Decoded | Unlock The Secrets of Human Behavior, Emotion and Motivation
The Dark Side of Psychedelic Therapy
04 Jun 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What are the risks of psychedelic therapy that we should be aware of?
As a society, we owe it to ourselves to educate people about the risks and not only pitch it as this amazing, euphoric experience that is going to change your life. Because just as easily, it could change your life in a negative way for the rest of your life.
Your brain is wired for deception, but here's the truth. Patterns can be broken. The code can be rewritten. Once you hear the truth, you can't go back. So the only question is, are you ready to listen?
Welcome everybody to another episode of Decoded. Today we are talking about medicine journeys. I realize this episode is probably going to be fairly divisive. We all know that I'm not afraid of doing that here. So I want to set some ground rules for what my intention is going into this.
And maybe a good point of reference, I did a podcast on one called The Psychedelic Report with Dr. Dave Rabin, who I very much admire. And we have a really great conversation about psychedelics on that one, where I go a lot more into the childhood origins that, to me, predispose somebody to not be a candidate for psychedelics. So if you want to go a little bit deeper into that,
the brain pattern elements of who it could be for and who it's not for, we dive very deeply into that. So the podcast itself is called The Psychedelic Report with Dr. Dave Rabin. Today's episode, my goal is to help us establish when there may be a more sinister narrative behind pushing or putting something up on a pedestal.
If we look back at the early 2020s, it's probably the first time that I started fairly loudly sounding the alarm about this because I was seeing the trend and the uptick in people engaging in psychedelics that, in my opinion, are not good candidates for psychedelics. So I want to make sure that we're clear. This episode is about...
Highlighting the concern, understanding where there may be a more sinister underbelly of psychedelics, and not to say that they're inherently bad. I think there's a time and a place for quite a few things. But I've noticed a trend that I think puts many people in a very dangerous psychological situation.
position that they had no business being in and our society normalizing things like medicine journeys is partly responsible for why this has happened. I think it's important for us to connect this uptick in psychedelics to a normalization of weed culture because I don't think you can separate the two of them.
The normalization of weed culture very much made the way for psychedelics to kind of come alongside that. Not to mention, and certainly not picking on him, I really love Joe Rogan's show and I think he's done a lot of great work. There are a lot of people that love talking about psychedelics and psychedelic research, but as you know,
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Chapter 2: Who should avoid using psychedelics and why?
where people unfortunately go when engaging in psychedelics, weed, medicine ceremonies. And if you're listening to this, I'm giving air quotes. You often are getting stuck into the liminal space between the fourth and the fifth dimension. Some may call this the astral realm. Some may call this the spirit realm. It is a place where time distorts. Time exists, but it distorts.
Think about somebody smoking DMT, which, by the way, I have not done. But a very common way to describe it is that you feel like you were gone for a really long time, but it's about 20 minutes. How is that possible? It's because you are moving out of our chronological time, but you're also still somewhat aware of the passage of time.
So when you come back, it still feels like it was a very long time. So there's still a concept of the passage of time. It's just not the same as what we experience in our everyday sober lives. That is why I call it the sticky web.
When people talk about astral projection, remote viewing, dream spaces, etc., or even from a Christian perspective, kind of battling in the spirit, oftentimes what we are talking about is that space in between. And one of my biggest frustrations from a spiritual perspective about this,
medicine journeys is that you're not actually going high enough to be communing with actual God and I believe the parts of the spirit realm that you want to be interacting with. You're actually subjecting yourself to quite a dark, confusing place and And for what it's worth, I actually believe that is part of the reason that it has been put up on a pedestal and been made more normalized.
Because ultimately, I'm a firm believer that the powers that be that run the world that we live in today – and I will let you decide what that they group is –
want us confused and distracted and disoriented and thinking that we're trying to chase God or meet God while we're actually being trapped into a web of deception and communicating with perhaps entities and spirits that are not inherently good. I remember early on in my career, somebody was like, who are your spirit guides? Don't you know your spirit guides?
And I'm sure I probably came off like an a-hole at the time. And like, perhaps I still do and that's okay. But I remember being like, I don't have spirit guides. And they're like, Busy, everybody has spirit guides. And I'm like, well, I don't have spirit guides. I only walk with God, Jesus, Holy Spirit. Like there's, I don't have spirit guides.
And people would be like, oh, well, you must have them. You're just like choosing not to. Anyways, from where I sit right now, I realize a lot of my spiritual walk, I was very much covered and protected. And I think to other people, it may have came across as though I was being maybe judgmental or stubborn. But I realize now in hindsight, I was honestly very covered.
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Chapter 3: How does ketamine therapy relate to psychological risks?
Psychedelics. Oh, yeah, sure. Weed. Yeah, how about ketamine? We'll just ship it to your house. Now, you've heard me talk on the show about how I used to be a raver. It's a big raver. Thankfully for me, I was a mostly sober raver. But I remember in high school, there were plenty of people in my friend group that loved to snort ketamine and go into a K-hole.
So imagine my surprise when after years of being a raver and watching people go into a K-hole where you literally think they're dead temporarily and then they come back, reanimate, and then they're like, can I do another key? Imagine my surprise when all of a sudden in the mental health space, people are asking me to take ketamine therapy seriously.
I'm sorry, excuse me, what did you just say to me? Let me ask you a question. Have you ever noticed how you can know something is unhealthy and still do it anyways? You know you shouldn't react that way in an argument. You know that habit isn't good for you. You know that that thought pattern is irrational. And yet somehow, your brain runs the same loop again.
This is where a lot of personal development goes wrong. Awareness alone doesn't change the brain. Repeated behavioral input does. Your brain changes through neuroplasticity, through the pathways you strengthen with action, not just awareness. And that is exactly why I created Renew Your Mind.
This program sits at the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral rewiring, and biblical teaching around the command to renew your mind.
Inside this program, I walk through what's actually happening in the brain when patterns form, why your prefrontal cortex shuts down under emotional pressure, and how specific behaviors activate areas like the anterior midsingulate cortex, which is responsible for resilience, discipline, and the ability to push through discomfort. But the most important thing we talk about is pattern opposition.
Because if you want a new life, you can't keep feeding the same neural pathways that created the old one.
scripture says be transformed by the renewing of your mind but most people were never taught how to actually do that renew your mind gives you the framework to begin interrupting destructive patterns strengthen your ability to regulate emotion and build the emotional resilience that is required to become a new creation if you've ever felt like your reactions habits or emotional patterns are running your life instead of the other way around this program was built for you renew your mind can be accessed at stan.store slash busy gold
Now, I do admit that there is a body of research that has been emerging that shows that there is some sort of efficacy with ketamine usage. It's not my job to tell you that there isn't or try to refute that. I think as it pertains to studies, I think studies can be manipulated in a variety of ways.
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Chapter 4: What is the connection between psychedelics and psychotic breaks?
I get that. Is that treating a root cause? Absolutely not. Is ketamine in that way curing anything? Is it treating anything? No. It's a distraction technique. And
I think all the more dangerous, a place where you are putting yourself into a drug-induced state and somebody is more susceptible to delusion, outside influence, false memories presenting as real, and it's already hard for people to parse through accurately their own historical narrative.
Then if you add drugs on top of it, you go from, you know, black and white to the grayest thing you've ever experienced in your whole life. So to me, this idea that we... This idea that we are going to now normalize weed, normalize ketamine, push psychedelic research and start to normalize psychedelics. We have to wonder...
What the true origin of that is and ask ourselves some really honest questions about does introducing those things generally help us or harm us? I think that there are specific use cases where people have benefit. Here's an example when it comes to things like mushrooms.
If somebody is a rigid control freak and they want to control every single step, they can't get out of their own way, they are extremely rigid and fearful, could doing psilocybin mushrooms give them some sort of a life-altering temporary experience where they cannot be in control and maybe they make contact with something that feels beyond their physical reality that makes them feel a sense of purpose?
Of course that's true. Of course that can happen. But it's also equally as true that somebody who already naturally skews toward psychological mechanisms like projection, deflection, blame shifting, splitting, and or some sort of other delusional behavior is actually more drawn to toward doing a medicine ceremony. And should that person do psilocybin mushrooms?
Absolutely not under any circumstances. So my biggest concern is that if you make it broadly accessible and you start talking about it like it's generally great for everybody, it's life transformative, it'll change your life. You're potentially putting people in harm's way because you've just talked about the generalities of it rather than saying these people are not a good fit for this thing.
And by the way, I feel the same thing about vaccines, right? I've never vaccinated any of my four kids. I've known way too much about this for a really long time in my adult life. And myself had vaccine injury. So I've never been the type of person that says vaccines were maliciously intended from the outset.
But I do think we have a lot of evidence at this point that there are certain people who are predisposed genetically to to have negative reactions to vaccines. And we just pretend like this is not a thing. So we don't learn how to screen for those people to be like, you're a candidate, you're not.
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Chapter 5: How can false memories arise during psychedelic experiences?
Lives can get ruined very quickly by having a person lose their tether to objective reality. And I think here's where I want to take it. My concern is that most people, and I think I realized this at a fairly early age, and this goes back to the epiphany that I had watching Fight Club when I was 13.
Most people haven't really sat with and considered how easy it is to slip off the edge into insanity. I know I have, like, I've thought about that question way too much in my life.
And I've been aware of that edge many times where it's like there might even be certain questions that you've asked yourself where there's an awareness like I shouldn't go down this line of questions too much because I'm going to slip off the edge. The line between sanity and insanity is razor thin, if at all.
And unfortunately, most of the people that have slipped off that edge by way of self-deception don't realize they've slipped off the edge. This is why I've talked in other of my Break Method lectures about this analogy, and really it's posed as a question. What separates the best psychic in the world from somebody with schizophrenia? possibly just a communication filter, honestly.
Especially if you look at indigenous cultures and who they make to be their shamans and medicine people, one could argue that they are intentionally seeking out people who we might call schizophrenic, but because it's being trained and cultivated and nurtured, they are building a communication filter so they know what to communicate to you about and what to keep to themselves.
When, if you've ever met a medicine person or a shaman or a psychic, et cetera, even in the Christian space, somebody who operates in the prophetic, what makes that person not seem insane is their ability to delineate what you can handle versus what you can't handle.
There are conversations that I can have with a handful of people that there's no way I could have those conversations with the everyday person because their brain would literally melt. Understanding who can handle what and understanding what the average person can perceive objectively versus what you're perceiving is incredibly important.
And unfortunately, many people with diagnosed schizophrenia, they can't find that delineation anymore. That delineation also often goes away when we're talking about psychedelics, which is why I think so many people end up being irrevocably harmed by psychedelics because nobody was pre-screening for who was not a good fit for this.
And I do want to very much thank Dr. Dave Rabin for the work that he does because I believe he's really at the forefront of trying to create a very clear protocol and screening process so that the people I'm talking about are never subjected to psychedelic therapy in the first place. So Dr. Dave Rabin. He's the best. Big fan.
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Chapter 6: What are the dangers of emotional dysregulation in psychedelic use?
And I lay down in bed to watch a movie with my husband. And all of a sudden, I'm like, this movie is giving me a lot of anxiety. He's like, do you want me to turn it off? And I was like, yeah, kind of. I just like, I just really feel really anxious. And then he's like, well, that's not like you at all. And I'm like, yeah, let's just do something else.
Then all of a sudden, I'm like, I kind of feel like I'm melting into the comforter. And he's like, babe, you're scaring me. And at this point, I couldn't figure out what was happening. But eventually, when I put it all together and I realized I had accidentally dosed myself, then I couldn't stop laughing. So then I'm like manically laughing, trying to tell my husband.
But I have like tears streaming down my face because I just think it's the funniest thing ever that I accidentally dosed myself. So finally, I spit it out. I'm like, I accidentally took mushrooms. I'm dripping. He was like, what? Are you kidding me right now? And I was getting on a plane in a few hours to go to Austin. So it actually in that state, because again, I tend to be like, Go, go, go.
My days are so structured. I have so much going on that it ended up actually forcing me into a momentary relaxed state that perhaps I wouldn't have taken for myself. So once I realized what I'd done, I kind of just submitted and went with it and it was fine.
Up until that point when I didn't know what was happening, it was very scary because I know myself really well and I knew something wasn't right. I didn't know what that was because I didn't realize that I had dosed myself. But once I figured it out, I was able to submit and it was fine. All this to say... Two things are true.
There can be a time and a place where somebody can benefit from something like this, and there can be a time and a place where this can change somebody's life irrevocably forever. And far too often, the latter is true. I think we need to be very conscientious of how we have let certain, you know, air quotes, spiritual practices kind of seep into the mental health space.
And with that in mind, I do think that at the same time, we have kind of a gaping God chasm in mental health. So I'm certainly not saying there is no place for spirituality in mental health because I think there is. I think there's actually a lot of that missing. But often what ends up getting put on a pedestal are things like medicine journey and hallucinogens.
And I think we're going to see this pushed much more. Even things like I know that now RFK Jr. is starting to kind of expedite psychedelic research and access to psychedelics. I mean, I've done Molly as well. I'm a pretty happy person. I do not really get like moody and down in the dumps and depressed. I have never felt worse in my whole
whole life than after i did molly the next day i was like oh this is what it feels like to be in full-blown depression and suicidal ideation this is terrible hated every second of it would never ever ever ever ever ever ever do it again so example i can't be the only one that has that experience and believe me because i was a raver for a long time i've seen other people go through that i just was such i was such a control freak back then that i never even tried i was like a
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Chapter 7: Why is there a difference between healing and truth-seeking in therapy?
So day one, sweat lodge. Nailed that. Learned a bunch of things about myself that ultimately very much helped me when I created Break Years Later. And then the next day is the peyote thing. when I go to do the peyote thing, they force you to be in a circle. And then there's this like spontaneous chanting thing. So everyone's going around spontaneous chanting.
And you guys, when I say that I hate the idea of like group sharing and chanting and all this stuff, I was like, oh my God, what have I, what have I done? What am I doing? And it gets around to me and I don't have anything to spontaneously chant because I'm like, what am I even doing?
and they were like, we have to say something, like, go, go, go, and I, so I start singing the ABCs, and eventually I was like, I am, I'm not a candidate for this, I can't do this, but what's really interesting is, so at this point, I've already drank, right, you're, like, drinking on multiple rounds, so I'm already on peyote at this point, but now when I have found myself singing the ACBs, the ABCs in this circle, I'm like, I need a timeout, I can't do this, I can't be around these people, because I didn't want to laugh at them, I knew that
They were having some profound experience and I just kind of was observing and just I didn't want to be disrespectful and laugh at them. And I knew that I was right on the edge where I was like, I can't chant in a group circle right now. So I actually removed myself from the group and I went, this was on a property where I lived.
So I went to my house and at the time my Sarai's dad, he was an incredible artist and he had painted this huge Ganesh Tonka. So I was actually sitting in front of this Ganesh Tonka, obviously like tripping hard on peyote. But at this point, I just wanted to be away from people. And I actually had an incredibly profound experience that I don't have any regrets over. It was great.
So I want to leave you with, I am certainly not ever going to say that there is absolutely nothing to gain from a psychedelic experience because I personally, I would be fraudulent. I would be lying to deny that I myself have had personally transformative experiences with hallucinogens because that is absolutely unequivocally true.
From where I sit now as a 41-year-old woman with four kids, I think as a society we owe it to ourselves to educate people better about the risks and not only pitch it as this amazing euphoric experience that is going to change your life. Because just as easily, it could change your life in a negative way for the rest of your life.
So my intention with this episode is to help you understand what you're potentially opening yourself up to, especially when we're talking about from a spiritual perspective, because many people think that they're meeting God and you are literally in the wrong dimension.
And for that reason, I've seen a lot of people, maybe even Joe Rogan included, who are chasing all these psychedelic experiences, thinking that they're trying to find God and maybe have met God. When really, they're actually meeting deceiving spirits and they're actually blocked in their spiritual evolution because they're not even going to the right dimension.
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