Psychedelics: Not a Magic Bullet
I have been training and working in the psychedelic-assisted therapy field for several years now, and it has been a magical, complicated, invigorating, and at times painful experience. I have facilitated journeys full of awe and healing, all the things you’ve read about in Michael Pollan's book, the articles, and the documentaries, and I have witnessed clients leave journeys feeling confused, disappointed, or more lost than when they arrived.
I have also been on the other side of it, as the person in the experience rather than the one providing a safe, stable, and compassionate container so that the person is able to navigate their own internal process.
My own journeys have been some of the most powerful experiences of my life, and that is part of why I care so much about how this field talks about itself.
I am grateful that this field is growing and that, for the most part, people are trying to do right by the “medicine” and the traditions we are borrowing from. But I am also troubled by the cultural appetite for fast fixes and the promises that leave people feeling more broken than before.
Psychedelics are not a magic bullet. You will not go into a journey and come out a healed version of yourself. Your difficult coping patterns will still be there. You will still get triggered, still get annoyed, still have moments of judgment and disconnection. What I wish for, what I keep coming back to, is a different way of framing what psychedelics actually offer.
First, let’s go through the challenges that come with psychedelic work.
The investment
As of now, going through the entire process of a therapeutic psychedelic journey costs thousands of dollars out of pocket with no insurance coverage. That is a hefty investment. Outside of not being accessible to most people, which is a serious problem, even for those able to make that investment in their mental health, it is a large sum of money, and it puts a lot of pressure on the journey to be “successful.” It helps to separate the money spent from the experience itself, so you can take it in and process it for exactly what it was. I name this with people directly, before we are anywhere near a journey, because saying it out loud takes the performance off the table. You do not owe your money a breakthrough. Once that pressure is set down, there is room for the honest result to arrive on its own timeline.
The afterglow
Most clients experience the “afterglow” for a few weeks after a journey, when things feel easier, the usual defenses quiet down, and they feel less triggered and more grounded in themselves. When this inevitably starts to fade, clients often feel as though they have failed. What is important to know before doing a journey is that the glow was just a preview, a felt sense of what their own system is capable of, and the work is learning to build toward that state without the medicine holding the door open. The dip is not a failure but usually where integration begins.
Suggestibility
Part of what makes psychedelics so successful is how open our neural networks are after taking the medicine. It leaves room to rewire our pathways and allows for relearning, which is very challenging for adults. These states make people porous, more willing to revise beliefs they have held for decades, more receptive to whatever the facilitator and the surrounding culture hand them. The downside shows up when psychedelics are used outside a proper container or with an untrained therapist.
With that in mind, let’s talk about everything they can offer and the “magic” I have seen, both in my own journeys and in the ones I have sat for as a guide.
Psychedelics are an invitation to lay all of your “stuff” out on the table. To connect to emotions, sensations, or memories that were previously out of reach. To visit places that felt too frightening or too buried under years of protection. To meet your defenses up close, to get to know them, even negotiate with them a little (and sometimes even feel frustrated that they are more present and insistent than usual). To connect to something bigger than yourself. To reframe and process past events in a different way that allows you to let go of some shame. Psychedelics allow you to have a consultation with your own unconscious. They offer a dispatch from the parts of you that don’t get airtime in ordinary life.
If you’re sitting with a journey that let you down, a quiet or confusing experience isn't a failure. The fading afterglow is normal and not an indicator of whether the medicine did its job. Coming down means you’re back in ordinary life, which is where integration actually takes place. Plenty of lasting change traces back to journeys that felt underwhelming in the moment and only came together later, in some unremarkable week that had nothing obvious to do with the medicine. If you’re stuck on what a journey was supposed to give you, and it didn’t, that’s worth bringing to an integration session rather than turning it over on your own.
The journeys that move people are often unglamorous. The session where someone mostly cried and felt their feet. The one where “nothing happened” and the shift surfaced three weeks later on an ordinary Tuesday, in a normal talk-therapy hour. If you have sat for enough journeys, you have watched someone have the full cosmic experience and change nothing, and someone else have a quiet, almost boring session and reorganize their life. Integration is therapy, slow and repetitive, the same relational and somatic work you already do, now with more raw material on the table. The same is true of the oldest, deepest wounds: reaching one while under the medicine does not mean it is healed. What you made contact with still needs the long, patient work afterward. The medicine can open a door. The integration afterward is often where the magic and sustained change happen.
Years ago, a client came in expecting to leave their body. They had read the accounts everyone reads, the ones about dissolving into light and meeting something vast. What happened instead was that they landed. They had lived with chronic pain for years, and for the length of the session, they experienced their body without it. No bracing, no intensity, none of the low-level negotiation they were used to having with themselves. Afterward, they told me, “I felt good in my body for the first time in years.”
During the journey, they felt disappointed. As they were going in and out of this “world,” they kept asking me, “Did I take enough?” “Is it working?” “Am I doing it wrong?” I gently repeated that they were not doing anything wrong. That the best thing they could do was try to focus on their breath. As they started to come down, they began connecting to their experience, sooner than most clients do.
As we sat with the disappointment, it began to morph into something different. They began describing what they had been given. Their body had shown them that calm was available. That was new information for someone whose body had mostly been the place where pain happened. They could go back to it, and they did, deliberately, in the weeks that followed, whenever they needed the reminder. What they came to was that everything was going to be okay.
None of this is meant to lower anyone’s expectations. The picture people arrive with is usually borrowed from someone else’s session, and comparing yours to it can cost you the first few weeks of noticing what you actually received.
The part of psychedelic journeys that tends to do the most for people is also the easiest to overlook, because it doesn’t look like much from the outside. It’s being accompanied: having someone in the room who is tracking your nervous system, who can stay with you through whatever surfaces without stepping in to manage or fix it. That kind of attuned presence is its own form of medicine, and it’s the same ingredient that makes attachment and somatic work effective. In a group journey where I was the one journeying, not sitting for anyone, the person lying next to me was having an intense, vocal experience with several facilitators gathered around them. Something in me that has never wanted to take up too much space or need too much kept me tethered to the physical world and unable to let go. I was getting frustrated, confused, and angry, and a hurt, younger part of me kept insisting that none of the facilitators had noticed I was struggling, that I would just have to ride this one out and accept that I wasn’t going to get the experience I’d hoped for. Eventually, one of them crouched down and asked if I was okay. “I’m fine,” I said. I still laugh at that. What she did next changed the whole journey. Instead of drawing me into conversation, she sat down beside me, quietly patient and kind, asking nothing of me. After a few minutes, she began working the pressure points on my feet. Something about being witnessed and cared for, with no expectations, allowed my system to fully let go, and I had one of the most beautiful and transformative journeys I’ve ever had.
The version of psychedelics that shows up in most marketing is about resetting or rewiring the brain, and I understand the appeal of a clean chemical shortcut. What I see in the room is more relational than that. The medicine can soften the guard and bring something to the surface, and from there it’s the person sitting with you, attuned and steady, who helps you meet it and make sense of it afterward. That’s part of why I put most of the weight on preparation and integration, not the journey itself. Of course, there is rewiring that happens, but I often find that those new pathways form through the relational, repetitive process.
One practice I return to with every client: before a journey, I ask them to write down all of their hopes and unspoken goals, the rational ones and the less rational ones. Getting those expectations on paper creates a little freedom from them. The medicine has a way of showing us what we need rather than what we want. We may arrive hoping to release control; our defenses may have a plan of their own.
Months later, a client and I will sometimes read back through what they wrote, and the thing they were reaching for has usually arrived, just not in the shape they pictured, and rarely on the day itself. That is the part the accounts leave out. The journey is one afternoon. What makes it hold happens in the ordinary weeks around it, with someone paying attention beside you.
