Using psilocybin to process grief and loss.
Psilocybin therapy is a powerful tool for helping people to process grief. Grief work requires us to move through the first four stages of grieving – denial, anger, bargaining, and depression – to the fifth: acceptance. But this is not always easy, and sometimes we find ourselves moving back and forth between stages or staying stuck in one stage for a longer time than we can tolerate.
When we experience a tragedy in our lives, our loss almost always feels personal, unjust, and unwarranted. “Why me?”, “How could this have happened?”, “I’m hurt”, “What did I do wrong?”, “Why didn’t I do it better or differently?”, “How can I live without him/her?”, “How can I face another day with this illness/in this aging body?”, “It’s not fair”. We fight grief tooth and nail rather than accept it because we fear that if we fully surrender to it, we may drown, cease functioning, and be lost to life.
The first four stages of grief frequently involve ruminations tied to feelings of nostalgia, regret, self-pity, and hopelessness. This is a perfectly normal response to loss. But when we stay stuck in persistent nostalgic, remorseful, self-pitying or despairing thought loops, our quality-of-life decreases.
Psilocybin therapy can open the floodgates of grief so a person who is unpleasantly stranded in denial, anger, bargaining or depression can be pushed along the river of grief to acceptance. A macro dose of psilocybin does this by changing how we conceptualize our personal losses. Often, rather than seeing ourselves as singled-out or isolated in our sadness, during and after a psilocybin journey, we come to see ourselves as being more deeply and intimately connected to our fellow human beings, our loved ones, and nature (the roses dying in winter) through our losses. In a psilocybin-induced non-ordinary state, it is easier to more viscerally understand that just like us, everyone has or will lose something or someone, and to learn that to lose and say goodbye is not only part and parcel of life, but one of the main reasons why life is so precious and beautiful.
Commenting on what his friend William Paul Young, author of “The Shack” calls the “Great Sadness”, author and Franciscan priest Richard Rohr refers to this sadness as “a pain so huge and so deep, it feels as though it will never end. And yet the sadness was focused not on one particular issue but on all of them at once.” A psilocybin experience beckons the brave explorer looking for a way out of their personal affliction to swim in the ocean of “great sadness” so that they may step out of the grief related to their specific personal tragedy and feel the full weight of all the sorrows they have ever experienced in their lives, and better yet, the tragedy, pain and sorrow that is woven into the fabric of life and reality.
In grief we experience our pain alone, but a psilocybin experience gives us the chance to see the silver lining – that when it comes to losing and letting go, we are all in it together. By becoming aware of the universality of grief, we may be able to truly accept, let go of some of the pain, and find a different way of living.
By Michele Koh Morollo, NUMEN NoSC Therapies
Comments