When people talk about difficult psychedelic experiences, shame might be one of the lesser spoken about topics. The Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which aims to learn more about these instances of post-psychedelic difficulties and help people recover from them, describes certain symptoms which may be a result of these kinds of experiences. Some of these symptoms might involve anxiety, PTSD, perceptual difficulties/HPPD, derealisation, depersonalisation, feelings of social disconnection, feeling depressed, a sense of a diminished self, existential and ontological challenges, cognitive issues, psychosis, sleep disturbances and nightmares, nervous system deregulation, or visions of childhood abuse.
But how much attention is placed on the emotion of shame? Is shame more difficult to talk about compared to other emotions? On a personal note, this is a theme that I’ve been focusing on more personally, where I recognise the links back to early childhood and think about how many instances of feeling shame I’ve experienced. I’m sure the sense of not being good enough runs deep, with shame often being linked to feelings of embarrassment and self-condemnation, along with a sense that maybe we’ve crossed a line somehow.
Why is it that some psychedelic experiences provide more than just a frightening experience and leave us feeling like our morals have been compromised? I’ve not had many psychedelic experiences that I would necessarily consider to be shameful, but some in particular have provided me with a sensation that I somehow got it wrong. In this article, I’ll be exploring some of my difficult psychedelic experiences in relation to shame, with a particular focus on Salvia divinorum and magic mushrooms.
Understanding Shame
Shame can be characterised as an emotional response to failure, where we might feel we’ve done something wrong or that we’re being told off. This might be in both the short term and the long term when it comes to what has been expected of us, either by our society, families, or ourselves – when we don’t meet those expectations, we can dwell on our shortcomings, thinking that we “should” be at a certain point in our lives but focusing on how far away we are from reaching that point.
Shame can develop early on in life, but little is known regarding the factors that impact this early emotional development. Differentiating it from guilt can be useful when exploring how these emotions impact us as a person: guilt is more related to feeling that we did something wrong, whereas shame is more related to our sense of being a bad person. The potential social disruption of being shamed can make this emotion even more devastating, as there might be an impact on our sense of identity in relation to a particular community.
Within this context, shame can emerge when we feel as if we’ve violated certain social or personal norms, which in general tends to result in avoidance or isolation, leading to a negative self-image where we become secretive and avoid proper communication. To compound this even further, it seems that we generally experience a lot of shame when it comes to talking about shame – we might get trapped in something known as a “shame spiral” if we’re unable to break out of these feelings. The only real antidote is doing our best to have more compassion for ourselves when we feel stuck.
The impact of the shame spiral might be more significant when it comes to difficult psychedelic experiences, where the lack of communication could seriously impede the integration of these kinds of difficult experiences. It can be challenging to put these difficulties into words, but without disclosing what we’ve been through, we might find that some aspects of these experiences remain psychologically unresolved.
Psychedelics and the Collapse of the Self-Image
Why do psychedelics have the potential to induce feelings of shame? Could it be that they reveal something about ourselves faster than we would like? We might encounter certain aspects such as selfishness, dishonesty, insecurity, arrogance, or hidden motivations, and psychedelics can often provide a mirror that doesn’t allow us to hide from these different aspects of the self any more.
In the pursuit of experiences that open the self to exploration, we might also find that our ego enters a state of dissolution, presenting challenges to our personal defences. We might over-romanticise the concept of ego-death and subsequently find ourselves unprepared to deal with what arises from the disintegration of the self as certain things are revealed. Could these ego-dissolving experiences lead to confrontation with whatever it is we’ve been avoiding, rather than having some kind of expected release?
The physical sensations that come with this kind of experience might also present some challenges, where the feeling of being overwhelmed might not allow us to properly settle into the experience. I’m reminded of my first experience with Psilocybe cyanescens, commonly referred to as “wavy caps” due to the shape of their cap. I was advised to consume a dose of 1.5 dried grams as this would be equivalent to a strong Psilocybe semilanceata (liberty caps) trip, which I’d had many times before.
I’d made tea as I usually do, by steeping the mushrooms in a teapot for 20 minutes, then slowly drinking a cup while doing a second infusion in the teapot and drinking another cup soon afterwards. I lay down in bed and within 15 minutes I said out loud “ah..fuck” because I just knew I was in for a complete arse-kicking by what I initially thought wasn’t necessarily a huge dose (although upon reflection, 1.5g of wavy caps is probably about twice as strong as a liberty caps, so this certainly wasn’t a beginners experience and at this point in my life I’d had a 5+ year break from consuming mushrooms).
I unexpectedly experienced something known as “wood-lover paralysis”, which can occur from ingesting certain psilocybin mushrooms that grow on wood, such as wavy caps. For two hours, I was unable to move, and this was mildly scary, as I wasn’t aware of this toxidrome (a syndrome caused by a dangerous level of toxins in the body) prior to consuming wavy caps…the only thing I could compare it to is DMT, where my body was pinned to my bed. I felt like the mushrooms had total control over me. I wasn’t able to settle, and I had essentially forgotten how to work with such a high dose of mushrooms, having not had any encounters with them for so many years.
I was trying to change the direction of the trip, almost like I would do during an LSD experience, where I thought the music might have some kind of impact. When this wasn’t working, I started feeling overwhelmed by the strength of the mushrooms, and then, interestingly, a layer of shame came over me. I felt like, because I was so experienced with psychedelics, I shouldn’t have allowed this overwhelming experience to happen, and I should have been more sensible – and there we have that dreaded word “should” that implies there was a wrong and a right way to do things.
I started to become frustrated at myself for not being able to calm myself down, and became upset because it was like the universe had confirmed that I was having a “bad” trip. At this point, I was aware that things weren’t going well and there was the potential to get stuck in these negative feelings, and fortunately, I had some experienced friends who were literally around the corner from my house (maybe only 2 minutes walk away), where I was able to be held in a safe space, which actually then became quite enjoyable from a social aspect. There was some shame associated with communicating the difficulties, but thankfully, I was able to feel safe enough to express these vulnerabilities.
I had a similar experience during my first trip to Amsterdam in my early 20s, where a friend and I decided to purchase some psychedelic truffles from one of the many smart shops in the city, which specialise in psychoactive substances. We had decided to eat the truffles and explore the Vondelpark, which is the largest and most famous city park in Amsterdam, and a place that I had hoped would have provided some kind of natural backdrop to an otherwise busy urban environment. I hadn’t anticipated how strong the truffles were, and the intensity started to become overwhelming…I said to myself, Why didn’t I just eat half of the packet? I could see that my friend was also feeling the strength of the truffles, and it seemed like we were both finding it difficult to express to each other what we were experiencing.
The park itself wasn’t relaxing in the slightest – I thought perhaps this might be a place where we could be free of bicycles in Amsterdam, but I was completely wrong! All I seemed to notice was the intensity of the waves of cyclists going through the park, as well as being put off by the energy of a man in the distance who, for some reason, seemed like he was being quite aggressive and loud. I felt a sense of hostility in the park, and when we decided to go for a walk, I felt that Amsterdam was not the right kind of place at all to be consuming psychedelic substances…or any drugs at all, for that matter! I felt a sense of shame that I had misjudged the intensity of the truffles or how I would react to consuming psychedelics in a city that I’d never visited before. I felt like the truffles were mocking me, almost saying, “Ohh, Mr Psychedelic thinks he’s so great that he can just eat us in a completely new place and have a lovely time…well, we’re sorry, but that’s just not going to happen.”
I entered this experience expecting something lovely and pleasant, and instead, I encountered confusion and feelings of not being safe in a brand-new environment. We might have certain expectations when it comes to psychedelic experiences that induce a sense of ego-dissolution, where we feel a sense of being connected to a greater whole, often coupled with spiritual or transcendent connotations. We can see this framing of the collapse of the self-image in a positive light, or maybe even the point we should be aiming for when it comes to having the “correct” psychedelic experience – but does this even exist in the first place?
I’ve mentioned in a few previous articles my fondness for the book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Ram Dass, which provides a metaphor for the process of ego-dissolution experienced under the influence of psychedelics. By using the Tibetan Buddhist process of navigating death, the book serves as something of a map to understand how to regard ego-dissolution and how to act when we’re going through it. From my interpretation of the book, I don’t feel like the intention is to necessarily tell people whether or not they’re tripping “correctly”, but more so how to engage with and prepare for something which is, at its core, totally at odds with our perception of existence. The Western mindset finds the idea of the self and ego difficult to navigate when it comes to psychedelic experiences, often leading to us placing more importance on this than might be necessary. The fixation on the dissolution of the ego might then require more tools to navigate it more comfortably, rather than being overwhelmed by the more uncomfortable psychological aspects of the loss of self.
Could we learn to dissolve our egos before we’re thrust into this so intensely by psychedelics? Perhaps we can’t ever fully prepare for experiences that might be much weirder than our usual experience of reality, yet there is something to be said for utilising the tools at our disposal to ensure we have more awareness about potential pitfalls within our psychedelic experiences. Perhaps this could be thought of as necessary training, where we’re able to avoid experiences which might cause us to feel shame or humiliation.
I feel like I could have read a lot more and perhaps been around people who were more knowledgeable before diving headfirst into some intense experiences. I’d not had much experience with psychedelics when a few friends and I decided to try some Salvia divinorum extract in my first year of university. We’d read some trip reports on sites such as Erowid, but in all honesty, I don’t think we did enough research. The local headshop in Canterbury sold all manner of things, including different strengths of salvia extract. For whatever reason, we didn’t think it was going to really do anything…it was being sold freely, so surely it can’t be that strong (great logic, I know, right?) and we decided to go for the strongest extract available at 50x. The salvia extract level determines the amount of salvinorin A, and these can range from anywhere between 5x to 100x, meaning that the product we bought could not be considered to be an entry-level product by any stretch of the imagination.
My limited understanding of the plant and lack of preparation provided me with an experience that I hope one day to be able to fully integrate…I just wish someone had told me to respect salvia and not smoke the extract, but chew the fresh leaves as was done traditionally by Mazatec healers in Mexico. Smoking is not the preferred method, and there’s some notion that doing so disrespects the plant. My experience was unfortunately nothing short of hellish, where my disrespect for salvia was thrown right back in my face.
The terror I felt was the most intense I’ve ever encountered in any situation, and in a strange way, I experienced being flung back into the sensations I experienced as a child, where I had recurring night terrors for many years. The intensity of the hallucinations – such as being in two places at the same time – was utterly overwhelming, and I felt like I was stuck in a loop that would go on forever. The worst part was that I’d forgotten that I’d even smoked anything, and this reality was now just my totally insane reality that I somehow had to deal with. I found myself stuck in a wheel (a common theme that seems to arise during people’s salvia experiences).
The panic I experienced from feeling like I was going to be stuck in this trip forever resulted in me having to “rip” myself physically out of the space…out of the stuck looping wheel that wanted to keep me there forever. The trauma that resurfaced left me in quite an erratic state, where my friend had to calm me down and remind me that we were in university halls, where other people might hear me. I quickly got out of the building, as it felt like my friend's room, where I’d smoked the salvia, was somehow tainted with demonic energy, and I went and sat by a pond in total silence.
The silence lasted for a few hours, which led to days, weeks, months, and years – I’ve never properly spoken about this experience in a way where I’ve been able to find peace with the decision I made to smoke this plant. I remember being at a family gathering shortly after my experience, and it just felt like I had nothing to say to anyone. Who even was I to say anything? The salvia trip had completely shattered my sense of self and left me feeling like I’d done something wrong. What words could I use to even express such an intensely strange and uncomfortable experience? Where would I start? It seemed easier just to stay silent and try to get on with life. Instead of communicating the psychological discomfort I was going through, it felt safer to internalise the shame and attempt to work through it on my own. I felt stupid, irresponsible, and embarrassed, which meant carrying everything on my own rather than being able to work through it in a positive way.
At 19, I wasn’t really aware of anything like psychedelic integration, and perhaps it didn’t really exist as a thing at the time. We were experimenting with different substances at university, and ultimately, it felt like it was our own fault if we pushed things a bit too far without doing our proper research first. It certainly would have been useful to speak about these challenges, and instead, my salvia experience tended to infuse some of the later experiences I had with other psychedelics. It became difficult to separate them, and there was a worry that I might not be able to have any further encounters with psychedelics that weren’t tainted by what happened with salvia.
Integrating Psychedelic Shame
Where individuals have challenging psychedelic experiences that are characterised by shame, they might encounter an increase in psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety, which seems to be a predominant emotion following these difficulties. Individuals who are entering into a psychedelic experience from a vulnerable place in their lives might re-encounter this vulnerability if they’re not in a safe environment. Unfortunately, not everyone who is facilitating psychedelic experiences has the best intentions, and it’s important to recognise where the red flags are to ensure as much as possible that we enter into a safe environment.
If we do have an experience that isn’t safe, then we should know that it’s not our fault, and that we shouldn’t feel shame for wanting to seek alternative avenues for healing. Sometimes we’re not as prepared as we could be, and in many instances, there are people out there just waiting to take advantage of vulnerable people who don’t have many options left. The depth of meaning that we take from psychedelic experiences can often amplify the feelings of shame, especially if we have an experience where there is a sense that we might have lost control or behaved strangely.
Through working with integration practices, we might be able to see where we can transform shame into curiosity, allowing us the opportunity to explore different parts of ourselves that might not have been revealed so strongly prior to these kinds of experiences. This is to say that we shouldn’t lose hope when we have an experience which might feel like we’ve got it wrong – this can be a defining sensation, and it doesn’t need to be. Our feelings of shame might just come from the conflict between how we think we should be experiencing psychedelics and our actual experience of them, and there might be a useful lesson here. What if going through these experiences of shame and integration allows us to not take shame so seriously, and instead allows us to see where we don’t need to be so fixed in our perception of ourselves?