“I’m all alone in this!”
Why this is a wall:
You might be saying to yourself: “Nobody understands what I experienced or what it means. After my trip, I feel like an alien in a strange land.” Or, “My partner/family doesn’t know what to do with these new expressions and the meanings I am trying to convey. I feel like I have to hide this even though it’s really meaningful for me.”
After a big, rich, powerful, expansive experience with psychedelics, there can be a sort of loneliness when you return to normalcy. Feeling distant and needing some withdrawal are common. In our attempts to return to some social stasis, we try to do the normal things to get back into our reality. But folding laundry, watching TV, taking out the trash, and just chatting with friends and loved ones all can seem so mundane. The triviality of daily existence makes us want to stop everything and everyone and dig deep into the profundity of our journey and what it portends for how we live. Yet the tedium persists, and folks can look at us weird when we try to say out loud the big things we are feeling, sensing, realizing, connecting. Not wanting to sound crazy, we sometimes stay quiet and maybe retreat into our own thoughts. This isolation, however, can hold us captive to our egos and prevent us from the kinds of connections we most crave. We have to be brave enough to discern what we need, ask for what we want, and protect relationships and spaces where it is nurtured. Isolation is a protection, not a solution. Resist the urge to indulge it. We were not meant to do this big integration stuff alone. We need to be with others and make sense of this in relationship, if not in community.
Potential ladders:
Telling loved ones you want to share with them what you experienced and learned. This is a scary, vulnerable, open-hearted move, and that’s all the more reason why it needs to happen. Given proper nourishment and contexts, expansiveness begets expansiveness. The more we open, the more openings open. Take the risk to ask for someone’s time and attention, and invite them to ask questions and make connections. Reach out and let yourself be held and heard. After all, when people go on big vacations to exotic lands, they often come back and ask folks to sit down and watch their slide show. You have permission to do the same (just don’t make it a PowerPoint deck, please). Also, when you first engage others about your journey, try to share one or two key takeaways rather than the whole experience. Depth is better than breadth here, plus we can sound kinda nuts when we unload everything at once. If you need help in picking those one or two things and describing them to others, ask your coach or guide to role-play with you. It can be kinda fun to practice bringing your insights into the “real world,” and doing so helps you stay connected to those big themes you’re trying to integrate.
Joining or convening psychedelic sharing groups. If you went on a psychedelic retreat somewhere, you may have been given the opportunity to sit with others who had recently journeyed to share experiences and takeaways. Particularly when such group sessions are well facilitated, these gatherings can help us to feel connected, to realize we’re not alone in our struggles and joys, and to accept the often ineffable nature of some of the things we’ve received when in a non-ordinary state of consciousness. But if you journeyed alone or just with your guide, then these group opportunities are sometimes unavailable. If so, it may be time to convene one yourself or look for existing groups nearby. It’s crucial, however, that such groups be intentional in their design, expertly facilitated, and governed by a shared set of clear norms. Without such features, groups can easily devolve into dumping stations, unhinged venting sessions, manic over-sharing fests, cringy holier-than-thou competitions, or any other variety of muddled free-for-alls. A good group should be a safe space to ponder, connect, share, and support one another. There are all kinds of resources online about how such groups can be organized and monitored, so some due diligence is warranted if you’re seeking to set one up.
Getting some psychotherapy. There, I said it. You might benefit (greatly) from some good old-fashioned psychotherapy from a licensed professional. They’re trained to tend to big emotions, bid epiphanies, big ideas, big pain, and big changes. And they’re typically very well prepared to handle all the smaller stuff that swirls around such things. Ask your guide or psychedelic journeying friends if they know any psychedelic-friendly therapists, and then reach out. A good therapist is a gamer changer, particularly if you don’t want to be alone in all this, processing everything by yourself. Call a pro!
Immersing yourself in nature. Really, we’re never alone. Ever. Even in a city, we’re surrounded by plants, animals, ecosystems, air, water, earth, and sky, the stuff that gives us life. Step out into it and slow down enough to behold and engage it, and you’ll start to feel the essential inextricability we all have to our planet and its aliveness. The processes a seed goes through to become a tree, the way a bird flies and navigates, the leaps and chirps of a squirrel, the courage and beauty of a flower, the elegance and precision of a dragonfly— these things will speak to you if you open to them. And when you do, you’ll hear how they too want not to be alone, how they too struggle to exist and persist, how they too sit nested in webs of interdependence. Suspend the illusion of separation and you’ll find countless sisters and brothers out there in nature who will resonate with your journey. If you’ll listen, they’ll listen back.
Accessing art, music, poetry, podcasts. You know that time when you heard a song or read a poem or listened to a podcast or saw a painting and you thought to yourself, “Yes yes yes! I experience the same thing!” In that moment, you likely felt seen, understood, affirmed. You felt that way because your experience was shared, was part of a collective experiencing, part of the human condition. You were connecting with someone across time and space, and the channel of that connection was your commonality. So if we want to feel less alone, sometimes all we have to do is access the expressions of others who have been right where we are. It’s why we have museums, radio, the internet (kind of), podcasts, books. You are unique and precious, and your experiences are too, but you and your experiences are also participating in a grand flow of collectivity. Tap into that and you’ll realize how connected you really are.