Heartbreak is a Bad Trip

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Chemical Collective or any associated parties.

My experience of a breakup in the summer of 2025, after a three-year-long relationship where my ex-girlfriend and I lived together, felt nothing short of psychedelic. My ex owned the house we lived in and decided to sell it without much of a conversation before moving away to a different part of the country. Nothing had drastically gone wrong in the relationship, but there were compounding factors that led my ex to the decision that she needed to not be in a relationship anymore. The conversation that led to the breakup felt like a bad trip – I was thrust into a feeling of despair and almost impending doom, like the world was ending. 

The person I had spent so much time with and had become so close to was now discarding the relationship and wanting to do life on her own. This felt utterly devastating, even though deep down I knew something wasn’t really aligned. I felt myself spiralling and panicking that I hadn’t really thought of what I would do in this situation – just never believing that it would ever happen, and not thinking about any real backup plans to prepare for this. 

I found myself in a state of despair, seemingly forgetting any strategies or spiritual practices to centre and calm myself. It was like my whole sense of being was unravelling, and I didn’t know what to do. In what was not one of my proudest moments, I walked up hastily onto the South Downs and made sure no-one was around me where I let out some anger and sadness in a very loud fashion – while it was a bit cathartic, I’m not sure this really had any positive impact, and I remained in this state of sadness that has still not entirely left me over 6 months later.

On the day of moving out of the house, I spent the evening trying to sleep in a new place. With just myself and a new roommate, who I was friends with but not particularly close to, I had very rapidly entered into a panicked state. I thought I had made the wrong decision to move into a new place straight away, and really felt like I should have left the country to clear my head, rather than trying to figure out a new living situation. 

I’d gone from something very calm and stable for the most part to now house sharing again in my mid-30s. Something felt very wrong with reality itself, like I was in a state of disbelief and fear…the shift from what had been very normal for over three years to a state of rupture just felt like the bad trip had been extended – I couldn’t settle at all, and my everyday experience just felt like the continuous onset of a bad trip. It was genuinely hellish, and my mind couldn’t focus on anything else; it was difficult to compare this to anything other than a challenging psychedelic experience. 

What Makes a “Bad Trip”

Bad or negative trips might be characterised by moments of fear, panic, paranoia, anxiety, anger, depressed states, confusion, and dissociation. We might experience terrifying entities or become retraumatised with feelings of grief, despair, or anguish as we revisit certain memories, often from our childhood. 

Along with these intense emotional feelings, we might encounter an altered sense of self or loss of control, potentially combined with being stuck in thought loops – this can create an impending sense of doom that the trip will never end. I’ve personally only experienced this in an extreme sense one time after salvia extract, when I felt like I would be stuck in that reality forever. This was probably one of the few trips that I would characterise as categorically “bad” in the sense that I just shouldn’t have smoked 50x salvia extract, having never tried it before, and one that I certainly regret. (The only positive outcome was that I got an extreme telling off at 19 years old, and understood very quickly that salvia was traditionally chewed, and it’s not something that should be smoked – especially in high dose extracts!)

These feelings of fear, panic, anxiety, depression, confusion, dissociation, loss of sense of self, grief, despair, and anguish have certainly been mirrored in my experience of my relationship ending. The overwhelming emotion of heartbreak and feelings of separation from someone that I’d spent so many years with was becoming something of an extended psychedelic state. I didn’t need any substances to enter into this world of dysphoria, where the sensation of being alone had just plunged me deep into a space I have found very difficult to climb out of. 

The Loss of Reality: When the Shared World Collapses

There was a lot of love and affection in my past relationship, as well as a lot of silliness and inside jokes – the loss of this relationship as a shared construction of reality has been devastating, as this also meant the loss of a planned future and the continued creation of a world that we shared. Routines and familiarity disappeared, and I was left with a void of just nothingness, despite everything else I had going on in my life. It was like an anchor had completely vanished, and things just felt totally unreal. 

Similar to the destabilising effect that psychedelics can have on our psyche, heartbreak can create a total distortion of reality, where we might not really know what’s real when the familiar becomes unfamiliar. My experience of this breakup has been characterised by a real sense of disbelief at the total loss of this reality, and this could be mirrored in what we see during challenging psychedelic experiences, where people enter into states of ‘ontological shock’ and existential distress. 

Within these states of psychedelic ontological shock, individuals might experience feelings of confusion about their existence and purpose, and preoccupation with meaning-making. There might be similarities within a state of heartbreak, where the sense of self within the context of a shared construct is no more, and perhaps in the shattering of this collective identity, we experience something similar to the dissolution of our ego.

Ego Death in Disguise?

Despite maintaining our interdependence and often doing our own thing, there was a lot of shared reality with my ex. My identity was not so tied up in the relationship from an objective point of view – I have a lot of different avenues in my life where I can express my identity, but it felt like something energetically was anchored to this relationship. This partnership that had been created meant a lot in terms of not just doing life on my own, and it provided me with the opportunity to grow and learn. 

But how much of this relationship, and relationships in general, becomes more about “we” than “I”? How much of the “I” is about co-creation in these kinds of relationships? I guess it depends on the nature of your relationship, but even without consciously co-creating, there is still something that happens from spending a lot of your time intimately with one other person. 

Does a breakup then cause forced ego-dissolution from the partnered self? It might feel like our identity has disappeared entirely, where our desires have vanished, and nothing seems to have any meaning. It can be a complete destruction of everything we had pinned our reality on, and often, we lose our core selves in place of the co-created self of the relationship. When that co-created self goes away, it can be almost impossible to remember who we actually are outside of the relationship. 

We often romanticise ego dissolution when engaging with psychedelics, but moments like this in a breakup can feel very much like forced ego dissolution – we don’t find it through a conscious exploration of the self, but rather through a violent and destabilising scenario where we might feel totally lost. There is no mystical revelation or beautiful narrative that connects us to a greater whole…just simply a sense of being alone and fragmented. 

We might struggle to make any sense of meaning from our heartbreak, and we can see this mirrored in challenging psychedelic experiences, where nothing seems to make sense, or we can’t find any meaning after an experience that could potentially bring up more trauma. 

I very much found myself in crisis mode in the aftermath of my relationship ending, and there are still waves of feeling like this over half a year later. Similar to going through the aftermath of a traumatic psychedelic experience and being in a state of psychedelic crisis, I was feeling unable to integrate or understand what I had gone through. Around halfway through this crisis, I started working with a humanistic and relational therapist, who has honestly been amazing, but I have also felt that going through this state, which feels psychedelic, might gently require some of these plants or fungi to assist my journey through this state.

Perhaps I would be able to find some meaning again, and even some joy, with the assistance of friendly fungal allies – I needed to do something to reconnect to myself and the world around me. Life often feels lonely and scary (especially now being single), but I have often found comfort in the experiences I’ve had with psilocybin mushrooms, where I genuinely have a sense of them being here for me personally, as well as being here to assist humanity and the world. 

Turning to Psychedelics After Heartbreak

I was excessively ruminating and unable to relax, and just experienced a constant state of disbelief, anxiety, and depression in the immediate aftermath of the breakup. I wanted relief from the pain, while being aware that it was just something I needed to go through. I wondered if consuming small doses of psilocybin mushrooms could assist with moving through this experience, despite some trepidation that it could potentially destabilise my mindset even further. 

The benefits of psilocybin mushrooms for treating depression are widely known, and my previous extensive experience with them has shown me many pathways towards finding joy and meaning in life. However, there was a lot of resistance when it came to even opening the jar – almost like I knew these fungi could really help, but there was something seductive about being stuck in this depressed state. The depression was almost like it was an entity that I’d known for such a long time, that thinking about an alternative option would require something of a leap of faith, or a giving away of energy that I’d been holding onto for a long time. 

It was like my life had lost all meaning, other than just to wallow in this sadness, and I knew that I needed to reconnect with the things in my life, which, from an outsider’s perspective, should unquestionably provide meaning. I have the freedom to write interesting articles about psychedelics, play in a touring band, and find myself as something of a public figure in the functional mushroom space. 

Lots of people enjoy my company and want to collaborate, but it feels, at times, almost impossible to connect with any of that. It often feels overwhelming to hold all of this stuff on my own, without a partner to share my experiences with and provide mutual support for when things get stressful. I’m doing this all on my own for the first time in years, and often I think, what’s it all for? 

The way through has been for me to reconnect with the energy of psychedelic fungi, which have the power to provide meaning in situations where all hope might be lost. I think about what is happening now with the war in Iran, along with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and increasing violence in the West Bank, as well as the continued war between Russia and Ukraine. I’m sure there are also lots of other ongoing conflicts we don’t hear about, and with the state of the world, it can be very difficult to feel hopeful or find any meaning. 

We can’t simply maintain our state of inner peace by ignoring outer war, and so consuming things such as psychedelic fungi to find meaning in our own lives should ideally catalyse us to engage with the rest of the world in a positive way. Perhaps these substances might eventually have the power to undermine the aggressive military forces in the world. But while that remains a big ask, we can certainly look towards different plants and fungi as a means to provide more meaning for ourselves and others in our wider community. 

On a personal level, this has allowed me to work through a lot of cynicism and close-hearted energy, which found its way back to my core sense of being post-breakup. In the immediate aftermath, I felt like a changed person – unable to find joy in life or take an interest in anything or anyone. There’s still a lot of this energy hanging around, and this requires care and attention to recognise where it might not be serving me, and how I can find ways to transmute it through creative pursuits, or consciously seeking out places and events where more open-hearted energy is required.

Tapping back into the energy of psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms, and more specifically, the heart-opening qualities of the San Pedro cactus, has allowed me to reconnect with the part of myself that is full of love and joy for the world. It feels almost too easy to be cut off from this energy, and I genuinely feel like these plants and fungi have provided me with a gift that can always be received – if I want it…and sometimes it’s hard to really want it, because it requires that relinquishing of control and sense that you’re going to solve all of this on your own. 

Are There Any Risks?

Of course, we should be aware that there could be the potential to open up the wounds even more – it’s much easier and safer just to shut ourselves down, and wallow in misery because we know it so well, and it doesn’t ever change. It just becomes even more of what it already was, and we continue to feed it with our sadness, rather than working through it. I mentioned previously my hesitancy to consume psychedelics in this state, and part of that was a sense of trepidation that this kind of experience could potentially destabilise me to the point where things could become risky. 

In assisting with the dissolution of ego, psychedelics have the potential to lower our defences, which can certainly be positive in certain therapeutic incidences, but might risk us feeling overwhelmed by the grief of a breakup. We might have waves of re-experiencing the pain, as well as the risk of further destabilisation if we don’t have a proper support network for integration. Going through heartbreak puts us in a fragile state, and it’s important to be aware of the dosage, as well as set and setting when it comes to consuming psychedelics. While they can certainly provide an opportunity to work through some of the grief, we should go in with a lot of care and respect so we don’t risk intensifying or exposing the heartbreak to the point where it becomes too much.

Integration and Renewal

When a large part of the sensations I felt were of disbelief, I was aware that the necessary path through this was acceptance. If I were to remain stuck in the disbelief of the breakup and possibly hold on to some kind of subconscious idea that it wasn’t really over, then I wouldn’t be able to work through the grief. 

Exploring the heartbreak through the lens of a psychedelic experience has allowed me to have more acceptance for how much I’ve struggled emotionally over the past year. I’m not in a place of judgement where I’m just expecting myself to simply get over it with time, but rather I’m able to see it as something where I felt flung into a state of dysregulation and destabilisation. This sensation of it being a bad trip eventually allowed me to see where the path through was working on myself, and grappling with a lot of the stuff I’d been avoiding, which the heartbreak had brought up in a big way.

In this sense, I’m grateful for this unfolding of events and have found benefit in consuming psilocybin mushrooms in particular to assist with reconnection and renewal of the self. Through this experience, I’ve noticed that a big part of me felt lost or subdued in my previous relationship, and how engaging with this reconnection has allowed me to rediscover myself and expand my energy into more positive environments. 

It’s a vulnerable place to be in, but integrating this experience within the context of psychedelics has allowed me to find some sense of meaning where I have often felt like giving up hope. It’s been a slow transformation, often feeling like I’m taking one step forward and two steps back – but when connecting with the healing potential of different plants and fungi in particular, I’ve been able to create more space around the pain and in between my thoughts.

Psychedelics aren’t going to erase what has happened, but they can make heartbreak more bearable and, in essence, “heal” our hearts to the point where we can be more open again to the possibility of love. The grief will still remain in some form, and that’s OK: it’s part of the chapter of this story, and it displays our ability to give and receive love, even if it doesn’t last as long as we thought it might, or the narrative goes in a completely different direction than what we expected. 

My ex was an important part of my life, and they still matter even if they’re not in my life anymore. Our experience together was a chapter in a wider story, and psychedelics have given me the opportunity to appreciate the positive, loving, and affectionate moments, while providing me with the acceptance to recognise where our paths were no longer aligned.

Oli Genn-Bash | Community Blogger at Chemical Collective | linktr.ee/oligennbash

Oli is one of our community bloggers here at Chemical Collective. If you’re interested in joining our blogging team and getting paid to write about subjects you’re passionate about, please reach out to Sam via email at samwoolfe@gmail.com