Writing Healing and Psychedelic Therapy with Stacey Simmons

Lisa Cooper Ellison [1:59]

Well, hello Stacy, welcome back to the podcast. I am so excited to see you.

Stacey Simmons [2:03]

I’m delighted to see you. Honestly, I’ve been looking forward to this for quite a long time, because talking to you is one of my absolute favorite things to do. So, I’m really happy to be here.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [2:13]

Well, the feeling is mutual, and I can definitely say that listeners of this podcast are super excited about this conversation for two reasons. One, they love you — they absolutely love you and all your work, especially The Queen’s Path, which we’ve talked about. Our last episode on memory was amazing; I got so much feedback on it.

Today we’re talking about something else that I see cropping up in the writing world, and really everywhere — the use of psychedelics for healing and for understanding memories. You, my friend, have written what I’m going to call the Bible on this. I’ll hold it up: Mushroom Pharmacy. If you want to know everything and anything about psilocybin and other psychoactive mushrooms, this is the book for you. So, I think that’s probably a good place for us to begin. What would you like us to know about Mushroom Pharmacy, and is there anything you’d like us to know about you that maybe we haven’t covered?

Stacey Simmons [3:19]

Thank you for that, and thank you for showing everybody the book. It was a labor of love — it came to me as a kind of surprise, as books can do. My agent had asked me, when I first got the book deal for The Queen’s Path, “What else do you do? What else could we focus on?” And I said, “Well, I am a certified psychedelic therapist, so I do that.” And he said, “Oh, I could totally sell a psychedelic book” — very Michael Pollan, right? He was really popular at the time. And I said, “I don’t know if I’m ready to write a book. I feel like I need to know more, I need to do more” — because that’s always my thing. If I need to know something, I need to go get a PhD in it. So, he said, “Well, okay, when you’re ready.”

Then a couple of days later, he got a request for proposals from a publisher for a book entitled Mushroom Pharmacy, because it was going to be a companion to a book called Cannabis Pharmacy, which had done really well for Hachette, and Black Dog and Leventhal. I wanted to keep my agent happy, so I wrote a proposal — and I got so into it. I was so excited to talk about the neuroscience, so excited to talk about, “Oh, there are these kinds of motions, and this happens in this part of the world.” I just really nerded out on the whole thing and sent him this huge proposal, thinking I was done, because I doubted they’d hire little old me — they’d probably hire somebody recommended by Michael Pollan or something. But no, they hired me.

It was such a wonderful validation that all the science-nerd stuff really paid off, and it was so much fun. I love this book, and I love doing psychedelic therapy. It’s amazing, and it really is transformative for people. I’m super excited to talk about it today.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [5:03]

That creates a follow-up question for me, because people hear “psychedelic therapy” and know that psychedelics are being reclassified in terms of the laws — becoming more accessible — and I think the research is there showing the merits. There’s always been the question of whether this is beneficial or not, and now the merits are being shown. But if people don’t know what psychedelic therapy is, can you give us a sense of that?

Stacey Simmons [5:32]

Of course. Psychedelic therapy has been around now for about ten years, though organizations like MAPS — the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies — have been doing this advocacy work for twenty or thirty years, pushing for psychedelics to be changed in the federal schedule. They started doing research on MDMA, working through Johns Hopkins, the University of California San Francisco, UCLA, UCSD — all these major institutions that gave real gravitas and credibility to the research.

The research has shown time and time again that when people enter a non-ordinary state of consciousness to work on unconscious material, they wind up with really great outcomes — often better than traditional therapy and medication. There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of research papers supporting this. Even just one course of psychedelic treatment — meaning the preparation, the medicine session, and the integration sessions afterward — has shown better outcomes than a year on SSRIs like Prozac. The outcomes people are experiencing are pretty incredible, and the research is there to show that it is sometimes more effective and at least as effective as traditional therapy and SSRIs.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [6:57]

That is huge. I remember reading about MDMA and the research being done in The Body Keeps the Score, because they were looking into it even back then. And I believe — you can tell me if I’m wrong — it was about a year or two ago that they decided not to legalize MDMA for therapeutic use?

Stacey Simmons [7:19]

It was last summer, yes.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [7:21]

So, the research has been there, the promise has been there. What do you think is different about psilocybin, which is a psychoactive substance that comes from mushrooms? How can it be beneficial for people, given the right environment and the right approach?

Stacey Simmons [7:41]

Let’s talk about it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know anything about psychedelics. Psychedelic mushrooms have been used around the world for millennia to help people heal — we know this. We have images carved into stelae and other artifacts from different parts of the world. We know that people have long used psychoactive substances like mushrooms and ergot to have psychedelic experiences for healing purposes. And there are lots of esoteric ideas about why that is — the fact that mycelium helps trees communicate and looks a lot like neural structure, for instance. But I won’t go too deep into that.

From a neuroscience perspective: psilocybin, when metabolized through the liver into psilocin — which is the active component used by the brain — looks a great deal like serotonin. It is a serotonergic substance, and our brains need serotonin to function. Serotonin is the most essential neurotransmitter in the brain, but it also takes the longest to produce. You can’t simply say, “I need more serotonin” and get it quickly, because the brain takes time to make it. Drugs like SSRIs work by sitting in the interstitial space between neurons and signaling the neuron not to recycle the serotonin — to let it linger so the brain can use it again. If you understand how serotonin reuptake inhibitors work, you realize how critical that neurotransmitter lifespan is. Anything we can do to make it more efficient helps the brain use its resources more effectively.

When someone takes psilocybin, they experience a surge in serotonin, and all the other neurotransmitters follow in an attempt to rebalance the brain’s neurotransmitter load. What also happens — and this is particularly true of psilocybin — is that the default mode network goes offline. The default mode network is our everyday, default brain: the one that worries about the shopping list, about grandma, about kids’ grades, about whether you sent the right form. When that goes offline, all the other regions of the brain are free to connect and communicate with each other. And with that added neurotransmitter load helping connections happen more rapidly and efficiently — it’s phenomenal.

In terms of healing and creativity, that kind of cross-brain connectivity is what gives people a sense of a boost. It’s what allows people to reach depths they couldn’t access before, to suddenly feel like they have answers — because a different part of the brain is now connecting to provide them.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [10:47]

I love that description of how it gets past our defenses, or the worried mind — and it’s that bypass that allows healing to happen. I can say that from personal experience. I did a journey that was very intentional, very carefully done with integration — and honestly, I’m still integrating it, which I think is an important point we should come back to, because the meaning-making process takes time.

What was really interesting for me is that I had already done a great deal of healing around my own trauma. I could tell you everything about how it works, what happened, all of it. So, I didn’t need the journey to revisit that — that wasn’t even the intention. My intention was simply: Show me what else I need to know. And what I ended up experiencing was going into what I can only describe as a matrix of love — I could start crying right now, because it was so incredible and so beautiful.

Every experience I had ever had, including the negative ones, came through — but not as a rehashing of trauma or the emotions around it. It was more like: Here are the people who loved you in these moments. Here is how this experience helped you. Even now, I can connect so deeply to the love of people who knew nothing about what was happening in my life and yet showed up. That was such a powerful experience of resourcing, and I’m still carrying it with me and unpacking it.

The other piece that came from that — and I think this is really interesting — is that not every psilocybin journey takes you into a matrix of love. And I found this remarkable decision point: when memories were coming up to be reintegrated in a new way, there was a dark rabbit hole present, and I had this clear sense that I could simply blow it away.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [12:55]

And I kept making that decision in a way that kept me in this matrix of love that was incredibly beautiful and supportive.

Stacey Simmons [13:03]

What you’re describing is set and setting. We talk about set and setting when preparing people for psychedelic experiences. The set is the mindset — how you’re approaching the journey, what your intention is, and what you’re hoping to participate in when you go. Are you trying to go into the matrix of love? If you’re a musician, are you trying to understand the spirit of the piano you’re composing for? What are you integrating yourself into as part of your mindset going in? That’s one of the critical pieces of preparation.

The other piece is the setting — creating a space of calm, happiness, ease, and support so that you’re not disrupted while you’re in the experience. You make sure you’re wearing comfortable clothes, that the music isn’t jarring. I did an interview about psychedelics the other day, and I told the guy: you probably don’t want to listen to Black Sabbath during a psychedelic session — that’s not the right environment. You want to bring in things that are supportive and encouraging of your journey, not things that are disruptive.

Now, “encouraging” doesn’t necessarily mean soft. It could mean that you’re trying to confront something challenging, and the set should hold that intention while the setting supports it. You still want it to be physically comfortable — you don’t want to be sitting on a hard surface or wearing itchy socks. Everything should be comfortable and conducive to the work.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [14:44]

Really intentional. And this is a different modality, but I think there are similarities with holotropic breathwork and other kinds of breathwork that put you in a non-ordinary state. The set and setting matter — and so does who is there to walk with you through it.

I just told you listeners about the matrix of love, and you might be thinking, “Oh, I want to go there too.” But I’ll be honest: in other journeys, I’ve also had to confront some of my biggest fears, pain points, and deeply difficult things — though always in a nurturing way. It wasn’t like walking into a nightmare and feeling nightmarish. It was more like feeling hard feelings I hadn’t yet processed and being willing to sit with them. Which I imagine is a significant part of the work you do with people?

Stacey Simmons [15:39]

That’s exactly it. Especially in preparing clients — putting them in the mindset of: We’re going to traverse this, and I’m going to be here with you. With psilocybin in particular, that journey can be six to eight hours. The shortest I think I’ve ever done is three. You come in and out of the depths — it’s not a steady-state experience — so it’s essential that the person sitting with you is genuinely committed to holding space. That means saying, “I’ve got you, we’re not going anywhere,” and not entering your experience with their own agenda.

It really is important to work with someone who knows what they’re doing. It doesn’t have to be a therapist — a trained guide can serve that role — but whoever it is needs to understand that they are there solely to support you, not to make it about themselves.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [16:35]

We’ve talked about set and setting. For someone wondering whether this is the right path for them, I want to make sure we cover the full arc of the journey before we get into who it is and isn’t right for. So, let’s stay with the journey itself — what else is needed beyond the set and the setting?

Stacey Simmons [16:59]

You never want to do this alone, if it’s at all possible — you need a trustworthy person present. You also want to do preparation work beforehand. That can be one day, or it can be several weeks, depending on what you’re looking to traverse. If you’re going into something hard and difficult, you might need a couple of weeks of writing, drawing, meditation, and reflection to get comfortable with the idea of confronting it.

I ask my clients to work out in advance the symbols that have been meaningful to them throughout their lives. If someone has a Christian or Buddhist practice, or any particular spiritual tradition, I want them to identify what will be meaningful and welcoming to them — so that if it shows up in the journey, they recognize it rather than being frightened by it. For example, if someone has only had a distant relationship with Kuan Yin and she suddenly appears and envelops them in love, that could be overwhelming. So, we want to build a kind of dictionary going in: What is possible? What symbols might be activated? Who do you look to? What do you reflect on?

And this doesn’t have to be religious or spiritual. It could be: I love my grandmother. She was my greatest support. She believed in me. Or your dog from when you were ten. Pick your symbols, develop them — almost like you’re writing a story — and decide who is welcome.

The other part of preparation is understanding how resistance works in a non-ordinary state. This is one of the hardest things for people to grasp: resistance doesn’t show up in a psychedelic experience the way it does in ordinary life. It probably won’t feel like resistance at all. It may show up in the body as rigidity, but more often it will feel like it’s coming from another realm — this is some dark force, this is my abusive father entering my experience, this is some negative influence. That’s actually your resistance showing up in symbolic form. And it’s good that you can recognize it as a symbol, because that’s where the work is.

Knowing in advance that resistance is part of the process, and that it’s there because of culture, trauma, and history — but that you have power over it — that preparation can be transformative. Sometimes resistance isn’t unpleasant at all. You can be in the matrix of love and simply notice: Oh, here it is. But whatever form it takes, you don’t have to be frightened by it.

One of the things I had to wrestle with in becoming a psychedelic therapist was this idea that all is welcome — that whatever shows up, we don’t turn it away or label it bad. There’s a concept of an inner healing intelligence: the idea that we are innately wired for well-being and healing, not only physically — the way a cut finger heals automatically — but also spiritually, psychologically, and emotionally. I struggled with that at first, trying to reconcile it with a scientific framework. But once I gave myself permission to stop separating my spiritual mind from my scientific mind, it became much easier.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [20:47]

That’s a great answer. To offer a concrete example from my own experience: for the setup, I was thinking carefully about diet for about a week and a half beforehand, doing a lot of journaling, clarifying my intention, and thinking through my symbols. When we set up the physical space, we did it very intentionally — calling in our guides, inviting everything for our highest good, and consciously expelling anything that wasn’t. If it wasn’t in service of my highest good, it was not allowed in that space.

And something you said that I think is really important for listeners to understand — and I know you can expand on this far better than I can — is that so much of this is symbolic and archetypal. The experiences you have in a journey may not be the literal experiences from your ordinary life.

Stacey Simmons [21:52]

In traditional settings — the cultures where these medicines originated — preparations always included fasting, avoiding meat, abstaining from sex: all of the things that help ensure the person is fully dedicated and their energy is held for the experience. What we now understand scientifically is that we don’t want to disrupt your baseline brain chemistry going in. So, if you can eat lighter, avoid meat, abstain from sex, and do those things for about a week before your experience, it’s very helpful. It doesn’t mean that if you don’t do them, you won’t have a good experience, but we know that preparing your body this way makes a meaningful difference.

To follow on what you said about expelling anything not for your highest good — that’s ritual. And when we talk about the archetypal and the symbolic dimensions of all this, we should remember that symbolic language and symbolic experience are critical to human understanding. We try to dismiss it as woo-woo, as though symbolism isn’t woven through our everyday lives all the time — but it is. Think about driving down the street and seeing a pickup truck with an American flag on it. You immediately have a reaction. Or seeing someone carrying a Bible. You immediately assign meaning. I’m not saying good or bad — just that meaning shows up for you automatically.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [23:13]

Yes.

Stacey Simmons [23:14]

Symbolism is part of how we understand ourselves and our world, and the only way to genuinely interact with it is through some form of ritualization. The unconscious understands symbolism far better than it understands language. So, if you can enter into a real dialogue with that symbolic world, you’re going to get a great deal more out of your psychedelic experience.

As for the archetypal realm — I don’t like to think of it as separate from me. I think of it as something I’m integrated into, suffused in like air, at all times. If you can hold it that way, then you’re already in constant interaction with those symbols. It’s really about the ongoing dialogue — spiritual, psychological, emotional — that you have with them. You can’t divorce yourself from it.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [24:05]

Right. And I love how you framed it: think about your positive symbols, the ones you’re welcoming in — but also think about the symbols that might signal resistance. What are the things that could show up and feel like a bad trip, when actually they’re representing psychological resistance? We welcome them so we can move through the experience.

As you were talking, I realized I haven’t personally had a lot of trouble with resistance, and I think that’s largely because when powerful feelings or difficult memories have surfaced, the story I tell myself in the moment is: Oh, here we are — we’re moving through this. So, I can welcome it, even when it’s uncomfortable. And I want to be honest: some of it was messy and ugly. But I allowed it, and that has been hugely beneficial for my own healing — being able to do that, and to know that even when something is incredibly uncomfortable, I am also okay.

That has also happened in very intentional settings, with a guide present, with structures in place that support the process. Which brings us back to what you said: don’t do this alone. You need someone who can be there with you and for you.

Stacey Simmons [25:36]

For me, it comes back to recognizing that we don’t go through this life alone. None of us are navigating by ourselves — we need each other. And the person sitting with you, as I said, doesn’t have to be an expert. They just have to be genuinely trustworthy and completely committed to your best interests the entire time.

It’s also really important that they understand: don’t impede my experience. If I’m having a hard time, hold my hand — but only if I ask. This comes up less with psilocybin and more with MDMA, but sometimes people experience strong feelings toward their guide: I want to be close to you, I want to be touched. We don’t go there, because then you’re creating a new experience rather than processing an existing one. The session is entirely about the person having the experience. The guide is there solely to support it, never to enter it.

It’s also important, after a psychedelic experience, not to make any major life decisions for at least a couple of weeks — ideally a couple of months. If you come out of a session thinking, I know exactly what I need to do: sell my house and move to Nepal — wait. Wait six months before you make that call. If something showed up as a big, overwhelming urge for change, that means there’s something in it that needs to be integrated first. Once you’ve done that work, you can make the decision from a clearer place. Never make significant decisions immediately after a psychedelic experience.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [27:10]

Yes — definitely wait it out. And a couple of words came to mind as you were describing that trusted guide: boundaried and grounded. That person needs to be grounded enough in their own experience that they don’t feel compelled to change yours, and boundaried enough to know what is theirs and what is yours — to remember that this is fundamentally an internal experience. It’s not about creating a new memory; it’s about reprocessing what’s already there.

For listeners who aren’t interested in psychedelic journeys, here’s a takeaway you might find useful: think about the aspect of symbology we’ve been discussing. What are you welcoming into your writing life? If you find yourself continually writing about the same person or theme, what is the resistance there? Could you get curious about what that resistance means or what it might be trying to tell you? You can explore that in many different ways — this is something you can work with even if a psychedelic journey is never on the table for you.

Now, I want to give your book a quick plug here — Mushroom Pharmacy goes into all of this in great detail, but also in really accessible detail, especially around the journeying process. It genuinely helps people think through what they need to do. So, if you want to know more, the link will be in the show notes. But back to our conversation — is there anything else you want to say about the journeying process before we move into integration? Because I think integration is a piece that’s often missed.

Stacey Simmons [29:02]

Just one more thing for the journey itself: make sure you have your tools available. If you’re a writer, have a journal, pens, markers. If you like to draw, have pastels or colored pencils within reach, because material that surfaces from the unconscious sometimes doesn’t come through in words. And if you have a guide, you want that person taking notes — you want some record of the experience that lives outside your memory, because memory alone won’t capture what your written or drawn artifacts will. Write, draw, and record as much as you can.

Stacey Simmons [29:46]

On to integration — it’s critically important, for a couple of reasons. The first is the nerdy science reason.

One of the things that happens with psychedelics, especially psilocybin, is that it creates new structure in the brain. A single exposure to psilocybin has been shown to produce neurogenesis and synaptogenesis in laboratory models. We don’t know with certainty whether this is exactly what happens in humans, but fMRI studies suggest it is. What laboratory — meaning animal — studies have found is remarkable: one exposure to psilocybin, and you have new neurons and new synapses. We don’t have any other medication that does that. It’s extraordinary.

But here’s the catch: if you don’t integrate those new structures into functioning pathways in the brain, they disappear. The brain has a natural pruning process — it actively manages itself to avoid overload — and anything that isn’t being used gets cleared away.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [30:47]

Yes.

Stacey Simmons [30:48]

So, if you have a big insight during your journey and then don’t integrate it, it’s going to go away. The research shows this. What an integration process does is take that information — that new structure — and concretize it, building it into working circuitry so that you have permanent access to it. If you skip the integration, you lose the benefit. Integration is the most important part.

And integration is not a single event, as you said — it can take months. I have a client where we’ve been integrating material from two psychedelic sessions for four years.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:26]

Wow.

Stacey Simmons [31:26]

I know — remarkable. But it’s still producing insight, so why stop? Without integration, the whole experience is like a roller coaster ride: you took the ride, it might have been fun, but it doesn’t mean anything. With integration, you create new meaning. You gain depth and greater access to yourself. To me, integration is the most important part of any work with psychedelics or non-ordinary states of consciousness. It isn’t optional.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [31:57]

I have some concrete examples from my own experience, but I’m wondering if you could share some of yours — the kinds of activities you might use to help someone integrate?

Stacey Simmons [32:12]

A lot of it involves art, writing, and creating stories — it becomes a form of narrative therapy. I’m thinking of a specific client right now. He’s a musician and music producer, and he lives that kind of life. He didn’t know I did psychedelic therapy — he hadn’t seen me since before I got trained — and he wound up really stuck. He did some mushrooms one weekend on his own, without support, had a very difficult session, and then was embarrassed to bring the content into therapy because he assumed I’d disapprove. When he finally told me, I said: “I’m a psychedelic therapist — bring all of it.”

During his session, he’d been frightened by what came up. His mother had passed away when he was young, and in the imagery, there was a dragon, weaving through the rooms of his house and his business almost like a snake — and when it finally reached him, his mother was at the center of its mouth. As we worked with that symbolism over months and months, it shifted. It would show up in dreams, in daydreaming, in creative writing, in sessions with his own clients — because he produces music for other artists. And gradually the dragon transformed. It became his friend. When it appeared, he understood it as a signal that there was something worth confronting — in his own creativity or in the creativity of the artist he was working with.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:50]

Wow.

Stacey Simmons [33:50]

It was really powerful. And usually that signal pointed toward something painful, because for him it was always connected to losing his mom.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [33:55]

So, what I’m hearing is: really working with the symbols, understanding what they mean, and over time offering new potential meanings for them — doing that through art and various forms of creativity.

In my own case, this was more connected to holotropic breathwork, but I think it applies here too: after every session we would make a mandala, and then write something — a poem, a few words, whatever came. I have all of mine. And what I’ve found is that it’s not just the act of making the artwork that matters — though that’s important in itself. It’s also about placing it in your space, so the integration continues every time you encounter it. I have a painting I created after my last session that I can visit with and keep journeying through. Having physical objects in your space — in addition to talking through the experience — can be a really powerful way to keep those neural networks and synapses active and permanent in the brain.

Stacey Simmons [35:05]

I agree completely. I did a training in France in auto-induced cognitive trance — another modality for non-ordinary states of consciousness — and several of the practices involved drawing and something called écriture close, which is like automatic writing, except you’re not trying to form words, just shapes that resemble them. The idea within that modality is that those marks become imprinted with the meaning of the moment, and you can return to them later to recover that meaning and add to it. The artifacts become tools not just for integration but for moving forward.

Creating any kind of material record of your experience is genuinely useful. It isn’t absolutely necessary, but I find that creative people do better when they’ve made something — a drawing, a poem, a song, or even just a longhand account of what happened. For writers especially, that engagement with the writing process keeps you actively in the integration.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [36:10]

It’s extremely tactile. Well, we’ve talked about the ways this can be beneficial, but like anything, something that’s great for some people isn’t right for others. When is this a good idea, and when might it not be?

Stacey Simmons [36:33]

There are some clear guidelines. We do not do psychedelic therapy with anyone who has active or latent psychosis — ever. Because psychosis already means the person is in an altered state of consciousness, and while it’s unlikely to tip someone into a permanent psychotic state, it is possible. There are also many people who’ve had psychedelic experiences and found themselves psychologically challenged afterward, because what they confronted shook their belief system or their way of life. If someone has very rigid beliefs, the confrontation and resistance during the experience is going to be extremely difficult. I wouldn’t say a rigid belief system is automatically disqualifying — but psychosis is. I’ve had clients with schizophrenia, clients who are bipolar with psychosis, who heard what I do and said, “Sign me up.” And I have to say: no. We don’t do this with anyone who has a risk of psychosis, even if they’re medicated.

One thing I should add on the preparation side: if you’re taking SSRIs, you need to discontinue them for several days before a psilocybin session specifically, because the combination can result in serotonin syndrome.

We also don’t do psychedelics with people who are in the middle of active trauma. You need some distance from the trauma before you can engage the medicine, because the grief and pain can be simply too overwhelming. The risk is that you dive straight into the grief with no way through — and we’re looking for a transformation of grief, not an intensification of it. When someone is in active trauma, the timing just isn’t right.

Something else worth naming: one of the common outcomes with these medicines is a period of elevated well-being afterward, which comes from that surge in neurotransmitters. And that feeling, in itself, can become addictive. I’ve had clients with significant trauma who start doing ayahuasca journeys every single weekend, month after month. That’s a problem. Chasing the well-being is not the same as integration — and it’s not healing.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [38:57]

I’m glad you brought that up, because I’ve seen an escapism culture develop around this — where the journey becomes real life, and ordinary life gets abandoned. Respecting this as the medicine it is, using it thoughtfully and responsibly, matters enormously. Yes, the mood boost is a real benefit — receive it gratefully when it’s there and be okay when it passes.

The way I think about it is through the lens of the window of tolerance. We want the experience to stay within that window. If you’re in active grief or active trauma, you’re likely already close to the edge of it — and a psychedelic experience could push you out entirely. That’s not useful. It’s not healing.

Stacey Simmons [39:49]

I love that you brought up the window of tolerance, because it’s not a framework most people outside of therapeutic training would reach for. It reframes the question as: What can you actually tolerate right now?

And what it means, practically, is that the person who’s suffering has to get genuinely comfortable with their suffering — not avoiding it, not trying to mitigate it — which is incredibly hard. But from a therapeutic standpoint, it tells you exactly where to work. It says: I need to be here with you, in this, before we go anywhere else. Not because suffering is something to sanction or prolong, but because suffering is a normal part of life, and we want to move through it as cleanly and as quickly as possible, so it stops dominating everything. Once we’re through the initial pain and grief, then we can begin to talk about a journey — about making deeper meaning from what you’ve experienced.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [40:45]

And I would add — because I do see this — that there are people who avoid their trauma, and then there are people who run straight toward the pain. They say, “You’re going to take me somewhere difficult? I’ve been there before. Let’s stay there a while. I’ll rip the Band-Aid off and go through all the hard things at once.”

I’ll raise my own hand here, so no one thinks I’m judging — because I’m not. At one point in my life, when I had complex PTSD, that was exactly how I operated. If it was painful, I knew how to be there — and in a strange way, that felt comfortable. What I’ve learned through healing is that I was simply living at the edge of my window of tolerance all the time, because my nervous system had been trained to believe that was normal. It isn’t healthy, and it isn’t good for your body. So be really kind to yourself. Stay curious. Ask: How can I be gentler with this?

We’ve talked about when this works and when it may not. We’ve gone through the full journeying process. Now I want to wrap up by coming back to the foundational focus of this podcast — Writing Your Resilience — and some things I think we need to be genuinely responsible about.

Last time we talked about The Tell, the memoir that generated a lot of controversy. I’ll put a New York Times article in the show notes for anyone who wants to read about it. But the core issue is this: the author went on a psychedelic journey, came away believing they had recovered a memory of severe sexual abuse, and wrote a memoir accusing someone of it. I’ve also been pitched other memoirs with psychedelic components — I haven’t read them, so I can’t speak to their content — but it raises something people say to me all the time: I want to own my truth. And while these experiences can be genuinely powerful and help you understand yourself and your truth more deeply, what do we do with what appears to be a recovered or reconstituted memory? How do we use this responsibly?

Stacey Simmons [43:14]

This is so important, and I’m really glad you raised it. As we’ve discussed before, memory is inherently plastic. It’s not like a computer file — stored somewhere uncorrupted and always identical. Memory changes every time you access it, based on how often you return to it, how much you discuss it, and what details get added or stripped away over time.

Now add psychedelics to that — where you’re supercharging the memory with emotion, visual stimulation, music, and heightened sensory experience. That’s not going to give you a more reliable memory. It’s going to give you a more emotional one. The medicine turns up the volume on the emotion and the symbolism of the memory. And it may not even be drawing on a real memory at all — it could generate an entirely fictional, symbolic experience that conveys the sentiment, the feeling, the emotional depth of something, without giving you any actual lived details.

I’m thinking of a client whose experience was clearly not the literal event, and yet it felt to him like absolute memory. He was transported back to his childhood home — he grew up very poor in central Illinois — and in the experience he was a small child, alone on a cold bare floor, with no one there to feed him or care for him, and he was crying because he didn’t know how he was going to survive. Now, whether that specific scene ever happened doesn’t matter. What was real was the feeling: a three- or four-year-old child, completely abandoned, in a cold place, with no one looking after him. That emotional truth was real. That historical self-assessment was real. Whether the cold room and the empty house are literal facts — we simply don’t know. But the experience was real, and people struggle deeply with that distinction because they want the experience to be factual.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [45:32]

Yes.

Stacey Simmons [45:33]

They aren’t the same thing. Subjective experience is not objective experience.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [45:37]

Absolutely. And I want to connect this to something different I’ve experienced — past-life regression. In one session, I was a witch being burned at the stake. Did that actually happen at some point in my soul’s journey? Who knows — and honestly, it doesn’t matter. What mattered was the feeling state it revealed: I cannot speak my truth, and if I do, I will be annihilated. That feeling was deeply relevant to this lifetime.

The way I translate it for myself, and the way I talk about it with others, is: we can’t know that as fact. But what we can know is that this is a feeling you carry, and this was the story that helped you connect with it — so you could understand it and do something different with it.

Stacey Simmons [46:35]

Exactly. Whether past lives exist or not — I have no reason to think they do, and no reason to think they don’t — what you’re describing is real in its impact. That fear of betrayal, that fear of speaking your truth, that fear of putting yourself in front of people: it shapes how you live. And that’s precisely what psychedelic therapy is for — confronting those things.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:03]

This has been such a wonderful conversation. I’ve loved every minute of it. If you could leave people with just one thing — something to carry with them, to put in their pocket — what would it be?

Stacey Simmons [47:19]

It would be this: You matter, and you are bigger than you think. Your experiences can show you how important you are, how valuable your contribution is — to your own life and to the lives of others. You can arrive at that knowing through psychedelics, through holotropic breathwork, through trance, through spiritual experience, through any number of paths. But I want to ask you to give yourself permission to confront the fact that you matter, and that your life is larger than you’ve allowed yourself to believe.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [47:53]

I love how you put that — confront the fact that you matter. Imagine what the world would look like if we all did that.

Stacey Simmons [48:02]

It would be magical.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [48:03]

It would be so magical. And it’s something I’m going to keep inviting people into, again and again. Thank you so much for being on the show — for this third conversation, this trifecta. It has been such a gift. I’ve learned so much from you, and I’m deeply grateful to know you.

Stacey Simmons [48:27]

Lisa, it is absolutely my pleasure. You are one of the lights in the world — especially in the writing world — and I’m so grateful to be part of your journey. Thank you for inviting me. I will always welcome the chance to talk with you, whether it’s over coffee or in front of a microphone.

Lisa Cooper Ellison [48:41]

I feel exactly the same way.

Thank you so much for listening. If you’d like to learn more about Stacey and — most importantly — pick up copies of The Queen’s Path and Mushroom Pharmacy, please see the show notes for this episode.

If you’d like to take this conversation a little deeper, grab your journal and sit with these questions: What symbols and rituals support your creativity and bring you peace and joy? And which symbols might be a sign of resistance?

You can make my day by leaving an insight, a thought, or a question about this episode — or anything else you’d like me to cover on the show. Speaking of listener thoughts, I want to give a shout-out to @ShannonsChannel, @SimpleGoodness6439, @YuBabble, and @DeborahCopperud for sharing your reflections on my conversations about author platforms and Family Constellations work. It was so wonderful to hear from all of you. And listeners, if you haven’t reached out yet, I would love to hear from you too.

That’s it for today’s episode. Thank you so much for listening — I couldn’t do this podcast without your support. If you loved this episode, here are three simple ways to keep the show thriving: subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite platform so you never miss an episode; leave a five-star review so others can find the show; and join our community by signing up for the Writing Your Resilience newsletter. As a thank you, you’ll receive a free copy of Ditch Your Inner Critic: Five Tools to Transform Self-Doubt into Self-Support.

Until next time, remember: your story matters. As you write and connect with the truest, most authentic version of yourself, you become not just the writer, but the person you’re meant to be. And that, my friends, is the real freedom writing can offer.