The Profile
Nationality: British
Lives in: UK
Age when taken psychedelic: 38
Occupation: Internal Communications and Employee Engagement
Psychedelic of choice: Ayahuasca
Place of ceremony: Amsterdam & Menorca
What was your intention?
To unlock my emotions.
I lost both my mother and my sister before the age of 13 and I shut down emotionally. I was kind of aware I was doing it but I couldn’t do it differently.
Then, I got to the age of my mum when she died (38) and that was the same year when I had a conversation with a friend about Ayahuasca. As soon as she mentioned it, it was one of those things I couldn’t stop thinking about and within 2 months I was in Amsterdam doing it.
A part of me wanted a quick fix because I realised that emotionally I was shut down. I thought, “right, what’s the thing that can bat me straight where I need to be” but a part of me also liked the concept of going inside and finding answers there rather than relying on external sources.
Why did you take it?
Originally, one of the reasons I went there was to try and save my marriage. My husband couldn’t communicate effectively – he had his own emotional experience. He wanted a family and I have never wanted children even before my mum died. I almost wanted to go there for an answer to tell me what was wrong with me why I didn’t want a family.
And probably the biggest, overarching reason was to deal with my emotional state. I was 9 years’ old when my mum died and back then in 1989 there was not much support for young people. It was just ‘get on with it and rely on your parents’ sort of thing. My father wasn't really around as he was dealing with his own pain, so I didn’t really get any parental support and I went from being 9 years’ old to being about 18 overnight because I knew there was no other way of coping with it. I basically turned into an armour-plated robot. Nothing touched me, nothing affected me. Any kind of indication towards getting help for what I had been through was just not something I would consider.
Fortunately, I like knowledge and educating myself and what I realised from that is that learning about things and understanding them is very different to actually experiencing it yourself and being part of it. I researched a lot about trauma and death of parents but never really accepted that it was something I had to address and change in myself.
Fast forward into my late 30s, my marriage was in rocky water and it was off the back of that that we jointly went into counselling. He didn’t really get much out of it but it made me start to think a bit more. That was the beginning of the journey.
What were you most afraid of?
You read the horror stories because obviously that’s what the press likes to talk about but I had done my research, I’d read some of the books on Ayahuasca and had a conversation with someone who had done it before, so I felt I was well informed.
The setting I went for my 1st one was in a beautiful house down the river in the Netherlands. Everyone was dressed in white, everyone was beautiful and spiritual, so it wasn’t like a raw Ayahuasca experience - it was a nice way to get into it for me.
I wasn’t scared of anything happening to me because I knew that was not going to happen. I was scared of what could happen if I open a door that I can’t then close or that I won’t be able to go through. But it was a sheer determination so there was not going to be a reason for me not to do it.
What did you most look forward to?
I wanted to see dead people and have some conversations and get some answers. I have memories of my mother as an entity but I don’t really have a lot of individual memories of the things we did. I think I blocked them out because I didn’t want to think about them. I always wanted to reconnect with that.
I didn’t quite manage to though. During my first session I saw a few things but they were not major and then I spent the whole night just shaking, feeling the trauma. I understood what my body was doing and so I was patting myself on the back.
What was the hardest bit about the experience?
Over the entire experience it was the lack of patience.
The 2nd 2 nights in Amsterdam I spent 6 hours having a tunnel of lights that I was going down. Every time I would get to the end of the tunnel, something would bat me out and I would have to go back to the start again. It was 6 hours of that. And me being me, being impatient, I was trying to work out how I could get through, how can I fool it so I can get to where I wanted to get to. And obviously the 3rd night was exactly the same. And what it was trying to tell me was that I was not ready and was not being let in.
One of the things I got was a clear message: “Go and work on yourself because we got you where you need to be. Now, go off and come back when you are ready.” This was hard because I think I expected that quick fix and something amazing to happen. And when you see things like that happening around you to lots of people having revelational experiences, you want to be a part of it. But then again, you also see some of the traumas that people go through…
I’m still early on in my journey. I’ve had to spend the last year processing the trauma through other means. I needed this psychological experience talking to someone who knew what they were doing and also the physical well-being experience of realising I had to look after myself.
What was the best bit about the experience?
I’ve been lucky in that I did not have anything being thrown at me that I could not handle. I’ve had conversations with several people that I know who are involved with Ayahuasca and I know that sometimes it’s about this slow journey.
The most important thing for me was that I had not cried for 20 years. After the 2nd ceremony, everything just started leaking. Now, I cry at anything. I am still processing all of the emotions that are still stuck in me but they are coming out slowly.
What did you get from it?
It softened my armour.
I also got that I have everything I need already. I have just forgotten or chosen not to realise it.
I brought myself into this new level of spirituality where I previously hated any premise of it or of God, because why would life be this cruel. I learned that once you have that kind of awareness inside you of what you need to do and how you can get through life, it almost springboards you to a completely different place, which can only be really called spirituality because you have become aware of the fact that you need to live your life the way you are meant to live it. We lose our way very easily in life because of what we go through and what happens to us.
How did it impact your life?
I left my husband January last year off the back of realising that the path that I’d chosen with him was a path that was easy because there was no emotion in it and he was never going to give me that emotional support that I needed or be raw and true enough to himself to be able to be that side of my life. I had deliberately chosen a partner to allow me to continue to live my life at a static level. And I felt sorry for him because that’s what he will ever have, I think.
So, as I became more connected to my emotions, I left him and ended up with someone I’d known for almost 20 years. We’d always got on really well and I always found him very intelligent but he wasn’t ‘my type’. I had this construct the society gave me of liking a certain type- all that just disappeared.
We have been together for a year and 2 months now and it’s amazing. He’s supporting me completely through all of this and he’s allowed me to be vulnerable, which I’ve never been before.
It’s not exciting compared to many people’s stories but it’s been a huge difference to me of understanding not only what I’ve put myself through by not feeling emotion (I ended up getting diagnosed with coeliac disease and chronic fatigue because my immune system was massively compromised due to everything I had stored negatively in my body) but now I have the answers to be able to keep myself out of that or to manage myself more effectively.
What did you struggle with after?
I struggled with feeling the emotions. It was going back to being an emotional toddler: I didn’t understand what the emotions were. The only real emotions I’ve felt over the last 20 years was probably anger because it was so easy to find and I felt it a lot of the time.
The toughest thing is understanding what my body is trying to tell me because there is still a part of me that wants to shut it all off.
What improved?
So many things have changed for me: I am able to feel emotions, cry and be vulnerable – all new things.
Also, the kind of relationship I have been able to build – the one based on authentic communication and support.
What do you need to work on?
I’ve been learning to meditate, trying different breathing exercises, trying to stop or quiet down the voices in my head and my continual thinking. I’m nowhere near that yet but I feel a shift is happening.
It’s going to take a while but I’m feeling a bit different.
I almost believe I had put a plastic cover over myself and a lot of the time I rely on that to keep me in control of what’s going on around me – that’s gone in some ways. I don’t feel like I need it because I don’t feel the need to protect myself anymore. I guess it has made me real in my reactions to things but then also real in understanding that I cannot do everything for everyone all the time. Part of my chronic fatigue syndrome treatment is around these different subtypes that you have. One of them is around being a ‘helper’ – you spending all your time helping other people so you don’t have to focus on yourself.
What would be your advice if you were to do it again?
I think more work on letting go. I’m a control freak – I have always been because it was my safety mechanism and a lot of why I didn’t get a lot of out of the Ayahuasca experience is because I still believed I could control the situation.
Being able to be vulnerable and to let go of everything is what I picked up. You can’t just go there and get fixed.
I did some inner child work before the 2nd ceremony, but I still had a way to go. I’d recommend doing that before.
Charlie's traumatic childhood experiences of loss and inability to handle the grief that followed turned her into someone so tough that she couldn't even feel herself. It's like she was sleepwalking through life, doing what was expected of her: working, looking nice, getting married, slowly heading towards the wall that was not going to let her get past it without taking a long and hard look at herself.
I find her story is not unlike many others' though. Even without such obvious traumatic experiences, many of us still do go through situations that make us harden, wanting to control everything in the vicinity, as if that was the way to quiet down the enormous stress we came to experience. And so we plan our lives not the way WE would want to live them but the way they seem safe and acceptable, hoping that is the way to happiness and fulfilment. That is until we hit that same wall. It comes in different shapes: break-ups, anxiety, depression, apathy - you name it. The main characteristic being that it is so painful that it's impossible to ignore it any longer and that's when the real journey starts.
Apart from the failing marriage, Charlie's love of learning was key to getting her onto a new path. Even if her initial intention did not go deep enough into the core of the problem she had to solve, it allowed her to get onto the path that got her to what seems like a better, more rewarding place. For starters, she can cry now and for anyone who has not done it much, it's an incredible release of built-up energy. I bet it's a relief for her.
I loved hearing how she proceeded to smash that armour she had built over the years. It's time to be soft now and crying is a good start!
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