Tripping to Cope

For the past eight days, Anaïs has spent her evenings at home, smoking and staring out at the New York City skyline—alone.

“I’ve been observing life and trying to process this new challenge,” she says. “I usually have people around me—it’s the first time I’m really, truly alone.” Her wife, Lesly, who is French like Anaïs, was filming a music video with a band in Europe when the United States abruptly shut down its borders. Lesly was forced to stay in France at her mother’s house in the Loire.

Now the couple are using this time apart to listen to their inner selves and “experience this exploration with the guidance of some drugs,” says Lesly. “I was already in the process of introspection and meditation when I arrived here, and I took a small dose of mushrooms left over from parties in Berlin, but I took less than usual since I’m alone.”

Anaïs is still in the early days of accepting the current health crisis. She’s hesitant to move from cannabis to mushrooms for fear of having a bad trip—nightmarish flashbacks of trauma, images of a beloved pet’s face melting—and needing to call someone for help.

“Mushrooms and acid are drugs I have less control over,” she says. “Weed is nice to slow down and observe my thoughts, but I want to go deeper, and mushrooms are the next step.” The question is: How does one avoid a bad trip during such a chaotic time, and is a good trip possible during self-quarantine?

Anaïs’s concern is not without justification. Back in the 1950s British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond coined the term psychedelic—which comes from Greek words that roughly translate to “mind manifesting”—to represent a drug’s ability to bring unconscious material into conscious awareness.

But as early as the 1960s, studies showed LSD’s effectiveness in fighting disorders like alcoholism, hypothesizing that the drug could potentially double the chances of recovery. More recently, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit commonly known as MAPS, researched MDMA-assisted psychotherapy as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Of the 107 participants treated in Phase 2, 68 percent reported they no longer suffered from PTSD one year after the trial.

“Whether it’s a pandemic or not, it’s important that people have adequate guidance, support and preparation,” says MAPS spokesperson Brad Burge. “People are going to use psychedelics to escape—like alcohol or opioids, drugs that could have the capacity to disconnect you from your emotions—but psychedelics are not effective tools for escape. If you have a drug that brings deeper emotions to the surface and you are in a place of great anxiety or ongoing trauma, psychedelics could actually magnify that stress and make it worse.”

Burge emphasizes the concept of “set and setting,” a widely accepted notion in psychedelic therapy that originated with Harvard psychologist and “psychedelic celebrity” Timothy Leary in the 1960s. The belief is that a user’s mindset (set) and physical surroundings (setting) could determine as much as 99 percent of their response to LSD.

“When done correctly, psychedelics can be complementary for people wanting to journey inward,” says Leanne, a nurse at a San Francisco–based clinic that specializes in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. “If it’s something you’re doing intentionally, you can set yourself up for success by creating the right environment. You can do it with someone, or one person can journey and the other can be a guide or safe space.”

Right now a majority of people, especially in major cities, are at home struggling with spending time alone. Staying busy has become a coping mechanism to avoid situations that don’t feel good—such as the reality of life during a pandemic. With shelter-in-place orders spreading across the country, relationships are one of many institutions being tested.

“MDMA and MDA—the latter is a lesser-known cousin to the former; both are euphoria-inducing psychedelics—in pure forms can be amazing for working on your relationship, and why not capitalize on strengths by amplifying them and feeling deep intimacy and closeness in tight quarters?” says Suzette, a San Francisco–based couples therapist. “But if your relationship has communication issues and you’re worried about your livelihood or physical safety—not to mention locked in the same space with your partner—you’re more likely to use less-ideal ways of coping, and psychedelics could exacerbate the situation.”

But drugs aren’t the only option at this unprecedented historical moment. When psychedelics were classified as Schedule I drugs, which came with the assumption that they have no medical use, Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof developed a new way to trip: Through Holotropic Breathwork breathing and music are used as a natural way to reach an altered state of consciousness. Think of it as a voluntary form of hyperventilation, or a benign panic attack.

“I always bring an Eiffel Tower snow globe to my breathwork classes in Paris,” says Susan Oubari, founder of two-year-old Breathe in Paris, a practice that focuses on two-stage pranayama breathwork. “When you arrive, your energy is kind of flat, but your breath really shakes you up. Like a snow globe, it takes some time to settle afterward.”

During what Oubari calls the shake-up phase, your body responds to the heightened breathing, and that’s when you start to trip. It’s similar to taking a drug—only in this case you can press pause if you’re on a bad trip. “You’re not going off on this ride where you’ll lose control because of a drug or substance,” Oubari explains. When you slow down with breathwork, you can see yourself more clearly and be in touch with your response system instead of your reactive system.

Regardless of your drug (or practice) of choice, tripping today means allowing yourself the opportunity to heal and calm.

“We are all, in some way, scared for our future, and when we come into this silence and press pause on life, we face it,” Oubari says. “We give ourselves permission to feel—and that’s one of the things I preach. Don’t be afraid to just fucking feel.”