My Trip on Magic Mushrooms: For Shame
(Part 9 of the story of my psychedelic-enhanced journey to mental health)
I had no idea how long it had been since I ingested the mushrooms, but it didn’t seem very long ago, and it felt like my trip was just now beginning. Previously, I had been panicky and uncomfortable, but now I felt relaxed and curious, ready to start making progress on the mental health issues that had instigated the trip. My rational brain was still present somewhere, in back of everything, silently observing, but all that it really could do was to remind me to speak out loud occasionally to narrate for David and Jimmy what I was seeing and feeling.
I knew that I had memorized a mantra to remind me to focus on understanding and getting rid of my sense of shame. Under the influence of the psilocybin, I couldn’t remember what it was. That struck me as hilarious: What good was a mantra if I couldn’t remember it?
But it served its purpose because I remembered that my number one goal was to eradicate the shame that was ensconced in my personality. The first step, my drugged brain realized, was that I had to find it. I knew that my shame was an integral part of who I am, so it made sense to dig into my body to find it.
In my hallucination, that is what I did. I reached down my throat to my gut and grabbed and hauled out pieces of myself. Not organs, like my stomach or spleen. I hauled out pieces of my personality, held them “up to the light” in front of my face, and examined them. I don’t remember the names of any of the individual pieces, but they were aspects of who I am, like pride or selfishness or kindness. They resembled geometric shapes or blobs of various attractive or neutral colors.
But none of these were the piece of my personality that I was searching for. I was looking for my shame. I couldn’t find it, or I couldn’t get it out of myself to examine. In my hallucinatory wisdom, the solution seemed obvious. I needed to regurgitate it — to vomit the shame out of my system.
So I did — in every way but in fact. I forced myself to vomit, as if I were sticking fingers down my throat and trying to throw up some nauseating, spoiled food. My brain and body really believed I was vomiting. The muscles throughout my body contracted and spasmed. It felt like bile had come up my throat. I vomited my shame right into my own lap — except that in reality, of course, nothing emerged from my mouth. But my brain believed that it had.
My hallucinating brain reached into my lap and picked up the shame that I had just vomited out of me. Like the other aspects of my personality, I held it “up to the light” in front of my face and examined it. It resembled a black, upside-down crescent made out of a disgusting sewage-like, tarry substance. It didn’t surprise me that my shame was so ugly and disgusting; it was my enemy and I wanted it gone.
I was elated that I had finally gotten it out of me, and I recall beginning to narrate aloud for David and Jimmy how I had finally succeeded expelling my shame, when I observed a little black sliver at the end of the crescent of shame detach from the rest of it and dangle in the air in front of me. Then it quickly sped through the air toward my gut, slithered its way to my belly button and crawled back inside of me through my navel.
I was horrified at this new development and remember speaking aloud as I considered my options. I could ignore what had just happened, but then I wouldn’t have accomplished my goal of eradicating the shame. I reasoned out loud that this may be my only chance to get rid of the shame permanently, and it’s why I’m on this trip. I was determined to go back and get that shame out of me for good.
The only way I could think of to get the newly entered sliver of shame out of me was the same way that had worked before: to vomit it out. So in my hallucination I did. Again. Although the muscle spasming was draining, I once again triumphantly vomited the black, disgusting crescent of shame out onto my lap. It looked just like it did when I vomited it into my lap before: the same size and everything.
Relieved at my success, I picked it up again and watched horrified as another small black sliver broke away from the crescent and again re-entered me through my navel. Astonished and upset, I think I said aloud, “It’s back in.”
I know that I paused for thought then. I don’t know for how long. But I had the presence of mind to try to figure out what “the game” was. What were the mushrooms trying to teach me? What did I have to do to get rid of the shame permanently?
I decided that the answer was perseverance. Maybe this was a test of my willpower. I wouldn’t give up. So I vomited the shame out of me again. And again a sliver broke away from the disgusting black crescent and sneaked back inside of me. And again. And still again. I spasmed and vomited that shame out of me at least five times, maybe six. And each time, a sliver sneaked back inside of me.
I was exhausted. Imagine the aches in your muscles after vomiting five or six times. That’s how I felt. I couldn’t keep doing this. I was never going to be able to get rid of this disgusting shame. So what do I do now?
The answer occurred to me immediately — it just seemed obvious. I was going to have to live with it. The shame was a living neural network inside my brain. I couldn’t surgically excise the grey matter that comprises it. I was going to have to find some other way of disempowering it.
That revelation was like a switch turning on in my mind. I felt a surge of vital energy, which served to convince me that I was on the right track. I hadn’t even begun to think about how to disempower my shame, but I instinctively knew that it was all I could do. With that understanding, all the tension in my body from the struggle against the crescent of shame dissipated. I felt content and comfortable, and although tired and drained by my multiple vomits, eager and anxious to continue exploring my shame.
Little did I realize that although the mushrooms didn’t give me what I wanted, they were about to give me what I needed. They were about to show me the origin — or at least my earliest memory — of my shame.
It seemed like shortly afterwards (although I still had no sense of time), I had to urinate again. My muscles were so tired that David and Jimmy had to help me walk to the bathroom. I stood over the toilet, unzipped my pants and pointed my penis at the toilet. I don’t know if anything really came out, but my hallucinating brain felt a blockage in my urethra near my bladder. As I tried to urinate, I felt the blockage leave my bladder and travel down my urethra until it fell into the toilet with a plop and a splash.
I looked in the toilet bowl, and my hallucinating brain saw that I had deposited a blue, roughly cylindrical gelatinous mass into the water. To this day, I don’t know what the blue mass represents, and I know that I was puzzled and thinking about it as I put myself back into my underwear and returned to the couch, with David’s and Jimmy’s assistance.
I don’t even know if I ever re-zipped myself, as I sat back down on the couch to contemplate what just happened. I know that I tried to describe it aloud for David and Jimmy.
As I did so, I felt myself urinating again, this time inside my pants. I felt the warm wetness spreading on my belly and thighs. At first I thought that I had really wet myself, but my pants appeared dry, and some still-rational part of my brain knew that I had just urinated into the toilet and wouldn’t have any pee left in my bladder.
However, it felt so real that I told David and Jimmy about it. Except that the words came out strangely. I said, “I peed myself,” a phrase I hadn’t used since I was a little boy. I didn’t seem to be able to use my normal adult language to describe what had happened, or how it had felt to me. I knew that this urination accident was somehow important, as was the loss of my adult language, which hadn’t abandoned me (as far as I knew) on this trip until that moment.
It wasn’t until the next day that I realized what had just happened. Under the psilocybin, my brain had just remembered my very first experience with shame. I was re-living a toilet training accident that had occurred when I must have been about two years old. I had not made it to the toilet in time, had urinated in my pants, and had been shamed — or at least had felt shame — as a consequence.
My brain had showed me what it remembered. I didn’t have a visual or auditory memory of the event because my brain hadn’t developed enough at two years-old to store that kind of memory. But it stored tactile memories. It had remembered what the urination accident had felt like on my skin. And the reason that I only had my toddler self’s vocabulary to describe the incident aloud to David and Jimmy was because when I re-live a memory under the influence of a psychedelic drug, just like with the ketamine, I only have access to the vocabulary that I possessed at that age.
The next day, when I realized what had happened, I was flabbergasted. Who would ever believe that the mushrooms had helped me to recall a key incident from when I was two years old? I don’t think that would ever have been possible with traditional therapy alone.
This was what Jimmy meant when he said that the mushrooms may not give you what you want, but they will give you what you need. My brain was trying to help me get a handle on my shame, to help me to disempower it. It showed me the earliest origin of that shame that it could remember so that I could recognize how unwarranted it is to continue to be influenced by that shame today.
If that had been all that the mushrooms had helped me to accomplish, it would have been a successful trip. But I hadn’t tackled my “shield of invulnerability.” My trip was not yet over. Could the psilocybin hallucinations help me to pierce or eliminate my emotional shield?
