Magic Mondays 4: The Hero’s Journey Dose For Complex PTSD
Despite that I’ve been talking about microdosing on psilocybin for a few weeks now (check out post one, two, and three to catch up if you need to), this was all never on my bingo card until a few months back. I got low key interested in microdosing about a month before Mighty Micro reached out to me but was absolutely not interested in mega doses, or as they are often called a “hero’s journey dose.” No way, no how, uh uh. As someone who has only had bad dreams it was such a no thank you from me. But then after I stacked a bunch of doses after the end of the first week, I had a major change of heart. Seeing slightly different colors than what exists organically on plants and having a filter to the room I was in was actually kind of fun. And given that the microdosing was working and that I’ve read a lot of data on how psilocybin is good for PTSD (and I have a case of CPTSD) I decided to do it. This week’s post is about that.
Was I worried about it? Yes, a little. Especially in the hours beforehand I kept wondering if I was really going to do it. It felt a little like being in line for a roller coaster where you’re excited but also feel jittery and a little nervous as the line moves closer to the loading station and you can’t help but wonder, am I really going to do this? I considered not doing it, but I had one day that was totally clear (after 2pm) and had no idea when I would have another window available so I decided to just do it. Beforehand I got mentally okay with hypothetically having a bad trip by remembering that I’ve had several bad days in my life (hence the CPTSD diagnosis) and felt steady enough to handle one more bad day if that’s what was in store. Plus I figured that even if it was a bad experience, I would work out some stuff or confront some things that maybe needed to be dealt with. So ready or not…I was doing this.
While most conventional wisdom says to not trip alone, I was pretty hellbent on doing so. Call it a trauma response if you must, but I knew it was likely going to be an emotional experience (even if good) and I wanted the peace to be present and candid and just do my thing with nobody watching. That said, a trusted friend who is experienced with psychedelics knew that I was doing this and was only a phone call away and the founder of Mighty Micro also offered virtual support too. So I took 4 grams of a Mighty Micro’s Hero’s Journey dose and threw on a Jesus and Mary Chain concert on YouTube. Within the hour I felt a little high and was having a mighty fine time watching those Scottish brothers rock out. But then hour two began to roll around and…nothing. Whatever high I had I lost and I felt completely flatlined. I was annoyed. It was so on brand for me to finally come around to doing something and then it’s a dud or something. A little more than two hours passed so I decided to take my dog for a walk in the neighborhood but not straying too far just in case I suddenly started feeling something - which kind of happened but it was like a whisper of a start more than anything.
Halfway around the block, I started to feel a little funny. It felt like my head was moving around to look at my surroundings for me versus me deciding where to look. Then a slight breeze came that only seemed to be angled at my legs and yet nearly knocked me over. When I made it back home I went into the backyard and sat on the patio. I felt a lot of pressure everywhere. My body, my head, my eyes - so much so that I had to ask ChatGPT if that was normal (which according to Chatty I guess it can be). I kept staring at the woods and somehow became convinced someone was going to walk out there. Maybe a forest creature (real or imagined) or even a dead relative. That didn’t happen. But tears started rolling down my face. Not sad tears but just emotion streaming from my eyes. I felt really good, and yet very emotional. Then in my peripherals it looked like the trees had faces, like in that forest level of Super Mario World, but when I looked directly at them the faces went away. Same difference when it appeared my legs had scales on them until I looked at them more directly. It was all surreal and yet mild. Finally, some branches of a tree near the edge of the woods looked like an alligator but specially the alligator from Fantasia. And it reminded me of one of those unique balloons you’d see at Disneyland and was moving around in a pattern I can’t explain. It was like a M.C. Escher drawing that looks normal until you realize that isn’t how physics work. The alligator never went away, no matter how hard I looked at it. This inspired me to go inside and go watch Fantasia.
Look, it’s a bit of a cliche to watch an abstract film like Fantasia while tripping. Fair enough! But my tie to this movie is personal. Before the age of three, a bunch of relatives died. I don’t remember them but my first memories are about them dying basically. I was too aware of life and death and my parents didn’t do the best job at keeping the life fact that is death age appropriate as I don’t have memories of not being aware that I would die and could technically die at any moment (as my parents answered me pretty bluntly when I asked if kids sometimes die). Then they’d make me say that creepy ass prayer, the one with “if I die before I wake”, and suddenly you have a preschooler who’s afraid of angels are going to kidnap them in their sleep. A lot of life long insomnia issues and OCD habits stem from this, but only in recent years in trauma healing and being more trauma educated do I understand this. Parts of my childhood were fine and parts were not, but everyone dying and being too aware of it set up my nervous system for a lifetime of failure basically. As a kid I both loved and was terrified of the film (hello, Night on Bald Mountain!). A few years before I was diagnosed with CPTSD I attempted to watch Fantasia as an adult for the first time. As a secular adult I knew this film wouldn’t scare me but I had to stop the film all the same because a lot of abstract and somatic memories came flooding back. I quickly realized how much the imagery around life and death throughout the film (and not just the demon that is Chernabog) really shaped my idea of life and death and made me think of a grandmother I lost at the early age who I don’t remember but I did associate the film heavily with her. It was overwhelming so I turned it off and have tried (and failed) to finish the film a few times in the year or so that followed because weird emotions bubbled up. I have since watched the entire film (last summer while being stoned AF) and loved it basically reclaimed it finally. What happened on this trip though was next level, and let’s just say that if I were the type of person who wanted tattoos I’d get a whole sleeve of all of the characters of Fantasia.
I wasn’t fully committed to watching the entire movie when I sat down to go watch it but within the first twenty or so minutes I knew this was the journey I was on because I related to this film in a way that I had never felt before, to Fantasia or frankly any other media. I saw myself in many of the characters, including characters I never paid much notice to. It helped me piece together my emotional biography (for lack of a better phrase) and I saw my emotional life, past, present, and even future play out throughout the film. I know the future part sounds insane, and believe me, I’m not entirely sure what to make of it myself. What I can say is that time got very bendy and I get why people question the nature of reality after a trip. I’m not saying I’m entirely there, but I appreciate why that’s some people’s takeaway. What kind of spooked me though was I have barely seen this movie as an adult (and was stoned the only time I made it through entirely) and so much of it was not only a surprise to me (seriously, I didn’t remember half of the characters) but I would have a thought and then it would unfold seconds later on screen. This happened throughout the film. Maybe my memory had all of that stored somewhere and the mushrooms accessed it, and if so fair enough! But consciously, I had no idea where half of the shorts were going and was very shocked to see whatever I was thinking effectively play out literally or abstractly on film.
At one point I took a break from watching and ended up having a conversation with myself in the mirror - as you do. But it was a conversation with my present self and either a future version of myself or a more highly evolved version of myself. A lot of my intentions with both microdosing and now with this macro dose have been centered around “who would I be without all this trauma weighing me down” and “how can I trust and work with life instead of being frozen” (the latter being especially true for the hero’s journey dose). Present me was in the mirror effecting asking how it gets better. Future or more evolved version of me had some truth bombs she was dropping about the past, present, and future. It’s a little hard to explain it in it’s entirety, in part because so much of this conversation was deeply personal and is in the official “off limits” for public consumption part of my life (I share so much…about grief and my parents dying, CPTSD, and more current and day to day interpersonal stuff that I keep private for my own sanity). But also you’d have to really understand the weird nuances and complexities of my life for this conversation to make full sense. Like, I would have to tell at least five long anecdotes to make each bullet point this better version of me was saying to have it remotely make any damn sense. But the TL;DR was that everything was going to be okay, the worst was over, I’m more loved than I feel and always was but now I actually have the tools to not get in my own way now and that’ll make me even more lovable and powerful. This other version of me reminded me that while I truly have been knocked down in recent years that once upon a time I was a force of nature and that is coming back.
The present me pushed back a lot. Any traumatized person will understand that sometimes the thing we most want to hear is the hardest thing to hear because we’ve been let down so much that we can’t handle or risk toxic positivity and false promises. But what got me was that I would crumble and cry harder upon taking in the information the “better” me was saying, but then I would close my eyes (from crying hard), but when I would open them back up the version of me who was calmer and the voice of reason was back. Her facial muscles were calmer, her voice was steadier and kind of stern, and she had a reverence, unlike the crying girl I was in real time. It was like I was going back and forth between two versions of myself. I had a split second where I questioned if I was putting this on, but I quickly got whipped back into whatever reality was happening in the mirror and I honestly had no idea what either girl was going to say at any given moment. It was like watching a movie where you’re on the edge of your seat not knowing what’s going to be said next in a fiery back and forth dialogue. Eventually the more evolved girl in the mirror ordered me to go back and finish Fantasia because “this was all going to end soon so you need to go back and finish” so I obliged.
What’s a little wild about going back to finish Fantasia, then and now, is that what we talked about in the mirror was playing out thematically. Some of it was on the nose, some of it was subtle, but I was watching versions of things being okay play out on screen that were incredibly related to the conversation I had just had with myself/”myself”.
Another fun fact about this rewatch is that while Night on Bald Mountain hasn’t scared me since I was well below the age of ten or so, I took in the visuals in a very different way. I could see everything in slow motion and saw so many different depictions of demons that I had missed in the past. You’d think it would unlock my inner child on a psilocybin trip and I’d get scared all over again and have a bad trip but instead I low key laughed it off. This is what people think hell is? Ha, this is child’s play. My life has been hell and it’s nothing compared to these cute demons. Even though I haven’t been scared of this short in ages, it felt good to take the power back even more for my little OCD and religiously traumatized inner four year old who saw Fantasia for the first time. And then the final scene, Ava Maria, which never did too much for me besides making me think that’s where my dead relatives were as it’s a heaven depiction because ultimately I’m a heavy metal/goth kind of girl who doesn’t love celestial imagery (at one point Night on Bald Mountain became a “can’t beat them, join them” situation for me, heh) I was utterly moved by this scene. I felt at peace in a way I have low key never felt. And then the movie ended and suddenly I was more back on earth. The trip had ended. The girl in the mirror was accurate- I had to go back and finish the film because it wasn’t going to last much longer and the timing for when she said that was perfect.
Afterwards, while I was back on planet earth so to speak, I was in quite the euphoric after glow for the rest of the night. Again, so much peace. And I was blown away at how good the trip was because I honestly couldn’t have had a better first one. A lot of emotional components of my life got neutralized and confronted in a way that was digestible to me. It’s like I tackled a lot of issues and have a few new mantras I’m working with day to day that keep echoing in my head when challenges or old habits pop up. Watching Fantasia was perfect as I am both light and dark; my childhood was full of existential fear and yet there was escapism in cartoons and now I’m an adult with a cemetery show who is also in comedy and am a puppeteer. Fantasia is the perfect hybrid of light and dark. I was told what I needed to hear in that bathroom mirror (and some of the future stuff has oddly enough proven to be true already that better or future me was saying…which I honestly don’t even know what to do with it) and either or, I have felt a lot more in my body and more centered this past month since I did the trip. I feel like I’m meeting the person I could have been had I not become so traumatized at every stage of my life, which was the exact intention of me using psilocybin. Here are some other drive by thoughts, tips, and observations:
I know not everyone has Complex PTSD but at several points throughout it I questioned how anyone could do this at this dose level recreationally as it it pretty intense and emotional. Again, everyone is different but it sounds like a lot of people have emotional (good and bad) reactions to mushrooms. Medium doses can be euphoric and I can get entirely, but these hero’s journey doses are no joke and I’m so confused as to how people act like it isn’t a big deal. Maybe one day if I do this a few more times I’ll get it, but this is an intense albeit fun medicine in my mind currently.
Speaking of, I literally cried the entire time. Again, not bad tears. Maybe in the mirror there was a little bit of conventional sad crying, but all of it was a release. Most of it was tearing at how beautiful many parts of life can be or how full and centered I felt.
The visuals weren’t too crazy for me. Besides being in my backyard in the beginning and what I already described that happened there, there were almost no other visuals. It felt like instead of surround sound I had “surround colors” in that whatever was happening in Fantasia beamed out of the screen and kind of surround the room. But again, it was peripheral and if I looked directly at it it would go away. My eyes were also glowing green in the mirror, so there is that. They were also very bloodshot from hours of crying so maybe my green eyes just popped more, but I don’t think that was the only reason why.
However the colors on the screen felt “very loud.” And every time I shut my eyes I’d see crazy visuals.
Tip: drink a lot of water as psilocybin and the neuro workout and rewiring that it is is both dehydrating and takes up a lot of metabolic energy. And keep tissue nearby in case you are crying the entire time like I was.
I slept for at least 9 hours that night and was a little tired (but light on my feet) the next day.
A lot of normal functioning shuts down. I had no appetite, no interest in checking my phone, and was just very much in my own world. I drank some water because I knew ahead of time to do that, but if I had not set a water glass on the coffee table beforehand I don’t think I would have thought to do that.
I officially like the hero’s journey more than microdosing. In the next two weeks here on Mondays I’ll explain how the rest of the microdosing journey has gone, but I definitely got more out of full on tripping versus microdosing and would almost rather trip every month or two versus microdose (but we’ll get there when we get there in the coming weeks about why as much as I’m a fan of microdosing it’s gotten a little less appealing for me- at least currently as I’m coming out of week seven). But yeah, I definitely want to do this again!
That all said, I’m glad I came to the decision to do this big trip on my own terms. After my failed heart procedure last decade I had a lot of friends mansplain to me (they were all cis, straight, white dudes who didn’t listen to what I was actually saying, ahem) that I should do a big trip. I wasn’t ready and they didn’t say anything that would have convinced me otherwise because they were not listening nor were they honoring what my fears and reservations were. Almost out of resentment I put off being even open to doing a mega dose of psilocybin (or even micro) because they were so unnecessarily agro about how I needed to do it. With ANYTHING involving trauma, you need to meet people with where they are at at not push, project, or assume but rather be curious as to why they are at where they are at. It’s alienating and doesn’t accomplish much when you push. Plus, we only feel good about our decisions when we make them for ourselves and on our own terms. So as much as I am now a proponent of psilocybin (even if not especially the big doses) for mental health, I also respect that it can take a moment to unpack fears about it and everyone’s journeys to get there (should they get there at all) is going to be different. I had a good trip because I was in a place to have a good trip. I unpacked a few things prior but was stuck on how else to heal so I was ready to try something radically different. That was my journey, maybe it’s yours and maybe it’s not. I’m not saying it was guaranteed that I would have a good trip, but I’m not terribly sure I could have even had a remotely good time a decade ago because I just wasn’t in a place to go to such a weird and abstract place mentally and I did not have the tools to know what to do with whatever could have happened. But if you are in a space of curiosity, please check out Mighty Micro.
Next week I’ll write about what happened after the trip, like how my energy and executive function got better and will expand a little more about this trip I took when relevant about what happened next.
Hope to see you next week!
Blair