My Autistic Psychedelic Journey: From Dissociation to Deep Connection
Growing up, I was a stranger to my own bodily sensations.
I would wear shorts on my walks to school on the snowiest days of the frigid Chicago winters. My body would shiver. But my awareness would fail to notice. Friends and family were my external nervous system. They would tell me that my body was cold, or that I seemed upset. And it was all so very confusing for me, growing up autistic—not because I felt nothing, but rather, because I felt all of the things, all at once.
In my pre-psychedelic years, I struggled with a common autistic comorbidity known as alexithymia. It’s a condition marked by difficulties with processing one’s own feelings and sensations. Alexithymia is why I couldn’t tell if I was cold or hungry. It was also the reason why, as a teen, it took multiple people pointing out my zig-zag-shaped arm for me to realize that I had broken it days earlier.
Alexithymia impacts an estimated 50 to 70 percent of autistics (as in, 50 million autistics worldwide) and 10 percent of all human beings, period (approximately 800 million people worldwide).
My struggles with interpreting my sensory experiences were extreme—so extreme that, growing up, I dreamt of dying. In so many ways I felt as if I was already dead. Into my mid-twenties, my suicidal ideation worsened. I stayed hidden under my bed covers for days at a time, savoring the numbed-out silence. I loathed the outside world, and saw no point to anything. And all I could do was endure a world that everyone else seemed to adore for reasons that I simply couldn’t grasp. That is, at least, until the day I tried LSD at the age of 27—when everything changed.
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Autism and Psychedelics
On the day of my first LSD experience, I sat on a mossy tree stump just west of Hippy Hill, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. As the medicine came on, I admired the twinkling sunlight, and I experienced the cliches that any human might report on LSD. I experienced “cosmic unity,” and “oceanic boundlessness,” and the insight that everything really IS connected. Sure. But even more amazing than all of that, for me, was the ease with which I could navigate my sensory processing. For the first time in my life, I could immediately and intuitively process and make sense of the complex vibrational information that seemed to be buzzing in and all around me in such absolute and utter abundance.
When a stranger walked up to say hello to me as I sat on my tree stump, I felt a surge of mutual ecstasy rising up within us both. I could hear the sing-song nature of loving energetic pulses ringing out inside our hearts. And as our simple exchange faded, I looked down at my heart and hands, and I put my fingers to my cheeks. I cried, joyously, and deeply, realizing that all of these sensations had been hidden just beyond the veil of my dissociated awareness for all of my life.
To say that this vibrational breakthrough was life-changing is an understatement. And given how many others seemed likely to benefit from such a breakthrough, I committed to seven years of self-experimentation, research, and writing. And then, in 2019, I published my first book on the topic: “Autism On Acid.”
Autistic Psychedelic Community
In the months following the publishing of “Autism On Acid,” I began receiving a stream of emails from autistics who’d experienced similar benefits to my own. Eventually, after receiving a sufficient number of messages (sidenote: I’ve now received case reports from more than 5,000 autistics), I decided to invite the world to join the discussion via the AutisticPsychedelic Community. I created an online hub that continues to host weekly peer support Zoom meetings in addition to always-available chat forums, online educational offerings, and more.
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A few months after we founded our community we published our first anthology of personal accounts, entitled “Autistic Psychedelic.” This book then assisted us in catching the attention of University College London researchers. The researchers invited our founding members to help co-author and recruit for a peer-reviewed academic study to explore the benefits and challenges of psychedelic use among autistic adults. This study is currently in peer review. It indicates that psychedelics hold very real potential for addressing core autistic challenges.
We Don’t Need A ‘Cure’
On a personal level, my scores have been reduced on both the autism quotient and alexithymia measurement scales. But it is important to clarify that I still identify as autistic, and I embrace that identity wholeheartedly. The intention of my work and the community is not to “cure” autism. Most of us see autism as a variation on human cognition and processing, rather than a deficit.
My baseline autistic processing is a wonderful gift that makes me exceptional at big systems thinking, visual-spatial problem solving, and so much more.
Even so, my approach to connecting with others has definitely evolved via intentional psychedelic use, shifting me from an avoidant attachment style to a secure one.
I used to stay in bed all day and daydream of being asleep. But after LSD, my life became a waking dream–a joyous dance of connection; of singing back and forth with humans that I loved, dearly, from a place of deep knowing. And this basic capacity for processing my somatic information has imbued every moment with an opportunity for not just joy–but also, critically, learning, growth, and the formation of more harmonious and sustainable patterns of relating to other human beings.
One other critical thing worth highlighting: psychedelics are cool, but the real medicine of this journey has been the experience of discovering and participating in a community populated by other autistics. Before I started this project, I didn’t know a single openly autistic person. Now, I know thousands of them. And I am grateful to call many of them dear friends. And best of all: we can be authentic with one another. We can wear sunglasses at night with one another–because the lights in the grocery store are too intense for us. Communicate with hand gestures and wear headphones at our conference table–because the crowd noise in the conference hall is way too stimulating. We can be autistic. We can be…ourselves.
Reflections on Psychedelic Autism
My autistic psychedelic journey has been a gradual and joyful transition from seeking out isolation to instead savoring connection. I used to spend my days locked inside my room or my computer screen. And now I spam the world with open invites to join us for our next community meeting, or to join me in the sunshine for another glorious microdose hike beneath the sun. And while I still need time to recharge from time to time, it’s critical to point out that I’ve also found a new way to energize: by absorbing the energies that emanate off of all the other warm, vibrational beings that occupy this earth with me.
Translated into Greek, the word “autism” means the isolated self. Thus, when people ask me how or why psychedelics can help autistic individuals, the answer is simple: psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and MDMA—compounds that have also been classified as “empathogenic” (to engender empathy within) or “entactogenic” (to engender touch or retrieval within)—are catalysts for facilitating deep and meaningful personal and interpersonal connection.
To be clear: my autistic psychedelic journey hasn’t always been easy. And my earliest days with psychedelics were not without a fair share of missteps. And that’s sort of the point of my current mission. No one needs to navigate these challenges—or these medicines—alone.
