How a Psychedelic Journey Can Support Eating Disorder Recovery

During a psychedelic experience, intense emotional content may arise. For people navigating eating disorders, big feels can feel unfamiliar, especially since the attempts at trying to keep physically small is a way to not feel big emotions. 

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To help the process of being with big feelings, having solid preparation and support in which you gain tools and context for navigating the experience is key.

And to prepare for this in a psychedelic journey, it is helpful to remember that despite what may arise in your perception or physical experience during the journey, the risk of physical harm is low. You won’t die from feeling the big feeling nor be completely swallowed by it!

Developing body awareness, learning about your nervous system and stress responses, as well as ways to regulate (breath, sound, movement, touch), recalling your intention, and developing a keen eye to spot reactive and unconscious avoidance patterns, are supportive tools to practice during the preparation phase, and to bring these skills into the journey space too.

 These exact skills can be applied throughout one’s eating disorder recovery journey, and so the process of preparing to navigate a psychedelic journey is akin to eating disorder recovery.

It is important to note that preparing for a psychedelic journey is not just a single 90-minute session with a therapist or a coach.

A psychedelic journey is part of an ongoing healing process, that goes at the pace of each individual’s nervous system, taking into account their (trauma) history, their current mindset, and how comfortable they feel with the person who is supporting and holding the journey space alongside.

For people in eating disorder recovery, feel safe with the facilitator is super key otherwise the eating disorder defenses will still be on guard, and this may make it more challenging during the journey itself.

 During the preparation phase, it is vital that there is space for the facilitator to truly take good time to develop rapport with the person who is seeking to journey, to gather information about their background, trauma history, and current medications, clarify expectations, explain logistics, delineate acceptable boundaries.

When there is relational safety, trust and rapport, and clarity one is able to surrender to and deeply engage in the experience. Without this safety, one may try to control the experience, hold back, or resist which can lead to feelings of overwhelm and fear.

With this deep level of understanding between the facilitator and the journeyer, there is flexibility and adaptability.

For people in recovery, developing a safe, co-regulated relationship that honours the inner rhythms of their psyche rather than following external protocols, can be powerful medicine. And when experience within the context of the psychedelic experience, can touch on supporting the healing of early developmental trauma, for example.

When there is enough safety, trust and rapport in the preparation and journey space, one feels empowered within themselves to face and be with whatever they encounter in their Psychedelic experience, and to trust that it will lead to whatever it is they are calling in to be healed.

Through this relational safety, you ultimately seek the answers on your own, access deep inner healing. It takes courage to face this. And having the right support and preparation will bolster self-confidence to face whatever arises.

A psychedelic journey is like an eating disorder recovery, just condensed into a few hours.

During the journey, accepting whatever comes up is exactly what is needed for this moment, rather than resisting, keeps one grounded in the present moment.

Since an eating disorder is a variety of coping strategies that attempt to bring someone out of the present moment (and shoots one into the past or future), reconnecting back to the here-and-now one of the key steps in healing from disordered eating patterns.

Facing the difficult stuff and surrendering is exactly what the eating disorder doesn’t want us to do. When shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, anger, grief, sexual energy, ecstatic joy, and love are experienced, people in eating disorder recovery can use the opportunity offered in plant medicine journeys to stay with these feelings and experience them fully.

Learning to trust oneself to hold and be with the unfamiliar, activating feelings in an embodied way, rather than trying to intellectualize or avoid, we can observe the ever-fluctuating feelings, and meet the eating disorder in a new way.

For people in eating disorder recovery, where there is often a deep fear in things changing and a tight grip on control, realising how quickly things do shift and that the ground under us is always moving, means that finding ground and home within the body is where we find the medicine we have been seeking.

Photo by Mark Autumns on Unsplash