Psychedelics Didn’t Fix my Broken Body Image—But Man, They Helped a Lot

If I am this open door, everyone is this open door

It was a full-length mirror—one of those cheap ones marketed toward college students, made to sling over a dorm-room door. But this one hung on the far wall of M’s bedroom. In it, the mess of dark covers, the plaid pattern of my baggy pajama bottoms, the amalgam silhouette of our bodies slapped together.

One of the first rules of psychedelics, I’d been told, is not to look in the mirror. The first time I’d ever done mushrooms—my guide being the boyfriend I’d recently broken up with; the need to process that breakup being the impetus for this trip with M—we’d duct-taped a top sheet over the giant mirror that dominated the back wall of my own bedroom. It would have been unavoidable. But this mirror was slender, offering just a silver sliver of the scene. In our preparations, M and I hadn’t even thought to cover it.

M was processing his own breakup. The two of us had been on a single first date years earlier; the very next first date I went on, I fell in love, solidifying what he’d later call our “funny little half-chemistry” into an abiding friendship. We had the kind of relationship where we could go months without talking, then pick back up with ease. And our most recent romances had dissolved in similar ways after weathering similar dynamics.

“Maybe we should do some drugs about it,” I’d suggested.

Psychedelics were fairly new to me. That first mushroom trip, with the sheet over my mirror, had occurred about two years earlier. For most of my life, fear had eclipsed my curiosity, precluding such experimentations. I’ve long been what might reasonably be abbreviated as “a control freak:” a straight-A Catholic school kid with debilitating social anxiety who’d eventually developed an eating disorder. I’d had my first panic attack when I was eight years old. To top it all off, I’d had extremely challenging experiences with the hardest “drug” I ever tried: marijuana. Surely, I thought, having more than once curled into the fetal position to wait for the terrifying THC tunnel-vision to pass, any more extreme psychoactive compounds were permanently out of my purview. 

But then I met the man who would become my ex. I fell like a well-picked-over Jenga tower. Suddenly, irrevocably, I had a guide I trusted. 

The man who would become my ex—and later, again, my partner—has a gentle spirit and a keen sense of empathy. He also has years of psychedelic experience. In the dingy kitchen of my daylight basement apartment, on the first day of a new year, he measured us out a moderate dose, pressing the blue-tinged fungi into slices of bread lined with peanut butter. 

“So… these sandwiches are going to take us to outer space?” I joked. 

He smiled back at me, but seriousness played at the corners of his mouth.

“Do you trust me?” He asked.

I did.

That first trip—eight weeks into our love, everything sparkling with heat and recognition—was, for me, uncomplicated, or about as uncomplicated as mushrooms get. We held each other so close there were no gaps between our bodies. I laughed at the swirling colors on the backs of my eyelids, trying only briefly to explain them. A lifelong writer, I felt the pressure to capture capture capture dissolve for the first time I could remember, like the release of a muscle I didn’t know I was clenching. I opened my eyes to look into my partner’s. “Words,” I said, grinning, “are stupid.”

Over the intervening months, I’d taken a handful of other trips—mostly mushrooms, twice LSD; some with my partner, once with a friend, and a few times solo. Some experiences were, indeed, challenging in ways I could never have understood, but I learned to trust my ability to breathe through what I was feeling, to lean in and accept. 

“Thank you,” I told my partner on one of our excursions: a day wandering around Short Sand, perhaps the prettiest Oregon coast beach, watching how every part of it breathed and changed as the hours passed. “I can’t believe I almost missed this.”

And then—M and I in his bed, the ceiling swirling with cathedral-like sacred geometry. Tears streamed down both our faces. 

“I just miss my friend,” he sobbed. “I miss my best friend.”

I felt the truth of his words reverberant in my own body. I thought about my own lost best friend—how hard we’d laughed and cried the first time I’d waded into psychedelic space, like the emotion between us could blow a crater into the earth. Even on that early day, the challenge had already been spelled out for us. As the mushrooms swept over our bodies and brains, he’d pressed his ear into my sternum, hard. His tears pooled in my armpits. 

“I run away from things,” he said. “I don’t want to run away from this.”

For my part, though, psilocybin had fused me to the earth. Roots extended from my body deep into the planet. 

Run all you want, I’d thought then. We are always only here.

But two years of sober life revealed the perfect symmetry of the attachment-style mismatch. His anxieties fit lock and key into my own, the resultant dynamic a grit foiling the smooth surface of our love. Although he said himself his fear had nothing to do with me, was his own work to contend with, it was all too easy for me to take it as evidence of my inadequacy—specifically, the inadequacy of my body.

The disordered eating habits I’d told myself I’d permanently kicked before I met him had slowly started creeping in again; for the first time in years, I was losing weight. I spent hours in the mirror examining the battleground of my body. Eventually I decided leaving was my only path to safety—though our love remained excruciatingly steadfast. Meeting him had been like recognizing a part of myself.

M blew his nose wetly beside me. Where exactly was my lost part now? What was he doing? How could I bear the immensity of the next half of my life—of sharing this planet with him, but not our journeys along its surface?

I so badly want to spend my life with him, I scribbled in the journal I’d brought to M’s for this purpose. I’ve always wanted to spend my life with somebody—and nobody can replace him. Above me, the ceiling exhaled.

But—I am somebody, I wrote, underlining the pronoun. I am my own witness. I count.

M turned to me. “Can I hold you?” He asked. When I said yes, he pulled my whole body onto his. This was the closest I’d ever been to a man without any sexual pretense—a radical novelty after a life spent chasing male attention like it was oxygen. I’d regularly assumed the same posture with my ex-lover, too—with all my lovers. Sex so often wasn’t about wanting, but wanting to be wanted—the thrill of physical proof that my body was enough, could incite a sense of urgency. The result: A performative pressure that had torpedoed more than one relationship.

M rested his hand casually on my ass, docile and without motive. His lack of desire, I realized with a shock, didn’t read to me as an insult. Our physical closeness was profound and prosaic, the plainspoken expression of something deeper. There was no performance, no striving. No test.

That’s when I caught sight of us, my chin tucked over his shoulder.

I couldn’t see my face, only my body—our bodies, two human beings in saggy sweats: legs for walking, our strange and well-designed feet. After a moment, I sat up to look more closely: the utilitarian scaffolding of my hips; the tattoo-covered canvas of my skin, an organ that had so often knitted itself back together over the thirty-four years it had clothed me. The trunk of my body, braless and breathing, stashed somehow with organs that perfectly fulfilled their functions. 

Alive. Alive. Alive.

It was the inverse of a ritual I had performed so many times, in so many mirrors—always punitive, always cataloging everything that was “wrong.” Suddenly, the whole concept was nonsense: that our physical appearance had anything at all to do with our value or purpose. Nonsense that looking “good” was even a meaningful concept, that a body is an object that can be normatively assessed.

I started laughing. Hard. Tears swept down my cheeks. My mouth—my mouth! That portal through which I nourish and express myself!—ached with laughter. M had sat up by now, too, and was looking at me with happy curiosity.

“I can’t believe,” I said, gasping for breath, “how much time and energy I’ve wasted—” another spate of giggles. “Worrying about my fucking body.”

And then, as it does, the fractal expanded outward: all the women whose bodies I’d envied, the hot flare of jealousy that so easily metastasized. They’re perfect. They have everything. They could never understand. The wall my insecurity had created—ostensibly for protection, but in truth an isolation. The righteous indignation I clung to, flimsy foothold, at both ends of the spectrum, whether I was The Fat One or The (Atypically) Anorexic One.

I’d already learned it wasn’t true, the experiential distance I’d imagined. I’d been writing about weight loss and body image for years, had heard over and over again from the very women I’d condescendingly considered immune from the problem: the ultramarathoner whose stomach turned at pre-race weigh-ins; the ex-cheerleader who admitted the slice of cafeteria pizza I watched her eat at lunch in high school—enviously spearing my own iceberg lettuce with a plastic fork—was the only food she consumed all day.

But psychedelics have the power to instantaneously span the gap between sympathy and empathy, to annihilate any imagined separation of self. The theoretical becomes tangible. If I am this open door, I thought, everyone is this open door. Doors so much larger and more complicated than the series of shapes we borrow. 

This wouldn’t be the only time I’d have a body image breakthrough while tapped into the flowing fabric of human consciousness—as curiously decorated in repeating neon patterns as it seems to be. Seven months later, I would find myself in Costa Rica, flattened under the heavy weight of ayahuasca. My revelations would be many and appropriately ineffable, but one would be clear enough to make me chortle—to imagine it, even in that moment, as a headline: Ayahuasca Told Me My Boobs are Fine. The larger and more consistent psychedelic message, as I’ve put it in short whenever anybody asks: your body just isn’t that important, silly.¹

Which isn’t to say that my struggle with body image is over. No matter how profound the trip, you (usually) do come back to earth afterward—back into the world of big screens and magazine covers. I still have food issues—though they’re far less severe than they’ve been in my past. I’m still looking for certain shapes when I gaze into the mirror; still sometimes compare myself to others. I still “think ‘bout my weight,” as Mikala Jamison, the author of Body Type, put it in the question that inspired this essay.

Which is to be expected. Healing rarely happens in a single moment. And although I’ve heard of exceptions—one-and-done encounters that cured lifelong depression or catapulted the journeyer out of a bad marriage in one fell swoop—for many, psychedelics are more like a yoga, a practice. While still nascent, clinical research into the efficacy of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the treatment of mental illnesses, including eating disorders and body dysmorphia, is underway—and showing promise.² But there’s no magic pill, even when the effects feel literally magical. Some describe psychedelic experiences as multiple years of therapy in a single session, but anyone who’s ever done therapy knows it requires effort. As one facilitator I know put it, “Psychedelics make the work easier. But you still have to do the work.”

If you are interested in working with psychedelics toward specific goals, like healing body dysmorphia, that process is likely best done with a qualified guide—who might also help assess your candidacy for these medicines, which are not for everyone. Some health conditions and medications are contraindicated with psychedelics. And it’s worth mentioning that most psychedelics remain illegal in the U.S., both at the federal level and in nearly every state. (The needle is moving, however; psilocybin in particular has been enjoying a decriminalization campaign that’s been successful in several American cities and the states of Oregon and Colorado.)

But as someone who was terrified to give myself over to altered states of consciousness, I’m glad I finally did. We’re all works in progress, always, but psychedelics made it real for me in a way no amount of reading or talking or positive-affirmations-in-the-mirror could have:

That the body is the sacred seat of experience, an instrument of connection. That the project of being alive is to forget our imagined sense of separateness. That we are all budded from the same hunk of clay.

(Still, if it’s your first time: probably avoid the mirror.)

1. Danielle Rateau, a YouTuber who herself has served as an ayahuasca facilitator and who also battled an eating disorder for a decade, says that when she brought her body image issues to the medicine, it told her, get over yourself.

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924977X23001098, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11920-022-01394-5, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10197863/,
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-psychedelic-drugs-may-help-depression

Disclaimer: Psychedelic compounds remain illegal in most parts of the United States and many other countries, and can have lasting negative side-effects. We do not recommend or endorse their use.