Welcome back! My piece about psychedelic parenting went live yesterday. It’s a raw look into my growth as a parent and how psychedelics and Jungian psychology are helping me along the journey. I am including a short excerpt below but go read the whole thing over at The New Fatherhood. I will be back next week with fresh content diving deeper into the unconscious. Until then.
When we talk and think about psychedelic parenting, we are really speaking about the parent’s personal growth. There is no special trick here. It’s tough and slow work. We see ourselves and our internal psychologies through our children and our parenting. Whether we choose to do anything with that insight is a matter of personal choice. But the material is there, and psychedelics have the power to help us dive deeper or decline further depending on how you approach it.
I had my first psychedelic experience a couple of months after my 40th birthday. Growing up I was always afraid of psychedelics even though they were prevalent and popular at my East Coast private school. My ego, that wily animal, established itself early in my life as a coping mechanism to deal with the gravity of my parents’ divorce, the departure of my father, and my mother’s lifelong depression. The sensitive, curious, and empathic feelings that typify a child’s existence were suppressed as my ego took center stage. Nothing much changed as I grew older and so the prospect of experimentation with psychedelic drugs didn’t sit well with me (or my ego).
Like anything in life, psychedelics require reverence and a great deal of preparation. Without clear and noble intentions, the psychonaut can easily lose out on the deep and powerful lessons these substances offer. The stakes are even higher for parents, given how our childhood directly affects our child-rearing – whether we acknowledge it or not.
Becoming your best self (and parent)
Carl Jung, the eminent Swiss psychologist popular in some corners of the psychedelic community, believed that we each had the ability to become the best possible version of ourselves. This lifelong exercise, which he called the individuation process, required deep and uncomfortable introspection into all parts of the psyche and unconscious. Most of us fall short because we are unwilling to engage with that murkiness and unresolved material.
Around mid-life, the darker aspects of our personalities that we keep from our daily personas, which Jung called our shadow, bubble to the surface. Along with suppressed emotional trauma from childhood, these aspects of our personalities give us a test. Confront the material as part of the individuation process of becoming our best self or suppress the material even deeper.
Confronting uncomfortable material from deep inside is something most parents have surely encountered. Thrust into the extraordinary situation of caring for another human being forces us to consider how we were cared for as children. At least, that is what happened to me.
The work of becoming the best version of myself began in earnest the moment I found out we were having a boy (he is three and a half now, and we are expecting a baby girl in August). Something shifted for me at that moment. It’s like my fractured relationship with my father entered the doctor’s room and said, “you can’t avoid me any longer”. My parents divorced when I was about five. I lived with my mother but would see my father once a week after school and every other weekend until I was about nine. Then the relationship ceased, and I haven’t seen him since.
After my son was born, I returned to therapy for the first time in a decade. Unprocessed trauma from my childhood rushed to the surface after his birth. I was desperate to unpack it for myself and for him. Every parent fears laying their psychological issues on their children. Robert Johnson, a well-known Jungian analyst, writes about this process in reference to the shadow of the parent:
“Probably the worst damage is done when parents lay their shadow on their children. This is so common that most people have to work very hard to throw off their parent’s shadow before they can begin their own adult lives. If a parent lays his shadow on a young child, that splits the personality of the child and sets the ego-shadow warfare into motion. When that child grows up, he will have a large shadow to cope with (more than just the cultural shadow that all of us carry), and he will also have a tendency to put that shadow upon his own children.”
I had been in and out of therapy since childhood, but I never deeply connected to a psychologist. My overdeveloped ego never allowed me to truly break down those inner walls while on the analyst’s couch. Most of my sessions turned into a lame intellectual exercise where I tried to catch the therapist in some sort of trap because they hadn’t read this author or were unaware of such and such concepts.
I put real effort into therapy after my son entered the world to deal with all of the emotions the shift brought to the surface. I didn’t want to parent from a place of trauma or engage in reparative parenting. Therapy also helped me and my wife cope with the stresses a new baby put on our relationship. I am still reflecting on how my childhood trauma has and continues to inform my parenting.
While I couldn’t dislodge the ego, I have made some real headway. Looking back on the months I was in session before my psychedelic journey, which wasn’t planned when I restarted therapy, I feel like I was tilling the soil of my psyche and preparing it for the psychedelic experience that blew everything wide open. Around this time, I began doing breathwork.
At first, it had nothing to do with therapy or mental health. I was getting into cold water swimming and stumbled across the Wim Hof breathing method. As I went deeper and my breathing sessions lasted longer, I began to unlock suppressed memories from my childhood. I would enter a breath-hold, and suddenly I was back at my primary school from a drone’s perspective. During one breath-hold, I was running after a small boy who I thought was my son only to catch up with him and discover that it was myself as a child.
Something was shifting. Becoming a parent of a son was dredging up visceral memories from my childhood and activating my “stuff” that lay just below the surface. Therapy was dredging up emotions that have been suppressed for years. The breathwork was using that fresh material to offer insights and avenues. Then I turned to psychedelics. The rest of this piece can be read at The New Fatherhood.
End note
Speaking of parenting, a couple of my favorite dad jokes gleaned from The New Fatherhood. Have a great week.