Three Decades of Drinking: What Psilocybin Showed Me About My Relationship with Alcohol

I was never the kind of drinker who lost jobs or got arrested. I was the kind who had two or three drinks every night, never missed it, became irritable without it, and had spent thirty years explaining to myself and others that this was simply how I was made. Sophisticated drinks, always. A connoisseur. Not a problem.

My therapist had been gently suggesting that the drinking and the anxiety were connected, that the drinking was doing work I hadn't acknowledged. I believed her abstractly but couldn't feel the connection.

The session showed me the connection in a way that bypassed my usual defenses. Not a memory, not a narrative — something more like understanding the architecture of how the drinking functioned. The relief it provided. The emotional regulation it had been doing for thirty years. The cost of outsourcing that to a substance.

I don't drink now. That sentence is true and also stranger than it sounds. I didn't stop because the session frightened me or showed me consequences. I stopped because I understood what I'd been doing and the understanding made the need to do it differently. I still miss it sometimes. But I don't want it in the way I used to want it, because I know what wanting it was for.