Six Months After Losing My Son: An Honest Account
My son died suddenly at twenty-three. Six months later, with a grief therapist experienced in psychedelic work, I had the most important conversation of my life.
I'm not going to write about how he died. What I want to write about is what psilocybin allowed me to do with the grief, because I think it's important information for people in similar situations.
Grief at this scale is not depression. It is also not something you can reason your way through or work your way out of in the conventional sense. The therapeutic frameworks that help with depression have limited purchase on grief. You cannot reframe the loss. You cannot develop more adaptive thoughts about your child being gone. He is gone.
What the session gave me was not relief from the grief — not at all. What it gave me was access to it. I had been managing the grief with the part of me that manages things, and management is not the same as presence. In the session, the management structure was not available, and I was present with the loss in a way I hadn't been.
The grief I have access to now is different from the grief that was inside the management structure. More real, paradoxically more survivable. I can speak his name without the conversation ending. I can look at pictures. I can hold the grief as mine without being crushed by it. I don't know if that's what healing looks like when a parent loses a child. I only know it's different, and more livable, than what I had before the session.
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