How Psychedelics Dismantle Our Maladaptive Beliefs
What is the potential mechanism through which classic psychedelics have a healing impact? How do one-off mystical experiences end up transforming people? How exactly does that fundamental shift occur?
Here’s one hypothesis — Mystical experiences viscerally contradict some of our deepest held beliefs and trigger memory reconsolidation.
Mystical Experience
Psychedelics are known to induce a range of perceptual changes, subjective experiences, and feelings. However, one thing that stands out is the power of psychedelics to facilitate a mystical experience.
The mystical experience is beyond words by its very nature. But there are some common themes across all reports of such experiences — ego dissolution, transcendence of time and space, feeling of reverence or profound sacredness, experience of pure awareness, a sense of unity / oneness or non-duality.
It’s the occurrence of such mystical experiences that reliably triggers long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes, and values. In a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, positive long-term outcomes were mediated by whether the individual had a mystical experience or not. Another team of researchers questioning 288 individuals on their experiences with psychedelics found that "Those with full mystical experiences reported more positive changes in all areas surveyed, as compared with those without such an experience."
On the other hand, casual users of psychedelics often complain about how people regularly revert to their mean even after positive experiences.
Rather than assuming it’s random, we should think about what is it that makes certain psychedelic experiences more “successful” than others. I believe it’s the occurrence of a mystical experience that results in a fundamental restructuring of our psyche.
Memory Reconsolidation
Our emotional issues arise from certain maladaptive beliefs / schemas we formed in response to external challenges and traumatic events. These beliefs then unconsciously influence how we think (and feel) about ourselves, how we react to what happens in our lives, and how we approach life.
For example, early childhood neglect can create a deep-seated belief of inadequacy or worthlessness in an individual. Which can then manifest as hypersensitivity to criticism, rejection, and blame; self-consciousness, comparisons, and social anxiety; or a sense of shame regarding one's perceived flaws.
A large part of healing is basically about dismantling such maladaptive schemas. Coherence Therapy suggests that we can update these schemas through a process called memory reconsolidation wherein we identify (or imagine) some experience that directly contradicts the emotional learning from the original memory, allowing us to update the problematic belief.
The authors of Unlocking the Emotional Brain (a book on Coherence Therapy) also suggest that "the brain has a built-in detection system which compares any consciously experienced beliefs for inconsistencies with other things that a person knows, and can spontaneously create juxtaposition experiences".
(For more, check out Book Summary: Unlocking the Emotional Brain)
The Dismantling of our Maladaptive Beliefs
We use a complex belief system to navigate reality. And to avoid uncertainty and overwhelm, we try to make sure the belief system is not easily disturbed. So we tend to adopt beliefs that are easily accommodated into our existing belief system (for emotional stability) and we tend to keep investing in our previously held beliefs. We also limit ourselves to environments that are most congruent with our beliefs. (This is what leads to Confirmation Bias)
Given all this, it’s very difficult to update a core belief. Especially if that belief was derived from an intensely emotional experience. Even if we become aware of our maladaptive beliefs, we can’t update them arbitrarily. Healing / integration cannot happen through "insight" or brute-forcing of new beliefs. The mind requires equally intense counteractive experience(s) to update the emotional learnings. This is where psychedelics come in.
The authors of “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics” suggest that the principal action of classic psychedelics is to relax the weighting of prior beliefs. Psychedelics loosen the tight grip we have around our beliefs and open our minds up — to new beliefs and perspectives.
On heroic doses, as we experience the dissolution of our ego, all our preconceived notions, beliefs, and concepts fall away. The hands of our mind completely let go of whatever they were holding on to. For a rare and brief period, your mind is free to touch unfiltered reality. Of course, this can be a difficult experience because you’re losing all sense of familiarity. But this is where the magic happens.
As the boundaries of your self melt away, you experience a profound sense of connection with all there is. There is no separation. There is no “you”. Or rather, it’s just you.
You realize that your “self” is just an abstraction, a fictional character that you’ve painstakingly put together to soothe yourself. And so, temporarily, you stop identifying with that character (what people call “ego death”). You are identified with something far more transcendent, call it whatever — pure awareness, cosmic consciousness, or the universal mind. This is where the “mystical” quality of the experience comes from.
The experience gets interpreted or expressed in various ways, let’s take a common one for example: "I am the universe". Now when you are experiencing yourself as one with the universe, you “know” you are the universe. It’s a participatory sense of knowing. The actual metaphysical reality is irrelevant. For your mind, it's more real than anything you've ever experienced and that's what matters. It leaves a deep imprint on you.
Now consider how deeply inconsistent this experience ("I am the universe") is with some of our deeply held beliefs like "I am worthless" or "I am inadequate". It's an extremely powerful juxtaposition. How can you hold these contradicting statements simultaneously?
That’s why, if integrated well, the mystical experience will trigger the dismantling of your maladaptive core beliefs, creating a deep healing impact.
Closing Thoughts
All in all, classic psychedelics not only relax your prior maladaptive beliefs but also provide a novel super-salient experience to update those beliefs. The more radical the experience is, the higher the likelihood of deep lasting change. So if your objective is healing and transformation, it makes sense to optimize for a set, setting, and dosage that would enable a mystical experience.
You’ll have to figure out the adequate dosage for your body. But in general, you can imagine how, at lower doses, your defense mechanisms would still be around to “save you”. You’d cling on to familiar beliefs and perspectives for a sense of safety.
Even at higher doses, if your set and setting are not optimized, you can easily deceive yourself to avoid facing what needs to be faced. For a long time, I unconsciously used conversations and beauty during my trips to distract myself. It was only when I took a high-dose trip alone with eyeshades on that I realized what I’d been missing. Terence Mckenna’s “heroic dose in a dark room” is a good heuristic to reliably trigger a mystical experience.
Such a trip can be a scary prospect. It can be a destabilizing experience as your belief system gets unraveled. And it can also be a disturbing experience as your trauma comes to the surface for processing. But…
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
— Joseph Campbell
It’s these “difficult experiences” that facilitate true healing and evolution of your self. Openness, curiosity and courage can take you to places beyond your wildest imaginations.
To learn more about how to navigate such an experience, see our Navigation page.
If you’re trying to make better sense of a disturbing mystical experience, I’d recommend checking out Mysticism and Psychedelics: The Case of the Dark Night, by Chris Bache.