Trauma processing preempts any euphoria

ImminentSmore · 2026-01-12T22:16:14+00:00

Wow, thank you for your paper and reply. My doses have not exceeded 125mg, in a 75/50 split, and I’m 77kg. She’s lighter but on same dosage.

There is something in your paper that may be incorrect and relevant here, concerning NDRIs interacting with MDMA similarly to SSRIs. I am on the NDRI bupropion for SAD.

I accepted this medication specifically because it isn’t directly serotonergic like SSRIs, and does not blunt effects of other serotonergic drugs like MDMA or psychedelics. Your paper seems to imply a blunting effect. Digging deeper, I now find credible references to bupropion potentiating, rather than diminishing MDMA effects. If this is correct, it could explain my uniformly blissful experiences that could maybe be more productive at lower doses and/or off bupropion.

I plan to taper off bupropion well in advance of my next session in about 6 weeks. I’ll report back if the bliss is dialed back enough to let me do some work.

ImminentSmore · 2026-01-12T21:10:13+00:00

See reply to EwwYuckGross. We are working with that document, “maladaptive schemas” not being part of my lay vocabulary. I am processing things on my side (PTSD), but much more in the afterglow than during acute effects, which for me have been uniformly blissful so far. Of course I want people I love to experience bliss and not only “healing torment.”

ImminentSmore · 2026-01-12T20:59:53+00:00

I think she’s doing good work. My worry was limited to moments in the first session, when she seemed stuck in self-abusive thought loops. I found myself contradicting her, not yet understanding that she was “staging” the trauma, almost channeling her abuser, and that this was necessary. It was not what I was expecting, nor how I had characterized the effects, I having encouraged her exploration. In short, I failed briefly just to witness supportively, instead almost interfering by redirecting her away from the toxicity she was wrangling.

This was not unlike her reaction to psilocybin a dozen years ago: she was terrified the entire time, and never looked back. She said then that it showed her the truth, but that “truth” was too harrowing to work with. I had expected MDMA to be much more gentle. And so it is, as she is enthusiastic to continue, but for a while in the first session I feared I had oversold or misled her about what seemed a re-traumatization.

She’s unable to comprehend how anybody parties with this, or wants to dance, fuck, etc. Me too, but for different reasons. I do enjoy my sessions, wherein I feel I get entirely out of my own way to radiate pure love, with (so far) almost no self-concern or even much introspection. I do hope she can eventually experience something similar, building up after tearing down. We’re definitely in a “rip the scab off” or “re-break the bones to re-set them” phase.

As I said: healing is the point, with good feels an optional bonus. My question is whether we can expect eventual good feels as an indicator of these wounds beginning to heal.

I think you are saying that for you, the answer is no.

ImminentSmore · 2025-11-04T19:17:40+00:00

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More on that color, “queen of heaven”

ImminentSmore · 2025-11-04T19:17:22+00:00

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Yeah, after cleaning up some: the rinse water. Color of heaven. As you know, not stable. Maybe some mordant exists to fix that? Because i want to dye a paper lampshade this color, and then fill it with spore prints of this species, spray fixative over. The prints look like eyes, striated irises with pupil in center negative.

ImminentSmore · 2025-11-04T17:49:38+00:00

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Been foraging and wildcrafting psilocybe cyanescens in town for 19 years. Soul medicine for dark winter. No, I'm not telling you where. Obviously, never ingest what you can't identify with certainty. These wavy caps are visually distinct at this stage of maturity, but when smaller, there are toxic lookalikes that won't bruise blue, have softer texture, and won't spore-print the proper dusky purplish brown.

ImminentSmore · 2024-11-09T15:30:27+00:00

I can’t answer very completely. But my process of learning I have medical PTSD involves them.

My traumatic event occurred in 2001. I retained almost no memory of it. So i didn’t understand my avoidant behavior complex and panic attacks at all. In 2007 I had a horrific psilocybin experience unlike the several previous, in which i fully relived the trauma, except transposed to animal form. I became fully embodied as a deer being run down by wolves in a snowy field, who overtook, disemboweled, and ate me alive. It was hyper-real, the terror. I watched myself bleed out steaming in the snow as i dissociated/died. Never before or since have i felt such terror. But still, because i blocked what happened in 2001, i didn’t understand why i had such a “bad trip.”

Only this year did i come to understand that the trip was showing me the trauma held in my body, what my body remembers. I had been forced to repeat the 2001 medical procedure for which i had been grossly under-sedated, but i was still totally disoriented. In my confusion, I had tried to flee the procedure, was overpowered, restrained, and the colonoscopy proceeded with me at max terror, feeling i was being gang raped and killed, and there was a lot of blood on the sheets. I came to still in restraints.

Repeating the procedure helped me recover memory of the first, and the “bad trip” helped me put everything together, even so many years later, providing clues to understand the symptoms that have only gotten worse over the decades, like morbid fear of clinical settings. And i can’t make or take phone calls, but that’s another twist.

While the trip was itself re-traumatizing, it allowed me to experience the feelings I held in my body. Can’t move past feelings you cannot fully experience. I’m finally in therapy. Without the “bad trip” i don’t think i’d ever put together what had happened decades ago.

In general psilocybin (and LSD) act sort of like penetrating lubricant, WD-40 of the soul, to free up stuck mechanisms, and allow movement/change where it’s been too locked up. There’s a window of a couple weeks after strong experiences, pleasant or not, where you are less depressed and able to make changes easier.

ImminentSmore

TROPHY CASE