Recovery That Kept Failing: How One Session Changed My Relationship with Food

I want to preface this: I don't recommend psilocybin for eating disorders without serious consideration and the right kind of support. The body dysmorphia and distorted self-perception that characterize eating disorders can interact badly with altered states. I worked with a therapist who specifically understood eating disorders and psychedelic-assisted therapy. That context was essential.

In nine years of recovery, I had made a lot of progress. I could eat reliably. I could go to restaurants. I had reduced the control behaviors significantly. But the underlying drive — the part that monitored everything, that measured and calculated and watched — had never quieted. I was in recovery from eating disorder behaviors while still in the grip of the eating disorder's core psychology.

The session, at 2.5 grams with my therapist present, brought me into contact with something underneath the behaviors that felt like its source. A specific kind of fear I had been managing, not addressing. An inherited idea about my body and its value that I had taken so fully inside myself that I hadn't recognized it as an idea.

The recovery since then has been different. Quieter. I still work at it. But the relationship with the core psychology has changed in a way that makes the behaviors less necessary. Something shifted below the level where nine years of behavioral work had reached.