Integration

Recreational drugs and Plant Medicines

It’s becoming common for people to use these medicines, often wanting to treat feelings and emotions. The medicines might be recreational drugs or plant medicines. Sometimes this goes well, but sometimes it throws up more material for us to work through.

Psychedelic integration offers a space to process what has happened and to make sense of it. Oftentimes trauma responses appear in medicine sessions, and there might not have been any relational therapy available for you to unpack it during the retreat or experience. This might have left you feeling disturbed or upset by the medicine experience you have had. Experiences such as having tremors, or feeling extreme fear, or seeing images that don’t make sense or are disturbing are common.

Processing trauma somatically, sober and without medicine, can be helpful to process those experiences. Trauma is a relational issue, and so it isn’t easy to resolve trauma by working on our own. Having another human to help you can feel supportive.

Many medicines remove us from the human realms of thinking, and they take us into the ‘transpersonal’ (literally away from people). This can link us to a bigger experience, and feel like a relief – but the relational problems we have in our everyday lives (with other humans!), might not change.

I was trained in somatic integration work in the USA.

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I am not an addiction therapist and I don’t work with alcoholism or drug addiction. If you are having problems with regular drug usage please contact: DAROS and Turning Point.