It Transformed My Life In Ways I Never Expected.
“I’ll move to the Azores if you want,” I said to my wife, Samantha, after a conflict with an extended family member, who blamed me for something they’d done. It wasn’t really an offer; it was a threat, and one I’d used before. The Portuguese islands where my ancestors came from had become my go-to escape fantasy whenever things got tough.
This was my default setting: fleeing when fighting didn’t achieve the desired result. I’d been doing it my whole life, and despite a decade of marriage to the love of my life, I couldn’t stop myself when I felt cornered.
One time, during a particularly intense argument early in our marriage, I ran out of the house, raced around the block, snuck back in, and hid away in a remote bedroom.
On the surface, I was living what anyone would call a charmed life: successful career, published author, six wonderful kids between us (three mine, three hers). But inside, a constant voice whispered, You’re not enough. You destroy everything you love. Run before you get hurt.
This voice had grown louder with the recent family crisis, which called into question my place in the family and soon spiraled into something far deeper. What might have seemed like a simple family squabble cut to my core, challenging my legitimacy, and awakening every childhood fear I had about being unwanted, being an interloper, and being somehow fundamentally wrong
The message felt clear: No matter what I did, I would always be an outsider.
It was an all-too-familiar voice that had been with me since childhood. Born to young parents, including a 20-year-old father with his own unresolved trauma who’d had to put his pioneering career in computer engineering on hold when I arrived, I grew up feeling like an unwanted disruption. Then, a day after my 16th birthday, my father nearly killed me in an alcoholic rage, an incident I’d spent decades minimizing, telling myself, Oh, I dealt with that long ago.
Here’s the thing: I hadn’t dealt with it — with any of it. And now, the quarrel with my wife’s family was reopening all those old wounds, threatening the peaceful life Samantha and I had built together. Deep inside, I knew the family conflict was rooted in complex dynamics based on false narratives and assumptions. In fact, I’d often deployed a similar strategy throughout my life: Blame someone else and you don’t have to take responsibility.
Approaching my 60th birthday, I’d been feeling apprehensive and anxious for much of the year leading up to this milestone. It felt increasingly like walls were closing in on me and a dark cloud was hanging over my head. The combination of old and new wounds exacerbated my feelings of anxiety.
That’s when Samantha made an unexpected suggestion.
“How would you like to go on a guided magic mushroom journey for your 60th birthday?” she asked. “I think it could be helpful for you.”
We’d recently hiked with an older fellow who’d done it; he recounted meeting all the dogs he’d ever had in his life during his journey. (“Sign me up for that,” I said.) It turned out his daughter was a highly trained psychedelic guide who had been leading such therapeutic journeys for several years. We reached out to her to discuss how it works.
While I’d experimented with psychedelics as a teenager, I hadn’t touched any drugs (besides caffeine and alcohol) since my oldest son’s birth almost 30 years ago. But this would be different, a carefully guided therapeutic experience with trained professionals.
Reading up on the subject, I learned about contemporary psychological studies suggesting deeply rooted trauma can be neurologically rewired and research indicating psilocybin — the psychoactive chemical compound found in some mushrooms — may temporarily dissolve the brain’s default mode network, the neurological pattern responsible for our most ingrained thought loops and self-narratives. I was desperate for such transformation.
We met the guide, I’ll call her S, over coffee, a young woman with a spiritual air — an aura, one might say — and a gentle, caring approach to how she described her work. She explained her own story and how “plant medicines,” as she called them, changed her life, soothing a lifelong struggle with crippling anxiety and the sense of emptiness she had felt for years.
After that initial meeting, S and I agreed to meet for a therapy session via Zoom, along with her colleague, M, who was trained in family systems therapy. Together, they would guide me on my journey. A rigorous questionnaire followed, including detailed medical and mental health history, and I had another therapy session over Zoom. Then we set a date for the journey itself.
In those therapy sessions, we examined the issues I was facing, and M led me through a somatic exercise to identify where the trauma was showing up in my body. I’d been struggling for a while with pain at the base of my neck, between my shoulder blades, and, sure enough, when M asked me to close my eyes and try to locate the trauma, that’s where I felt it the most.
S also asked me to think about an intention heading into the journey. What did I want to accomplish or focus on? What did I intend to heal?
After careful thought, I decided to go back to heal my childhood trauma — from the feeling of neglect as a young child to the verbal and often physical abuse I’d suffered at the hands of my alcoholic father. And, more specifically, to assuage my unresolved pain over that brutal encounter with him when I was 16.
For the journey itself, I brought along photos of myself at 18 months and as a teenager, which we placed on a makeshift altar, to contribute to the setting, and conjure those former selves so I could heal them.
In my intentions, I wrote about wanting “to heal those parts of myself that had been wounded by others, whether by neglect, betrayal, or abuse,” to reconcile them, and “lift them up and bring them into my heart and forgive them for the wounds they carried all these years.” It was a tall order.
While I felt safe and comfortable with the guides who would sit with me during the entire session, I did have one concern: Were my expectations (and Samantha’s) too high? What if I failed? What if the mushrooms didn’t have any effect and I just drifted along only to return unchanged, untransformed, back to my old self?
On the day of the journey, I found myself in a secluded retreat nestled in the quiet mountains of the Northeast, far from the hustle of daily life. The air was crisp, the snow-covered landscape with gentle rolling hills in the distance offered a serene, almost timeless atmosphere. It felt like a place where nature’s stillness could foster inward reflection, a hidden haven that seemed designed for deep introspection. My two guides were there with me, leading me through the experience. It seemed like a place meant for moments like these.
We performed a ritual, including a sage smudge and a tarot card pull. Then we reviewed my intentions, and S prepared the first dose of the medicine, grinding the dried mushrooms and mixing the powder into hot cocoa, which made them more palatable and easier to digest. I drank from the cup until there was nothing left. Then, I sat down on the floor and talked a bit about the significance of the day for me, and how I was feeling.
About 20 minutes after drinking the mushroom-cocoa mixture, I started to feel the psilocybin kick in. A pleasant feeling overcame me, like being a little tipsy, but not cognitively impaired. My vision became sharper; I noticed even the tiniest detail in the wooden beams and window frames of the room.
I decided to lie down on the mattress that had been placed in the center of the room. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, and I could see birds in the sky through the large picture window overlooking a meadow and a snow-covered mountain.
A few minutes after settling in, S asked if I wanted to put on an eye mask, which would facilitate the inward focus of the journey. She also offered headphones and put on a playlist of music designed for journeys like this.
While my intention had been simple — to heal the part of myself that believed I was fundamentally broken — the mushrooms had other plans.
I was thrust into a vision of 16th-century Portugal, watching my 12th great-grandmother tied to a stake in Lisbon, betrayed to the Inquisition by her own 19-year-old son. It was like the most vivid dream I’d ever experienced, and I witnessed the scene before me through my eyes. I was able to move, as if I were truly there, and walked toward the woman and put my arms around her, offering the forgiveness she never received in life.
Suddenly, she rose into the sky and evaporated. Then I looked down to find myself in her place as the flames began to rise.
Instead of fighting the fire, I surrendered to it. As the flames consumed me, they seemed to burn away layers of accumulated pain — not just my own, but generations of it. Her teenage son appeared too, sobbing at my feet, and I found myself forgiving him as well. Something profound was happening, not just personal healing but what S later called “quantum healing” across time.
I was slightly disappointed at first: This was supposed to be about me! Who are these people to me and why do I have to be the one to soothe their souls and set them free? I’d known about this bit of family history from my research I’d done four years earlier when I read the transcripts of her trial, and I’d even been to the square in Lisbon where this burning happened. But I hadn’t thought about her or her trauma for years — and certainly not when I set out on this journey; it was the furthest thing from my mind.
Although this was the most profound aspect of the experience, there were other memorable parts of the journey. At strategic points during the session, between doses of the mushroom mixture, my guides checked in with me, asking what I was experiencing. S took notes, writing down my answers to their inquiries. At one point, I told her my body disappeared; another time, I felt like I was floating in the room.
My auditory sense was heightened to such a degree I could hear every nuance of every note of the music playing through the headphones, and sometimes in extreme detail: the sound of fingers on a keyboard as keys were being depressed; the scratchy, waxy vibration of a bow on a violin string. At one point, I anticipated the music, as if I were writing it before it was performed. (I later learned this was merely a syncing issue between the playback in my headphones and the computer speakers in the room!)
Then I heard a snippet of Portuguese being spoken in one of the songs on the playlist. It was an announcement from an airplane, a flight attendant instructing passengers to adjust their own oxygen mask before that of a child or seatmate. I laughed aloud. One of the guides asked what I found so funny, and I said, “I can’t escape it … it’s Portuguese … that was Portuguese!” S had no idea; it just happened to be on the playlist. (It turned out to be a song by a band called Arms & Sleepers; when I wrote later to ask the composer about it, he said he’d recorded it on a TAP Air flight from Lisbon in 2020.)
All told, the session lasted about eight hours, and when I started to come out of the journey, my guides began to ask more questions. We were beginning what is called integration — trying to make sense of aspects of the journey and to understand what transpired and what it meant to me.
The guides undertook this part of their practice with curiosity, seriousness and care. S prepared a light dinner of chicken soup and a salad while we talked, and M led me through another somatic exercise, instructing me to locate any part of my body that felt changed from the experience. The tension in my neck and shoulders was gone.
Through their questions, I began to piece together what I had felt. While my initial reaction had been frustration over how the journey wasn’t as much about me as I’d hoped — or not as much focused on me as I’d intended — in conversation with my guides, I concluded, or perhaps the mushrooms showed me, the trauma of my distant relatives was indeed related to mine.
Betrayal, duplicity, hurt; resolve, forgiveness, release. It was all related and now it was as if my being burned at the stake had scorched off all the trauma associated with the betrayals — my ancestors’, my childhood’s, what I had recently experienced with my wife’s family, and even my own betrayal of others over the years.
When I returned home the next day, Samantha noticed the change in me immediately.
“You seem more present,” she said. “More grounded.”
She was right. The constant mental escape routes I’d maintained throughout my life had mysteriously closed, replaced by a newfound ability to stay present in difficult moments, and to not get attached to the pain.
My obsessive behavior also began falling away. I stopped compulsively checking door locks and stove burners before traveling. I started sleeping through the night instead of lying awake with anxious, ruminating thought loops. When disappointments occurred, I managed them with unexpected grace.
The real test came three months later at a family function where I had to face the person who’d triggered my recent crisis. Instead of attacking or running away — my usual fight-or-flight responses — I calmly set boundaries. Rather than being self-righteous, I embraced a quiet, unshakable presence allowing compassion to flow, especially compassion for myself. I’d found forgiveness, but also the strength to protect myself from toxic relationships.
It’s been a little over a year since that first journey. I’ve done a few more sessions since then, what I think of as “maintenance doses,” each one bringing new insights and, surprisingly, some of the most profound experiences of unconditional love — for others and, finally, for myself — that I’ve ever known.
Now, my experience may be an anomaly. Not everyone will have such a profound journey the first time. I may be predisposed to allowing the mushrooms to get through to me. But — and this is an important aspect — through daily integration of the experience, talking about it with friends and family, journaling about it, meditating on it, and even the act of writing about it in this essay, what I learned from the mushrooms sticks with me. It wasn’t just a one-and-done experience; as with everything, this is ongoing work.
And I’m not suggesting psychedelic-assisted therapy is a miracle cure. In fact, although studies have shown it to be transformative for many people, especially those with psychiatric symptoms, it may not be for everyone. Readers should consult with a medical professional before seeking out this type of therapy. While decriminalization of psilocybin and other psychedelics is underway in a number of states and municipalities, possession, sale and use are still illegal under U.S. federal law, so you should proceed with caution.
For me at 60, however, psilocybin gave me something I never expected: a chance to rewrite my inner narrative. The critical voice dominating my consciousness for six decades has fundamentally changed. I occasionally still hear it, but now it doesn’t get to me. When I notice the voice, I point to it and say, “Nope, not today.” I can acknowledge pain without being consumed by it. Most importantly, I’ve stopped threatening to run away when things get hard.
Just last week, Samantha and I had a disagreement about something minor. Instead of immediately planning my escape to the Azores, I stayed present. We worked it out. And later, when she asked if I was OK, I realized I was more than OK: I was finally, fully home.
Scott Edward Anderson is the award-winning author of six books, including “Dwelling: An Ecopoem” and “Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances.” Anderson writes on environmental issues, personal growth and culture. His recent explorations into psychedelic-assisted therapy have positioned him as a thoughtful voice in the dialogue about innovative mental health treatments. Learn more about him at scottedwardanderson.com or follow @greenskeptic on various social media platforms.
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