It's made me a lot more mindful of my mental state and I'm a lot stronger for it. I've become aware of positive and negative influences, where I'm being worried or too blasé, comfortable or not.
I haven't had mushrooms and I've heard that it really digs out deep things in your mind.
Most of my trips were pretty surface level but that’s probably because there was usually a lot of external stimulation going on (music festivals, concerts, drum circles etc.). I’ve also had good trips just sitting around with friends and listening to music but those were a little more introspective. My bad trip was in a familiar, comfortable setting too but as soon as the trip started I couldn’t escape the bad news I was anticipating and fixated on it the entire time.
My dosage was much too high and while I'm not going to deny any of the benefits, it was a very traumatic experience for me that made me seek therapy. For a while I would have some lingering visual hallucinations (a few months past the incident) when I would close my eyes and it would trigger panic attacks. That's mostly subsided, but I wish people would put a higher emphasis on the mental damage it can do.
I've also failed more than once to realize how much adrenaline was in my system on beta blockers... until they wore off. That's a harrowing enough effect sober that I approach them and all potential interactions with caution.
In mine, it was because I was in a dark, isolated, cold physical space. In my experience one really heeds to be in a "warm", comforting, bright if you want it, space where you are free to roam and explore safely. It can't be a little box. These are ingredients for a stressful life, so why would they be ingredients for a good trip.
The best thing I've seen that captures this is the trip montage in 21 jump street. On one side the one guy is having the time of his life, the other guy is in hell listening to creed.
As someone with a baseline dopamine deficiency (permanent nihilistic depression-like symptoms), my trips were always “bad trips”, but I used to enjoy them akin to how one might enjoy a horror movie or haunted theme park. I like to think it changed me for the better, but I’m not certain there weren’t lasting negative effects. I was used to darkness, but they magnified it by orders of magnitude… and you can’t “un-see” stuff like that.
Just a word of caution — when planning on trying them for the first time, i suggest making sure the first dose is smaller than the recommended starter dose, and work your way up — you can always take more mushrooms, but you can never un-take them.
And yeah, this time it was a much higher dosage than I had done in the past... like 2-3x. It had been a few years since my last trip and I had forgotten what dosage I was used to. The residual effects from this last one left the impression that the entire thing felt like a nightmare that you just can't shake. Either way, I may revisit in the future, but yeah there's a lot of healing that needs to happen first.