How psilocybin therapy can help with grief
Using psilocybin to process grief and loss.
Psilocybin therapy is a powerful tool for helping people to process grief. Grief work requires us to move through the first four stages of grieving — denial, anger, bargaining, and depression — to the fifth: acceptance. But this is not always easy, and sometimes we find ourselves moving back and forth between stages or staying stuck in one stage for a longer time than we can tolerate.
When we experience a tragedy in our lives, our loss almost always feels personal, unjust, and unwarranted. “Why me?”, “How could this have happened?”, “I’m hurt”, “What did I do wrong?”, “Why didn’t I do it better or differently?”, “How can I live without him/her?”, “How can I face another day with this illness/in this aging body?”, “It’s not fair”. We fight grief tooth and nail rather than accept it because we fear that if we fully surrender to it, we may drown, cease functioning, and be lost to life.
The first four stages of grief frequently involve ruminations tied to feelings of nostalgia, regret, self-pity, and hopelessness. This is a perfectly normal response to loss. But when we stay stuck in persistent nostalgic, remorseful, self-pitying or despairing thought loops, our quality-of-life decreases.
