life telling me that I am a violent aggressor. Accordingly, if I perceive that I am losing actual control over the "filters" I have in place to keep this "violent aggressor" at bay, I will become terrified that I will splatter my apartment red with blood as I go on a rampage.

Of course, I am not a violent aggressor, but this is not emotionally known by me, and clearly at a deep emotional level I am certain I am. So much so, in fact, that even while I was tripping and seeing fractals on the wall and my hands were doing 360 degree twists and I was drooling, even at that point, my conditioned knowledge that I was a threat to people around me preceded all that in my brain.

This means that below everything that I am is this knowledge that somehow I am an aggressor, conditioned, certainly therefore, at a very young age in an extremely severe manner.

The fear of losing myself is the worst thing about this. I was so afraid of losing who i was during my trip, so constantly petrified of it that now I feel traumatized at the concept of losing myself. I feel constantly as if I can lose myself.

I believe there are certain facts I need to understand to heal my mind of this terror:

The trip that I experienced and the state of mind I was put in was induced by a drug, and such a state never existed before it or after it. I could not escape it because the drug was running through my system, and as predicted as my system cleansed me of it, the effects wore off. It was 100% drug induced, and cannot be induced without my consent unless I am taking a drug. This means that I consented to losing myself, and unless I consent to it in the future, it will NEVER HAPPEN. I will never, ever lose myself unless I decide to.

When I refer to losing myself, although I perceive it in that manner, the truth is I am not losing myself. I am freeing myself of the shackles of believing that I am a threat. The problem is the drug forced me to accept that prior to me knowing and understanding that I am not a threat. It was trying to put me in a position of not having control prior to me believing I was not a threat. I believe the effect of this could equally be good or bad, but regardless I have decided that I want to eventuate this at my own pace, and not one dictated by an external stimulus (in this case, the drug). Therefore, conclusively, the trauma of the experience was due to restrictions on my brain that I am unprepared to let go of, but that once I do, I will no longer fear losing.

As time progresses my paranoia about losing myself will lessen. This is because as I wake and sleep, and eat and drink, and become happy and sad, my mind and emotions will experience different natural highs and lows. And as they do my mind will naturally get paranoid but over time become comfortable knowing that even though these experiences happen, that even though I am getting high and low, that nothing will force me into a state of unrepression with the severity that the mushrooms did. This, eventually, will actually permit me to take a smaller dose of shrooms without paranoia because I will be comfortable with a small loss of a control, or a small amount of pressure being placed on my repressive ideas. Right now any pressure upon them makes me feel terrified.

It is almost as if in every day life we certainly do experience unrepression. Some fear, some abuse, some bad conditioning is being challenged, and accordingly we feel these minute almost invisible losses of control as those preconceptions are challenged and removed.

I experienced a serious strong and severe push against one such preconception, and with a severity I was unable to flow with. Because I was unable to flow with it, I have retracted like scared puppy in a corner, petrified of any such movements.

However, such movements are normal, natural, and as previously stated, healthy and under my complete control unless I am under the influence of something extremely potent. Even marijuana is not potent enough to force me to lose control as mushrooms did. However, in my current state of trauma, they are potent enough to make me terrified that I will (since even the minor infractions that occur naturally cause me terror).

Well written. So well expressed in fact I found myself enthralled at a mind that could share an understanding I have, but am not always capable of accessing, because of my shroom trip.

I felt what you express here, and more. I know this delicate place you are in, I go there still, even after months have passed... So much more than... a daunting wall impedes my movement towards sharing... For me, this will take time and much energy. I will have to meditate just to access the emotions experienced, and then I will have to reflect in order to communicate them. I'm am interested in what you have to express, because you express it so well that I can understand you. And about something so profound....

The best I can do is focus on which parts of the text pop out to me.

What I can say from my initial read is that, what you experienced was as real as anything else you have experienced and it occurred in the same place everything else does in your reality. In your mind. What you found was real, you're disconnect from the "man" you have become, losing yourself, was real, and in my opinion, in the right environment, favored.

It was not 100 percent induced by the drug, because your one of a kind experience was brought on by your one of a kind mind. It was your will to understand and lose what was stressing and depressing you that caused you to experience these things. You found exactly what you were looking for.

The depths that you traveled to get to the places where you found those deep emotions, was vast, but as you spoke of retreating, not the end.

"When I refer to losing myself, although I perceive it in that manner, the truth is I am not losing myself. I am freeing myself of the shackles of believing that I am a threat. The problem is the drug forced me to accept that prior to me knowing and understanding that I am not a threat."

And this is the truth that will set you at ease. If it is the truth, that you are really who you are once you have lost yourself, then you can not stop it and it is already a part of you. You can not unlearn this knowledge in anyway. And you needn't. I believe that accepting what I found is what is healing me, and it is. Just last night I found myself shaking at the recollection of my senses. But those senses, I cherish, and through no will of my soul, but only the scarred animal within me, do I cower.

I have had this exact experience as well.... and though I interpreted it differently than you I find your account very enlightening.

Like you I had a profound fear of losing control and hurting or killing people. Unlike you however I took this to mean that there was an actual part of me that wanted to do these things.

Now I could very well be delusional about this judgement, and your account helps me see it all in a different light.

I handled this experience differently than you as well. My analysis of it stopped at "there's a part of me that is very evil" and consequently my plan of action was to search for the root of this evil and rechannel it to a more natural expression.

I also can't rule out that this interpretation I chose is the result or origin of some kind of self-loathing. What I mean is, I might have a natural inclination to see something bad about myself and instead of considering more possibilities for its existence, I end up coming to the premature conclusion that this is further justification for my self loathing.

But if my interpretation has any validity, I have to wonder why a part of me would be so animalistic and sociopathic unless it was tortured in some way regularly and without my conscious awareness.

It could also be that this fear, in line more with your interpretation, is actually completely unfounded and it is the fear itself which , when it is brought to that magnitude that only psychedelics seem capable of, causes people to literally act out in these sociopathic ways, which give us the psychedelic horror stories we've all heard.

So the fundamental question is, is it the fear that causes this delusion, or is the fear a legitimate defense of some very tortured part of our personality that needs healing?

I also want to add, and I think you've already hit on this Decius, that after an experience like this, there's a certain level of trust of one's intentions and the autonomy of one's actions, that is lost.

For what is more frightening than to be hijacked by something within our own mind.? This consequently, for me, extended to how I inevitably dealt with people. For a while I would create a very cautious distance between myself and people I perceived I had power or influence over. I did not want them to be in danger.

Now of course all hope is not lost. I've gotten much better over the years to the point where I don't feel damaged anymore and to be honest I do feel like I'm more myself than before I started tripping though I'm almost certainly not as emotionally available as when I was a child - but I think adolescence could also be to blame for that.

quote:

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For what is more frightening than to be hijacked by something within our own mind

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Nothing, absolutely nothing. From the inside out, with no cure or escape. I literally told my sitter that I would kill myself if she did not watch me. I told her to get forks away from me.

I originally concluded, quite adamantly what you did - that I actually AM dangerous in that state of mind.

But I am now convinced that this is not true at all, and as you put it, a perception based on self loathing.

I sort of know this too because I tripped out again recently on weed and again became paranoid of the same thing - however it was not so intense so I actually LET myself act out in whatever way I perceived I was afraid of. As a result I was gentle as a puppy, and the realization of the fact that I had let myself go and didn't do anything harmful caused immense emotional pain in me.

This means to me that the fear is completely illegitamite, but as i said early, deeply, deeply rooted in me as knowledge. I was absolutely certain that I was dangerous, and in fact almost relished that fact (as if it made me powerful).

Again there's some parallels between your experience and mine. After these horrible trips (I think I've had more than one) weed did affect me differently. It felt more like tripping to me. If I smoke mids I don't get this but if I smoke really good weed it will sometimes feel almost as strong as full on tripping and these same fears can arise.

It can all be very confusing though. I've made very profound realizations about myself when smoking really good weed, like for instance, how I tense up my shoulders in relation to certain modes of thought. I became consciously aware of this phenomenon and was able to alter it, though not without constant vigilance. But when I come down I am left with the memory of the realization and I wonder if it was legitimate. (this one dealing with my tension proved to be for sure and it's something I work on regularly).

But other realizations like this evil side, it is harder to know if it is real or a hallucination. It doesn't help either to consider the odds of all this. Think about it: there's some plants that evolved more or less separately from us and they provide us with no nutritional value but they do these weird things to our head. Are we getting realizations because it is warping our perception and in doing so we can see what is shockingly obvious because it appears to us in a slightly altered form, altered enough that we can evaluate it with fresh eyes?

Or is it very selectively triggering/blocking some key filters or walls we've built up in the development of our personality which opens a kind of pandora's box? Sounds pretty damn lucky if you ask me.

I will say this: this is frontier territory. The path we're on here isn't well worn. There's a couple general sign posts here and there put there by psychology and the religions of the world (though more symbolically clad in the latter).

A thought just came to me about this whole bad trip experience we've shared. I distinctly remember being in this hellish uncertainty of my autonomy and scrambling desperately for some solution when I settled on this Christ personality. I know this sounds out there and it could very well have been a delusion but it was like I realized that this Christ personality (it makes me think of what Jungians call "archetypes" ) was the only safe personality to be and that's why Christ and every other saint ultimately chose it, because it was the only uncontradictory personality one could be.

Obviously I'm not Christ and a lot of times I'm not very Christ or saint-like (or even want to be - though I definitely respect the guy, even if he's fictional). I'm just throwing this out there in case there's some parallels that maybe you guys forgot about.

I definitely lost too much control to find any safe haven. I must have asked my sitter about a thousand times "this will end right? this is just the drug right?" because I was on the brink of some mind shattering seizure at every given second for about 2 hours.

It was the most hellish experience of my entire life. I am now, after creating this thread as a form of therapy, treating myself like a rape victim who has serious psychological trauma.

I think when most people say bad trips, there is such a large variation in that term. All I can say is I was very, very close to ripping my face off with my hands. Anything to escape where I was.

And another effect of the shrooms was I was completely disconnected from reality. In fact, it looked like this little box to me, and I was 99% convinced that once I ripped my face off that I would awaken as some other guy somewhere else, and this nightmare would end.

It was like it pushes all my life, everything I knew, my sitter, my everything into this little box and moved that box away from me, and so I was aware of existence beyond that box, and the most frightening thing is as this happened the box became highly irrelevant to me. Almost inconsequential, like a dream.

The value I placed on my life was almost nothing because I was so certain that this was just one aspect of reality and that the reality waiting for me after I shot myself in the head was more true and real, and I was just desperate to wake up from this nightmare.

The thought of shooting myself in the head was such a positive thought that it scared me. Ripping the skin off my face felt like a soothing option. Even as my trip first neared the uncomfortable status I became so concerned so quickly that I immediately was contemplating telling my sitter to call the hospital.

This was at the start of the trip which is probably the most daunting memory of all because I had no fucking clue how torturesome and hellish the next two hours were going to be.