Tom’s Tale of Healing from Abuse, Anger and Addiction with Psychedelics

Images: Psilocybin metabolite | Brain Imaging under Psychedelics, Michael Pollan and Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, Wikimedia Commons

Tom Sanderson looks like a retired accountant, maybe because he was one. He also ran a successful farming business with $112 MM / year in sales across 12 states. At 65, he’s on the older side to be trying psychedelic mushrooms for the first time in his life, to be contemplating a visit to Burning Man. You see, Tom’s recently read Michael Pollan’s best-selling book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, and he hopes mushrooms can help him resolve the deep and unresolved trauma he has been carrying since childhood.

Tom’s been a Type A personality for most of his life with serious anger management issues. He is also a chain smoker, a “walking ashtray” (his words) with cigarette perpetually in hand. Tom’s been on SSRI anti-depressants for years, but they haven’t done a thing for him. Transcendental Meditation hasn’t helped him either. A dark shadow hangs over his life. Tom can’t say for sure, but maybe he’s this way because he was sexually abused multiple times as a child.

Tom is intrigued by Pollan’s claims on behalf of psychedelics but doesn’t want to experiment with them on his own. In his own words, he is “intellectually inquisitive, but not adventurous.” The farthest he’s gone is to have tried pot, but he doesn’t like it. Through a friend, he learns of Aurora Dawn. Aurora Dawn is a new age shaman, beads, incense and all, who channels angels and is in constant communion with the Universe. Aurora will be Tom’s therapist and guide him over Zoom as he ingests 5 gm of psilocybin mushrooms. She will help Tom spell out his intent for the session, get into a positive frame of mind, and identify a secure and comfortable space for the session. As described in multiple NIH papers*, the patient’s rapport with the therapist, their own expectations, and the ambience of the physical environment all strongly influence positive outcomes for psychedelic therapy.

When I interview Tom in early 2022, he describes the aftermath of that first psychedelic experience. It turns out that Tom has no recollection of the actual session. As he puts it, “it blew him away.” It also cleared up 55 years of living with trauma. 4 ½ hours after he consumed 5 gm of mushrooms, Tom wakes up to find that he is completely free of anger, of the weight of the horrific sexual abuse he experienced as a young boy. As we talk, Tom is amazingly comfortable describing the details of his abuse. I ask him how. “Events from the past are just things that happened, they don’t need to have an effect on me in the present” he says, “I now look down on my life from 30,000 feet, see and relive events and see them as just objects”. Since that session, Tom has not needed his anti-depressant medication anymore.

Tom did a follow-up session with Aurora Dawn a few months after the first one, this time with the intent of kicking his cigarette habit. His wife sat in this time to take notes. In this session, God spoke to him as he stood in a river. Upstream lay his past, downstream his future. In the distance was a bright light representing the end of his life. God said “Here are your choices. You can hold on to the past and you can keep reliving any slice of your life, or you can let go and move on.” Tom remembers responding “I chose to be right here, in the present”. Coming out of session, Tom experienced what he calls a “suspension of craving”. Prior to the session, he knew smoking was bad for him, but that wasn’t enough. He especially liked to smoke while playing golf. The suspension of craving lasted 24–48 hours, and that was enough space to let Tom choose the right path moving forward. It’s been over a year now, and Tom has not had any impulse to smoke. “I can now choose”, says Tom.

Clinical research and academic papers on the efficacy of psychedelics in treating depression, trauma and addiction are numerous, with institutions like Harvard and Johns Hopkins leading the way. This NPR article speaks directly to Ted’s experience: Using Psilocybin To Help Smokers Quit Cigarettes : Shots — Health News. It describes another lifelong smoker, Chen McLaughlin, describing how she kicked her nictoine addiction after a single therapy session with psilocybin. “You could pay me $5,000 and I couldn’t smoke another cigarette,” she says. “I know it sounds really weird, but something in my brain sort of got switched.”

As with Tom, Chen seems to have had a mystical experience during her psychedelic session, where “the spirit of her recently deceased mother stood by her throughout her session”. There’s even an NIH paper on this topic: Psilocybin-occasioned Mystical Experiences in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction (nih.gov). While I am not sure what to make of the role God and deceased parents have to play in healing from addiction, Tom’s therapist Aurora Dawn would probably say I told you so. In the shamanic cultures of the New World where psychedelics have been used for healing and insight for millennia, the emphasis has always been on the spiritual aspects of the psychedelic experience.

Tom adds “Psychedelics have made me feel connected to everything, including the bagger at the grocery store, with whom I now make genuine eye contact and have a genuine connection with.” He now feels connected to “dogs, trees, his garden, stones and inanimate things, the mountains, water, everything.” Not bad for a self-described Type A who was until recently “full of anger, intolerant with employees and business partners, and accustomed to winning at all costs”.

The work of Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris of the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London on the neuroscience of how psychedelics effect healing is instructive. The neural imaging studies he’s performed indicate that psychedelics rewire existing patterns of thought in the brain, such as addictive behaviors, or depressive or narcissistic thinking. Psychedelics also seem to enable subjects to relive and recategorize painful memories, enabling them to make peace with these memories.

When I think about Tom’s transformation, I am reminded of a very different kind of transformative journey, one that thousands of senior leaders and managers from companies like Microsoft, Google, Expedia, SAP and eBay have experienced. The Pathwise Leadership program that these executives have taken starts from the premise that most of us are shaped by childhood trauma***, which in turn determines our personality type, defense mechanisms and triggers, both in the workplace and in family life. It uses multiple techniques including mindfulness and dream analysis to make participants aware of these triggers and transcend them. A Microsoft VP I recently spoke to describes the impact Pathwise has made on him “It has helped me see existing in the Universe in a very different way and got me to work on my compassion and empathy”. That doesn’t sound a whole lot different from Tom’s mystical insight. And it’s a reminder that it is not the path we take but the destination we arrive at — unburdened by trauma, less narcissistic, more compassionate and empathetic — that is important.

One more thing. Tom made it to Burning Man. “Burning Man was awesome with everyone being so connected… it was like having coffee with 80,000 people”, he says with a smile and a turn of phrase that only a Seattleite can come up with.

Note: Tom’s identity has been anonymized and I’d like to thank him for sharing his deeply personal journey with me.

*i) Set and setting, psychedelics and the placebo response — PubMed (nih.gov), ii) Set and Setting in the Santo Daime — PubMed (nih.gov) **Psilocybin-occasioned Mystical Experiences in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction (nih.gov) ***Childhood trauma can be the result of seemingly minor events like a parent criticizing you for a poor showing at the soccer game, or for poor grades at school. Most of us have not had to undergo the kind of deeply scarring experience that Tom did.