This makes a lot of sense the more I think about it
A bad trip is just an anxiety attack while you are too vulnerable to understand reality.
I had a friend explain it like
hey if your trip is bad, just focus on old fashioned death and pinup art of the devil and stuff. Just go full blast into it like YEAH TAKE ME MOTHERFUCKER and it should turn around on you.
I always loved that advice but never got a chance to try it
Better idea is to just walk into a different room.
It is like you walk into a different room in your mind. And it changes your mood considerably.
Honestly, that isn’t the best advice. A bad trip can be anything from mild discomfort, to paranoia, to a full on traumatic nightmare experience that has the potential to scar your psyche for a while to come. I had one of those nightmare experiences about 20 years ago after eating datura stramonium seeds. It was a 2 and a half day death trip, that I only came out of by being forcibly strapped to a bed and injected with haloperidol in a hospital. That experience messed with me for about a decade afterwards.
Your experience is valid but Datura seeds are NOT the same thing as acid and shrooms, yeah? Deliriants and psychedelics are completely different experiences. You are much more likely to have horrifying and terrible trips with deliriants, and you will not even understand what’s happening to you isn’t real, because categorically deliriants take that ability away from you.
In 2025, even in the 2010s, the Psychonaut Wiki is absolutely invaluable for harm reduction like this.
Gotta be desperate for a high to take datura. That is a poisonous plant with unpredictable results. It grew regularly where we lived, and we had a physician family member who basically said if you’re going to get high even some of the harder drugs were a better choice than datura. He’d seen too many people who didn’t survive or came out with permanent damage. It was a poorer rural area where they worked, and combined with boredom people tried other shit to get high. Datura’s got a bad track record.
I was young and I honestly had no idea what I was doing. A friend of mine gave me the seeds and I had never even heard of the plant before that point, and 5 minutes later I was choking down the seeds. I was young and dumb, and this was a gigantic mistake I made that caused me extreme trauma for about 10 years afterward. I didn’t actually even know what a deliriant was, or that it was even possible to trip like that and have hallucinations that were absolutely terrifying, fully formed, and were much more real than reality itself.
I had one try to go bad on me, but some friends took me on an adventure and it turned out great.
That’s awesome, friends are fantastic
I love friends. I’d sure love to have one someday!
I’ve found that being inside is a good way to have a bad trip, for me. Outside is great.
Ive been lucky enough to never have a bad trip. Im unlucky in that I’ve only been able to trip a handful of times.
As the meme says, there are no bad trips. If you’re serious about psychedelics and not simply taking drugs for entertainment, you’ll always get the trip you need, but not necessarily the trip you wanted.
A “bad” trip just means you either needed to process some difficult stuff, or you might have violated a bunch of rules regarding set and setting. In both cases, you get the expected outcome.
Honestly, difficult trips are often the most rewarding since they help break up stuck patterns of thinking and behavior or bring things to the light you’ve been trying to hide from yourself whose repression caused internal suffering etc.
This always assumes you’ve done your homework and you don’t suffer from e. g. preexisting medical conditions. If you’re schizophrenic and take psychedelics, you might have an actual bad trip, that’s a completely different story, naturally.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. Stop spreading dangerous misinformation.
Honestly, delete this comment.
Nope. Bad trips exist. I was sat laying down in my bed the entire time crying while my mind was spiraling down shitty paths that after the trip made zero sense. I was disguested with myself. I couldn’t make myself move. Not locked in but zero motivation. Like that feeling when you need to pee but stay in bed because you’re too tired to move cranked to eleven. I screamed in my head to raise my hand and it took way too much effort to do so.
I tried to cheer myself up thinking logically about the shit going through my head. It made it much worse. I wanted to die. That’s not hyperbole. About three and a half later I finally got out of bed and into the shower to cry there. I remembered everything I thought of and that I hated myself but it all wasn’t true. Completely illogical and mostly nonesense.
What did I gain from this? Nothing. You can say whatever you want to pretend there’s some underlying massive rebelation or positive that trip should have given me but I reject that whole heartedly. It just made me feel awful for about 5 hours fucked me up for about a week and made me hesitant do mushrooms again. Didn’t work though as shrooms are delightful most of the time
So, what did your integration look like? Did you talk to a professional about this? That’s the part most people seem to leave out, and without that, well…
There are bad trips. Sometimes, yes, ‘bad’ trips are just an expression of one’s mental state, exacerbed. You can look into it, ponder and maybe do some introspection because it is necessary.
But sometimes bad trips are just bad trips. The drugs just hit too hard, or you’re not prepared for it and you go spiralling down an infinite staircase of pain and anguish. But you have nothing to gain from it, except the memory of a bad experience.
I agree. I tried to hint at it, but I should have probably formulated it less dismissively, less absolute. That’s on me.
What I wanted to express is the unfortunately very common notion that each beneficial trip, or any trip really, has to be a pleasant experience, and that’s simply not true.
That’s why I prefer to frame it as three types of trip: good, challenging, and bad. Good trips are fun and maybe productive, challenging are productive and unpleasant, and bad are unpleasant and unproductive.
It can be really easy to mistake what should be challenging for bad and that’s where things like therapy techniques (cbt and dbt can really help here) and reintegration can be vital. But some people describe wholly unpleasant trips that don’t increase self awareness or present opportunities for growth or healing, as well as some people going in to psychedelics when they don’t have the tools or the spoons or the right mood that day.
For that last bit, every trip should begin with an honest reflection of your mental state and if you need to bail for the day, because once you get on the ride you can’t leave until it’s over.
No you really didn’t “try to hint at it”.
Honestly you sound like a teenager who just discovered drugs and really enjoys them so you went down the research rabbit hole.
And there’s nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but everything you said sounds like it’s coming from an arrogant/privileged place.
For what it’s worth, I’ve been actively involved in psychedelics for almost 51 years, so I trust even you will be able to deduce that I’m unfortunately the opposite of a teenager.
I already admitted that I opted for a rather inappropriate way to express an opinion that was (rightfully) misinterpreted and tried to better express what I was trying to get at.
You are free to completely dismiss that attempt as well, but please don’t try to bring seniority into this.
Lol. So full of yourself. No one is trying to bring “seniority” into this.
Saying you sound like a teenager who just discovered drugs is not the same as saying you are a teenager* (*so shut up - the adults are talking?)
Retarded take. Yes, there are bad trips.
People don’t like to hear it because it sounds like invalidating toxic positivity, but you’re right. Aside from fringe cases, there’s no bad trips- only challenging trips. It may even be traumatic, but that doesn’t make it an inherently bad trip; it’s all about how you respond to it and what you do with it after.
One could make that argument for anything. There’s no bad anything. No bad experiances ever. The word bad is meaningless.
Anything bad that happened to you was actually very much a good thing you just don’t know how to make it so because you responded wrong
Kind of, yeah. If you think this is dumb (beyond your reductionist take, I mean), I’d genuinely recommend you read Viktor Frankl (I ignore the religious stuff tho, personally, tbc)
It’s a specifically important distinction to make for psychedelics though. If you go into it thinking bad trips are real, you’re more likely to have a challenging trip, and you’re more likely to have a defeatist attitude afterward creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Especially when using psychedelics therapeutically, it’s extremely beneficial to go into it with the mindset that there’s no such thing as a bad trip. It reduces the odds of having a challenging trip in the first place, makes them less challenging when they do happen, and improves successful integration of challenging trips afterward
So your issue in actuality the word “bad”
I think this is detrimental. You can reject the word bad and pretend everything is something good if you handle it right but this is just reductionist and unhelpful.
Even with your examples you speak transformativly. This is a much better framing. Turning something bad into something beneficial. Life and lemons
When you have a bad trip you’re having a bad time. Pretending that it’s impossible for a trip to go bad makes it so when one does your advice is rejected. Framing it as a “challange” puts burden and blame on the individual that is undue. On Shrooms you are not in control pretending you are often is what leads to a bad trip. Acceptance of the mindset, of the trip, is the most common and most effective suggestion one can have for psychedelics. You aren’t in control past set and setting. It’s not your fault if things go south.
Praise be the shroom god allow them to send you as they wish. Go with the water not against it. Float like a log and even though the water is quick you won’t drown.
Bad isn’t a bad word. It’s just a descriptor.
Sure, often (not always) bad can lead to good even great but rejecting the reality of the negative for forced and fictional goodness is delusion. If that trick of the mind helps that’s ok for you but inherently blaming others who recognise bad makes you lesser.
Outside of psychedelics the issue is the same. Blaming, which is exactly what you’re doing, others for the bad positioning it as framing and a failure to realise it’s all actually good hurts people with little chance for help to be given.
To go to the absolute, absurd, worst example. A child sa victim. Should they have rejected the idea of bad? What happened to them was good they failed to create? No. Can they make good out of it? Yes. The experiance was still “bad”
PS. I will read frankl. Thank you for the suggestion. Any suggestion on specific material?
The label “bad trip” has a loaded connotation. People think of a bad trip as something to flee from or as the negative outcome of a psychedelic. I’ve had multiple challenging trips (all lsd), and yet there was a time in my life I went back every 6 months or so.
When you frame them not as a risk or as a thing to flee from, but as a chance for uncomfortable growth it doesn’t make it less uncomfortable, but it can make it significantly more productive even than the good trips. You don’t control where it takes you, but you do control how you interpret it and how you respond.
So when the drug sits you down and shows you the bullshit you’ve been on you have a choice: do you hide from it, internalize it, or otherwise interpret it as disparaging you, or do you take it like an honest conversation from a trusted friend or mentor and accept that you need to change. It’s similar for trauma, psychedelics aren’t used in treatment of trauma because it’s a nice easy fun time, no it’s a guided challenging trip through your traumatic experiences to help you confront them in a productive manner.
I personally don’t like saying there’s no such thing as a bad trip, I think it’s entirely possible that psychedelics can lead you into uncomfortable places where you either have nothing to learn or aren’t yet able to deal with it. But I do think the vast majority of “bad trips” could benefit from being reframed as challenging so that people’s response to them is to attempt to grow from them rather than to pop a xanax. Though of course the pre trip check in is also invaluable, double check that you’re in the right mood before taking the drug and remember that it’s always better to bail than go in when you aren’t prepared.
There’s a broad push in the therapeutic psychedelic community to use the term “challenging” instead of “bad” because semantics and framing matter. I know it can be annoying, but some words carry an unfortunate connotation that’s best subverted by using a different word altogether.
I do take issue with the words “bad” and “good” in general, but I wouldn’t say that there are no experiences which can be described as bad. (I’m also an amoralist and believe nothing is inherently “bad,” so at least I’m consistent, however unpopular)
I recommend Frankl because I realize this sounds inherently invalidating, but if anyone is allowed to say it, it’s a holocaust survivor. I’d recommend “Man’s Search for Meaning”, which he wrote shortly after being liberated from a concentration camp.
Alright I apriciate the effort you’ve given here. I’ll see about educating myself more on your stance. Your continued explination here has been quite helpful in making your stance seem more reasonable than I first thought.
It’s not about the destination it’s about the journey.
Wait that’s a different trip.
Idk the first oath would probably really help when a trip starts going off. May not make it good, but could turn a bad trip into a challenging trip
Had a few, do not recommend
Thanks Bernie!
Whoa, that sign is talking to me.
The good old ecstatic condition.
