Dark Contemplations: Positive Disintegration and Psychedelic Integration

Psychedelic experiences have the power to help us transcend or to smash and annihilate us. They can shatter our most deeply held beliefs and experiences of ourselves and the world around us. This process can happen in both liberating and deeply painful ways. With both experiences, psychedelics strip away and reveal the reality that has been with us all along. How do we make sense of such a force that smashes, even annihilates us? How do we clear away the debris so something greater and more liberated can emerge?

“By combining the maps of positive disintegration and the dark night of the soul, we have the tools to wander through the darkness as long as necessary, knowing that there is ourselves and the light somewhere ahead of us.”

— Adam Kadmon, LCSW-S

This question is crucial when integrating “bad trips.” These refer to very challenging psychedelic journeys that shake us to our core and can be full of immense suffering. One method [2] involves techniques drawn from narrative therapy to help shape a challenging trip into a good one. This approach involves crafting one’s own meaning and purpose from the experience. It gives us the ability to construct meaning and purpose by organizing our painful experiences into something able to be felt, understood, and digested. Crafting meaning from destructive power is a crucial skill to cultivate in journeying through non-ordinary states of consciousness. This creative yet destructive process is at the core of not just psychedelic experiences but spiritual growth and healing itself.

Positive Disintegration and the Dark Night of the Soul

Psychedelic and plant medicines are such aids in this growth process. This effectiveness is due to their potential to be catalysts of rapid personality development. But, the breakdown of personality in a phase of rapid growth can be perilous without a compass and map for the territory. One useful map to draw upon is the concept of positive disintegration [3] from Polish psychologist Kazimierz Dąbrowski. For Dąbrowski, there is no personality development without a disintegration of our current psychological structures. This process must necessarily include high states of tension and anxiety. Experiencing a negative experience of falling apart or disintegrating can provoke panic and dread that we are losing ourselves. These experiences may, in fact, very often be a kind of descent upward. We feel as if we are falling when we just descend into deeper layers of the self.

A Map for Integration

For anyone who has faced a challenging psychedelic journey, these experiences of positive disintegration without support, guidance, and a map of this dark territory can provoke a spiritual crisis. Another useful map for crafting spiritual and philosophical meaning from this state of positive disintegration is St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. It describes a state where everything falls apart and shatters, and we are left to wander through the darkness, waiting for the light to come:

“Although this happy night brings darkness to the spirit, it does so only to give it light in everything; and that, although it humbles it and makes it miserable, it does so only to exalt it and to raise it up; and, although it impoverishes it and empties it of all natural affection and attachment, it does so only that it may enable it to stretch forward, divinely, and thus to have fruition and experience of all things, both above and below, yet to preserve its unrestricted liberty of spirit in them all.” – St. John of the Cross [1]

Disintegration’s Role

Disintegration typically means breakdown, collapse, ruin, falling apart, and the total collapse of our defenses and psychic structures. However, we did not build many of these psychic structures for peace, joy, and expansion of mind and consciousness. We built them to help us survive and protect the self from some unspeakable forces of trauma and pain impacting it. The psychedelic experience—especially the challenging journey that demands we surrender our ego and attempts at controlling our experience—seeks to dissolve these very structures out from under us and show us how we participate in our own suffering by perpetuating the original pains and traumas. It is up to us to decide what to do with this wisdom.

This process is when positive disintegration and the dark night of the soul combine in an especially relevant for psychedelic integration. Disintegration also means dismantling as a prelude to construction and subsequent creation at a higher level. Along with this process comes questioning ourselves and the world, identifying what we truly want and who we really are. It also confronts us with the dichotomy of the higher and lower, good and evil, within ourselves. It is this very tension that is a profound catalyst for personality and human development. This tension is the dark night of the soul.

The Personal Revelation

Once, during a very challenging psilocybin journey, a mysterious, shadowy figure stood over me while I sat curling my knees to my chest and saying, “I want to know who I am!” The figure felt like some version of myself that the mushroom allowed me to encounter. However, it was beyond my comprehension at the time. That version of me would only respond with “STAND UP.” Every time, I desperately asked to know who I was. Eventually, I did, and it showed me that there was no external authority that could tell me who I was. I already possessed this wisdom. It became a felt reality when I stood on my own two feet and claimed my place in the universe. And that the continued effort to deny this reality of myself was exactly how I perpetuated my own suffering.

Only when we gaze most directly into our essence can we develop our own unique personality and ideal version of the self that can guide our lives. Through making radically new existential choices not dictated by our trauma and crafting meaning from our suffering with an emphasis on positive disintegration, we can integrate and unify the higher and lower aspects of self. This ideal self then becomes the autonomous standard upon which we can find an opening to a new way of being, feeling, and thinking in the world. This journey is precisely the path of personality growth and development. By combining the maps of positive disintegration and the dark night of the soul, we have the tools to wander through the darkness as long as necessary, knowing that there is ourselves and the light somewhere ahead of us.

Divine Illumination Through Dark Contemplation

“And thus it is fitting that, if the understanding is to be united with that light and become Divine in the state of perfection, it should, first of all, be purged and annihilated as to its natural light, and, by means of this dark contemplation, be brought actually into darkness. This darkness should continue for as long as is needful in order to expel and annihilate the habit which the soul has long since formed in its manner of understanding, and the Divine light and illumination will then take its place.” – St. John of the Cross.

References

1. Cross, S. J. (2007, August 1). Dark Night of the Soul and Other Great Works (L. B. Hildebrand, Ed.; E. A. Peers, Trans.).
   
2. Gashi, L., Sandberg, S., & Pedersen, W. (2021). Making “Bad Trips” Good: How Users of Psychedelics Narratively Transform Challenging Trips Into Valuable Experiences. International Journal of Drug Policy, 87, 102997. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2020.102997
   
3. Nelson, K. C. (1989). Dabrowski’s Theory of Positive Disintegration. Advanced Development, 1, 1-14. https://www.positivedisintegration.com/Nelson1989.pdf