This was hard to write.

I had to remember a time in my life that was both liberating and deeply painful. For years, I felt disconnected from parts of myself, weighed down by emotions I couldn’t fully explain. Through psychedelic-assisted therapy, I began to uncover truths about my past that my body had been holding onto for decades.

Sharing this story is not easy, but I hope it resonates with those who feel stuck, questioning why they carry a heaviness they can’t name. Healing is a lifelong journey, and it often asks us to confront truths we’ve buried deep within ourselves.

I hope that by sharing these experiences, you’ll feel seen, heard, and encouraged to listen to your own body’s wisdom.

Trigger warning: This series will trigger you in one way or another, please read with care…and be gentle with yourself. I recommend you read this part in a private place or with a group so you can have a space to decompress.

The Awakening: Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

As I continued my healing journey, I entered a new phase of therapy that would deeply change my life.

I began a form of psychedelic-assisted therapy with a new somatic therapist, and it expanded my understanding of myself in profound ways.

That's when everything changed and expanded. It is when I truly reconnected to my body and spirit.

This therapy opened the door to confronting parts of myself that I had repressed for so long. It was a process of deep emotional release and self-reflection that allowed me to peel back layers of unresolved pain.

I learned somatic techniques from my therapist for about six months before my first psychedelic journey. This preparation was necessary for what was to come. The first journey session was six hours long, and it was intense from the start. This initial session was what they called a "handshake" with the medicine—it was the introduction to this type of work. It was a process of purging energy, I was vomiting throughout the six hours of the session. I spent most of that time releasing emotions I didn’t even know I was carrying. Some of the energy I purged was mine from the grief, sadness, and rage I carried for years, and some of it was not mine but it felt ancestral.

Afterward, I felt like a new person, as if the veils had been lifted and a heavy weight had been taken off my shoulders. It was a difficult but liberating experience. I couldn't believe how much I was carrying for so long.

I later attended a women’s circle facilitator training retreat in Puerto Rico, which complemented this healing journey. The retreat was a space for spiritual and emotional healing, where I learned breathing techniques, ancestral practices, chanting, bodywork, and visualizations and how to hold space and facilitate women’s circles. One of the most powerful aspects of participating in a women’s circle was not just to heal myself but to hold space for other women in sisterhood. I truly felt connected to my role as a healer, grounded in the work I was doing for myself and with others.

After the retreat I had this urge in my body. Something was telling me, “Sonia, you need one more medicine session.” That inner knowing led me to a second session of psychedelic-assisted therapy. I learned over time how important it was to listen to my body, a lesson I had learned from my somatic therapist. I learned how to build a relationship with my body, how to trust it, and how to connect with the wisdom it held.

This time, the experience was much more intense. As we worked through layers of past trauma, I felt myself regress—back to a younger version of myself, reliving emotions and memories that had been buried for so long (I could never remember any childhood memories before age seven until this journey). It was as though my body was taking me back in time, when I was four years old and my body experienced rape by a paternal uncle. Abuse that I had no conscious awareness of for the past thirty years until the medicine showed me.

The revelation of this memory broke me, unraveled all the parts of me that were being hidden by my unconscious mind to protect me. All the parts that were holding shame, rage, and unworthiness.

The past few years of integrating this trauma have been life-changing in ways I cannot explain (maybe I’ll write a book one day). When I finally uncovered the truth about my past, everything in my life started to make sense. It was as if my whole life had been clouded by a fog, and once I remembered the abuse, everything cleared up.

I use to have a recurring dream throughout my life where I was driving but I could not see because my eyes were closed and I could not lift the weight of my eyes. After this medicine journey, I had a dream that I was driving and I could see exactly where I was going. I even reached my destination, something that had never happened in my dreams before. I haven’t had a dream where my eyes are closed since.

Looking back at my story, there was a time when I would just accept what people told me as truth. I never questioned anything. This acceptance wasn’t about being naïve—it stemmed from learning to not trust myself and instead trust everything outside of myself. It came from being threatened to keep this abuse a secret.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that this was a survival mechanism, rooted in the abuse I experienced at a young age. At four years old, my brain was still in its early stages of development—vulnerable, malleable, and easily influenced. This was when I was exposed to the deepest forms of manipulation by my uncle. He used everything against me—religion, spirituality, food, the love for my family—everything was a tool to control and keep me quiet. Sexual abuse is not just sexual, it is physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual abuse (in my case, and in many cases of sexual abuse). The weight of it all stayed with me throughout my life, hidden from my consciousness and manifesting in ways that were impossible to recognize, even as a trained therapist.

It wasn’t until I was 34 years old (three decades later) that I was able to remember everything that happened to me. The memories came back, and a new layer of grief, pain, and confusion surfaced. At first, I didn’t even believe it. How could this have happened to me? I thought. Am I making this up?

The disbelief was so strong that I questioned my own memories. A new chapter of deep healing began— but this time it was purely somatic healing, because my body remembered everything.

TEACHABLE MOMENTS

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is simply what it sounds like: psychotherapy that is assisted by a type of medicine to open you up to your deepest wounds. The medicine doesn’t heal you, it opens you up to the work that needs to be done by you in order to heal. I needed the assistance because I could not figure out what was making me so depressed. I needed assistance remembering what happened to my body.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy is not the only way to remember, but once you commune with the medicine its wisdom never leaves you. You can connect to the medicine through meditation and focused attention.

Healing is not for everyone. One must have the capacity and internal resources to be able to confront difficult truths about themselves and the world. If you are thinking about healing, start building your external and internal support system now.

Notice the physical sensations in your body, take a deep breath and repeat after me, “Healing is a lifelong journey that takes patience, practice, and persistence.”