“that experience doesn’t count! that person should have known they have, or their family has, a history of schizophrenia!”

“that experience also doesn’t count, you should have known to use it in a familiar place around people you are comfortable with!”

I dislike how legalization crowds often come up with absurd arguments just to make their “side” look harmless, as opposed to “hey, we really need to research this to isolate its redeeming benefits if any, in reproducible peer reviewed studies where side effects are more than anecdotes”

It can be so bad that we never want to try it again. It's all apart of the journey and the experiment.

I've had a couple bad trips, and I'm glad I had them. They created clear fear, paranoia and terror that I'll always remember. It caused me to appreciate the 'real' world a lot more.

I do not know how to explain it - but I know from my experiences that a truly bad trip wouldn't remotely compare. I'm very convinced a bad trip can give you real PTSD.

I'm glad your experiences weren't worse. I don't mean to minimize your experience. But I think it can unimaginably worse.

I'm not glad I had them. The pain wasn't worth it. The lessons I learned could have been learned in different (safer) ways.

The worst nights of alcohol poisoning, vomiting, and multi day hangovers aren't even a tiny fraction of the suffering I felt on psychedelics.

"Take it easy duuude, but take it!" - Terence McKenna

All subjective, and the lines become fuzzy.

It’s the first time I saw someone differentiating different types of meditation and it seems to match your experience.

Basically, we can either exercise and build up our focus to our internal state and bodily sensations OR do the same but focusing externally.

The interesting thing is that some people are biased to one or another, and if you have issues like anxiety then you should probably practice meditation to strengthen your focus and attention less on your body and more externally.

Really recommend the whole EP, I think you’ll find particularly interesting given your story.

I get super anxious about doing anything I haven't done in a while, but falling off the bike solves the fear of falling off the bike real fast. For me, at least

Have you looked into Internal Family Systems? Your experience seems to match pretty closely to the idea of protectors and exiles in IFS. I think meditation sometimes bypasses protectors, which can result in extreme pain.

The changes in brain function occur in both, I think they both let you "move down paths of thought you normally wouldn't" if that makes any sense? There's studies for both that show similar changes in neuroplasticity, and I've heard from many psych users who later moved to just meditation and they seem to swear by not needing psychedelics

Hope you're doing okay. That anxiety is something that's almost impossible for people to understand if they haven't experienced it.

I've never really put this experience in to words before, reading it back maybe it's time for me to try something other than waiting for it to burn itself out.

God I know exactly what you mean. There's this feeling that surfaces during the trip that's so familiar and so real and you realize it's always there, but hiding under the surface. And now that you've seen it, you can never quite fully ignore it again.

> maybe it's time for me to try something other than waiting for it to burn itself out.

It hasn't burnt itself out for me either. I don't think it ever will. But therapy has helped, as has leaning into life, and getting lost in it a bit.

What a wonderful therapeutic substance, it just doesn't fix everything on its own but requires further work, paving the path for it.

However, 30 years later I have understood it and am very full and compete due to this process.

I think what is scary is that it takes us from unknowing children into fearful adults without the skills to self reflect in a way that we can heal ourselves.

High quality therapy with a sound and grounded therapist really helped me. Beyond words actually.

It is easy to blame the trip but it isn’t the trip. We can alter ourselves, or the way we react to things.

Hope you make some progress.

I really, really wish I could recommend psychedelics, but I can't right now.

I've had at least 6 trips with tested lsd, I've had challenging moments in trips - but never bad trips outright. I truly think you learn the most during these challenging moments. But like you said, this is different from a bad trip. I know they cannot compare.

AFAIK a bad trip is effectively a panic attack, which will fall into a feedback loop, and even though I haven't personally had a bad trip, from my experience I'm very very certain you can obtain legitimate PTSD from one.

I always prepared extensively before a trip. Playlists, activities. Importantly I had an set amount of a long acting Benzodiazepine. In the case of a bad trip I could abort it, or at least some of it. However I cannot recommend this unsupervised. Everyone has different reactions, and I suspect I've been lucky. I do not even know for sure that the amount of Benzodiazepine I had would have been enough.

I do think they offer an experience that can't be replicated - at least in the way I used it. But I cannot currently recommend it. It's too unpredictable. If you are being guided by a psychologist, with a psychiatrist on standby to properly administer medication in the case you need to abort the trip, then maybe, maybe it's safer. I don't really know yet.

I look forward to the time that we have a better quality studies, and a better understanding of them in general.

If anyone does decide to do them, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE practice risk management. Test your stuff with at least two reagents, have plans in place, preferably trip sitters.

tl;dr - bad trips absolutely are a thing. "difficult moments" are also a thing - and I agree they are learning moments, but they are not the same. They are not even comparable. We cannot pretend bad trips are not a very, very real risk.

Do you feel like set and setting or your previous mental state going into the trip caused the bad trip?

I experienced the worst pain I could ever imagine, felt my consciousness stretched to fill the infinity of space, and was then convinced this was my eternal state, with no possibility of escape.

> Do you feel like set and setting or your previous mental state going into the trip caused the bad trip?

It did. Set and setting is important. But it's almost impossible to get the ideal set and setting that precludes any possibility of a bad trip. Especially because psychedelics often appeal to those already suffering. It's the catch 22 of people suffering being told that psychedelics might help them. But how do you gain an ideal set and setting to take psychedelics until you gain the internal peace you want so badly that led you to psychedelics in the first place?

I suspect a lot of these bad trip reports and reports of adverse consequences long afterwards are by people who tripped recreationally, in poor settings, with little preparation, and little if any support during the trip, and no integration afterwards.

If you're reading this and thinking about it - don't do it if you're uneasy in any way. I've had awesome experiences taking boatloads of shrooms but it was only after I figured out settings I knew were 100% safe (caretaker, extensive prep beforehand reading online and had friends who had done it that talked me through details).

I believe these drugs will save us all someday but we can't just shove everyone into the pool hoping they figure out how to swim.

Maybe its because whatever the distortion is, I inevitably start trying to figure out how it works, and the whole trip turns into scientific self experimentation. Perhaps a normal person would be scared seeing a friends face morph into a demonic figure, but I just find myself asking "why his face and not everyone's face?" and then proceed to systematically look at faces for what feels like hours. Because I'm actively trying to figure out the trick, I'm never losing sight of the fact that it is indeed a trick. And thus I never loose sight of the fact that my friend isn't literally morphing into a demon and none of this can actually hurt me. So I'm never for real scared.

On some drugs, dosages, and settings, you can lose all concept of what a "face" is. Or even what "is" is. All I knew was pain, suffering, torment, spinning, and eternity.

Maybe it is possible to sidestep the badness you experienced by trying to focus on scientific self experimentation like I end up doing. Maybe that's just not possible for you for neuro-physical reasons. If you ever decide to trip again, try it and let us know if it works.

Seems you don't hang out on Psychonautwiki, r/researchchemicals, MAPS.org, or any of the highly scientific drug communities going about deliberate, skeptical research in the space.

Just because you don't look for them doesn't mean they aren't there. If your only experience is hanging out with fried deadhead hippies I can see how you might reach this conclusion, but the space is broad and deep and many other types of people approach and research it.

Many of these highly respected researchers are psychedelic advocates.

Not only that, it's not uncommon to forget that you've even taken anything, and these experiences are often felt as "more real than real".

This is why it's important to do to have an experienced person you like and trust there with you. They can remind you that you are under the influence, comfort you if you need it, and keep you safe.

basically, if you dont end up in hospital or break out of the trip with benzos or similar, then you are going to turn that bad trip into something less bad to good was what i was trying to get at.

This sounds like a defense mechanism on a dose low enough that your mind can still defend itself like that. It's possible to take such a strong dose of psychedelics that they blow through any such defense mechanisms.

Unfortunately, such doses sometimes lead to amnesia afterwards, as the mind may still try to defend itself from even the memory of it.

This is yet another reason to do this under the guidance of a trained therapist, who can prepare you for the experience, help you to engage with the experience instead of trying to talk yourself out of it, and help you integrate it afterwards.

Why are you rationalizing this? How are you so sure that there really aren't people who simply don't get major distortions to their emotional state, and that there isn't anything wrong with them?

Not for everyone but I don't mind the occasional bad trip.

There was some thought that something important was waiting for me there, or that doing it again would heal the pain from the previous time.

It didn't heal me, and it was even worse the second time.

I learned way more in my bad trips than in my good ones. The good ones were fun, but pretty superficial. The bad ones forced me to face my shit that I might never had faced if I hadn't done psychedelics.

Going through pain and suffering has also made me a lot more empathetic to the pain and suffering of others. I know what it's like to be disoriented, afraid, and in incredible agony, so when I see someone going through something similar I can relate and have a lot of empathy for them. If I had never gone through something similar, I probably wouldn't.