As well as these biological and psychological factors, there’s another dimension that can be seen to link the two. This is whether your nervous system feels safe enough to let go.
The Body’s Shutdown Response
Dr Rosalind Watts, a psychologist who was the clinical lead for Imperial College London’s psilocybin for depression trial, noticed a pattern among participants who didn’t break through during sessions. Many of them had histories of serious trauma and showed signs of what she calls “interpersonal distancing”. This is a guardedness that comes from years of not feeling safe with other people.
This can result in someone mentally holding on tightly because they find it extremely difficult to feel safe and trust facilitators or emerging experiences.
When someone’s system feels extremely unsafe, there can be a shutting down. Watts has suggested that on a neurobiological level, protective mechanisms are activated that effectively put the brakes on a psychedelic experience; if something feels too dangerous to the organism, the organism simply shuts down rather than opening up.
This doesn’t work as a conscious decision. It is not as simple as just saying “I am going to trust and let go,” and then the defences are down and sensitivity is up. Our nervous systems have their own memory and intelligence, and if someone has learned that opening up leads to harm, then their system may activate shutdown defences, even if they consciously want to have a breakthrough experience.
Watts has talked about our mind/body organism as having what she calls a “homeostatic balancing system”. Homeostasis is our body’s natural tendency to maintain balance and stability. For example, your body will sweat when hot and shiver when cold. It is a type of intelligence that is built in for self-regulation. Regarding psychedelic experiences, this would mean the nervous system has an intelligence about what it needs for healing. Just like your body won’t let you consciously stop your heart or forget to breathe, it might also regulate how deeply you go into a psychedelic experience.
Some have a more mystical way of understanding this and believe that with psychedelics, you do not get the experience you want, but that you get the experience you need. In this frame, one’s own innate intelligence could be protecting them or only allowing them the intensity of experience that they can actually handle and integrate at that point.
But what might actually be happening on a biological level when this shutdown occurs? The answer may lie in a protective mechanism called dissociation.
The Dissociation Factor
There is another layer to the safety and shutdown response that is especially relevant for people who have experienced significant trauma. This is dissociation, and it might be one of the most significant factors why some people experience nothing on psychedelics.
Dissociation is a biological response to trauma. It is an involuntary numbing that happens when your brain releases natural, endogenous opioids. Leading PTSD researcher Dr Bessel van der Kolk found that Vietnam veterans, twenty years after their original trauma, still had a numbing response equivalent to an 8 mg injection of morphine when exposed to stimuli that reminded them of the war. To put that in perspective, hospitals use smaller doses of morphine to treat severe breakthrough pain. So this shows that we have an internal pharmacy inside of us that can secrete powerful opioids to numb us out, even decades after a trauma has occurred.
This matters for psychedelic experiences because of what happens when a psychedelic response meets an opioid response. You might take a psychedelic substance to open yourself up, but simultaneously, your neurobiology is dumping numbing opioids into your system to protect you from traumatic memories.
Saj Razvi, who is Director of Education and Founder at Psychedelic Somatic Institute and has been part of hundreds of MDMA-assisted therapy sessions, describes how this shows up: people feel completely sober, even at what should be the peak of the experience. They think they received a placebo. They feel bored, like nothing is going on, or they might become sleepy. Just like antipsychotic meds can stop a psychedelic trip, our body’s own opioids can help shut the experience down.
The degree of dissociation depends on one’s trauma history. Someone with a single traumatic event will have some dissociation around that incident. But someone who grew up with prolonged childhood neglect or abuse has likely lived significant parts of their childhood in a dissociative state and will have much more dissociation to work through.
According to Razvi, the key is recognising that the nothingness itself is valuable and the perceived non-response is an access point to go deeper. This can require skilled facilitation and trust. The blankness might need to be sat with for 30 minutes, 2 hours, or even longer, before it cracks. However, when it does, the overwhelming experiences hidden by dissociation (deep grief, fear, abandonment) can begin to emerge.
Understanding dissociation can help to explain why some people need exceptionally high doses to break through, and why the nada experience does not always mean that psychedelics simply don’t work for someone. It might be a sign that your system has very good reasons for keeping certain material locked away, and working with it may require skilled support to navigate past the protective mechanisms.
10x the Dose with Grof
However, it seems that it is possible to override even the strongest of defences with high enough doses.
Psychiatrist and psychedelic therapy pioneer Stan Grof noted nada experiences likely due to shutdown responses with some of his most vigilant and guarded patients. Something in their mind/body organism was wanting to keep them safe and shut the experience down at doses that would typically be effective. He found that they had such a tightly held psyche that only an extremely high dose could break through their defences. He would scale up from more standard doses until a breakthrough dose was finally achieved, and he mentioned doses as high as 1500 micrograms of LSD, almost ten times that of a typical high dose.
Interestingly, once a breakthrough dose was finally achieved at the higher dose, a regular dose would then have the expected effect. It seems as if their nervous system needed evidence that it could survive letting go before it would allow itself to do so again.
Sometimes a Lack of Trust is Appropriate
It is worth noting here that sometimes a lack of trust is appropriate. Resistance to experience is not inherently bad, and people’s defences have been built for a reason.
This is particularly important in the current landscape, where psychedelic ceremonies and retreats are growing faster than proper training and ethical standards can keep pace. Many psychedelic ceremonies also still happen underground, without sufficient regulation or oversight, and there are enough reports of poorly held or otherwise irresponsible spaces and sessions to know some sessions or psychedelic facilitators may actually be unsafe.
In some cases of nada or diminished experiences, someone may be subconsciously picking up on red flags that their conscious mind has not fully processed yet. A nada experience in an unsafe setting might actually be a nervous system’s protection from potential harm.
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I have Aphantasia and get visuals on psychedelics.
My ability to get visuals ramped up after taking an Nbome and a few DMT experiences.
Interestingly I get strong fractal visuals (especially on DMT and Ho-Met) but my friends get visuals where they see /experience different places… they sound very different to mine and more immersive.