Unfreezing: Healing Trauma with Psilocybin

A personal journey through somatic, spiritual, and psychedelic-assisted healing of complex PTSD

Introduction

Before meeting my therapist, Sandy, I spent decades searching for a way to understand the lingering effects of early trauma. Even as I built a life of outward stability, something within me remained unresolved. Over the years, I explored countless avenues, spiritual practices, travel to sacred sites in India, experimentation with traditional and non-traditional psychedelics, and a range of therapeutic approaches, seeking relief and clarity.

Across a series of eight-hour, therapist-assisted psilocybin journeys, long-frozen parts of me began to soften. These sessions helped me address the effects of intense childhood trauma, including sexual abuse. The work eased patterns that had shaped my inner life for decades.

Over time, I began to recognize that a guide could only take me as far as they had traveled in their own healing. In Sandy, I found a therapist whose commitment to somatic training, along with her own path through childhood challenges, shaped the quality of her work and guided my transformation.

Unfreezing

As I prepared for a session with a strain of mushrooms called Shiva Lingam, I reflected on my belief that, like all psilocybin mushrooms, it carries an ancient consciousness. I found an incredibly beautiful chant called Karpur Gautam, which Mantras of the Mystics sing, invoking Shiva and transporting me back to India.

After listening to the chant several times, I set my intention:

Guide me on my journey. Lead me through darkness to the light of your Divine existence.

In early sessions, Sandy helped me navigate the unfamiliar physical manifestations of trauma. This time, I remembered that I was safe while also being encouraged to access my own inner healer. This intelligent Self was able to witness the youngest parts of me as I released the trauma I had been holding for so long. That witnessing created space between me and the pain, allowing me to remain present without blending.

Even though her office is small, it provides a carefully held set and setting, with a gorgeous view of the Colorado mountains through the windows. As the medicine took hold, I moved between the padded armchair and the three-inch mat on the floor.

Integration

While in the chair, I bent forward, collapsing my upper body onto my thighs. It felt comforting. After some time had passed, I slowly — with each inhale and exhale — rose until I was fully upright, my head and spine aligned.

I shifted to the mat, folding into child’s pose with my head on the pillow, where I screamed and screamed and screamed. Then I lay on my back, my body shaking the way an animal shakes after surviving danger.

Well into the session, I entered another somatic release. My breathing became ragged and shallow, expressing pain I had carried for years. In previous journeys, I had spent hours trying to open my throat. This time, the instruction came once. I remember saying, “I’m stuck. I’m stuck. I’m stuck.” The guidance was simple: “Get unstuck.”

My breathing began to settle. I asked the facilitator to play the chant I had chosen. Soon after, I sat cross-legged and turned inward.

One of the most striking moments was realizing I could breathe into my pelvic bowl and lower abdomen in a way I never had before. Trauma had long constricted this part of my body. Now, the breath moved freely. In that moment, I released an old pattern.

Surprisingly, I did not leave my body, a form of dissociation I learned early in life as a survival skill. This time, I remained present.

By the end of the session, I felt a quiet sense of wholeness. Parts of myself that had felt frozen for decades seemed integrated within my body. It was a moment in time, not a destination. I still sit with uncertainty in my life, but something fundamental has shifted.

Conclusion

It’s been over four weeks since this journey. What I find undeniably true is that with each journey, I progress beyond the effects of the trauma. The changes feel permanent, unlike many approaches I explored in the past, which left me feeling wonderful for a few days. The experience faded until I could barely remember what had once felt unforgettable.

With psychedelic medicine, there is no effort required to remember what happened. I simply find myself changing, showing up differently in the world.

This particular journey was a seminal moment in my therapeutic trajectory. When I first started seeing Sandy, I was seeing her twice a week. Two years in, she decided to offer the psychedelic therapies. Then I began seeing her once a week, and after this last journey, I now see her once a month.

I now feel the capacity to implement much of what I have learned over the last four years, and I largely attribute that to the effects of the psychedelic therapies.

“That witnessing created space between me and the pain, allowing me to remain present without blending.”
— Judy Forsyth

Neuroscientist Gül Dölen has spoken about the reopening of critical periods in development. I absolutely feel that this work has allowed me to revisit and, in some ways, finally fulfill critical periods from my early childhood that I haven’t attended to.

For me, that is not simply insight or relief. Parts of me that were frozen and stuck in the past have begun to thaw, and the possibilities of my life today feel limitless.