Guidance needed..

[DaveTripper]

Ok, so...

The beginning of last summer (2009) me and a couple of my friends decided to eat an eighth of shrooms and go to the beach. This would be my 5th time eating shrooms, each previous time being nothing short of amazing and beautiful. There were three of us tripping, and 2 sitters who drove us down there and took care of us on our journey. We ate the shrooms about 15 minutes before arriving at the beach, and by the time we parked the car, we were already coming up. The three of us who were tripping went to the bathroom, and then headed out to find a spot on the beach, it was pretty crowded, and i felt the overall presence of other people and families comforting. For the first hour or so i felt great, sitting in my beach chair, getting rushes of euphoria, literally watching the sky turn shades of red.

As the day went on things started to get a little sketchy.. particularly when i would try and take part in conversations my friends were having. I kept feeling really confused as to what my friends were talking about, and when they would make jokes and start laughing, for some reason i thought they were all laughing at me. This started to send me into silent mode and i would just stare out at the beach, observing all of the children playing and stuff like that made me feel happy and warm. At the 4th hour, the three of us immediately came down, which was weird because it was the most abrupt comedown i've ever experienced on shrooms. the day ended with us going to a friend's party, and i was left with a nice afterglow.

Now at the end of that same summer, me and my entire crew of friends decided to have a crew trip to end the summer. In addition to the 7 of us tripping, there were 3 other close friends who chilled with us during the trip. We each did an eighth at my friends house while his parents were away. 5 of us are in a band together so we set up all of our equipment before hand, very eager to try jamming on psychedelics for the first time.

We ate the shrooms and decided to jam through the come up. We played two songs until the come up got a little too intense and then each strapped on our own headphones and went out on the back porch to sit in the sun. This was amazing to me, i was listening to some MGMT and i remember staring at my blue jeans and my legs looked like two flowing rivers coming out of my body. After we completely came up we went back inside to jam and played for about an hour, and let me tell you, it was amazing. It felt like nothing else existed outside of our jam session, like we were in a tiny closed off part of the universe. In the midst of jamming, another friend came over and walked into the room to say hi to everyone, and i remember the only thing i could say was, "pleasure to meet you sir" even though i've known this person my entire life.

After his arrival, we stopped jamming and went back outside, where the non-band members were all having an amazing time as well. We were all sitting around a large table on the porch and everyone was just sitting around making jokes and laughing and genuinely having a great time.. except me. I fell into that same paranoid state-of-mind i experienced on the beach, and i thought that every time someone laughed, they were laughing at me. Everyone noticed that i was in a bad way and one of my sober-friends who had never tripped before said, "Man, you're scary quiet" and all i could say back was, "i'm me" His comment made me spiral down even lower and seeing all of my friends connect in a way i wasn't really made me depressed. The rest of the night went on like that and for weeks after i felt very paranoid that my friends all thought i was weird or insane or some shit.

My last trip, was in october, on 1 hit of cid. I was planning on doing it alone one day at my house when i knew nobody would be home for quite some time, but the night before i wanted to do it, my best friend that i've tried every single drug with for the first time asked me if i wanted to do it with him. This would be my second time with acid, the first being a week after the shroom trip i just talked about, on 3 hits of some really weak acid ( i was to find out. even though it was weak stuff, i got pretty paranoid again. but i was able to comprehend things better than the last shroom trip.) So anyway, i figured maybe a trip with just one other person is what i needed to get my head right, and maybe i wouldn't be so disoriented and confused. Needless to say, this wasn't the case, and i was in for the worst "set-setting" scenario possible.

I went to his house, nobody was home, we dropped. We sat in his living room watching a movie and his girlfriend came over to sit with us. I would have preferred it to be just us but he wouldn't do it without her (she had just recently talked him out of a pretty bad acid-trip). So we chilled for about an hour and i could start feeling the tingling in my body, i was about to start tripping. Right as i start coming up, his little sister comes home from school. Him, being who he is, was absolutely comfortable with this and we went downstairs to say hi. I said hi, and thats about it, freaking out that she's gonna know im tripping and whatnot. After hanging out with her for a couple of minutes, we went outside to smoke a bowl, and decide what we were gonna do next. We went to his girlfriends house and i was feeling pretty anxious because i've never been there before and i just didnt know where this day was going. We laid together on her bed for an hour listening to the beatles, and as good as it sounded, i was very anxious and i couldnt stop my body from trembling. I told them that i thought i was heading down a dark road and i was nervous about having a bad trip, and they tried to talk to me but i knew there was nothing they could do. We went out on her deck and sat around for a while, i remember feeling very awkward and just plain weird, not knwing what to say. Every idea my friend brought up, my acid-plagued brain would twist and distort until i didnt even know what he was talking about. Now this is the real kicker, his gf's mom comes home, and i'm forced to spend about a half hour in her living room trying to act normal and hold a normal conversation with her and my friends and in my head i am crying like a baby just saying, "get me the hell out of here". I'm confident that if i had a car i would've said peace and went home and listened to some nice music and gotten myself out of the terrible mindset i was in.

The rest of the day went on like this except getting worse and worse. We went to another friends house and tried to ride the trip out there by watching movies and whatnot, but i couldn't understand a single thing that was happening to me. While watching these movies i once again was plagued with thoughts that my friends were making fun of me every time they laughed and i literally convinced myself i was insane. I finally got home at around 2am and went to bed feeling like a nut.

The next day i was sooo happy to be back in reality, but i knew i was changed. The first few weeks were really tough because i was still paranoid about my friends and i thought i had lost most of my mind. Now, 4 months later, I've made some progress and i've had a couple of talks with my friends about the bad trips i had, telling them how paranoid i was that they hated me and all the crazy shit i was thinking. They reassured me about how much they love me and i actually broke down crying to them. Nevertheless, i am still plagued with anxiety, and i feel like i can't connect with people half as well as i used to be able to. I get nervous looking anybody in the eye, and i usually just say what i need to say to get through a conversation.

I feel like i may have ruined myself, and any chances i had of finding love one day. I've always been a shy guy, but i've always been very smart and very passionate with women. I've had three long lasting relationships with people i thought i was heavily in-love with, and i fear that i'll never have that again. When i talk to my friends about this, they say that i need to trip again to fix it, and that i've just lost belief in myself, which i definitely have. But i'm afraid that there might be something much deeper like some kind of mental illness that i dont want to release, so i am reluctant to try tripping for a while.

This isn't what living is supposed to be like, and after my first 4 trips i thought i had the best life in the world and that i was a much better person from it. Now i am depressed, and full of anxiety. What is my next step?

P.S. Thank you for reading this, i know it was long.

 

[stormyweathers]

dude
give me a 3-5 sentence summary please

 

[Help?!?!]

Sounds like the regular old mind fucked paranoid thoughts that can come up while tripping. These sort of feelings can continue to manifest everytime you trip if you don't learn how to sort the paranoid thoughts that aren't true from the real thoughts. If you start getting paranoid about your friends you'll just have to work through it because everyone at some point will probably get these sort of thoughts(thinking people are laughing at you/making fun of you/are out to get you). I suggest taking a low or medium dose of any pyschedelic you want alone and attempt to work through them. Oh and next time someone wants to do something your not completely comfortable with when tripping(bringing another person into the equation/go somewhere) just tell them you'd rather trip alone.

For everyone else the summary of this is pretty much three different trips all with friends and the op becoming paranoid and was unable to overcome these feelings causing unpleasant experiences.

 

[solistus]

A few thoughts...

First, it doesn't sound like latent schizophrenia or anything to me. I'm no expert, and if you feel it necessary please don't let me convince you not to seek help from a licensed psycoanalyst or other type of therapist/psychiatrist. Personally, though, I'd consider some other possibilities first.

The most important question, and one you can only answer for yourself with a bit of soul searching: are you sure these anxieties didn't exist at all _before_ the trip experiences? I don't know how old you are but those precise types of anxieties about fitting into social situations and feeling like any interaction with others involves them judging you based on what you do/say/look like/etc. is quite common especially in adolescence and early adulthood, which for most of us is also when drug experimentation begins. Having these anxieties alone, especially if it's only severe enough to be a real problem while tripping, is nothing to worry about, per se. If psychedelics seemed to create a problem out of literally nothing - if you had no social insecurities and never felt anything at all like these fears before - then there may be some bad reaction or even a latent condition being brought out.

You say that after even the anxiety provoking mushroom trips, you still felt fine, even better after the fact, right? So the anxieties didn't continue into sober interactions, you were able to think back and learn from them, etc.? But after the acid trip with the same anxieties brought out even worse by having to hide your trip from an authority figure (gf's mom), you feel these doubts crippling your social life now. Is that about right?

Again, my PERSONAL view here: your first acid trip went bad when you got the fear of a bad trip from early on, and you had an experience most inexperienced trippers would find very traumatic - having to hide your high from a parental figure. The fact that this was the worst of your bad trip type experiences doesn't surprise me. Perhaps LSD doesn't react well with you, or perhaps those tabs were something else entirely, like a DOx. At any rate, I don't think you've ruined yourself. I don't know you, but my personal view is that your "always having been shy" involved repressing some of these very anxieties before as "just shyness" and all the trip did was resurface that trauma and make it impossible to repress again.

FWIW, I used to be much the same way and still struggle with social interactions I don't choose to engage in of my own accord. There's a big difference between not liking to put on masks in social situations (which is something a lot of psychedelic users do find more difficult after they've tripped and seen those masks for the ridiculous social construct they are - it can be hard to go back to living what feels like a series of white lies, or acting as yourself based on what you are supposed to do, be, think and say...) and not being able to connect with people on an individual level. Do you have any really close friends you'd feel comfortable talking about this stuff with in person? I suspect that will do more good than either tripping again or expensive therapy sessions.

Long story short: As a harms reduction advocate I can't throw out the possibility that there is some latent condition you have begun to 'activate' or whatever which would be best served by professional help, but I wouldn't panic and conclude you've "broken your brain" or anything. I would also hold off on psychedelics at least until you have some idea what's going on. Next time you try them, if you decide you want to try them again, make SURE you won't get stuck in a situation like that - either do them at home alone, or at least plan in advance so that you always have an exit strategy so you can be alone if you decide interacting with others is no longer what you want to do. It could be that you're just naturally very shy and struggle enough as it is with social interactions, and this pressure, which you didn't notice as much before experiencing it in its extreme form while tripping on a powerful psychedelic, is just a bad mix with otherwise productive psychedelic trips for you.

The big concern is that your symptoms are persisting long after the trip. This doesn't mean anything is physiologically wrong, but it does mean that this is almost certainly something deeper than just a bad trip leaving you shellshocked for a bit. If it's not a chemical imbalance, it's a psychological one that you need to work through, IMO. I want to close by reiterating that the basic type of anxiety you describe - fear that others are laughing at or judging you, and that you aren't interacting socially in the "right" way that everyone else seems to be naturally capable of - is entirely natural, perhaps even universal. The only reason I'm a tad concerned about your specific case is the length and severity of this 'episode' of experiencing it when you say you didn't before. The fact that you mention your natural shyness leads me to believe that this goes deeper and isn't really "new" at all. It may not have manifested in the same _way_ before you had this trip experience, but I would suggest thinking long and hard about how you used to think of yourself in social contexts before ever tripping. I suspect at least some of the groundwork for these fears - that there is some magical combination of body language, speech, etc. that is the 'normal' way for a social human being to interact and that you need to fit in so peers will accept you - will seem more familiar than you may have thought. I remember feeling exactly the same way after my first few trips and wondering if I would be able to form the kind of close relationships I had formed before, but by the time I stopped dwelling on it I realised that, when I was with people I truly felt connected with, none of that stuff mattered. The real revelation for me was actually an MDMA experience when, by projecting these anxieties onto other people as I interacted with them and realising that they probably thought *I* was judging their every move when I wasn't, I reached two important conclusions: one, most people are also just as insecure and want just as badly to be accepted and are looking for a way to *relate* to me, not a reason to reject me as different, and two, those few who are constantly judging and rejecting those who are different are boring, narrow-minded jerks and I'm better off not living my life worrying about them Projection is a useful concept for understanding social insecurities in general. I believe that when most people worry about other people accepting them, the real problem is that they haven't learned to accept themselves yet - that ambiguous "other" through whose eyes they feel like they are always being judged and watched is their own unconscious! Don't worry about if you can form the "right" kinds of interpersonal relationships: when they are truly meaningful, they find a way to form despite all your insecurities and awkward social graces.

 

[Teotzlcoatl]

THIS IS VERY COMMON, YOU ARE FINE!

This happens to many, many, many people.

The first thing you should know and fully realize is that you are 100% OK.

There is nothing wrong with you.

Normally any strange feelings due to this type of thing should go away within a few weeks.

The same thing happened to me about a year ago, it took me about a month to get over it, but I feel I actually learned alot!

What is my next step?

Stop doing ALL DRUGS (everything that isn't food or water, from caffeine to heroin) and rest your mind.

Take a break from things and relax.

Try a different entheogen next time you trip... such as Ayahuasca or Peyote.

 

[DaveTripper]

I don't know you, but my personal view is that your "always having been shy" involved repressing some of these very anxieties before as "just shyness" and all the trip did was resurface that trauma and make it impossible to repress again.

Do you have any really close friends you'd feel comfortable talking about this stuff with in person? I suspect that will do more good than either tripping again or expensive therapy sessions.

Next time you try them, if you decide you want to try them again, make SURE you won't get stuck in a situation like that - either do them at home alone, or at least plan in advance so that you always have an exit strategy so you can be alone if you decide interacting with others is no longer what you want to do. It could be that you're just naturally very shy and struggle enough as it is with social interactions, and this pressure, which you didn't notice as much before experiencing it in its extreme form while tripping on a powerful psychedelic, is just a bad mix with otherwise productive psychedelic trips for you.

The only reason I'm a tad concerned about your specific case is the length and severity of this 'episode' of experiencing it when you say you didn't before. The fact that you mention your natural shyness leads me to believe that this goes deeper and isn't really "new" at all. It may not have manifested in the same _way_ before you had this trip experience, but I would suggest thinking long and hard about how you used to think of yourself in social contexts before ever tripping. I suspect at least some of the groundwork for these fears - that there is some magical combination of body language, speech, etc. that is the 'normal' way for a social human being to interact and that you need to fit in so peers will accept you - will seem more familiar than you may have thought.

Thank you so much for your response Solistus. Me having always been shy is a definite factor in the anxieties i experienced during my trips and afterwards. Even before i started smoking weed I was always nervous about what people thought about me, especially people i thought were better than me. After my first couple shroom trips, i realized that nobody is better than the next person, but i still couldn't apply it to myself i guess. I still had myself on a lower pedestal than everyone else.

I have talked to my closest friends (one of them being my cousin, who has been more of my "best friend" than my cousin my whole life) about this, and they always reassure me that they would never want to harm me emotionally in any way. But they insist that I trip again with them and I just don't want to have to "Try" to have a good time, I want to wait until it feels natural again.

Like you said, the only reason I'm concerned is because of the length of the after effects. It's been 4 months already, and while i do feel better, i'm still not 100%. Perhaps this may be because I'm dwelling on it every day of my life.

If I ever do decide to trip again, I know I'll do it alone so i can realize that all of the paranoia i experienced on previous trips was just my head fucking with me, and really just a bunch of non-sense.

Thank you for your thoughts, you made me feel a little less like a crazy person.

 

[DaveTripper]

Bumping this..

Wondering if anyone else has any ideas about why I still feel so insecure 4 months after my bad experience.

Thank you.

 

[Roger&Me]

Judging by your eloquence and apparent lucidity, its extremely unlikely your cognition has been perturbed to the point of mental illness.

 

[solistus]

^^^ Agreed. Social neuroses and mental disorders rarely manifest as a problem you are conscious of, able to describe pretty clearly and worried about - typically the symptoms are disavowed and one refuses to see the problem.

A common experience after trying psychedelics is feeling that one no longer has a 'normal' baseline mental state to return to, as if once being broken out of whatever mould we were in previously, we can't seem to fit ourselves back inside it. I suspect this is partially because the legal and social status of 'drugs' in general makes it hard to properly integrate the experience or talk about it, but also because you seem to become more conscious of your own actions and it can be hard to get used to 'automatically' doing/saying the socially acceptable thing. The most valuable insight personally that helped me get over this was simply realising that 1) almost everyone else feels exactly the same insecurities - social relations are scary!, and 2) the ones that don't deserve my pity, not my envy. The only way to be completely confident and free of doubts and insecurities is to lull yourself into accepting a simplistic ideological world view.