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Bad trips are a real risk with all psychedelics. I don't like the attitude in psychedelic communities that there's "no such thing as a bad trip, only a challeng

Bad trips are a real risk with all psychedelics. I don't like the attitude in psychedelic communities that there's "no such thing as a bad trip, only a challenging one". I had a couple bad trips. It felt like living in hell for a literal eternity. It's almost impossible to describe the agony that the human mind is capable of experiencing. It's absurd how much suffering the human mind can experience. The main message I got out of those experiences was that everything I learned in hell could have been learned in other, safer, ways.

cyode 4y ago
I’m sorry you experienced that. Do you feel like it left any lasting effects?
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  It's been almost 3 years, and there's still some remaining effects. Doing a lot better though! Therapy has helped.
yieldcrv 4y ago
Agreed, there is a lot of victim blaming and invalidation in the psychedelic community that is oddly paradoxical. “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”
tremarley 4y ago
We can get bad trips with any type of drug. Even weed and alchohol. 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.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  I've had some horrible experiences with alcohol, but nothing compared to the experience of eternal torture I felt with psychedelics. 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- system16 4y ago
  Comparing a bad psychedelic trip to a bad experience with cannabis or alcohol is kind of trivializing it. A moderate LSD dose can last 8-12 hours and at its peak is much, much more intense. Unless you have some valium on hand, if things go south there is no escaping it. You can't just go to sleep like you could with alcohol or cannabis.
  - aricz 4y ago
    Edibles can kick your arse in a major way and go on for hours. I've had a few experiences that surpasses most of my trips on LSD. But I agree that a moderate-high dose of LSD that goes south is much harder to control. Sometimes it's just like a bomb detonates in the center of your mind, and you're using the next days (weeks, months or years) collecting the debris and trying to piece them together. "Take it easy duuude, but take it!" - Terence McKenna
    - DenisM 4y ago
      What is moderate-high in your book?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - aricz 4y ago
Encrust6221 4y ago
I took mushrooms three years ago and immediately gained a pervasive baseline anxiety in my life. Haven't been able to shake it since. Wouldn't recommend if you have any issues with anxiety in your life beforehand.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  This is a risk that many psychonauts seem unwilling to accept. Hope you're doing okay. That anxiety is something that's almost impossible for people to understand if they haven't experienced it.
  - Encrust6221 4y ago
    I'm doing okay. You are right, it's a very vulnerable and almost inevitable feeling, like I've been shown who I "truly" am inside, something that I only accessed directly during that trip, but which exists below the surface all the time. Which obviously cycles heavily back into the anxious feelings. 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.
    - Trasmatta 4y ago
      <3 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.
      - saiya-jin 4y ago
        So it basically allowed you to start the process of reconciliation with oneself, finding balance that was never truly there, being able to work with sore spot that was before hidden too well. You probably felt a bit off before but never went digging and accepted it just as part of you. What a wonderful therapeutic substance, it just doesn't fix everything on its own but requires further work, paving the path for it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lend000 4y ago
Could you elaborate on what exactly you experienced (and your takeaways) from your bad trip? Do you feel like set and setting or your previous mental state going into the trip caused the bad trip?
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  > Could you elaborate on what exactly you experienced (and your takeaways) from your 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?
  - lend000 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Part of the set is who is there, and if there's someone there who's experienced (or, ideally even trained in psychedelic therapy) and who you like and trust, they can help guide you and support you. 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.
jrvarela56 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I agree the risk is just shrugged off by experienced users. 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.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
I'm not trying to dismiss your experience here, in fact I'm sure its all accurate, but I must make the curious observation that I don't seem to get the distortion of emotional state so many others seem to have on psychedelics (be it positive or negative). I get all the other distortions. Time is skewed, vision gets geometric patterns, stream of consciousness becomes more of an unnavigable white water rapids of consciousness etc. But the whole experience is mostly orthogonal to good or bad or scared or euphoric or any other emotion you can list. 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.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  > 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 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.
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    I'm not denying that its possible to lose all concept of a "face" or even know what "is" is and to only be left with pain, suffering, spinning and eternity. On the contrary, I find it to be an immensely scientifically valuable observation that you lost all concept of a face, didn't know what "is" is and only knew pain, suffering, spinning and eternity. Just knowing that you end up with that experience and other people do not tells us something insightful about which sorts of brain function are universally hard wired and which parts can differ from person to person. 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.
kuhewa 4y ago
Yeah i never experienced fight-or-flight panic (outside of the brief moment before a car accident collision or whatever) until a few weeks after i tried a strong salvia extract. Its like those neural connections got well-trodden enough in that afternoon to become a real pathway.
DenisM 4y ago
You had a couple of bad trips? They way you describe them it was awfully bad, and yet you did it more than once?
- npteljes 4y ago
  Maybe he had like 230 trips, and of them, a couple was bad.
- RHSman2 4y ago
  Humans are dumb (me too!)
- nikisweeting 4y ago
  "Bad trip" is a huge space of possible levels of bad. I've had tons of uncomfortable trips but none were "bad" enough to deter. Each person has a widely varying level of comfort with discomfort and resolve to keep trying. Same thing with extreme sports or any voluntary exposure to discomfort with perceived gain. Just like extreme sports each painful experience also has a non-zero risk of deterring you forever and no longer seeming worth it. Whether you're willing to keep rolling the dice is up to how much you gain from each experience and how you integrate it.
- boppo1 4y ago
  I fractured my leg the first time I went skiing. I went skiing again the next season without a second thought because it seemed like I could have fun if I was careful to do it right.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Yep I was dumb. The first one was bad. The second one was infinitely worse.
nikisweeting 4y ago
I've had painfully horrific bad trips that lasted for eternity but none have seemed to have any lasting downsides. If anything they build my confidence in my own psyche because I can endure them and come out fine on the other side / can now approach them with confidence and usually de-escalate the horror during the trip. Not for everyone but I don't mind the occasional challenging/painful trip.
tempestn 4y ago
After experiencing a subjective "literal eternity of hell" once, why did you do it again?
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  Because I'm a dumb human, and wanted to touch the flame again. 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.
BatteryMountain 4y ago
And the problem with these Eternity in Hell experiences, is that it can permanently traumatize you and embed (new) triggers for things like anxiety/panic attacks and other stress disorders. It can feel truly real, truly horrifying, in a place where time don't exist, where you don't know words or language. That kind of experience can change a person, and not always in a good way.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Yes, they have the potential for harm... which is why they should be treated with the utmost respect, with serious preparation, and ideally under the guidance of a trained psychedelic therapist who you like and trust.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"The main message I got out of those experiences was that everything I learned in hell could have been learned in other, safer, ways." 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.
- Trasmatta 4y ago
  It's possible to learn empathy without having to spend eternity in hell first.

cyode 4y ago

I’m sorry you experienced that. Do you feel like it left any lasting effects?

Trasmatta 4y ago
It's been almost 3 years, and there's still some remaining effects. Doing a lot better though! Therapy has helped.

yieldcrv 4y ago

Agreed, there is a lot of victim blaming and invalidation in the psychedelic community that is oddly paradoxical. “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”

tremarley 4y ago

We can get bad trips with any type of drug. Even weed and alchohol. 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.

Trasmatta 4y ago
I've had some horrible experiences with alcohol, but nothing compared to the experience of eternal torture I felt with psychedelics. 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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
system16 4y ago
Comparing a bad psychedelic trip to a bad experience with cannabis or alcohol is kind of trivializing it. A moderate LSD dose can last 8-12 hours and at its peak is much, much more intense. Unless you have some valium on hand, if things go south there is no escaping it. You can't just go to sleep like you could with alcohol or cannabis.
- aricz 4y ago
  Edibles can kick your arse in a major way and go on for hours. I've had a few experiences that surpasses most of my trips on LSD. But I agree that a moderate-high dose of LSD that goes south is much harder to control. Sometimes it's just like a bomb detonates in the center of your mind, and you're using the next days (weeks, months or years) collecting the debris and trying to piece them together. "Take it easy duuude, but take it!" - Terence McKenna
  - DenisM 4y ago
    What is moderate-high in your book?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - aricz 4y ago

Encrust6221 4y ago

I took mushrooms three years ago and immediately gained a pervasive baseline anxiety in my life. Haven't been able to shake it since. Wouldn't recommend if you have any issues with anxiety in your life beforehand.

Trasmatta 4y ago
This is a risk that many psychonauts seem unwilling to accept. Hope you're doing okay. That anxiety is something that's almost impossible for people to understand if they haven't experienced it.
- Encrust6221 4y ago
  I'm doing okay. You are right, it's a very vulnerable and almost inevitable feeling, like I've been shown who I "truly" am inside, something that I only accessed directly during that trip, but which exists below the surface all the time. Which obviously cycles heavily back into the anxious feelings. 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.
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    <3 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.
    - saiya-jin 4y ago
      So it basically allowed you to start the process of reconciliation with oneself, finding balance that was never truly there, being able to work with sore spot that was before hidden too well. You probably felt a bit off before but never went digging and accepted it just as part of you. What a wonderful therapeutic substance, it just doesn't fix everything on its own but requires further work, paving the path for it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lend000 4y ago

Could you elaborate on what exactly you experienced (and your takeaways) from your bad trip? Do you feel like set and setting or your previous mental state going into the trip caused the bad trip?

Trasmatta 4y ago
> Could you elaborate on what exactly you experienced (and your takeaways) from your 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?
- lend000 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  Part of the set is who is there, and if there's someone there who's experienced (or, ideally even trained in psychedelic therapy) and who you like and trust, they can help guide you and support you. 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.

jrvarela56 4y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I agree the risk is just shrugged off by experienced users. 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.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

I'm not trying to dismiss your experience here, in fact I'm sure its all accurate, but I must make the curious observation that I don't seem to get the distortion of emotional state so many others seem to have on psychedelics (be it positive or negative). I get all the other distortions. Time is skewed, vision gets geometric patterns, stream of consciousness becomes more of an unnavigable white water rapids of consciousness etc. But the whole experience is mostly orthogonal to good or bad or scared or euphoric or any other emotion you can list. 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.

Trasmatta 4y ago
> 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 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.
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  I'm not denying that its possible to lose all concept of a "face" or even know what "is" is and to only be left with pain, suffering, spinning and eternity. On the contrary, I find it to be an immensely scientifically valuable observation that you lost all concept of a face, didn't know what "is" is and only knew pain, suffering, spinning and eternity. Just knowing that you end up with that experience and other people do not tells us something insightful about which sorts of brain function are universally hard wired and which parts can differ from person to person. 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.

kuhewa 4y ago

Yeah i never experienced fight-or-flight panic (outside of the brief moment before a car accident collision or whatever) until a few weeks after i tried a strong salvia extract. Its like those neural connections got well-trodden enough in that afternoon to become a real pathway.

DenisM 4y ago

You had a couple of bad trips? They way you describe them it was awfully bad, and yet you did it more than once?

npteljes 4y ago
Maybe he had like 230 trips, and of them, a couple was bad.
RHSman2 4y ago
Humans are dumb (me too!)
nikisweeting 4y ago
"Bad trip" is a huge space of possible levels of bad. I've had tons of uncomfortable trips but none were "bad" enough to deter. Each person has a widely varying level of comfort with discomfort and resolve to keep trying. Same thing with extreme sports or any voluntary exposure to discomfort with perceived gain. Just like extreme sports each painful experience also has a non-zero risk of deterring you forever and no longer seeming worth it. Whether you're willing to keep rolling the dice is up to how much you gain from each experience and how you integrate it.
boppo1 4y ago
I fractured my leg the first time I went skiing. I went skiing again the next season without a second thought because it seemed like I could have fun if I was careful to do it right.
Trasmatta 4y ago
Yep I was dumb. The first one was bad. The second one was infinitely worse.

nikisweeting 4y ago

I've had painfully horrific bad trips that lasted for eternity but none have seemed to have any lasting downsides. If anything they build my confidence in my own psyche because I can endure them and come out fine on the other side / can now approach them with confidence and usually de-escalate the horror during the trip. Not for everyone but I don't mind the occasional challenging/painful trip.

tempestn 4y ago

After experiencing a subjective "literal eternity of hell" once, why did you do it again?

Trasmatta 4y ago
Because I'm a dumb human, and wanted to touch the flame again. 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.

BatteryMountain 4y ago

And the problem with these Eternity in Hell experiences, is that it can permanently traumatize you and embed (new) triggers for things like anxiety/panic attacks and other stress disorders. It can feel truly real, truly horrifying, in a place where time don't exist, where you don't know words or language. That kind of experience can change a person, and not always in a good way.

pmoriarty 4y ago
Yes, they have the potential for harm... which is why they should be treated with the utmost respect, with serious preparation, and ideally under the guidance of a trained psychedelic therapist who you like and trust.

pmoriarty 4y ago

"The main message I got out of those experiences was that everything I learned in hell could have been learned in other, safer, ways." 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.

Trasmatta 4y ago
It's possible to learn empathy without having to spend eternity in hell first.