Sometimes integration is gentle. People sit with me, have a meaningful experience, walk away with some insight, and over the following weeks they slowly let what they saw inform how they live. Things shift, but not dramatically. The experience becomes a reference point. Life continues, slightly different.
This isn’t what this post is about.
This post is about what to do when integration is the opposite of gentle. When the weeks after ceremony bring up material you weren’t expecting — old memories, old grief, anger you didn’t know you were carrying, fear that won’t quiet down, dissociation, sleep disruption, intrusive images, periods of feeling unmoored from yourself or your life.
If you’re reading this because you’re in that place right now, the first thing I want you to know is that it’s more common than you think, and almost always passes. The second thing I want you to know is when to ask for help and when to keep moving.
Why this happens
The medicine doesn’t add anything. It doesn’t put new material into you. What it does, sometimes, is loosen the structures that have been keeping older material out of conscious awareness. Those structures are there for reasons. They formed because at some point, that material was more than you could process, and your psyche found a way to put it on a shelf.
Ceremony, for some people, takes things off the shelf. Not all at once, usually. Often the experience itself feels relatively contained, and then something starts surfacing days or weeks later. A memory you hadn’t thought about in years. A wave of grief without an obvious cause. An emotion attached to a person from your past that you’d thought you were finished with.
This is not the medicine doing something to you. This is you, finally meeting something you’ve been holding away from yourself, sometimes for a long time.
What usually helps
Slow down. The instinct when difficult material surfaces is often to push harder — to read more, to do more practices, to seek another ceremony, to “process” it. Resist that. Difficult material processes by being felt and witnessed, not by being analyzed.
Spend time alone, but not too much. Solitude is important; isolation is not. Be alone enough to feel what you’re feeling. Be with people enough to remember you’re not in the past.
Move your body. Walk, especially. Long walks. The kind of walking where you don’t bring music or a podcast. Whatever’s surfacing tends to settle when the body is moving slowly and steadily through space. There’s something about the rhythm of walking that lets the nervous system metabolize what the mind can’t.
Write, but not to figure it out. Write to get it out. Don’t try to make it coherent. Don’t try to make it meaningful. Just put it on paper and let it be on paper instead of inside you.
Talk to one person. Not several. Talk to the person in your life who can hear hard things without flinching, without trying to fix them, without making it about themselves. If you don’t have that person, talk to a therapist who knows about this work. Don’t talk to your full social circle. Don’t post about it.
Sleep when you can. Eat regularly. Reduce or eliminate alcohol, caffeine, screens before bed. Treat your body like a body that’s doing work, because it is.
Be patient. Most of this material moves through in three to six weeks. Some of it takes longer. Almost none of it stays at its initial intensity. The first week is usually the most acute; by the third week it’s usually quieter; by the second month it’s usually something you can think about without being engulfed by it.
When to seek more support
There’s a difference between difficult integration and a mental health crisis, and it’s important to know when to escalate.
Reach out to a therapist or doctor if any of the following are happening:
- You’re having thoughts of harming yourself or others, beyond fleeting intrusive thoughts
- You’re not sleeping at all, or sleeping for very long periods and unable to function
- You’re unable to work, care for yourself, or care for the people who depend on you
- You’re feeling persistently disconnected from reality in a way that doesn’t pass
- You’re using alcohol or other substances to cope in ways that are escalating
- Your symptoms are getting worse rather than better as time passes
- A trusted person in your life is concerned about you
If you have a history of bipolar disorder, psychosis, or other serious mental health conditions, the threshold for reaching out is lower. Don’t wait. Call your psychiatrist, your therapist, or your physician. You’re not failing the work by needing support. You’re doing the work by recognizing the limit of what you can hold alone.
If you have a therapist who knows about this work, lean on them. If your existing therapist doesn’t know about this work, you have a choice: tell them honestly and see if they can work with it, or find someone who can. Therapists who are explicitly trained in psychedelic integration are increasingly available; the field is growing. You can also work with someone trained in trauma without telling them about the ceremony — what surfaces is the same material that surfaces in trauma therapy generally, and good trauma therapists know how to work with it.
The longer view
When I started doing this work, I was naive about how hard integration could get for some people. I’m not naive about it anymore. The medicine can open doors that take real time to walk through. Some of the people I’ve sat with have had transformative experiences and walked away easily. Others have had transformative experiences and spent six months in difficult, important work that they wouldn’t trade for anything but that they also wouldn’t describe as comfortable.
If you’re in the harder version of this right now, I want you to know two things.
First, you’re not broken. What you’re meeting is real, and meeting it is the work. You did not do anything wrong, and the experience did not malfunction. The fact that hard material is surfacing is, in its own difficult way, a sign that something is moving that needed to move.
Second, this passes. Not because the material disappears, but because you become bigger than what you’re meeting. You build the capacity to hold what was previously holding you. That capacity grows slowly, and not in a straight line, but it grows.
Reach out if you need to. I’m part of the network of support for the people I work with, and I expect to be used. There’s no shame in needing more support than you anticipated. Most of the people I’ve watched come through the harder side of this work have asked for help at some point. That’s the move.
You’re not alone in this. Even when it feels like you are.
