I treated my own C-PTSD with Psychedelics
Content/trigger warning: this article includes references to trauma, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and childhood sexual abuse.
“What did you do on the weekend?” my friend asks. Her soft English accent lingers in my head. I look around the yard of the school that my three children attend, the yard I’d find myself in every weekday afternoon at three. I toss up quickly in my head, do I tell her what I really did, out of excitement, or do I pretend I did something completely different, out of fear?
Despite the fear, why do I feel this undying urge to yell it from the treetops to anyone that’ll listen? My heart races, my stomach hits the floor as the words tumble from my mouth and my voice shakes: “I took LSD with my husband”.
I watch her face, she looks confused… “What’s that? Is that like meth?” she quizzes me.
I instantly regret my decision to tell her. I forget, not everyone has researched drugs as intently as I have, and that says something, as I am quite the novice. She doesn’t get it. And I can’t blame her for that, but I feel frustrated knowing that from here on out, some people might cast some pretty shitty judgments, even if my friend wasn’t doing that herself.
I take a breath and attempt to explain what it is and what it does within the three minutes I know it takes the other mums to reach us from the front gate. But I give up…because I know, that’s just not enough time to break such a stigma.
I make a mental note to remind myself not to talk to people about it until I have articulated a better response for this exact situation, because I realise it’ll come up a lot, and I despise the idea that I’ll be judged for something that helped me save myself from myself. Especially knowing that it hurt no one else and that my use of this drug since has only bettered my human experience in our society (therefore, bettering society in some small way).
I grew up in a home that used drugs. Mostly recreationally, and when I say recreationally, I mean my family home was spotless because my mum found that at that time in her life, cleaning the house on speed really helped to get the house sparkling fast, so she could spend time art-and-crafting with us kids.
At the age of ten, I was no stranger to stories of my mum and her friends tripping in the bush with elephants, or cleaning my ponies in the bath with glittering-fractal waters. I was also no stranger to the bottles of booze or sneaky weed tins and pipes lying around the house. At one point, I’m told my 18-month-old brother ate a tin of cannabis. It must have been a sad day for mum that day. This might paint a horrid picture but I promise, there was a lot of love and fun in there too. And while I could start my own war on drugs for their involvement in the trauma I endured during childhood, I don’t. I owe much of my progress to them; specifically, to the schedule 9 drugs LSD (Lysergic Acid Diethylamide) and ‘magic mushrooms’ (psilocybin) that would later change the trajectory of my life for the better.
Many years ago I was diagnosed with C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), and GAD (Generalised Anxiety Disorder). I’d been suffering from depression and anxiety for most of my life, but hadn’t had any treatment for these. But when the C-PTSD came on, it was something else…
The flashbacks began in 2015, and that was it, I spiralled from there on, into the ever-consuming darkness that many childhood sexual abuse survivors do. I had to then try to fight my way out the trauma that the six years of sexual abuse (at the hands of my then step-father) had caused me. It was then that I discovered it was a process—a long, painful, agonising process—and because of it, sometimes people die.
Eventually, I ended up wanting to end it all, not because I hated my life, but because I needed to escape the pain.
I was tired. I was tiring of the anxiety, the fear I had of my own thoughts; ones that would change so fast and so erratically that I was scared that I’d snap one day, and then I’d be the mum in the papers who did something really stupid. I was tiring of fantasising about leaving my family, and how simple that would be for my husband.
The saddest part of this was that I considered myself lucky; I had a supportive family, lovely children, a wonderful husband and a beautiful life. But I had this trauma. It was there with me, following me around, reminding me it was there. Every. SINGLE. Day.
I was attending therapy, trying the antidepressants and the over-prescribed anti-psychotics. But I was still in this silent torment; I was also self-medicating with over-the-counter pain medications, wine, and sugar.
After my diagnosis and despite already knowing I had PTSD and depression, I began to read a lot about what to expect and how to work through it, but to me… the prognosis, it didn’t look good. Some heal, many don’t, some even wrote to me to tell me how they still suffered from their trauma well into their senior years.
One of the first articles I read about living with C-PTSD from sexual abuse was about a young woman in Belgium who had been granted the right to end her life in her twenties. The doctors deemed her mental conditions untreatable, stating that she would have no quality of life from then on out. I would see women on the news in their seventies or eighties talking of how their childhood trauma consumed them. It was from these stories I came to fear that I’d be stuck in this endless depression loop for years or even decades to come.
In time, I came to accept that my children would become unconcerned that “Mum’s crying in the shower again”, that “Mum’s hiding in bed” and “Dad is always worried about Mum”.
In the darker days while I was waiting to snap, I’d imagine that their only memories would be that “My mum died from her depression”. This was my life now. I had not only succumbed to this idea but I had accepted this as my fate: it would be this hard forever, at least until I died.
In time I began to see a transpersonal counsellor who recommended that I take up writing about my experience. So for once I listened, and slowly, with the flow of my words, the pain sometimes lessened. I realised how cathartic writing could be, so I started writing, then created a community of support, a place where I could curl up and hang out with others who, like me, assumed our diagnoses as ‘sexual abuse victims’ were essentially terminal.
I had been attending psychotherapy sessions with a psychoanalyst every fortnight for about a year when the opportunity to take part in a study to treat PTSD with Cognitive Processing therapy came along. The week prior to taking part in the study I had also had my first ever LSD-induced experience.
The months prior to that, I’d spent a bunch of my life on Reddit and a further 100 hours on websites dedicated to the use of psychedelics in the therapeutic sense, desperate for an answer I never thought I’d get.
During this LSD experience, I had no choice but to face my trauma as I sat across from my husband out the front of our house on that balmy summer night. We talked and we cried so hard that I couldn’t breathe, and then we laughed until we cried some more.
It was during those hours that I made peace with the anger I had carried for my abuser for the past twenty-something years. I forgave him after I pulled apart every aspect of my abuse, and then I asked, “Whose fault was it? And even if we knew exactly the what/how/why and who of it all, can we place blame on that basis? And then what?” What do I do with that?
Despite my years of searching, it became clear to me that the answer was simple. It was on me. Not that I was responsible for the abuse I suffered. But I was waiting for something or someone to do the work of healing for me. I also assigned too much of my own progress in my healing on having some kind of justice for what he did to me. I had to make peace with myself. I had to forgive myself, I had to let go, because I had done all I could. I had to stop doing the same thing I always had. And I finally had done that on this night, by altering my state of mind and really looking inside.
‘Letting Her Out’. Painting by Antanika Hoberg
Forgiving him, is forgiving me. Letting it go. It all made sense now.
Forgiveness often brings out heated arguments and conversations because many people think forgiveness is saying that what someone did was okay, or that ‘that person is okay’. But that’s not what it means at all. Forgiving is being kind to myself. Forgiving means letting go of the anger and the pain. Forgiveness is about me, not the man who did this. I am the only one who has the power to change this.
Hours later, exhausted and slightly terrified, I lie beside my husband as something is triggered and a new traumatic memory rushes through me. I cry for a moment for the hurt, and then the emotion, the pain, slides quietly from me.
“Are you alright?” my husband asks.
“Yeah,” I smile. Somehow, feeling completely at ease with the memory that appeared before me, I lie my head on my pillow to sleep, completely unaware that tomorrow would be the beginning of a very passionate relationship, between me, myself and LSD.
I spent the next 15 weeks in the CPT therapy study. Little did I know, integrating my experience with therapy was one of the best things I could have done right after an experience like I’d had, as psychedelics tend to enhance neuroplasticity in the brain (it enhances our brain’s ability to change and adapt throughout life). I’d read about these drugs helping with depression, anxiety and OCD but I had not yet understood how. Later I would learn that “LSD can enhance self-awareness and facilitate the recollection of, and release from, emotionally loaded memories” (Vollenweider and Kometer 2010).
I was able to do much of the work I needed to do in therapy much more easily, because I was able to integrate things I’d learnt during these sessions with a rational ease.
I realised how much responsibility I had for my own healing. It was freeing. At first, I thought I was being emotionally void during my sessions, that I was disassociating again, because I wasn’t crying, I wasn’t shaking, I wasn’t thinking the way I usually did. I was talking boldly and bluntly about it, I was almost confident, with an air of nonchalance. I no longer wanted to sit in my pain, but to explore it. I wanted to see what I could do next. It became clear to me that something was different.
I’d signed up to the study believing I needed help with dealing with what had happened to me. What the LSD combined with therapy helped me realise was that most of that work was done during that psychedelic experience a few weeks earlier and what I really needed to do was to work on me now. I’d worked on the trauma for so long, that I’d neglected myself.
Eventually, I was signed off by the psychologist because I no longer suffered from C-PTSD. And I’ve never been back to that life.
The Future:
Back with my old psychoanalyst in our bi-monthly briefings, the conversation quickly changed from one about my trauma, to my everyday life issues that now took a welcome dominance in my life—like my parenting, or what to do with myself. I was lost, because I didn’t know who I was without the trauma.
I began making small changes, ones I’d been meaning to make but never had the desire or need to put into action, because who needs plans when you feel like a stupid waste of space? I started to actively change my mind about how I saw my body and my mind; I took part in a nude photo shoot with other survivors of sexual abuse, I unfollowed all the ‘inspo’ pages on Instagram, I stopped doubting my intelligence. Then I started onto bigger things such as university at 32, something I never dreamed was an option for me (I may have cried like a baby and had to be chaperoned by my husband on the first day, but hey, baby steps!) I even started meditating daily, eating well, exercising, reading and being nicer to my kids…
It was almost as though my whole personality and potential had been held hostage by my own trauma, and now I was finally the person I would have been if I’d never been through that. The dark cloud that sat on me for my whole life had dissipated, and I had this new empathetic self-perspective. Before LSD, my trauma felt like another baby I had to take care of, a big slow baby sloth in the room, who cried when she threw the bowl at the wall, expecting something different to happen each time.
Psychedelics helped me move through the distractions and patterns of my past and allowed me to consider that I have a future. As I look forward truly hopeful for the first time, my life is clear before me, a world of real opportunity, a world I created with the assistance of a drug that I was not allowed to have.
And while I do not miss my darkness (and who would?), I think of it as an old friend, one who I never really liked anyway, but still remember fondly for the lessons she taught me.
My old friend trauma and my new friend LSD had led me here to explore other things to aid me in finding purpose again. I can only hope that one day the stigma related to such incredible experiences is lessened by voices such as mine.
Written by Antanika Hoberg
Disclaimer: This is a story of one person's experience, written from their perspective. Psychedelics are not a panacea, and should be treated with caution and respect. The APS does not advocate breaking the law. If you are new to psychedelics, or would like to learn more, we recommend checking out our FAQ and our resources page.
