Trapped in the Loop: Psilocybin and Six Years of OCD
I have OCD severe enough to have significantly disrupted my work and relationships. This is the account of one very difficult, very important session.
The intrusive thoughts began when I was nineteen. By the time I was twenty-five, I had lost a job, two relationships, and significant portions of years to the loop: thought, doubt, reassurance-seeking, temporary relief, same thought, same doubt. I knew intellectually that I was doing the loop. Knowing did not stop the loop.
I had done everything the standard protocols recommend. Exposure and Response Prevention therapy, SSRIs, clomipramine, augmentation with antipsychotics. Each intervention helped partially. None broke the underlying machinery.
The session at 3.5 grams was one of the most difficult experiences of my life. At two hours, I was inside something that felt nothing like the psychedelic experiences I'd read about. Not pleasant altered states. Something that felt like confronting the OCD itself from outside, watching the loop that had run my life like a mechanism exposed.
What came out of the experience: the loop was visible to me in a way it hadn't been before. Not as my thoughts, but as a process happening in me that I was not the same as. I don't know if that's neurological, psychological, or both. I know that it changed something. The intrusive thoughts still come. They feel, now, like guests rather than residents.
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