Comment on Psychedelic Truth
TherapyGary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours agoPeople don’t like to hear it because it sounds like invalidating toxic positivity, but you’re right. Aside from fringe cases, there’s no bad trips- only challenging trips. It may even be traumatic, but that doesn’t make it an inherently bad trip- it’s all about how you respond to it and what you do with it after.
i_need_your_bones@piefed.social 8 hours ago
In that case there’s no bad anything. No bad experiances ever. The word bad is meaningless
TherapyGary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 hours ago
Kind of, yeah. If you think this is dumb (beyond your reductionist take, I mean), I’d genuinely recommend you read Viktor Frankl (I ignore the religious stuff tho, personally, tbc)
It’s a specifically important distinction to make for psychedelics though. If you go into it thinking bad trips are real, you’re more likely to have one, and you’re more likely to have a defeatist attitude afterward creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Especially when using psychedelics therapeutically, it’s extremely beneficial to go into it with the mindset that there’s no such thing as a bad trip. It reduces the odds of having a challenging trip in the first place, makes them less challenging when they do happen, and improves successful integration of challenging trips afterward
i_need_your_bones@piefed.social 7 hours ago
So your issue in actuality the word “bad”
I think this is detrimental. You can reject the word bad and pretend everything is something good if you handle it right but this is just reductionist and unhelpful.
Even with your examples you speak transformativly. This is a much better framing. Turning something bad into something beneficial. Life and lemons
When you have a bad trip you’re having a bad time. Pretending that it’s impossible for a trip to go bad makes it so when one does your advice is rejected. Framing it as a “challange” puts burden and blame on the individual that is undue. On Shrooms you are not in control pretending you are often is what leads to a bad trip. Acceptance of the mindset, of the trip, is the most common and most effective suggestion one can have for psychedelics. You aren’t in control past set and setting. It’s not your fault if things go south.
Praise be the shroom god allow them to send you as they wish. Go with the water not against it. Float like a log and even though the water is quick you won’t drown.
Bad isn’t a bad word. It’s just a descriptor.
Sure, often (not always) bad can lead to good even great but rejecting the reality of the negative for forced and fictional goodness is delusion. If that trick of the mind helps that’s ok for you but inherently blaming others who recognise bad makes you lesser.
Outside of psychedelics the issue is the same. Blaming, which is exactly what you’re doing, others for the bad positioning it as framing and a failure to realise it’s all actually good bits people with little chance for help to be given.
To go to the absolute, absurd, worst example. A child sa victim. Should they have rejected the idea of bad? What happened to them was good they failed to create? No. Can they make good out of it? Yes. The experiance was still “bad”
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
The label “bad trip” has a loaded connotation. People think of a bad trip as something to flee from or as the negative outcome of a psychedelic. I’ve had multiple challenging trips (all lsd), and yet there was a time in my life I went back every 6 months or so.
When you frame them not as a risk or as a thing to flee from, but as a chance for uncomfortable growth it doesn’t make it less uncomfortable, but it can make it significantly more productive even than the good trips. You don’t control where it takes you, but you do control how you interpret it and how you respond.
So when the drug sits you down and shows you the bullshit you’ve been on you have a choice: do you hide from it, internalize it, or otherwise interpret it as disparaging you, or do you take it like an honest conversation from a trusted friend or mentor and accept that you need to change. It’s similar for trauma, psychedelics aren’t used in treatment of trauma because it’s a nice easy fun time, no it’s a guided challenging trip through your traumatic experiences to help you confront them in a productive manner.
I personally don’t like saying there’s no such thing as a bad trip, I think it’s entirely possible that psychedelics can lead you into uncomfortable places where you either have nothing to learn or aren’t yet able to deal with it. But I do think the vast majority of “bad trips” could benefit from being reframed as challenging so that people’s response to them is to attempt to grow from them rather than to pop a xanax. Though of course the pre trip check in is also invaluable, double check that you’re in the right mood before taking the drug and remember that it’s always better to bail than go in when you aren’t prepared.
TherapyGary@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
There’s a broad push in the therapeutic psychedelic community to use the term “challenging” instead of “bad” because semantics and framing matter. I know it can be annoying, but some words carry an unfortunate connotation that’s best subverted by using a different word altogether.
I do take issue with the words “bad” and “good” in general, but I wouldn’t say that there are no experiences which can be described as bad. (I’m also an amoralist and believe nothing is inherently “bad,” so at least I’m consistent, however unpopular)
I recommend Frankl because I realize this sounds inherently invalidating, and if anyone is allowed to say it, it’s a holocaust survivor. I’d recommend “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which he wrote shortly after being liberated from a concentration camp.