Plant Medicine is Healing my Trauma (Repost)
*This post was originally published July 2021. Republishing today in hopes of helping others in similar situations.
Written by: MINDI ALBRECHT
The dream was always the same.
It was the Monday night before Thanksgiving 2017, and I left my former husband and three daughters to move in with my (now) husband. We had spent the weekend dividing our assets and hauling my half across town, using only our teenage girls to help.
This process was especially brutal because I was still in love with my (then) husband— he and I possessed a powerful trauma bond and an even stronger bond of living in complete denial. Our 27-year marriage had weathered the darkest, most scandalous of crises over and over and over again until this one.
The time came for me to drive away from my husband, daughters, and home— I was raw and engulfed in grief, shame, and heartbreak. My husband asked me if I could stay for one last night with him. I said that I couldn’t. We hugged, sobbing, and when I left, my heart shattered into a million pieces.
The dream always ended there, and I would wake up gasping between tears, heart pounding. That haunting heartache would be back, burning a white-hot hole of pain and regret into my chest. The dream visited me regularly from December 2017 until March of this year, and it would take me hours after waking up to regulate my tears and emotions.
My life had been a one-way express train to character and integrity suicide. Halfway through my first marriage, I started flirting for attention with a male acquaintance, and that feeling was intoxicating. My attitude shifted from carpool mom to “fuck it” in 2.2 seconds, and it was then that I moved into the role of antagonist and villain in my biography. I slept with my best friend(s) husband(s) and played a destructive part in fracturing marriages. I did things without thought of consequences or individual suffering. I spent money recklessly, took enormous risks, had zero boundaries, and self-medicated heavily with booze and weed. Slowly but surely, I evolved into the worst version of myself.
I met and fell in love with my current husband while we were both married to other people— our beginning meant the ending for our former spouses and children, and the damage we did was severe. Afterward, I understood that I needed to repair myself, take accountability for my swath of destruction, and change my behaviors. Starting intensive therapy twice a week, I began becoming self-aware and accepting responsibility. I worked hard and made real progress, but the dream kept showing up, completely wrecking me with every return engagement.
Plant medicine started calling me in November 2020. As I dove into researching and gathering information about ayahuasca and psilocybin medicines, I discovered that they could help heal deep trauma, change my default mode network of thinking, and restore self-love to my scorched soul. This was made for me.
On a frigid cold night in January 2021, I met mother ayahuasca, and she warmed me and then changed me through compassion, understanding, grace, and clarity. She gave me empathy and insight into my ex-husband and the ability to release the heavy guilt I carried like a badge of honor. In those early morning hours, mother ayahuasca finally permitted me to forgive myself for what I had done. To this day, it is one of the greatest and most life-changing gifts I’ve ever received.
But still, my dream returned.
I started mushroom plant medicine in March 2021– I learned that psilocybin could reduce and or eliminate symptoms for depression, anxiety, addiction, migraines, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD, and trauma. My trauma had been practically begging me for this.
In his article What psychedelics taught me about healing trauma, Dr. Craig Heacock states, “It is now becoming clear through psychedelic psychotherapy research that trauma is held both in the body and in a person's spirit. Herein lies the reason why so many people suffering from depression and anxiety, addiction, and/or profound psychological despair have found their mental health struggles to be so resistant to treatment: I believe these disorders are more often than not tied to a deep and largely untouchable, river of trauma that lies beneath our reach in the unconscious.”
Psilocybin is opening up access to these realms that have been so difficult to reach and understand. And once this access has been established, we are finding that patients are healing. They are facing their trauma and then putting it down. I am one of these patients.
Dr. Nicole Lepera, the Holistic Psychologist, said, “Remember, we are not treating mental illness. We are treating trauma responses. coping mechanisms, and subconscious programming.” Psilocybin, with the help of my professional counselor to integrate, has officially ushered in the significant bulk of my healing. In April 2021, I started microdosing psilocybin and soon after realized that mushrooms had evicted my inner addict.
May 7th, 2021, I wrote, “This morning, I realized that I can’t remember the last time I had the dream.” Fast forward to July 2021, the dream is officially a part of my past, and I am healing.
Thank you, plant medicine, for your continual help and guidance in the purging of trauma in my life. It’s the nicest thing that anyone’s ever done for me.