DOSE:	100 ug	oral	1P-LSD
			Pharms - Clonazepam

BODY WEIGHT:

54 kg

This is the story of how a bad trip affected me for a long time, and how I got better. I am writing this almost 4 years after the trip in question. At the time of the trip I was 26 years old and mentally and physically healthy, and always had been. I'm going to write about the trip, but also the long aftermath and how I recovered in the hopes that it can help someone.

The trip:

The bad trip I had was my fourth trip overall in my life, and my third with LSD. I took 100 micrograms of 1P-LSD purchased online. It was legal in my country at the time. I had taken higher doses before, up to 150ug.

The setting was at home in my apartment, with my boyfriend of many years. We both took the same dose at about 2pm and lay down in bed to trip. We had a vague intention of wanting the trip to bring us closer together in our relationship. For the first two hours or so, everything was good. I had interesting visuals and funny little thoughts that I don’t need to detail here.

About 2 hours in, I went to use the bathroom. I remembered that some people advised against looking in the mirror while on acid. I got the bright idea to try it and see what it was like. When I saw my reflection, there was just something off about it. I can’t really explain it but it shocked me horribly. I was grinning and looked somehow evil. I looked away, but the image of my face remained in my mind for a few seconds. I went back to bed and tried to shake off the horrible feeling that had suddenly arisen.

Short tangent: some of my friends who are into psychedelics really want to read into the fact that my own face was what started the bad trip. They see some kind of self-esteem issue or something. I always push back on this interpretation. I think I just don’t like seeing distorted faces, period - mine or other people’s.

After I lay back down, I was still unsettled. A new tone of feeling had entered the trip, and I didn’t like it. I wanted it to go away and started to hope that I wasn’t going to have a bad trip (in retrospect, BIG mistake). The feeling got worse and worse over the next half hour or so, until it dominated the entire trip. I kept trying to make it go away, but everything I tried made it worse. It was also getting dark, and that absence of light just made everything worse too. Everything was just bad and looked wrong and I couldn’t explain why. It was just pure suffering without a reason.

I didn’t tell my boyfriend until I knew I was 100% having a bad trip, because I was afraid it would rub off on him. Once I said something, he supported me and got me some fresh air, which helped. I still felt like my whole reality was coming apart, and I had no grip on anything at all. Anytime I thought I could grasp something comprehensible, it would melt away. Nothing was solid and it felt horrible, definitely in the top 3 most horrible things I’ve ever experienced. That said, I still retained some awareness that this would stop, that I was having a bad trip and would just have to ride it out. Eventually I started to meditate with my breath, and discovered I could sit with these negative feelings and sort of “tread water” in them. I think if I had not been a meditator, it would have been worse. After a while, I could accept both the negative and the earlier positive aspects of the trip.

I meditated until the effects started to wear off. Immediately after, I felt so strong for having gotten myself through that experience. I felt like a warrior, like I had learned what it meant to suffer and come out the other side whole. I drew some art and journaled about it, then eventually went to sleep.

Short-term effects (first 2 months after the trip)

In the days and first few weeks after the trip, I continued to feel really strong. It seemed obvious that a bad trip would happen to me eventually, and it felt like a rite of passage in my psychedelic journey. I continued to draw and journal, and spoke to a few friends, two of whom had had a similar experience before. I felt like I had realized my own strength, and everyday annoyances could not faze me anymore.

A few times, I noticed some small after-effects. About 3 days after the trip, I was in a crowded train with my boyfriend. It suddenly started to feel very cramped and I felt trapped and nauseous. I really wanted to get off the train. I was aware that this was not a normal level of anxiety for riding a train. With my boyfriend’s help, I rode it out and felt better as soon as we got out at our stop. I figured this was an after-effect of the difficult trip and told my boyfriend that I was afraid to be someone who had mental health issues now. He assured me that it would probably not last.

Apart from that, I noticed a small difference in my meditation practice. Sometimes, when I would end a meditation session, something about the world just seemed off. I can’t really explain what. I saw a potential connection to the bad trip but was not too worried. Weird things happen in meditation all the time.

And once, a few days before things got really bad, I was sitting in a bookstore waiting for someone for half an hour or so. I started to wonder what it would be like to have a flashback right now, by myself, with no one but strangers to help. I felt anxiety rising and calmed myself down by telling myself that this simply would not happen. But this wasn’t very effective. I felt anxious until my companion returned and we could go.

Extreme difficulties (2-6 months after trip)

On New Year’s Eve going into 2020, I had the first of what I called “anxiety attacks.” These continued off and on for about 6 months. In retrospect, as someone who now works more closely with the DSM-5, I realize that at least some of them would have fit the criteria for panic attacks, just without the typical symptoms.

I was with my family over the holidays, and we went out to a restaurant. It was noon and I hadn’t eaten yet, in anticipation of a big lunch. I was starting to feel a little sick because I hadn’t eaten. (Side note: this was common for me and later turned out to be a metabolic problem caused by my birth control.) I ordered a sweet tea, which I didn’t realize was caffeinated, and drank it fast hoping to get my blood sugar up. Our food came and I ate slowly but did not feel better. Eventually I thought I was going to be sick so I went to the bathroom. In the bathroom, all of a sudden, nothing looked right anymore. Or rather, everything looked normal but nothing felt right anymore. I felt a strong urge to get the hell out of there. I felt trapped. I went back to the table and moved my chair facing outward so I would feel less trapped. I saw some eye floaters and static on the wall in front of me (note: this was also actually not unusual. I’ve had light visual snow since childhood when looking at solid colors, especially when I am dehydrated). I couldn’t follow the conversation, and everything seemed off. I told my mom I wasn’t feeling well and we went outside.

My heart sank when we went outside, because outside was no better. The street didn’t seem real - nothing did. I felt like I was in another universe that was not my own, although everything looked absolutely normal. To make things worse, we had all planned to go to an escape room. I couldn’t do it. I felt sick, dizzy, anxious, and wanted to flee. I was convinced this was some kind of flashback - the feeling of being trapped reminded me of the bad trip. These feelings escalated until I just laid down on the floor and stared at nothing. Eventually my mom took me home. She figured I had the flu or had eaten something bad, and I didn’t contradict her. I knocked myself out with some Dramamine and felt better after a nap.

I’ll interrupt the story with a note on how I feel about this first episode now, years later. I think it was caused in part by the trip, but also by the way I was thinking about the trip afterwards. I had never had any mental health problems or anxiety to speak of before, so despite the long latency period of 2 months, it feels dishonest to say this could have been unrelated to the trip. I would also describe the trip as a traumatic experience, and I don’t use the word trauma lightly. I think some of my symptoms are best described as a trauma reaction, rather than a delayed drug effect. But beyond that, I had spent the past 2 months ruminating about the possibility of having some kind of flashback to the bad trip. This is not at all unusual for me - I have always had a very active imagination and daydream every day. But this meant that the possibility of having a flashback was very present in my mind. I may have been more likely to panic at normal things, like floaters or dizziness from not eating, and interpret them as signs I’m having a psychedelic flashback or going crazy. I wonder sometimes if I worried so much about going crazy that I made myself crazy, or at least made it worse.

Back to the story.

The next day, the same thing happened again around lunchtime. Before it happened, I had been worried it would. I didn’t tell my family about the derealization or the psychedelics - just that I was feeling sick, which was true. I knocked myself out with dramamine again.

Over the next few days, things got worse. I was waking up every morning with a sick, anxious feeling in my body. I think that was actually the worst part. My body constantly felt like it feels right before you have to do something nerve-wracking, like give a talk or go on a scary rollercoaster. I could not get away from this feeling - I woke up with it, and it would last most of the day.

Within a week, I felt like I understood why someone might kill themselves. “I’m not going to do it, but if this goes on for a year… I get it.” I remember having that thought. The speed at which I went from a normal happy person to toying with the idea of suicide scared me then, and it scares me now. I was not in my right mind.

Sometimes, the anxiety would escalate briefly into a feeling of intense panic. This usually would happen when I wanted to leave the house. Once I went on a walk with my mother, and the feeling of the world not being real became extremely strong. Like in the bad trip, I had the strong feeling that something was very wrong and that I needed it all to stop, but I couldn’t say why. I felt trapped in my own mind. This escalated until I confessed to my mother that I thought something was really wrong with me and broke down crying in the middle of the sidewalk. My mom, to her credit, stayed calm and walked me home. Her calmness plus the crying helped me feel better.

Soon I went to my old GP in my hometown and she wrote me a script for clonazepam to take as needed until I could fly home after my holiday and get longer term help. I made strict rules for myself to make sure I could not become too dependent on it.

I did not want to leave the house, but I made myself do it. I knew that giving in would make it worse. I sometimes had my friend, a psychiatric nurse, go with me. She was very helpful because she reassured me that she had seen things like this before, and it usually stops.

Being at mom’s house wasn’t exactly comfortable either. It was the house I grew up in, but it also was not. Everything looked normal, and I never really had any visual psychedelic effects or psychedelic flashbacks. But I felt like I had woken up in an alternate, horrible universe, and I did not know how to get back home. I did not feel at home in the world anymore.

For about 2 weeks, I woke up with this awful anxiety and derealization every day. Then I flew home with the help of clonazepam.

Once I was home, the symptoms stopped being a daily thing and began to come and go. It became more common for me to go most of the day without anxiety, but then have an anxiety attack out of nowhere a couple times a week. Certain situations seemed more likely to trigger them (e.g. being in an enclosed space like a car, being somewhere new) but they also happened at home. Sometimes there would be some lower grade anxiety preceding the attack, sometimes not. The episodes usually involved anxiety/panic, derealization, feeling sick (nauseous, shaky), occasionally shortness of breath, feeling like I am about to lose control, and being afraid of other people seeing me like this. I would have to lie down and be barely able to move or speak. If someone asked me what was wrong, I could not tell them - it was like I would dissociate from the symptoms and be unable to verbalize that something was wrong at all. If in public, I would also be afraid of making a fool of myself or of no one helping me. I made myself go out when I could, but it was hard. Episodes usually ended in crying, because that would always make them stop.

The pandemic happened midway through this, and all of a sudden there was no expectation to go out in public anymore. This was actually good for me because it meant I could recover at my own pace. I was determined to get better. I would not accept that this was my life. I threw everything I could at the goal of getting better: changed my diet, exercised more, read tons of books, watched psychologists lecture on YouTube, practiced meditation and breathing exercises, and tried out mental tricks to try and help manage my symptoms. I would have signed up for therapy, but the pandemic made that unfeasible.

Soon, the symptoms started to change. I started having flashback memories during anxiety attacks. The first couple of times, the memories were of the bad trip. But then they started to be memories from my teenage years. Nothing traumatic - just highly emotional, you might call them “representative memories” that were part of a pattern at the time. I remember feeling exactly like I was 15 again and rage crying in my room, hating my parents. I was reliving it. Often there was a sense of catharsis after these flashbacks, which gave me the feeling that I was in a painful process that might hopefully have an end one day. That gave me some hope.

A few things were particularly helpful. A psychology professor on YouTube talked about how people with anxiety do not get better when they get less scared - they get better when they get braver. That resonated with me and I bought the guy’s book, then started trying to get braver anytime I could. I did the things that scared me. I tried not to cower when I felt an attack coming on, but instead let it wash over me - like when you’re tripping, incidentally. This helped immensely. I learned to dissociate the feelings of derealization from feelings of anxiety.If I could accept the derealization, it would not cause anxiety anymore and became more manageable.

Another therapist on a podcast mentioned that people sometimes fear what they also secretly desire. I wondered if this applied to my situation. What could I desire about going crazy? It came to me immediately - people around me would care for me and help. I wondered if I was missing that in my life. I realized I had been. I won’t bore you with the details, but this realization really helped me resolve some unfinished business with my parents and how we related to each other while I was growing up. This was related to my flashbacks of being a teenager as well. As I processed these feelings, I felt like I could really let them go and move on to a healthier relationship with my family. This letting go has actually stuck, and I see a contrast to some of my other family members who are perfectly willing to hold grudges for decades. Without my bad trip and whatever the hell it set off inside of me, might I still be angry with them?

Finally, one of my best friends was really helpful. She has been through worse than I have by a mile and is one of those people who isn’t a therapist, but really could be. She helped me talk to myself and to my inner fears in a way that helped me understand and work through them. She held me crying in public and was one of the few people who really understood the ambivalence of the situation I was in. On the one hand, I was clearly having psychological symptoms and I was not well. On the other… I could feel myself growing. I was working through some old baggage. I was learning to deal with difficult emotions, and felt like I was getting stronger as a person. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like an adult instead of just a kid in an adult’s body.

I am comfortable calling my post-trip difficulties an anxiety disorder, because that’s one accurate way to describe them. But I prefer the term “dark night of the soul.” It encapsulates the growth as well as the suffering. Both were very clearly present.

Over time, the anxiety attacks became less frequent. Something odd happened that spring, and it was a couple of months before I had any more attacks after that. I was hiking in the forest with my boyfriend. I started to feel an attack coming, and I coped by beginning to meditate as I walked. My breath was the object of my meditation. Then my body was. Then the forest. Then the whole world around me. And then - I was the object. I “left” myself. The best way I can describe it is that my “self” was a planet, and my awareness left it and went into space. That space was made of unconditional love. There was deep, heart-wrenching compassion for the troubles I was going through. There was forgiveness, which I needed because I felt I did this to myself. There was a sense that everything would be alright, and that nothing in me was fundamentally broken (which I feared very much). It must have only lasted a few seconds, but I got the sense that things would be fine for a while. I felt at peace for the rest of the day. This was completely unexpected and has not happened to me before or since in meditation; I am not even a particularly diligent meditator. Just to be clear, no drugs were involved.

After that, I went 2 months without an attack. They came back that summer, sometimes triggered by stress from being on the hunt for a job. Eventually I decided I needed to pick up and move on in my life, despite the pandemic and my anxiety issues and not finding a job I wanted. I moved to a new city in July and began an internship there.

Less severe difficulties (6-18 months after trip)

This is long so I’ll try to wrap it up. I moved and took a job related to psychedelics, and I was surrounded by wonderful people who were interested in personal growth. Being around them helped a lot, and my symptoms lessened. The attacks were infrequent and less severe. I joined an integration course which helped me move on even more.

I tried to get in with a psychologist after a particularly bad anxiety day right after I moved. That was the first and only time when I had real thoughts of maybe committing suicide. It was scary because I felt like my suicidal thoughts were not fully in my control - something in my brain was toying with the idea, without my permission, and I felt helpless to determine whether those thoughts became more serious. But the waitlist for therapy was many months, and because I moved again in December I never got in. Thankfully, the suicidal thoughts did not return. But though the attacks stopped, I was left with constant, low-grade “background” anxiety. I could never fully relax or enjoy myself. It was like I was constantly conscious of how many awful things there were in the world, and I could never fully let that go.

I eventually decided to take LSD again to try and work through my anxiety. I had not taken any drugs since the bad trip, but decided I wanted to do it after reading about the REBUS theory of psychedelics. It seemed to precisely fit my situation, and without confronting my fears, I thought I might never truly get better. I asked an experienced friend to tripsit me and took the exact same dose of the same batch of LSD again, almost exactly 11 months after my bad trip. There was a moment in which all my emotions were personified and seated at a round table. My anxiety appeared suddenly, dark and threatening. I remembered what I had learned and invited it to the table. It shrank to the size of all the other emotions and joined them. I felt something in my mind click back into its rightful place. I did not have any anxiety problems at all for about 2 months after that and I felt better able to accept all of my emotions, pleasant or not.

When I moved for another new job 2 months later, the low grade anxiety came back. I never had another derealization attack, but I was just an anxious person in some ways. I went to therapy to help me manage stress, and it helped a bit, but it wasn’t enough. Then, about 8 months later, I decided to trip on LSD again to work through my anxiety some more. Metaphorically, my previous trip gave me a fish, but this one taught me how to fish. My anxiety appeared as a monster again, but I learned more about how it worked and what I could do to interrupt it. During the trip, I learned and practiced a particular meditation strategy (I call it “loving awareness meditation,” and it’s not so different from loving kindness meditation) which worked like an antidote to anxiety. This idea appeared to me during the trip without prompting from anything external except perhaps the music. It worked during the trip, and it has worked ever since whenever I feel anxiety coming on.

Post-post-trip difficulties (> 2 years after trip)

In the weeks after that trip, I used my new method each time I began to feel anxious, and it always worked. Eventually, the anxiety just stopped coming. I have been completely recovered from my post-trip difficulties for about 2 years now, and am back to my old happy self.

Well, not quite. That whole experience gave me a lot, and despite everything, I’m grateful for it.

Don’t get me wrong - I think it was more painful than it had to be, and I would hope that in the future, people going through difficulties after psychedelics will have access to more support. I think I would have been spared a lot of suffering if I had been able to trust someone knowledgeable with my problems right away, or had a good community right after the trip instead of many months later. I also don’t think all post-psychedelic difficulties are wellsprings of personal growth, even if mine was.

But all in all, this experience is part of who I am now, and I think it helped me grow and gave me more depth as a human being. I have more empathy for others’ suffering, I can more easily bear my own problems, and because I work in the psychedelic space, it is sometimes very valuable to understand the risks of psychedelics in this very personal way. I also learned the value of being able to turn to others for help, and to receive it - I think that has now made me more generous with others.

Most importantly, in order to bear my suffering I had to discover a sense of meaning in my life. I had always been pretty happy, but I don’t think I had a strong sense of meaning or what’s really important in life before this. But my recovery was full of meaning. The meaning of life has never been more obvious to me than when I was suffering terribly, and yet could still say that I wanted to live. Every moment of life is worth living now. The world is infused with meaning and especially with beauty, simply as it is.

So if I could go back and erase that bad trip and all the suffering it brought, I would not. It has given me what I call “the gift of contrast.” Every day I wake up and the world is real, that’s a damn good day. And that gives me strength to be there for others when they are suffering as badly as I was. I hope to give the help that I received back to others tenfold.

Exp Year: 2019	ExpID: 118058
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 26
Published: Jan 24, 2026	Views: Not Supported
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1P-LSD (682) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Post Trip Problems (8), Bad Trips (6), Retrospective / Summary (11)