Why There’s No Such Thing As a “Bad Trip” with Psychedelics
Challenging trips, yes. But always for a reason.
Earlier this year, I lived through what one can only describe as a full-body exorcism during an Ayahuasca ceremony.
For six hours straight, I found myself in a death loop, cycling through the different ways one can die. Suffocating, melting, drowning, you name it. Every fiber of my being was penetrated with immeasurable discomfort as I was crying and screaming. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. Multiple helpers had me pinned down in an effort to console me, unsuccessfully.
I did not have “a bad trip”.
In fact, I believe there’s no such thing as a bad trip. There are challenging experiences, yes, but that’s not the same thing.
Over the last three years, I’ve worked intensively with different psychedelics to heal depression, PMDD, PTSD, and an eating disorder. I read every book and watched every documentary out there. I flew across the country for the world’s biggest psychedelics conference to hear top researchers and practitioners speak. Along the way, I encountered tons of personal journeys.
I’ve never met someone whose life was negatively impacted by psychedelics. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it just shows it’s rare.
If the elusive “bad trip” is what’s holding you back and making you hesitant about psychedelics, I’d like to invite you to explore what else could be true. Read on to find out where “bad trips” originate from, why challenging journeys can bring about profound shifts, and how to best navigate them.
The “Bad Trip” Is a Residual from the War On Drugs, Perpetuated to Keep People from Using Psychedelics
When Richard Nixon declared the “War on Drugs” in 1970, he promptly ended a flourishing period of psychedelic research that spanned across the 50s and 60s.
He declared drug abuse to be public enemy #1 and passed a comprehensive act that regulated drugs based on their medical use and potential for abuse. Schedule 1 contained substances with no medical use and high potential abuse included substances such as cocaine and crack, marihuana, MDMA, and classic psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin.
The war on drugs, it turns out, was not a war on drugs but a war on people.
As John Ehrlichman, a top Nixon adviser revealed in a 1994-interview that was published in 2006:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Within a year, the ongoing psychedelic revolution including all the promising research it involved was killed.
Yet, the movement also wasn’t perfect. Tim Leary, one of the Harvard psychologists starting the movement, became a problematic public figure, urging people to “turn on, tune in, drop out”.
As veteran psychedelic researcher William Richards notes, “turn on, tune in, and drop in” would have been a more productive call.
Over the following year, War on Drugs propaganda would flood the media with misinformation. The goal was clear: to make people scared of drugs. To reinforce how harmful and addictive they were. With force, the media erased the memory of the mountains of research that had proven the medical benefits of psychedelics, the biggest victim of the War on Drugs.
The problem was never the drugs, however.
Science reveals that psychedelics are the least harmful of all substances.
David Nutt famously conducted a study in which he compares the harmfulness of 14 substances. His list is topped by alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine. Ecsatsy, LSD, and magic mushrooms are at the very bottom.
Further, case studies such as Columbia University’s Dr. Carl Hart who openly speaks about his responsible drug use, including substances such as heroin, prove that there’s more to the story. That the harm drugs do create cannot exclusively be blamed on the substances themselves.
Science Proves Side Effects Are Extremely Rare When Used Responsibly
Clearly, psychedelic drugs in themselves are not inherently dangerous.
The notion that LSD triggers psychosis or makes you jump off a roof is nothing but outdated anti-drugs propaganda. That’s not to say that it’s never happened. I’m sure it has. Just as people drunk on alcohol have jumped off roofs. It’s to say that it’s the absolute outlier experience.
As transpersonal psychiatrist Stan Grof argues, the harm of psychedelics like LSD and mescaline is minimal. Grof cites research conducted in 1960 by psychedelic pioneer Sidney Cohen who reviewed 25,000 administrations of LSD and mescaline. He found that problems such as flashbacks, prolonged reactions, psychotic breaks, and suicidal attempts were actually extremely rare when responsibly used.
Yet, while they were extremely rare, they did happen.
Just as the most commonly prescribed antidepressants such as SSRIs are known to, on rare occasions, trigger suicidal thoughts and actions.
Rare Side Effects Are Common In Most Drugs
Of course, no one's running around telling people how dangerous SSRIs can be. They help a lot of people, but they harm some.
In “Anatomy of an Epidemic”, Robert Whitaker neatly lays out decades of well-hidden research that show that most psychiatric drugs are not only insufficiently effective but can also harm patients in the long run.
With most treatments, we accept that there is a risk-reward profile.
Even when you get a routine surgery done, there’s always that 0.5% risk that something will go wrong. Sadly, people die from complications from the simplest undertakings all the time.
It makes no sense, then, to dismiss the potentially life-changing mental surgery substances such as LSD can perform because of minimal risks.
There may be bigger forces at play, too. Pharma companies make billions from medication every year, whereas no one will get rich from treatments that cure conditions rather than treat their symptoms for eternity.
And then, of course, there are substances like nicotine and alcohol known and scientifically proven to kill millions of people every year. Yet, they are legal.
Psychedelics CAN Produce Challenging Experiences, But There’s Always a Lesson To Be Learned
We’ve seen that side effects falling under a traditional “bad trip” are rare, but challenging trips are not uncommon.
But there’s a big difference between a bad trip and a challenging one.
While a bad trip has negative effects that linger, a challenging trip is more like psychological torture that does, however, end when the trip ends.
Psychedelics commonly act as mirrors, showing you the part within yourself you least want to interact with or see. That, in itself, can be pretty damn terrifying. It can, absolutely, for the duration of the journey, drive you crazy.
As researcher William Richards notes in “Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences”:
“What is so important here is the discovery that the monster has meaning and in itself is an invitation to enhanced psychological health and spiritual maturation. Its purpose is not to torment, but to teach.”
Its purpose is not to torment, but to teach.
I’ve had many journeys, most notably the aforementioned death-loop night, that were excruciatingly painful. I spent hours crying, sitting through physical pain and discomfort, reliving traumatic memories. While Ayahuasca is one of the most violent psychedelics, I’ve also had challenging journeys with mescaline. Psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and MDMA seem to be the most agreeable, which is why they are the two compounds most commonly used in the new wave of psychedelic research. LSD has been nothing but beautiful in my experience (but people sure have different experiences).
I’ve found the difficulty of the experience directly correlates to its impact.
The more difficult, the more transformative (if navigated correctly).
True Healing Involves Facing What You Think Will Kill You, and Discovering That It Doesn’t
In psychedelic journeys, you live through whatever you need to live through to release the painful beliefs and emotions your subconscious is holding on to. Once you process whatever your regular waking consciousness deems too painful to process, you’ll come out feeling a hundred pounds lighter.
As one of my readers, Helin Göçer, once put it:
“What people call a “bad trip” is also a call from our psyche, after each bad trip one may see how needed it was for the perception and understanding of the self and the world.”
Healing doesn’t (only) happen when you feel the weight lifted off your shoulders and finally feel grateful, content, or forgiving.
Healing happens when you feel the entire weight of your misery on your shoulders, and it doesn’t break you down.
You lay there and you bear it.
It’s when you face the most appealing sides of yourself, feel the most unfeelable feelings. When you cry tears and tears of desperation and experience grief that makes your soul scream silently in despair.
Healing happens when you face the things you think will kill you, except they don’t.
It’s Up to You To Decide If the Possibility of Short-term Discomfort Is Worth Long-Term Transformation
It’s important to note here that not all psychedelic journeys are challenging.
Some of them are just outright beautiful. In fact, most of them, in my experience. You don’t get to choose though, so you have to be willing to accept the worst before you go in.
You don’t have a say in whether you get bliss or terror.
One thing is sure, though, which is that psychedelics will always give you whatever you need most.
I have no doubt that it was imperative for my healing to experience that outright terrifying night (and all the other ones).
In the end, the choice is yours.
You get to decide what’s more painful: living with your addiction, anxiety, or depression for the rest of your life attempting to manage it.
Or, living through a few (potentially) challenging psychedelic journeys, but eventually coming out on the other side with newfound emotional, mental, and spiritual freedom.
How You Can Unlock the Power of Psychedelics While Minimizing the Risks
To conclude, I’m sharing a shortlist of things I’ve found to be most impactful for navigating challenging experiences.
You won’t be able to avoid them, but you can influence how you handle them.
- Only undertake psychedelic journeys in a guided setting with experienced practitioners, especially in the beginning. Interview them ahead of time and vet them for experience, references, and empathy.
- When you encounter challenges during your journey, the best thing you can do is to face the monster. Don’t try to resist it or control it. Remind yourself that everything comes up for a reason, and approach every scary little thing without judgment and curiosity.
- Ask yourself what your experience is teaching you, but don’t cling too desperately to finding an answer. Sometimes difficult experiences will resolve within the same journey and come to a beautiful resolution. Other times, it will take longer. Don’t get stuck searching for a lesson when it’s clear there’s none to be found yet. Return to curiosity and trust.
- Your most powerful tool to manage your experience is your breath. Long, deep breaths can do wonders and have shifted many journeys from challenging to beautiful within minutes for me. It’s not always enough, but it’s always worth a try.
- Call the free harm reduction hotline Fireside Project if all else fails, and you're not surrounded by a supportive guide, to speak to someone who might be able to help you get through it with empathy and compassion.
- Make sure you have integration support in place. After challenging journeys, it’s critical to have a support system in place that can help you make sense of what happened. I’ve had journeys that were followed by weeks of nightmares and flashbacks. Having someone to talk to is critical.
That’s all.
I hope you journey safe and smoothly.
But, I also hope it will be a little challenging.
That’s where the magic happens.
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