Why We Need Cheerleaders for Psychedelic Therapy

Picture this. You’re a magic mushroom guide and you’re on the phone with a potential client inquiring about psilocybin therapy. The client is kind, curious and he’s already cultivated a reverence for natural medicine. He’s found you because he’s suffering from treatment-resistant depression and a buddy of his recently took a monumental step away from his anxiety thanks to psilocybin therapy. 

You’re thinking to yourself that this is a great scenario. Here is a client who needs this therapy, and he just so happens to carry a condition that you know a ton about. Likewise, he’s not afraid to look inward and he’s serious about the therapy.  Fifteen minutes later, however, you let the client know that you can’t move forward and direct him to a ton of community resources and encourage him to send a note if his situation changes. 

Seems strange, right? The call was going so well. What the heck happened? Well, you got to the part about his support network, and that’s when the green flags started to flash a blinking red…

Support for Legal Guided Mushroom Therapy: Preparation

Before we talk about the importance of a support network before, during and after this therapy, let’s explore what support from a facilitator looks like. I spend about 20 hours with every client of mine. In addition to a screening call, we have 2 rigorous preparation sessions before the journey. During the journey, I’m actively supporting the client all day, and then we meet for two extensive integration sessions. While that is a lot of support, it’s simply not enough. Full stop.

As y’all know, psilocybin mushrooms are powerful medicine. They tend to undress our brains and help us grapple with buried or forgotten pain that may be causing a lot of our problems. They show us new ways to consider the universe that tend to contradict a more rigid conception of existence that the rest of the world shares. When we land back in our world after such an extraordinary experience, we need help adjusting. Beyond our facilitator helping us integrate, it’s nice to have someone we can talk to as we tiptoe around our old routines and look for ways to integrate our newfound insight. 

This potential client described above had no support network in place to help him prepare and integrate this therapy. He wanted to hide it from his wife and children who he lived with. He didn’t have a therapist nor a network of close friends he could confide in. That buddy with the anxiety? Turns out he met him in a bar and he doesn’t even have his number.

Support for Legal Guided Mushroom Therapy: Preparation

Broken record alert! Preparation requires discipline and deliberate acts of self care. Though our facilitators can insist we refine our intentions, lean into ritual as the journey date approaches, and practice dropping into the medicine, most of the hard work is on us. The ten days before a journey is a sacred time, and a solid support network and stable living situation is paramount. Imagine living among a group of people who didn’t know you were doing this medicine, and if they found out, they would immediately dismiss it. Not only would it make for some awkward conversation, but you’d be hesitant to really adopt ritual and nobody would be doing the little things to help accommodate your upcoming trip.

Now, imagine the utopian version. Our roommates, partners or family members know about our upcoming journey and support us unconditionally. They encourage our serious preparation, even going as far as cooking meals for us, and making sure we’re not disturbed as we practice dropping into the medicine. Imagine how good that feels as we show up at the center for a powerful journey, knowing that we’ll eventually return to a loving, warm environment. 

Support for Guided Psilocybin Therapy: The Journey Itself

The day of the journey is always a long, lovely and depleting experience. During the ceremony, we trust the container we’ve built with our facilitator and rely on that human to shepherd us through the trip. Once the session is over, we’ll go home in a cathartic yet exhausted state. The next few days are pure recovery days, and we really shouldn’t be doing much of anything at all.

If we don’t have an active support network, those 48 hours can be a little nerve-wracking. Ordering food or cooking might seem randomly difficult and our thoughts might be ricocheting around our minds and demanding an audience. We might be expected to perform our regular domestic duties, and if we’re hiding the experience from the people we live with, that can evoke a ton of negativity. Even though, we’re meeting our facilitator for integration the next day, those hours in between are not always easy. But, if we have someone to call, someone to bring us a snack or give us a hug, it’s so much easier to rest and center ourselves.

Support for Guided Mushroom Journeys: Integration

Maybe the people in our support network don’t know every little thing about us. Maybe we’ve shared more with our facilitator then we’ve shared with most of our friends. That’s absolutely fine, but integration shouldn’t be kept a secret. As we connect the dots of our journeys, we’ll not only want to bounce ideas off folks, but we’ll want help incorporating the insight into our daily routines.

If we’re hiding our magical journey from our closest humans and tackle integration without simple support and psychedelic cheerleaders on the sidelines, we’re less likely to make significant real progress. 

But What About that Potential Client?

I know, I know. Simply abandoning folks like our potential client in the first paragraph is not the answer. A lot of people like him who would benefit from psilocybin therapy might not have the luxury of a robust support network. Some domestic situations actively exacerbate our problems and looking inward during a psilocybin journey might help us figure that out.

How do we make sure we reach these people? Can I, in good conscience, turn them away? The answer is yes and no. I emphatically (loud for the folks in the bleachers) will not facilitate a psychedelic journey for someone actively in crisis or without a support network. Best case scenario, the journey is mild and the client can integrate a few minor lessons. Worst case is they have a powerful, dynamic trip that utterly uproots their worldview and makes sifting through the rubble of the aforementioned instability an impossible task—they may wind up looping in isolation and worse off than they were before the journey.

So I generally, meet in the middle. If someone is seeing a therapist, that’s a great start. If someone is willing to reach out to a family member or friend who might be in ally, then I’m all ears. Most of the time, we agree to take a step backward, cultivate a support network, then start the rigorous preparation for an incredible journey. Magic mushrooms are strong medicine. And just like any medicine, we need a community around us that makes space for us to rejuvenate and heal.