I never imagined I’d be here—sitting across from my patients and sponsees, carrying the weight of a secret that could destroy my career, my license, and my standing in the recovery community. But here I am, a clinician in recovery, bound by ethics and legality in a state where psychedelics are still illegal. And yet, I have tasted hope in a way I never thought possible.
I’ve been in recovery for years. I’ve done everything right. I’ve worked the steps, attended countless meetings, sponsored others, and had my own therapist. For a long time, these things were enough. They carried me through the early years of sobriety, the tough days, the restless nights. But then I hit a wall. No amount of step work or meeting attendance could touch the deep-seated, unresolved pain that lingered inside me. I could feel the darkness seeping back in, the edges of my recovery fraying.
Going back on psychiatric medications was an option, of course. I had spent years on them before, a cocktail of SSRIs and mood stabilizers that numbed me enough to function but never truly healed me. I had been off them for years now, and I wasn’t ready to return to that fog. I needed something different, something deeper. After a lot of research and soul-searching, I cautiously but hopefully decided to step outside the bounds of conventional treatment and into the unknown.
I went outside the country to participate in an ayahuasca ceremony. I was terrified but desperate. Sitting in that dark, humid room with the shaman chanting, the earthy scent of the brew filling my nostrils, I felt a fear that ran bone-deep. But as the ceremony unfolded, I began to feel something else—a release. A cathartic experience like nothing I had ever known. For the first time, I truly felt and understood how my repressed childhood trauma had affected every aspect of my life, even influencing my choice to become a therapist. I could see the threads of my pain woven into the fabric of my identity, guiding my every decision, my every relationship, my every action.
It was as if a fog had lifted, and I could finally see myself clearly. I cried—deep, guttural sobs that seemed to shake loose something inside me. I felt years of pain, shame, and self-loathing begin to dissolve. And in their place, there was hope. Real, tangible hope.
Returning home, I felt like a new person, but also like a person burdened with a new kind of weight. I knew I had found something powerful, something that could change lives. And yet, here I am, sitting across from people who are in the same place I was—desperate, lost, hopeless. People who have tried everything recovery has to offer, who have done the work and still feel empty, who are hanging on by a thread.
I want to reach out, to tell them, “There’s another way. There’s hope. I found it, and you can too.” But I can’t. I’m bound by the ethics of my profession, the laws of my state, and the anti-psychedelic sentiment that runs deep in the 12-step recovery world. Suggesting something as radical as a psychedelic experience could mean the end of my career. It could mean losing my license, my livelihood, everything I’ve worked so hard to build. It could mean being ostracized from the very community that helped save my life.
And so I sit in silence, giving the same advice and guidance I always have, offering empathy and understanding, but painfully aware that I’m holding back a part of the truth. I listen to their stories, their struggles, their pain, and I know there is more I could say, more I could offer. But I stay silent. Because in this world, even a whisper of psychedelics could end everything for me.
It’s a strange, conflicting place to be—having found hope but sitting across from the hopeless, unable to share it. I feel like a fraud sometimes, like I’m holding back a lifeline because I’m afraid of losing my footing. And yet, I also feel a profound gratitude for having found a way forward, a way to heal in a way I never thought possible.
Every day, I wrestle with this dilemma. Every day, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing by staying silent. And every day, I hope for a time when the conversation around psychedelics in recovery will be different, when we can talk openly about all the tools available to us, when we don’t have to choose between our own healing and helping others heal.
Until then, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done—showing up, listening, offering support. And I’ll keep carrying my secret, hoping that one day, it won’t have to be a secret anymore.
