Drugs!

And emotional avoidance

(image - pill packet, detail of possessions collage by Jo)

Thank you for tolerating the exclamation mark in the title, I couldn't resist the opportunity for some attention grabbing.

Generally speaking, drugs are used as a form of emotional avoidance - if you feel uncomfortable sat in the social soup of the pub a glass of wine makes things feel a little easier (and of course there are some drugs that make you believe you’re a hotbed of scintillating conversational tidbits).

It’s not just drugs that can be used for emotional avoidance either, any addictive behaviour will do it - I like to sneak off for a little doomscroll at family events for example.

Psilocybin, as a drug, can also be used to avoid emotions - of course. Psychedelic experiences can be entirely transportive, bewildering, hilarious - they provide a whole range of experiences. They can provide unpredictable effects, there is a loss of control, as with any drug, which can be amplified in certain settings.

But we are interested in the use of psilocybin to meet emotions. The people we talk to use psychedelic trips to encounter themselves, with all of the discomfort that entails, they are attempting to resolve emotional issues. Mushrooms have transformative effects on this front; uncovering feelings, opening up neural pathways to uncover those habits so embedded within us so as to become invisible. So while psilocybin is of course a mind altering substance - a drug (with or without an exclamation mark) we are interested in the therapeutic possibilities of psychedelic journeys that run counter to emotional avoidance.