How Rape Survivors Can Heal Using LSD and Magic Mushrooms

What I learned from consciously tripping on drugs as a rape survivor

Photo by Tanya Zajdel, Mexico City

According to a veteran psychedelic researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine named Roland Griffiths, over 70% of people who took magic mushrooms to treat mental illness, anxiety about impending death or PTSD reported their trip as being one of the most important experiences in their entire lives!

Moreover, according to research, psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms often induces an emotional breakthrough and renewed perspective for those who ingest it.

Marc Morgan, a survivor of child sexual assault reported similar beneficial effects stating that when he took full doses or even micro-doses of mushrooms or LSD it helped to take the edge off, giving his body a break from the mental ‘chronic pain’ of the trauma he lives with. What’s more, researchers are slowly opening government-approved clinics to explore the treatment of mental health illness with drugs like LSD, mushrooms and even MDMA!

But anyway, here’s my personal take on the matter based on my own experiences with these substances.

My first experience with mushrooms serendipitously dropped in my lap when I was in my early thirties and my best friend invited me to spend the weekend with a group of her musician friends in the mountains.

As someone who survived a violent rape and was later diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and PTSD, I tried traditional anti-anxieties but they weren’t a solution I wanted to commit to.

Additionally, being brought up super conservatively, I was very wary of taking drugs and only tried Marijuana for the first time in my twenties!

But age is a funny thing and my thirties brought with me the sweetest gift called, ‘The Therapeutic Skill Of How To Stop Giving A Fuck’.

Now, artists sure know how to party! They organized a wide variety of food, drinks, alcohol and ordered a sample of just about every drug I had never even heard of! (Duh.)

My friend Sharon and I showed up early to the beautiful wooden cottage by the lake. I was so excited to be on vacation that I practically jumped around the place like a bunny rabbit on crack but then fell asleep before the party began at 11 pm like an overtired toddler.

The next day I was offered many varieties of drugs but I decided on a small dose of mushrooms because I reasoned that it was the only drug concocted naturally, in the forest by Mother Earth herself.

Very soon after I swallowed the overly chewy, moldy grey gunk, I began to feel very overwhelmed, like I needed to be alone in a quiet place.

The sounds, voices, colours and sensations around me felt so overwhelming I nearly wanted to crumple up into a ball and pretend I didn’t exist.

So I quickly told Sharon that I needed to be alone and wandered off into what I later described to her as ‘an enchanted forest’ (which turned out to be me sitting on a patch of weeds beside a rotten tree stump).

But it was on that small patch of grass that I did indeed have a magically spiritual, mentally healing experience.

I sat on the earth all alone and slowly got lost in the fine details of the grass around me. I contemplated the bright green blades of grass and felt the calmness of the earth as it seemed to slowly breathe, heaving up and down ever so slightly around me.

“Mother Nature breathes too,” I whispered out loud. It felt comforting to hear my own calming voice. I lost feeling in my body, I felt disconnected from my past, my memories and the ability to process the world around me. Almost like an infant sees the world, everything felt new, fascinating and detailed.

It felt liberating to process the world anew, outside of the usual brain I saw the world with. Dissociated from my body, I suddenly felt as if I too were a blade of grass, or a flower growing from the earth. I felt a very strong, earthy presence, like Mother Earth was sitting with me, holding me in her earthy womb.

It was springtime and there were many small green shoots just starting to grow from the dirt. “Mother Earth had a long, hard winter. She was very cold. She felt frozen and alone,” I spoke sympathetically to the ground.

It felt right to talk out loud to her presence around me.

It was about four years ago since I’d been assaulted and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it as the trauma evolved in my body. The ominous feelings about the upcoming date had been swimming in my head for a while, though I preferred to avoid it.

But now, sitting in the dirt, feeling mother nature breathing with me, I felt supported to peek inside the centre of this howling, writhing horror script that stewed inside my mind and chest.

I wondered if perhaps Mother Earth and I had a lot in common.

I looked down at my breasts and my hands that worked so hard to care for my children and realized that I too was a mother, just like Mother Earth.

I channeled mother earth’s energy and in an empathetic, mother-like tone of voice, I began to hold space for each part of my body.

I began with my breasts.

I looked down at my chest and whispered the words I knew my breasts would say to the world, if only they could speak.

“You were abused. Your voice was not respected. You were used against your will.

I validated their pain.

“You were led somewhere you didn’t want to be.”

I held space for them. I grieved with them and for them.

My breasts asked for a moment of silence.

I looked at them and nodded my head, respecting their wishes.

When my breasts were ready, I gently placed my hands over them, so they could feel covered and protected.

“I’m sorry,” I told them, “You didn’t deserve that. You deserved to be treated with care and respect.”

My breasts nodded in silent assent.

“Even though you were disrespected, you gave life and immunity to two infants,” I kindly acknowledged their herculean efforts.

They seemed to nod with a stoic sort of pride that a war veteran might convey.

I continued this conversation with my body parts, oblivious to time.

Then came my hands.

First I grieved with them, then I thanked them for caring for my body.

I looked at them and realized that just as Mother Earth was often frozen solid, alone and polluted and was able to find ways to heal herself, I too possessed the power to heal my body and mind.

“You are healing hands,” I told them over and over as if to integrate this belief into the muscle memory of my hands. “You have powers to heal your body”.

My hands acknowledged what I was telling them in their own silent, sad way.

I help space for them.

When I finished sitting by myself and talking to my body parts, I stood up and walked back to the cottage.

Coincidentally, I indeed received a visit from Mother Nature herself because my menses began right at that point in time. How about that, Mother Earth?!

I wandered around, proud as a peacock, feeling as zen as could be with my newly discovered ‘healing hands’ until I met Sharon, lying topless on the dock. “Where were you?” She asked. “I was wandering in the woods,” I replied with a peaceful smile painted on my face, feeling light as a feather.

As the sun went down that day, the mushroom’s effect slowly waned.

My usual thought processes returned but the deep sensations of healing and repair I felt that day stayed with me until now. Not all the time, but I am able to revisit those neural connections.

I am still proud of my healings hands.

I still feel a sense of resolution and peace for giving my body parts the acknowledgement they needed and deserved.

I still appreciate the very real presence I felt of the encompassing aura of Mother Nature and the symbiosis my body has with hers. Maybe my mushroom trip made me ten times more of a hippie than I started out, but I don’t mind.

Next came my terrifying LSD trip which was wildly different from my zen mushroom journey.

While my mushroom trip was a fairy-like experience, the LSD trip felt like I was possessed by an artificial, aggressive force that roared unforgivingly and relentlessly in an almost violent way through my body and my mind.

This trip began about a year later when it was springtime once again and I found myself in a similar headspace about my past as the year prior.

On a lazy Saturday afternoon, I decided to try LSD for the very first time with my new boyfriend. Oddly, I didn’t realize until the next day that I took the LSD on the exact date the assault occurred.

This trip began as an experimental journey, more out of curiosity than anything else, really. I sat on Samuel’s lap while I placed half of a tiny little cardboard square under my tongue. “Why are we cutting this in half? It’s so tiny!” protested Samuel. Thankfully my nursing background made me paranoid enough to start conservatively, “Let’s try a bit and see what happens first…”

Oh. My. GAWD.

I never imagined that sucking on a sliver of soggy cardboard could send you into a 15-hour haze of torturous mental insanity that mind-fucked me so badly, I wished it was over only shortly after it began. I promptly stuffed earplugs in my ears and hid underneath my bedsheets.

My body trembled and I felt cold and jittery all over.

As someone who lives with an anxiety disorder, this is just about the last feeling I wanted to live with for the next 14 hours. Sounds became overwhelmingly loud, colours stood out and I lost most of the feeling throughout my body. It was like I was floating around the house, instead of walking.

I could hear Samuel complaining beside me, “Why are there so many squirrels playing in the ocean’s waves over there?”

I tried to answer his query until I realized that I’d never been asked that question before.

The floor seemed to shift as I walked on it, I swore the walls had hundreds of animal and human faces carved into them and there were shapes and patterns on the surfaces all around me. All those humans, all those animals throughout history. I could swear, they all existed at some point, they all lived and died and they all had stories.

Did their stories matter? I wondered. Most importantly, did my story matter in the vast history of the world? Did my story matter? Does my story matter?

We decided that the only way out of feeling the extreme anxiety and jitters was to give in to the nervous giggles that seemed to be bursting out of our bellies. We giggled about things like how difficult it was to pour water without spilling. When we looked at each other, we began to giggle so uncontrollably that we had to drink water in separate rooms to avoid drowning in our own sips of water.

Finally, we decided to bad trip together, lying next to each other in the bed, but not too close because touch was insanely overwhelming for me.

The next few hours went like this, “Jessica, can I touch you?”

“Shhhhh!”

“Oh, I’m sorry”.

“That’s okay, Samuel”.

“Can I hold your hand, Jessica? I really want to hold her hand,” he muttered to himself.

“Too much Samuel, that’s too much.”

“Awww!” he lamented, “I wish I could hold her hand! Hey Jessica, am I being too much? Because I really like you. I hope I’m not being too much….do you think she still likes me?” he mused loudly.

I began to giggle incessantly as my boyfriend who also happens to be 10 years younger than me reminded me of the song ‘Teenage Dirtbag’.

Those lyrics played repeatedly in my head as Samuel mused aloud how much he had a crush on me and wanted to hold my hand, only to be told he was being ‘too much’…

🎶 ‘I’m just a teenage dirtbag baby…won’t you see Iron Maiden with me?’ 🎵

“How is holding her hand ‘too much’?” He droned on, “Haven’t we had sex like a hundred times already?”

I continued laughing uncontrollably until my cheeks and my sides physically hurt.

“At least she thinks I’m funny…”.

After about six hours, my body seemed to collapse into a cloud of dust. So much so, that if you told me I had turned into a rock, I would have believed you.

I felt very calm and still. I was able to observe my environment objectively without any reference like I had never seen those objects before. The lens with which I usually see and understand my world, just disappeared.

I gazed at the water, the trees and the cars without associating these objects to their own names, to any of my past experiences with them, to any meaning, memories or any reference to them at all.

Trees usually remind me of my past memories of experiences with trees, but now they were just tall, strange, green and brown flowy objects. It felt refreshingly peaceful to visualize my environment anew without any trauma tainting my perception of those objects.

It was at this point when I turned to Samuel and described what I was experiencing, “It feels like I have no identity. No memory, no past or future. Like I’m just a being existing without any emotional baggage.

I feel like a newborn who hasn’t developed any meaning or associations to the objects in front of me. Everything around me just is. I can appreciate their colours and shapes as if I’ve never seen them before”.

My body was getting a rest from my PTSD spinning mind and piercing emotions.

It was about this time that I realized something profoundly simple. My story mattered only as much as all the women throughout history who suffered from violence.

They raised their voices for millions of years, resulting in only small systemic changes to a patriarchal world.

My story is a drop in the bucket for history but according to the physics of time using ‘Block Universe Theory’, every moment that ever happened and ever will happen still exists today all at the same time, somewhere in space. All those moments of truths that powerful white men hide…my truth and every woman’s truth exists forever somewhere in the sands of time and winks at the future watchfully waiting to be heard, knowing full well it will one day be known one way or another.

My body had a break from feeling emotions, it came to its’ own logical conclusions from an emotional hyper-distance.

About 12 hours after the dose, I slowly felt like the old ‘me’ was returning to my body again.

In summary, during both trips, my body internalized long-lasting feelings of greater resolution related to lingering traumas.

I observe that leaving reality through mushrooms and LSD and being thrown into the world of imagination gave my mind the extra creativity it needed to source its’ own self-healing processes.

Additionally, during a trauma, the mind dissociates from the body in order to protect our psyche, “Let’s pretend this violence isn’t happening and go numb” is the game of survival. Only later does the PTSD set in with graphic, disorganized flashbacks of what occurred.

But when external substances are taking over this mind and body numbing task and distancing the survivor from her own past, it’s easier to revisit these feelings or events because hey, you’re in another universe right now anyway!

“Do I want to return to my body as the same ‘me’ I was before?” I wondered aloud, “No” I whispered.

I sat on the balcony near Samuel and listened to him fingerpicking on his guitar. I smiled as he sang to me while I returned to this life, “You are a beautiful fairy…you are my queen…I love you more than you’ll ever know….”

I returned to earth and back into my body slowly and groggily. I felt humbled by the earth and her past, and by the dark oceans of untold female history.

My environment felt more concrete and real to me somehow. As if I was able to digest reality a bit differently, a bit more easily.

My brain learned that there are different ways I can inhabit my mind which can guide me to grater internal truths.

I returned to my world feeling better than I had left… As a fairy queen who was loved and most importantly, whose story mattered.

That’s precisely how mushrooms and LSD helped me and many others struggling to process the seemingly impossible. Because sometimes it takes visiting another world to stretch our mind’s capacity to better process this one.

By Jessica Bielski

Edited by Tanya Zajdel.

Tanya is a mental health nurse specializing in trauma therapy and women’s health. She writes for Rewire Trauma Therapy’s online therapy services: https://www.rewiretraumatherapy.com/