DOSE:

100 - 200 ug

sublingual

1P-LSD

(blotter / tab)

The Journey from a Bad 100μg Trip to a Great 200μg Trip

A 1p-LSD Trip Summary

1. Preface

The following is a summary of my experiences with LSD over a period of around two years. This summary comprises four trips. The purpose of this summary is to tell the journey from my first, bad trip to my pleasant, most recent trip. Most trip reports usually only detail one experience, and either a really good one, or a really bad one. After my first (bad) trip, I had found that there were few reports that detailed the journey following such a bad trip to a better trip. The following report fills that gap to show what such a journey may look like, and how to improve one’s trip experience.

2. My Overall Set

When tripping, the factors that determine whether a trip will turn out good or bad are known as the “set” and the “setting”. The “set” describes how a person feels internally and may include recent experiences in life as well as childhood trauma. The “setting” describes the immediate external circumstances of the trip, the time, the location, the people present, the activities etc. My overall set therefore describes my overall personality and issues relevant to this trip summary.

I am generally described as an introverted and reserved person. I have above-average intelligence and perform well in my work and studies. I struggle with every-day social interactions, in which I often find myself wondering whether I am behaving right, or whether the other person liked what I just said. On the other hand, I greatly enjoy talking about professional topics from various fields and find it easy to speak on them even in front of an audience. I have issues sleeping, generally having trouble falling asleep and awaking too early as well as repeatedly awakening at night. I enjoy meditation, but used to avoid strenuous physical activity such as sports. I enjoy being by myself and engaging in my hobbies.

I grew up in an emotionally abusive household. A certain family member would gaslight me, by telling me that I am useless, that what I just said was stupid and generally criticizing everything I did. My other family members would not respond to this behavior and generally pretended that it did not happen. I was treated as the black sheep, the odd one out that is responsible for everything bad, and who is only treated well when the abuser is having a particularly good day. This has caused me to feel great hatred and resentment towards my family. My upbringing overall involved a lot of depression and anxiety which I always wanted to get away from as much as possible.

My issues are best described as a mixture of OCD and codependency to pathological narcissistic behavior.

Examples:

I am walking through the park. I see children playing in a way that reminds me of my childhood. The recollection of my childhood triggers discomfort, which I then attempt to remedy by setting my right foot down more heavily than my left foot for the exact next five steps. The immediate discomfort disappears, but is followed by a feeling of background anxiety and uncertainty.

I am writing a section of this report. I realize that a section that I just wrote might be criticized by someone reading it, which causes me discomfort in fear of how they might react. I now start to ruminate on what might be wrong with the section, what is wrong with me to feel that way, and descend into a spiral of doubting myself. I then have to get up and perform a distracting action to reset my thought process. The same thing eventually happens again.

I am sitting in the bus and thinking. I am thinking about whether Josh saying “Good work!” last week was meant to be a sarcastic remark secretly aimed at derogating me. I feel discomfort. I feel annoyed that I was thinking in a way that made me think about what Josh said last week. I now have to think a new thought (a show I like, a quote I often repeat internally etc.) in a certain way to handle the discomfort.

Codependency has a range of symptoms depending on the type of person the sufferer is codependent on. Co-Dependents Anonymous provide a helpful list of symptoms of which I think I have the majority. The most problematic one for me is putting the needs of others above my own, and having difficulty with expressing and properly identifying my own feelings.

After graduating school, I gained a lot of distance from my family and generally avoided contact with them. This made me feel much better and led me to fully bloom in my social life and my career. The symptoms of OCD and codependency remained however, and varied in intensity depending on how stressed I was.

Aside from my psychological issues, I also have tinnitus on one side from my ear. I always had it to some extent, but it began to become unpleasant, noticeable and even painful towards the end of 2019.

3. First Trip – 100μg, Beginning of 2020
3.1 Set

Career-wise I was at a good, but uncertain spot. I had just come off from my final university exams. I was immensely exhausted and drained. I felt that my life as a student was coming to a closure with success, but found myself struggling to relax and enjoy things. I still had some unresolved issues from my childhood involving my relationship with my family members as described above.

I always expected that upon passing my final exams and properly entering the life of a responsible, hard-working adult, the issues from my childhood would be resolved “automatically”, that my hard-earned success would prove all doubters wrong and undo the suffering in my past.

Realizing that this was perhaps not happening as I had hoped, I began to look into LSD. I had made experiences with shrooms and weed before. My first and only experience on shrooms had been very pleasant, but not strong enough to trigger anything meaningful. Weed was usually a mixed bag for me, providing me both with relief as well as increased anxiety.

I was always fascinated by the level of introspection psychedelics were said to offer, and was eager to explore them as a way to deal with my issues. I had not arranged for any particular activities and came with an open mind. I was very nervous about what the experience was going to be like.

3.2 Setting

I was at home, in my apartment where I live with my significant other, who also was at home during the trip. I had made no special preparations and planned for no specific activities.

3.3 The Trip

I took one tab worth 100μg 1p-LSD and put it under my tongue at around 10:00 in the morning. About an hour in, I felt the effects coming on hard. The coming-on of a psychedelic drug feels like being on a rollercoaster that suddenly begins to accelerate. I felt a sudden pressure sink into my skin, and my mind began to get thrown into disorder as it struggled to interpret the different signals my environment suddenly gave off. I was positively excited about this, and at first capable of not panicking in part due to my experiences with shrooms and strong dosages of weed. There was a very noticeable feeling of body load and vasoconstriction from the beginning though.

As the first noticeable visual symptoms began to appear such as seeming HD vision, a slight shift and morphing of objects in my field of vision and increased color intensity, I started to enjoy the trip. Being on a new drug is usually an exciting feeling that makes me want to try out things that I know in order to see what they are like on that drug. I began to think about various things and browsed the internet on my phone. As the trip progressed, I also thought about negative things on purpose to test the trip, such as scenes from horror movies, and excitedly laughed at them.

Further in, the body load became increasingly unpleasant and my joints felt more and more tense. I had to lie down in bed as I was unable to handle the physical load in any other position. My tinnitus began to increase in intensity, and felt like a drill going into the side of my head. Negative thoughts about my past and current life began to appear. The body load and the tinnitus made it extremely difficult to positively distract myself. I got caught in a negative loop. I would get a negative thought, try to focus on something positive, become unable to enjoy the positive thing due to the tinnitus and negativity, and return to the negative thought or get a new negative thought.

This loop began to take over the entire trip and lasted pretty much towards the end. It made me feel depressed, as I was unable to enjoy anything in that state. Anything I ate tasted bad, drinking felt unpleasant, my music seemed wrong and any other media just scared me. The intensity of the depression felt similar to the one I thought I had overcome in my childhood. This made me feel as if I had not progressed at all, crushing me psychologically. I felt worthless, lonely and without purpose.

During the trip, I already started to google what might have caused the bad trip, and came across an article about the impact of stress on the mental and physical health of humans and how stress can accumulate in the body if it is not released. Reading this on LSD left a deep impression on me and made me realize how stressed I must have been. I had great difficulty sleeping as the effects of LSD still remained until around midnight.

Towards the end of the day, the negative feelings continued, though becoming increasingly sober allowed me to somewhat manage them. I was left with an overall feeling of depression and disappointment however, and felt highly dissociated and empty in the weeks after. I felt that I had gone the wrong way in my journey, and now had to figure out my way back.

4. Second Trip – 200μg, Latter Half of 2020
4.1 Set

After my first trip, I began to analyze in detail what went wrong. What bothered me was that my experience with shrooms several years prior was quite positive overall and left me with no negative impact. I suspected that my neglected physical health played a large role in the bad trip, and resolved to improve it for the next one.

The first thing I changed was to go for a jog regularly. I always hated cardio and avoided it wherever possible, limiting myself to lifting weights at best. Following the bad trip, I would jog every two days religiously, not missing a day and improving a bit each time. It felt awful at first and what kept me going was not some sudden happiness released by this change, but the remaining feeling of depression that I felt I did not deserve and wanted to tackle. I also started to look into supplements to deal with possible deficiencies and began to pay closer attention to my diet.

The second thing I changed was to socialize more. While I had made quite a few friends during my studies, I would usually neglect going out with them and never took the initiative in making plans with them. This change came very reluctantly though, and I did not fully realize it for now.

The third thing I changed was trying to reduce my work load and stress myself less over my success. This change was also not fully realized following my first trip, largely because for most of the time before my second trip I was not fully done with my studies yet.

As a result of jogging regularly, I began to notice improvements to my physical well-being and sleep quality. I also felt calmer overall. Furthermore, I had taken some steps towards handling my tinnitus involving my teeth, posture and stretching exercises, and had seen some improvements.

I went into the trip with some hope, but also much greater respect and with some fear of the possible consequences.

4.2 Setting

I took two tabs worth 100μg 1p-LSD and put them under my tongue at around 8:00 in the morning. I wanted to start earlier in hopes of being able to sleep better after the majority of the trip. After placing the tabs, I went for a jog in order to reduce the body load and vasoconstriction during the trip. I had also prepared a number of supplements and beverages to help with this. As with the first trip, I was in my apartment and my significant other was home as well. I was planning to take a shower and eat breakfast after jogging, but had to skip the shower as I noticed the effects coming on already after returning home.

4.3 The Trip

The coming-on felt stronger than the first trip, likely due to taking twice the dosage this time. The body load came on in a noticeable way, but felt slightly more manageable this time around. I attempted to play video games as the trip came on, in hopes of being focused on a positive activity instead of falling into negativity. Once again, the body load and vasoconstriction became too much however and I had to lie down in bed again.

The increased strength of the trip allowed me to appreciate some effects such as closed-eye visuals and much greater color intensity. At the same time, the negative feelings also came with stronger intensity, and the body load, vasoconstriction and tinnitus once again began to torture me. I battled with the negativity for quite some time, but began to lose slowly.

At the peak of the trip, the effects became so strong that I managed to introduce positive thoughts by putting on my favorite calming music. I began to close my eyes and let the effects happen; enjoying the visuals I would see when closing my eyes in connection with the music. This began to completely overshadow the previous negativity, and I was reminded of the things people would describe during their positive trip experiences. I began to feel connected to everything in the universe, and a calming sensation of both infinity and impermanence, fully accepting the notion of death and believing that existence would continue in some form. In my mind, I found myself floating in an infinitely large room of various color shapes, some of which were arranged as connections to various nodes. In each node, I would see a past or a future self of me, and felt that they were all connected and happening at once in a pleasant way. This made me feel as if nothing could ever go wrong, and that things will always continue. I spontaneously drew an amateur rendition of what a nerve cell in the human body looked like in my mind, being satisfied with each stroke and not worrying about what it may look like. I felt very happy and content, satisfied that I had managed to improve my trip, on a larger dosage even. My tinnitus was not noticeable, or rather became a pleasant noise producing a row of colorful shapes in my mind.

As the peak wore off, the positive feelings remained for some time, but soon negativity began to set in again. This immediately made me doubt the validity of my experience, and made it seem “fake”, as the happiness began to be replaced so easily. I was unable to recall the happiness properly and even felt a sense of shame in the experience I just had. As with the first trip, the effects remained for the rest of the day and made it difficult for me to sleep for some time.

Following the trip, I was disappointed that the experience was not fully a good one, but also regained hope that a fully good experience would be possible eventually. I had noticed during the trip that the body load was still too uncomfortable, and that feelings of loneliness had also set in. I resolved to truly socialize more, and to do full body workouts in addition to jogging. My journey seemed to had gone the right way partially this time, but I still got lost and would have to find the way back.

5. Third Trip - 200μg, Beginning of 2021
5.1 Set

Before my third trip, I had already been working a proper job for some time and was rather stressed due to pursuing a lot of additional projects. I felt that I was somewhat stuck in my newfound adult life, and longed for progress. My physical health was still improved overall, though I had begun to miss out some jogs and workouts due to work-related pressure. Emotionally, I was at a somewhat difficult spot because I had not felt as fulfilled with my work as I thought as I would. Despite all that, I resolved to try my luck with LSD again, figuring that the experience and strong dose might be sufficient in order to gain a positive experience that I might hold on to. I also decided to take weed in the middle of the trip to see how it might alter it.

5.2 Setting

I took two tabs worth 100μg 1p-LSD each and put them under my tongue at around 9:00 in the morning. As with the second trip, I went for a jog before tripping, this time placing the tabs after returning home so that I would have enough time to shower and eat breakfast. This time around, my significant other was not home, as I wanted to go as deep as possible to see if there might be any issue I was missing in my journey.

5.3 The Trip

I decided that I would take the trip as casually as possible, and attempted to just go about my day as I would whenever I wanted to relax. I laid down in bed from the get-go and put on some videos on my phone in an attempt to get lost in them. I covered myself under a pile of various blankets and pillows and made my bed as comfortable as possible.

The familiar body load and vasoconstriction came on, but were less severe than before. As my perception began to alter, I started to develop a newfound curiosity about the video I was watching and began to enjoy it in a different way. About an hour and a half into the trip, I ate the weed edible that I had prepared for the trip.

The weed had the benefit that before real negativity could come on, the familiar, pleasant effects of weed began to take hold and added a new layer to the trip. Interestingly enough, the weed did not majorly increase the intensity of the trip, but instead added another spin to it . I developed a blind curiosity and found myself enjoying music and various videos easily, though the experience also felt simplified and misty in a way. My thoughts felt less profound and I focused on mundane things more. This made for a pleasant, but non-profound peak.

As the effects of weed wore off, the effects of LSD remained. My tinnitus became noticeable again, and I began to have negative thoughts again. They were less intense than before, but I also felt emptier than in the previous trips. Due to the absence of my significant other, I also felt rather alone towards the end. I decided that next time I would have a pure trip again, and try to focus on the trip itself more again. The trip ultimately felt rather shallow. I felt that I had gone nowhere on my journey.

6. Fourth Trip – 200μg, End of 2021
6.1 Set

Before the fourth trip, the time span that had passed since the last one was much greater than the previous ones. During this time, I had been jogging and working out regularly. I also stretched very frequently, and massaged particularly tense spots in my neck and face area on a regular basis.

Before the trip, I had resumed an important personal project and made very good progress on it, while cutting down my hours at work to have more time for it. I had also finally taken a vacation after previously never properly taking an extended vacation due to work and various projects. I had met with close friends more often than years on my own initiative, and also reinitiated contact with some friends I had not spoken to in quite a while. All of this was part of a major decision to remove overly high pressure I was putting on myself and focusing more on enjoying things. I was also quite stressed from that year, but had recovered from a large part of it already thanks to having begun my vacation and being in the middle of it.

A very important part for my set was the realization that I had OCD and codependency. Previously, I never quite knew what was wrong me with and why I found myself excessively ruminating on what I had said and done in the past. I never thought that it might be OCD, as I thought that the disorder was about obsessively arranging objects and associated it with overly tidy people, which I am not. As a result of my trips, I was a lot more open towards what might be the issue and spontaneously read the Wikipedia article on it. Practically every single symptom that was shown applied to me, and reading posts on Reddit from fellow sufferers confirmed my finding. As a result, I had developed various techniques to combat my OCD, the most important being simply ignoring the thought and waiting out the unpleasantness, no matter how long it lasts.

The realization of codependency came a bit later but similarly struck me as a moment of eureka. I realized how often I focused on the issues of others and helping them, instead of focusing on my own, and how often I would project my issues to others. This made sense, as I had grown up with a family member who very likely suffers from narcissistic-personality disorder, and whom I would subconsciously try to please even well after I had no contact with them.

This made me realize the significance of the connection between my disorders and the relationship with my abusive family. While I was always aware of this connection, I thought I could sever it through distance and success. Previous attempts to confront them about their abuse always ended in what I thought was failure, because they would not acknowledge the abuse and would largely treat me as they did before.

As part of my research into codependency, I had come across the concept of self-love as an important element in resolving it. I was familiar with the concept, but never really gave it much thought. Reading through reports of sufferers from codependency and also OCD, I found that many of them described how rediscovering their self-worth and resolving to unconditionally love themselves was a key step to recovering from their disorders. Following that discovery, I began to remind myself daily that I love myself. I would picture myself hugging my depressed childhood self and telling them that everything is okay. I would enjoy the things I like more consciously and try and pay less attention to any negatives. Instead of letting my inner-critic drag everything into the mud, I would try to relax and see what is good for me.

This culminated into confronting my abusive family members in a different way. When the opportunity to meet them after a long time of distance presented itself, I became nervous and wanted to avoid the encounter at first. At the same time, I realized that this was a key step in overcoming my difficulties that I had been avoiding out of fear. I was aware that in the past, any attempts to directly confront their abuse in a way to make them admit that they did something wrong would end in frustration and great feelings of hatred. Having focused on myself and my own happiness more, I realized how they had great psychological issues of their own, and acted in the way they did because they were unable to process their own issues properly. My abuser had been throwing his own self-hatred at me and others because he was too weak to handle it by himself. My other family members were too self absorbed in their own issues to ever truly care about someone else. What made this realization possible was how I objectively lived a better life professionally and relationship-wise than all of them, and how none of them were progressing with their lives at all, whereas I was handling problems and situations they would not even be able to comprehend.

I therefore resolved to simply spend some time casually interacting with them, not giving in to the negativity that I wanted to throw at them. Rather, I wanted to let the objective reality of our situations to set in, and to allow me to see them more as struggling people with their own issues instead of the monsters I had formed in my head. With regard to confronting my trauma, I just calmly informed them that they hurt me very badly, that it caused me a lot of pain, but that I no longer care about them, found a great life for myself and will no longer bother with my past with them. I succeeded in doing this, feeling a surreal calm when interacting with them due to simply focusing on my own achievements instead of attentively listening to them to find something to bring up. This allowed me to properly realize the reality of my situation, and managed to mostly let go of the trauma of the past.

Overall, I felt quite confident that this would be a good trip. As a mantra, I made sure to say “I love myself no matter what” continuously.

6.2 Setting

As with the previous trips, I was at home in my apartment. My significant other was also present. I took two tabs worth 100μg 1p-LSD and put them under my tongue at around 9:00 in the morning. I planned to play a pleasant video game for a certain amount of time until the trip would become too much, if it would come to that. I was ready to accept any emotion the trip would bring.

6.3 The Trip

The onset of the trip was a lot more pleasant than usual. There was hardly any body load, and I did not feel any vasoconstriction. It distracted me for a brief moment as I was playing my game, but I was able to adjust and refocus on the game while enjoying the sensations the trip was bringing. I simply lost myself in playing the game for a while in a pleasant way.

As the trip progressed, it became increasingly difficult to remain at my desk, so as usual I moved to the bed and covered myself in blankets. I was not thinking any particular thoughts at this point, but just let my mind drift and enjoyed my sensations. There was an increasing sense of uneasiness creeping up on me however.

As the peak of the trip began to arrive, I felt a wave of unpleasantness ready to crash down upon me. I was still repeating the phrase “I love myself” regardless, and continued to do so as the negativity increased. And then it suddenly happened.
I began to cry.

For the last five years, I had not cried a single time. At first I was only making the facial motions of crying: squinting my eyes, contracting certain face muscles, without tears coming on. I began to sob, and slowly I could feel tears coming out slowly, then faster and faster coming out of my eyes. I progressed to whining and wailing loudly. I cried intensely, with snot coming out of my nose as well, eventually covering my whole face and my pillow in tears, snot and saliva. I looked like a character from an Anime crying theatrically, feeling as if my tears were flooding everything around me. My significant other brought me tissues, wiping my face just once covered the entire tissue in snot and tears.

As I cried, memories, or more accurately sensations and feelings of the past came up more clearly than they ever did before. I remembered the loneliness. I remembered being hurt and having no one around to comfort me. I remembered feelings of abandonment and disappointment. There was no hatred towards anyone, I was simply feeling what I felt as a child, and felt sorry for myself. I did not blame myself for anything, but cried more and more as I kept saying that I love myself, which made me cry even more.

As I continued to cry, I also began laughing between crying due to feeling happy about the disentanglement of the immense emotional load that I was freeing myself from. The act of crying used muscles that I felt had gone completely unused otherwise, and felt like the thing I should have been doing to resolve the pressure that was causing my tinnitus and other problems. The facial motion of crying also increased the intensity of the visuals I was seeing, in a different way from simply closing my eyes.

My significant other comforted me and I told them that I love them and myself. I was hungry like I had never been before in my life. They brought me lunch, and I started to eat ravenously.

I began to realize that I had developed a moderate eating disorder due to often starving as a child. I remembered how often I would spend a day hungry and go to bed without having eaten anything out of fear for asking for food, or because no adult was present to make some for me. The lunch felt like the best thing I had ever eaten. While normally I would eat certain vegetables only with some reservation, I happily ate anything that was on the plate, still crying and being thankful for getting to eat something so delicious. I was constantly rotating between crying, eating and laughing, in a complete emotional mess and yet the happiest I had ever been in my life.

As the trip slowly wore off, I felt immensely relieved and spent a lot of time talking to my significant other about my experience. I simulated crying a couple of times after, and felt that just making the motions already brought me some relief. I read up on crying and how it is a natural response to stress and an important mechanism in resolving it. I read how on average people normally cry a number of times per year. I realized how I rarely saw anyone cry in my family, and how much society appears to disapprove of showing this emotion in public. Towards the end of the trip, a bit of negativity reappeared, but I managed to balance it out with self-love and reminding myself of my accomplishments and that I deserve good things always. I slept much better than in my previous trips and was full of energy and motivation the next day and the days after until today.

This trip has made many connections clear which I sometimes realized, but never properly internalized. When processing stress and trauma, I avoided crying because I was afraid to say that I love myself, and because I was afraid of the absence of anyone to comfort me when crying. I refused to cry because I wanted to avoid the pain that I thought lies beyond it. When encountering difficulty or uncertainty, I sought validation from others because I lacked the self-love necessary to validate myself. I realized that failing and being weak is okay, and that I will love myself regardless of what happens. I realized that crying is an important part in processing stress and trauma, and will make sure to cry when I want to cry. Like laughter, crying is a normal, natural response which I do not have to hide. I will no longer suppress any of my feelings, regardless of whether they are bad or good feelings. I have found myself and I love myself, a discovery which still brings joyful tears to my eyes as I am writing this. But I have to make sure that I fully implement this progress, because I still find it difficult to cry and have to openly practice doing so.

7. Conclusion

I still realize how fickle one’s experiences with this substance can be. One wrong thought, one wrong sensation and I can be sent into depression unless I remind myself of my self-love. To me, LSD is simply a neutral amplifier that makes you feel whatever it is you are feeling on the surface and below it a hundred times stronger. Whether it is good or bad entirely depends on you and how you treat yourself. I realize that what I was feeling during my trips was an extreme representation of my daily self, which was constantly struggling to maintain balance while already being stuck in anxiety and depression. I now love myself, always. Every second of my existence is a pure gift and I fully enjoy every single one of it now.

Exp Year: 2021	ExpID: 116032
Gender: Not Specified
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Jan 28, 2022	Views: 1,253
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1P-LSD (682) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Therapeutic Intent or Outcome (49), Personal Preparation (45), Depression (15), General (1)