I’ve been clean and sober in AA and NA almost 17 years and I’m about to embark on a psychedelic adventure. I’m classifying psychedelics as anything that is neither an upper or a downer and non addictive, these include, LSD, mushrooms, mescaline, MDMA, 2CB, DMT, and marijuana. My hypothesis is if they are non addictive it’s because they do not affect the endorphin receptors and if they don’t affect those receptors, like alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and meth do, then they will not catalyse the phenomena of craving.
My life is actually better than ever. I meditate and exercise daily, my businesses now give me enough income to do mostly what I want, which is read, write, travel and chase girls. I have a loving relationship with my kids and a few moderately intimate relationships with friends. But despite the gratitude I feel for my life I’m sure I have missing wiring. I back away from deep intimacy, and spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to get laid with girls ten to twenty years my junior. My empathy levels are barely above that of a psychopath and I feel like I could be a better version of myself.
I read psychopaths couldn’t be cured, there was no science that had been discovered to build empathy in them so figured my brain had just missed the phase of empathy receptor building. I could live with that, but I thought it possible that the occasional bouts of mild depression might have something to do with lack of empathy, compassion and hence connection with others.
Recently I hear about the benefits of Ayahuasca and how the shamans reject that it is even a drug. I watched a youtube video documenting the ceremony and did some research in forums and it would appear many recovered alcoholics have done an Ayahuasca ceremony and didn’t lead them back to the drink. I was intrigued. The video showed emotional purging similar to what I had experienced with my own emotional processing just from consciously trying to feel feelings instead of deny them or talk myself out of them.
I know there are deeper layers to my emotional sickness, the same sickness that caused me to destroy myself with alcohol and heroin. I wandered how much of my life and passions were this disease and how much were me? What I read and saw of Ayahuasca lead me to believe, or at least suspect that this treatment could remove the last layers of addiction and allow me to live truly for me. If that happened and I was still lacking empathy and chasing pussy for the rest of my life, then so be it. I would be more than happy with that, it would be me, and I would be a unique soul in an unfathomably large universe. I would make the most of what I had and continue to get better at working with it. But what if I changed? What if a psychedelic experience, or series of experiences, changed me, or more importantly changed my desires. I want to live my life, the life and destiny of my DNA blueprint, not the abridged version caused by missed wiring in my upbringing.
I looked at all the options of an Ayahuasca retreat and it was a mammoth effort. The trip from Australia to Peru, and the time off work the major obstacles, still it was worth it. I sat with these thoughts for a few weeks since I didn’t want to be compulsive about it and wanted to let it sink in. I rang a friend I had gotten clean with and he warned me against it saying that if you take uppers like that you will eventually want to take downers, I didn’t argue but it was contrary to what I had read online about AA members taking Ayahuasca, who claimed it hadn’t set off any cravings for alcohol or depressant type drugs.
As I went to meetings over the next couple of weeks I started to see holes in the AA program, not so much for newcomers, AA has gotten so many people sober, it’s unarguable the big book and AA program can get and keep you sober, but I could see AA doesn’t deal with long term sobriety. How could it? There was no one that was sober more than a few years when the book was published. The simple solution of continuing to help newcomers for the rest of your life is sound advice, but it does not address the repressed emotions of long term sober alcoholics.
It’s only my own anecdotal evidence, but the amount of alcoholics that suffer from long term depression and suicide seems high. I remember talking with friends when we were about 5 years clean about the weird older cleaner members (OCM). It’s understood that the disease of addiction/alcoholism is progressive – if you are sober for 30 years, you not only go back to drinking like you used to, but within months you are even worse than you used to be. It would appear that part of the disease makes you get old and weird even if you stay clean and this leads to depression, relapse, or suicide.
As I looked across the table at these other members over ten years clean, they look miserable, frowns on their faces, tired from working long hours and not looking forward to going home to their demanding spouses. Could psychedelics cure this insanity? How ironic if it could.
As I did more research I found that LSD might give me the same experience as Ayahuasca and I wouldn’t have to travel to Peru. I had not seriously considered LSD because of the ties it had to my addiction and me partying on it so much. I had loved tripping as a teenager, I had taken 100’s of trips partying and never had a bad trip, but it was partying and I was nearly always drunk. I had crossed psychedelics off the things I can do list because of my sobriety and hadn’t given them a great deal of thought for 17 years except the occasional trip down memory lane and some of the good times, but the more I read, especially the new trend of micro-dosing, the more practical LSD seemed.
While I had some respect for the Peruvian shamans I didn’t really buy into all the hocus pocus of their Ayahuasca rituals. I understood it as a good way to prepare for the drug and have it in a safe place with an experienced guide, but I believed it was a drug acting on your neurons not the spirit energies they believed. The other thing is I am so introverted did I even want to do it in a group of people, or even a guide for that matter? I had taken plenty of LSD, and high doses up to 700 micrograms (7 trips – that was pretty wild), I knew what to expect with a normal dose of 100-200, the chance of anything negative happening was almost nil. To mitigate the risk further I could keep some Valium on hand if I did feel it was too much. So my theory was a dose of 100-200 micrograms, one to two blotters, taken early in the morning after my morning meditation and spend the day listening to music, drawing, maybe some writing, if I’m not too out of it I can go for a walk by the river and the trees. More will be revealed.
Red Pill Recovery 