How to Change Your Mind

When I asked McDaniels how long she had been sober, she surprised
me: she wasn’t. She’d actually been on a bender just a few weeks earlier,
after her daughter “hurt my feelings by asking for money I owed her.” But
the binge lasted only a day, and she had only had beer and wine to drink;
in the years before her psychedelic session, she would binge on hard
liquor for two weeks at a time, the drinking interrupted only when she
blacked out. For McDaniels, a one-day binge now and again represents
progress.
McDaniels read about the psilocybin trial in the local alternative
weekly. She had never before used a psychedelic but felt desperate and
willing to try something new. She had made many attempts to get sober,
had been in rehab, therapy, and AA, but always fell back on the bottle.
She worried that her head injury might disqualify her from the trial, but
she was accepted and in the event had a powerful spiritual experience.
The first part of the trip was unbearably dark: “I saw my children and I
was bawling and bawling, for the life they never had.” But eventually it
turned into something awe inspiring.
“I saw Jesus on the cross,” she recalled. “It was just his head and
shoulders, and it was like I was a little kid in a tiny helicopter circling
around his head. But he was on the cross. And he just sort of gathered me
up in his hands, you know, the way you would comfort a small child. I felt
such a great weight lift from my shoulders, felt very much at peace. It was
a beautiful experience.”
The teaching of the experience, she felt, was self-acceptance. “I spend
less time thinking about people who have a better life than me. I realize
I’m not a bad person; I’m a person who’s had a lot of bad things happen.
Jesus might have been trying to tell me it was okay, that these things
happen. He was trying to comfort me.” Now, McDaniels says, “I read my
Bible every day and keep a conscious contact with God.”
By her own lights, McDaniels is doing, if not well exactly, then
somewhat better. The experience has helped her begin to rethink the
story of her life she tells herself: “I don’t take everything so personally,
like I used to. I have more self-acceptance, and that is a gift, because for a
lot of years, I did not like myself. But I am not a bad person.”
That one’s perspective could shift in such a way in the absence of any
change in circumstance strikes me as both hopeful and poignant. I was
reminded of an experiment that several of the addiction researchers I