Bad trip - PTSD - Remedy: another trip?

[sidereal]

Hi all, I'm new here and with your indulgences I'm keen to get your opinions on a strange little situation which has grown from the seeds of a bad mushroom trip i had about 2 months ago!

I approached it all wrong from the begining. Took what was handed to me without knowing the potency. Relied on amounts taken on past use. I ate about 5 or 6 (don't even know what type!). Little did i know the folks handing them out were planning to make tea with them which i understand relieves some of the potency.

Anyhow I left that place with a friend to return to my own abode. We began watching Live in Pompeii by Pink Floyd and smoked some weed, which I think set things off. I'd never smoked weed in the height of a trip - always coming down. Suddenly an image (ancient italian frescos displayed on screen) suddenly began eminating out from the television to engulf the entire room. I decided to retreat next door to the kitchen to get a glass of water. It shifted gears on my again and I couldn't handle the sensory information which felt like it was 'coming at me'. The room, walls, geometric layout of the room ceased to have any meaning for me. I sat on the floor and groaned in dispair.

After a moment I managed to get up and stumbled back into the living room and asked my good friend to turn off Floyd. That didn't help as the informertial that replaced Floyd seemed all wrong aswell. I demanded that the TV be switched off. After this it gets hazy, I remember telling my friend my head hurt like hell, like it was being pumelled. I was on the floor coming in and out of consciousness with my friend sitting in front of me, alarmed, clicking his fingers trying to get m e to stay with him. I demanded that he call an ambulance as i thought my mind was breaking and somehow reasoned that I needed some drug to counter the effects of the one I was immanently suffereing from before it was too late. I think I experienced a common anxiety attack - my first ever, so I attributed it to the Psilocybin.

Was taken to hospital, got trapped in a loop in the ER room and thought reality was repeating every 20 minutes or so, when it was probably just the nurses repeating a routine. I wasn't 100 per cent sure why I was even in hospital after I got there and at one point even suspected that I was dreaming with this feedback loop, that i could hear voices of friends and relatives who were probably standing around the bed trying to get me to 'wake up'! haha! ahhh.

Anyway it slowly wore off. The nurses and doctors really didn't know how to deal with me which made it slightly worse. "what effects are you experiencing - isn't that why people take the drug" etc etc. I should have stayed at home and faced it, managed it. Again - a lack of preparation I think, and respect, for what can happen. All my other psychedelic experiences had been great (a few LSD trips, a couple of mushroom trips).

Aftermath: About a week later I experienced my second ever full blown anxiety attack in a university computer lab after a strong coffee and feelings that 'that bright red couch over there looks really fibrant, like i'm having a flashback'. About another week later I began to develop anxious reactions to some types of artificial light - esp tail lights and this sometimes made me feel like I had done damage to my brain. Lights subjectively look too bright and even menacing. Some other lights seem like this too. No more full blown panic attacks as I quikcly learned to understand anxiety and deal with it via breathing. None have felt like coming on for a month or so now. but some lights, esp car tail lights, still look menacing, and I would rather this feeling not be there in my life. Its not effecting my practical life really, from the view point of someone else monitoring me.

This could me mild HPPD, but rather I think I had/have a very mild case of Post Traumatic Stress disorder. I have always associated lights with my trips, and I have always loved neon lights, carnival lights etc, and monitored them on trips keenly, so I think my brain has paired lights with trips with anxiety, in the typical format of PTSD, like, for example, someone who was abused as a child on green carpet might never be able to look at the colour green without axiety. It also fluctuates with my mood, if i'm feeling more anxious and unnearved lights look 'worse'. I think my mind is oversensitive for misplaced survival reaons for signs of being 'in that state' again, and if it beleives it is, then it begins an axiety reponse. A natural survival mechanism to a perceived threat. Hence i fixate on lights and even think they're brighter than they are. Either that or its HDDP which has been reported to itself caused anxiety... but if i remember back to the week in between the bad trip and the onset of my anxiety, i can't remember being overly sensitive to lights. So this makes me think its PTSD. I gave in and reinforced the beleif in my mind that I wsa going through something truamatic on that fateful night when I could have ridden it through. being taken in an ambulance to a hospital tripping was pretty messed up in intself, aside from the mental war with my own brain on psilocybin.

Anyway, to finally get to the point (sorry). Do you think it would be beneficial for me to have a well measured, light, psychedelic experience to come to terms with my mind? Or should i avoid this realm of life and, if i think its an issue, seek cognitive behavioural therapy or something?

Has anyone heard or experienced any reoccuring negative mental states after a trip (related to anxiety, idealy, but anything) and then remedied them with another, healing trip?

Thanks you.

 

[IJesusChrist]

Well, to start off my response, you are doing alot better than I was! I had my first anxiety trip while on some good THC. I didn't actually have anxiety - but I was "displaced" in reality and didn't really know how to deal with it. About 2 weeks later I did mushrooms for the first time, all hell broke loose and my reality was destroyed for quite some time.

What you are experiencing is PTSD, which just means you had a traumatic experience. Do not immidiately label it as damage, you have not damaged/destroyed/killed any cells in your brain. You did nothing BAD to yourself, both objectively or subjectively. You CHANGED your brain. You now have some wires in your brain that are STRONGLY (possibly some of the most connected neurons) connected to that trip, whether it be Floyd, Hospitals, or tracing lights...

Your brain has automatically assigned these connections with anxious feelings - since you were anxious at the time. Some people say you will be able to "heal yourself" and realize what you were seeing was the wrong perception - I believe that is only half the battle at best.

It's been about 4 years since my trip (I think?) and it has been a battle - I'm never going to change back to who I was before the trip, and at first this can be very discomforting. You can realize what you saw was actually nothing to be anxious about, but this will not change your anxiety to the subject, only your logic. Anxiety is not logical; it is instinctual and you will be apt to have anxiety for some time now. (If you are like me!).

This is not damage - this is how our brains were made. When we have a scary situation, we are programmed to stay away from it, if it ever occurs again - i.e. "flashbacks". The thing is a bad trip usually has little to no logic - so these anxieties may trigger at random times.

The real key here is to build yourself a new hill, a new home (a new set of neurons) that pertain to psilocybin. I would suggest not trying this for atleast 6 months. Rather, attempt meditation, attempt confronting your "flashbacks" with soberiety. Once you realize what you were really fearing that night, you will have some relief - but like I said, that is half the battle. The other half is creating a new home for your psychodelic self, a new bliss.

 

[ophiuchus]

i believe what IJC has mentioned about neurons is SPOT ON. this experience(mushrooms) amplified your subjective experience of the environment you were in and things you experienced. now i dont claim to know what made things go sour for you, as that's something you'll have to take some time to figure out for yourself... but he is right, you will have to take those strong connections that were formed that night, and try to make them subjectively positive to you again. psilocybin is a fantastic TOOL in helping to do this, however, it is not a "cure". think of it more like a magnifying glass. once you can kind of ease up a little bit on the anxious feelings that you get in those specific settings that cause you the anxiety, and feel comfortable and at ease, THEN, it might be a good idea to try and experiment a little more. but yes, for now, i think not taking any at all for a while, or at least sticking to lower doses if you must is a good idea, at least till you can feel like you love the experience again, or at least be neutral in those anxiety inducing settings

 

[ophiuchus]

is your outlook on life still a positive one, or was it before? this can be a good measure of how much subjective "damage" (for lack of a better word) that you have done. if you feel positively about life then your road will be considerably easier, however even if you dont, hope is definitely not lost at all. it's all about persistence.

 

[IJesusChrist]

Right, good question - how are you emotionally right now. My experience was very depressing - I was not looking forward to living on this earth for very much longer after my experience (this was just ignorance and immaturity at their worst). Is your outlook on daily routines affected emotionally from the trip? Or is it simply odd things such as 'tracers' and situations?

This isn't an easy thing to solve - I'll be honest - but when you do you are an immensely stronger individual because of it.

You may also not be taking this as seriously as I did at the time - I was way too critical and a bit too emotional in my mindset to tackle my situation effectively and efficiently at the time. I had alot of 1 step forward 2 steps back in my healing process, I think this website is a great resource in order to avoid those. So please, ask questions - let us know where your head & mind are at in all of this.

 

[sidereal]

Thanks for your replies and consideration gentlemen.

My outlook is fairsly positive, I think. Some days i have felt perhaps slightly depressed, energetically/mentally... This could be linked with anxiety, something going on with serotonin. But its hard to say if there is any general difference before vs after. Still monitoring this. Working hard in a band and at a masters degree which hasn't seemed to go down hill. I think i'm very good at rationally working through this, if i wasn't it would have been a lot worse I think. A philosophy degree and a bit of knowledge of cognitive science has helped (but in some respects i think this contributed to wild thoughts while on my bad trip... paranoid thoughts about different sorts of brain malfunction!). A friend of a friend had some sort of a bad trip and couln't bring himself to look other people in the fact for three whole years, so its no where near as bad as that. It got better after the first month and now I think it is sitting at a roughly steady level now, fluxtuating with the general mood i'm in on a particular day. Again, still monitoring.

I don't know whether i should try and stop attributing significance to things like red tail lights when driving, try to ignore it and re train, or confront such perceptual discomforts by focusing on them and telling myself nothing is threatening. I worry i will become fixated on the problem if I take the later approach all the time.

What was/is your anxiety linked to IJesusChrist? Your story sounds very applicable, its good that you have managed it.

 

[Shamanomenon]

First of all, I don't believe in bad trips. I know that people have them, but my argument is that they are not caused by the trip, but rather by your conscious mind's inability to process/accept what it saw. Having a healthy mental makeup is all about your ability to be open-minded and cope. That's all life really is.

So, in a sense, having a bad trip is really nothing more than a call from your mind telling you to learn to cope with things, because you'll be much happier in the long run for life in general if you can.

You have to remember that psychedelics are a mind-altering substance. Our entire realities are based on the view-point from a conscious mind. Subconsciously, we process far more through our senses than what our conscious minds are aware. Most of this sensory input is filtered out, because it's not immediately necessary for our survival in that moment. When you take psychedelics, you are essentially entering a dissociative state that can access all of this raw sensory information. You see things that your conscious mind just isn't prepared to handle.

Essentially, you are introducing your conscious mind to a new reality. Only, it's not new, because deep in the recesses of your subconscious mind, these things we're already known. You're basically just bridging the gap between your two minds and creating a single mind that slowly learns to integrate both realities into one. This is typically referred to as your Third Eye. The thing is, once your conscious mind becomes aware of this separate reality, it will naturally want to know more about it. This is why I believe flashbacks occur. A flashback isn't caused by some misfiring neuron or due to brain damage, it's caused because some sensory input triggers the memory of this separate reality during a waking, conscious, sober state, and suddenly your mind is crunching away trying to decipher which reality it is in.

In and of itself, this is a wholly natural process that eventually breaks down the two separate realities and forms a single, cohesive reality in the brain.

 

[sidereal]

Shamanomenon,

Can you be more specific, perhaps apply what your saying to my case? Are you saying that subconsciously I was scared of lights, for some strange subliminal reason, all along, and that now my consciousness is simply aware of this fear??

"having a bad trip is really nothing more than a call from your mind telling you to learn to cope with things": I could cope with lights just fine before my 'bad trip'. Its now that I can't, after. Do you know about classical conditioning (i.e. Pavlov's dog) and PTSD? I had a terrible experience while under the influence of a psyhoactive substance and now my brain is paranoid about detecting stimuli which might indicate to it that its in a similar 'threatening' situation so it can get me out of 'danger'.

Of course bad trips are caused by the inability to process/accept what sees, which creates the terrible experience. Whether this is caused by something as meaningful as the conscious mind experiencing subconscious recesses, or simply nuerons misfiring to create abnormal experience, is a very complex scientific point I imagine.

 

[Shamanomenon]

My apologies, I was just trying to give a general explanation of how I see the whole process effecting the brain and the merging of the two realities.

The truth is, I've had trips like the one you've described, where you feel like you're being bombarded with sensory overload. Hell, you watch TV while tripping and you'll see all kinds of crazy stuff. However, I didn't see it as a bad trip, nor did it make me particularly anxious. You have to go into every trip with the belief that it is allowing you to explore things about yourself and the world that otherwise you would never have access to. The sensory overload trips for me we're just a call to a more simpler lifestyle. The world in a conscious, sober state is full of sensory overload. There's so much noise in the world... Advertisements are everywhere trying to sell us crap. TV is vastly useless. Radio and Internet and what have you. You have to deal with the stresses of work and family, etc... The fact is that most people's minds don't get a chance to rest, because they are constantly being bombarded with sensory overload. On top of that we have poor diets and exercise, we don't get enough rest and we're all depressed and anxious because they're trying to turn us into robots. lol. But see, I realized that this is true for me due to my sensory overload trip and I have been trying to cut down on all of those things and just spend more time in quite and nature.

I don't know if you've ever used DXM, but I would recommend doing some research on it at Erowid or Lycaeum. I prefer natural psychedelics, but in this case, DXM is easily attainable and since it's pharmaceutical, potency is always consistent. You can see what dosages to take and the effects for each range, so you can research it and know what to expect.
Also, I know some people argue against tripping alone... But I have to admit that the most beneficial trips I've ever had were when I tripped alone in my bedroom, lying on the floor in complete darkness. Close your eyes, eliminate the stimuli and just trip off into your own mind.

 

[ophiuchus]

I don't know whether i should try and stop attributing significance to things like red tail lights when driving, try to ignore it and re train, or confront such perceptual discomforts by focusing on them and telling myself nothing is threatening. I worry i will become fixated on the problem if I take the later approach all the time.

you must systematically do all of those, and throughout repetition, and much persistence you can make the feeling subside. there is a mantra that is done in some buddhist meditations that goes something to the effect of, " see the (negative issues). let them come/be. and then let them go/ release them." now the wording is more eloquent. but it's the concept that is important and should be applied. that's generally repeated as many times as necessary until one can manage to reach a state of relaxedness, or until the meditation is over. maybe you should try to meditate on your problems

 

[IJesusChrist]

A friend of a friend had some sort of a bad trip and couln't bring himself to look other people in the face* for three whole years,

Are you a friend of my friend? That's where I was... Still I find eye contact overwhelming on some nights.

More on this later - I get internet tommorrow finally so I will contribute more in coming days

 

[IJesusChrist]

Hey man, so I have internet now and I'll give you my 3 cents;

Stop analyzing yourself. I know you won't be able to but no matter what your knowledge is of neurochemistry or neurology your psychology doesn't change upon a greater access of knowledge in the subject... You may find yourself more intelligent and more confident in how you handle yourself, but this is not going to change your genetic make-up in your neurochemistry.

The reason you had a "bad" trip was undoubtedly (to me) due to the fact of your genetic make up, and basically your entire nurturing through life up to that point, or atleast your adolescent stages were extremely important to what is now you, and what has caused this extreme anxiety & paranoia.

You're going to have to accept the fact that you had a very debilitating psychological event. This is not neurological, i.e. you have not depleted your serotonin levels, your dopamine levels, or any type of other physical damage, we clear on that? Doesn't matter, because you'll figure this out eventually.

Actually this might have confused you, what I'm saying is why you had this occur is neurological, or atleast so deep within who you are and how you are raised it is almost genetic. However, the event itself and its outcomes are purely psychological.

The worst thing you can do in this situation is over analyze what has happened. I've said this before and I'll say it again because I believe it is extremely important in your and my case:

"The bad trip isn't what makes you go crazy, it's the not knowing that will."

I don't literally mean crazy, but the real reason this is going to bug the fucking hell out of you is because you don't know what happened, and you never will.

so, I know you won't just "let it go" because you really can't - your brain and mind are going to analyze this to a dust, but in the end, you have to take some kind of comfort in not knowing.

I hope this helps, because if I had heard this a week after my bad trip, it may have been a few weeks before baseline, rather than a couple years...

 

[empower]

This thread has me close to tears! It's so relieving to read that my experience was not and is not so unusual.

I feel as though I have mild PTSD due to a bad mushroom trip in September of 2010. I've had 'bad' trips before that one but I would've taken any of those compared to the hell that I presented to myself in September. Right after the trip I was fairly traumatized and then my husband and I took a two month long hitchhiking trip where my mind was usually distracted by focusing on fulfilling my basic needs. However, since we've settled down into a more domesticated lifestyle, my mind has time to obsess over what happened, and my anxiety became unbearable at a point (now it has subsided significantly, but it's still there), I feel triggered throughout the day by my negative mental relationship with certain environments and things, night time being a MAJOR problem for me (the bad trip was at night), I find it almost impossible to look in a mirror or look at pictures of myself, it feels unfamiliar, scary, and "off" (I spent some time during the trip looking in the bathroom mirror, I was feeling my inner self as a child but my outer self was my mother at 40 and where my outer self truly lies was just lost in space), my nerves are jittery a lot of the time due to my high anxiety. It's a cycle because the stress of the bad memory causes me anxiety, the fact that I worry so much about the strength of the anxiety makes me depressed and more anxious.

I was never this way. I've had panic attacks for years (my first being triggered by THC :\) but I've never felt as hopeless as I can feel lately.

I've dealt with this for about two months and I hadn't found anything as soothing and assuring as this thread.
Thank you all. It is so important for those of us with these experiences to provide support for each other and I look forward to feeling stable enough to pass this advice along should someone approach me with the same issue.

 

[Schwanke668]

Well not entirely sure what to say on so many levels.

For myself I havent taken real mushrooms in years and when I did they were mixed with pretty much everything short of peyotte every other week so I couldnt tell you which trips were shrooms and which were something else so my knowledge is more from the general psychedelic then any particular inducer.

With that having been said. I never had a 'real bad' trip but I did have trips that altered me perminently and i feel that what might help you the most in dealing with the experiences is the meditation in terms of learning to allow this new altered state of mind to become a natural part of your psyche instead of trying to push it away or destroy it.

I like the buddhist mantra though I didnt know it existed until now. I figured out on my own the concept of dealing with thoughts by thinking "its just a thought". If your sitting in your chair and laying carefully and having thoughts then you can allow those thoughts to pass through you and simply 'be'. Both allow the thoughts to just 'be thoughts' and allow yourself to just 'be alive' and 'be human' and 'be at rest'. Not trying to control anything.

This I think allows you to get used to the new structuring of your psyche/mind and then as you get used to your mind being altered and the altered becomes the new norm then you can start processing individual thoughts again and figure out at a much more as you might put it Pavlovian level of stimuli and responses.

I think about what my mom said once from her sociology degrees. There is no such thing as 'normal people.' EVERYONE is different and what is normal to one person is not normal to others. At the same time there are healthy normals and unhealthy normals. An unhealthy normal is the guy that was abused as a child and then abuses his children because to him thats just how you raise kids. Or the woman who is constantly dating overbearing and dominating men because her father was overbearing and dominating and thats who she 'looked up to'.

Then again healthy normal is the person who helps the old lady across the street every time because thats just how their family did things.


What can happen though is a psychedelic experience I think can open the pathways to allowing yourself to see 'hey that normal is unhealthy' and it may do it in a violent jarring way. I cant know for sure and like IJC is saying you may never know and may have to accept that but for example it could have been that you had a supressed memory from childhood that was accessed and 'let loose' in your mind and now your having the woman in red syndrome where everytime you see red lights you are distracted by them even if the supressed memory had nothing to do with red lights but for example your psychedelic experience happend to be thinking about the memory while a red light or a car commericla or something flashed on the screen.

Lots of possiblities and psychedelic experiences can be like frog in a blender on a hot plate ala mode psychology for yourself and in a 'bad' trip who knows what you might have dug up that you now have to face but as again IJC you may never know.

IJC did help me deal with my issues in this area in the sense that for years I felt as if I was going insane because I was constantly having these experiences that seemed psychedelic but I wasnt on anything it definitely did NOT feel like flashbacks as I had had them for 3 years earlier.

What he showed me and it helped me to deal with it, a label if you will, was that my mind had slipped into a partially perminent pscyhedelic state that was akin to the lifting of the veil or maybe as mentioned in this thred the Third Eye opening and now I can constantly cognitively see the 'reality behind the reality' as I had described it years ago.

For me it was kind of like being trapped in Kurt Vonegets Slaughterhouse Five only now I like it there and I know how to either switch between the chapters or atleast survive until someone else turns the page!

Good luck and prayin for ya.

 

[sidereal]

However, since we've settled down into a more domesticated lifestyle, my mind has time to obsess over what happened, and my anxiety became unbearable at a point (now it has subsided significantly, but it's still there), I feel triggered throughout the day by my negative mental relationship with certain environments and things, night time being a MAJOR problem for me (the bad trip was at night), I find it almost impossible to look in a mirror or look at pictures of myself, it feels unfamiliar, scary, and "off" (I spent some time during the trip looking in the bathroom mirror, I was feeling my inner self as a child but my outer self was my mother at 40 and where my outer self truly lies was just lost in space), my nerves are jittery a lot of the time due to my high anxiety. It's a cycle because the stress of the bad memory causes me anxiety, the fact that I worry so much about the strength of the anxiety makes me depressed and more anxious.

empower, I am sorry to read about your situation. its been about 7 months since my experience i first posted about now, and i can honestly say things have gotten much better. Exactly as you say, the problem is one's 'negative mental relationship with certian environments and things'. Similiarly to you, I went away (but for only a week) shortly after my bad trip. The week was a blessed releif, for the most part, a distraction, but upon returning to the house the bad trip happened within, on THE VERY FIRST NIGHT, I had the worst reaction I've had in my whole experience with this thing. I felt like i'd lost it. Rooms were looking the wrong size, the colour green seemed to be far too overpredominent, and my nervious system become hypervigilant. I went straight to bed but I thought there were peoiple outside my window. this was not a flash-back. It was severe anxiety.

Anyway, I did two things which most helped me break the negative mental relationship with environments and things over a period of probably two or so months. My goal was to break the cycle of bad emotional reactions to certain stimuli. I had conditioned my brain to be scared of certain stimuli because i had a terrible experience around these stimuli. So the thing to do was to slowly be able to experience these things with less and less fear - to condition my ractions in the other direction. Only when i could experience these things with incrementally less and less fear did things get better. I hope this makes sense.

1. Exercise. This may seem redundant but I started doing 20-30 minutes of exercise (jogging, cycling) every day to generally improve my mental state. It did wonders for anxeity and depressed feelings. General anxiety levels came down so that I became less vigilant and obsessive with monitroing my environment for 'danger'. Thus i would experience the things (like car tail lights!, lights at night generally) that used to get me anxious without as much anxeity - thus teaching my brain that these things, in themselves, are not dangerous. After a while i could take a drive and not even notice car lights, which was a relief.

2. Councelling. I goto university, so i have free access to psychologists. I only had a few sessions but i learned some basic cognitive-behavioural-therapy skills to challenge where my thoughts were leading me. When you experience something that makes you frightened, an important part of that experience invovles thought. You have thoughts which are linked to emotions. These thoughts are often 'automatic', they have a 'life of their own'. My task was to become aware of what thoughts i was having during an experience, of say, lights at night, and to consciously challenge them. For example, i would get anxious about lights and then a causal chain of thoughts would automatically come. I would like i'm going crazy. I had to stop for a minute, acknowledge the thoughts, and challenge them on a rational ground. 'Am i going crazy or is this just a perfectly normal (albeit anxious) reaction to a situaiton in which my body feels itself under threat?' 'Am i really under threat or have i just conditioned my mind (from one traumatic experience on schrooms) to react this way'.
I was also feeling depression (anxiety can often lead into depression, this is a common route). I would sort of have 'empty' emotional responses to things that used to be meaininful, such as trees. Again the goal was to begin consciously (i.e. reflectively) changing thought patterns back to a healthier state. Even if i didn't feel an emotional warmth to the sight of some trees, for example, I would consciously make myself think 'its good that the trees are green and healthy, trees are good' or 'trees are a beatiful example of life' etc etc. it seems childish but who cares. its about conditioning your brain in the other direction again.

(3.) avoiding drugs. I have not had another trip, i'm not sure i ever will. If you feel worried in any significant way, then i would suggest don't do it. I would like to for closure, but i'm not a god and i have limits. I stopped smoking pot, for the most part, which helped my general mental health significantly. Weed, with some people, can be very very bad for axiety, depression. Weed can be the enemy.

I hope this helps, and good luck. Be aware that there is always help out there. PTSD is fairly common and every counceller deals with it, and will not judge you that it was caused by drugs. Cheers

 

[ophiuchus]