The Father I Couldn't Forgive: Psilocybin and Thirty Years of Distance

I want to be careful about the framing here because psilocybin did not tell me to reconcile with my father or forgive him in the sense of excusing what he did. What it showed me was something about the cost of the wall I had built and the way the wall was still defining me.

The experience brought me into contact with my father at an age before the abuse — memories of who he was and who I was before the relationship became what it became. I hadn't visited those memories intentionally in decades. What I found there was a person I had loved, and a version of myself that loved him, and grief for something that was lost before I understood what it was.

The thirty years of distance had protected me appropriately. It had also kept me from fully grieving what the relationship could have been and wasn't. Those are different things, and I hadn't understood the difference until the session showed it to me.

I have not reconciled with my father. I may never. But my relationship to the loss has changed. The anger that had been the primary affect of thinking about him has softened into something more complex and more livable. That feels like something the thirty years of managed distance couldn't give me alone.