Divorce or Psychedelic-Assisted Couples Therapy?
Written by Emma Stone
“We've been together 14 years and are now considering divorce, but deep down we still love each other. We've been struggling with communication and intimacy for several years. We've tried couples therapy before with little improvement and a hole in my pocket. We are both experienced with psychedelics and have done them together before but always in group or party settings. The plan is to make some tea, shut off any distractions and spend the trip together. Talking, touching, raw and honest. Some things have happened in our relationship in the past that we still need to heal from but can't seem to confront without arguing or one of us ending up hurt. I'm hoping this experience will help get them out and enlighten us.”
When the weight of past wounds or present hurts are seriously threatening a relationship, it can feel like divorce is the only option. However, the upheaval of marital dissolution can unleash weighty emotional, economic, psychological, and mental repercussions.
Even divorce lawyers caution against rushing into divorce, warning that the process of legally ending a marriage can completely upend one’s life, along with the lives of all those involved.
Nearly half of marriages end in divorce
Approximately 42 % of marriages in the UK in 2021 ended in divorce. In the US, that rate is even higher, tending towards 50 %. Let that sink in.
The far-reaching implications of divorce are often dulled by misconceptions that suggest dissolving a marriage is as simple as signing some papers and recapturing one’s liberty.
Conversely, a wide body of work indicates that divorce carries weighty costs and consequences for both men and women, children, and wider family members in terms of economic status, health, well-being, domestic arrangements and social relationships.
The Financial and Health Costs of Divorce
Beyond the actual cost of the divorce–which can average from $ 15,000 to $30,000–women, in particular, tend to experience serious financial setbacks.
Women often experience disproportionate declines in household income, personal earnings (especially if they’re returning to the workforce) standard of living, and sharp increases in their risk of poverty. Women may also be more likely to risk losing home ownership and falling down the housing ladder.
While the economic impact of divorce is considerable, divorce also weighs heavily on health and well-being–particularly for men.
Divorced men have significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease than their continuously married counterparts, and are more likely to experience increased rates of hypertension, depression, substance abuse, suicide, cancer, and early mortality. Researchers have found that men experience more substantial health declines, and a reduction in subjective well-being, are more likely to take up harmful habits and feel lonelier and more isolated.
What’s most revealing is that researchers have found that these illnesses arise in part from the stresses of divorce.
The Impact of Divorce on Children
Beyond the couple, divorce has far-reaching effects on children.
Children can be detrimentally affected by the trauma of divorce in diverse and complex ways. The statistics are sobering and document a strong negative empirical association between parental divorce and a wide range of outcomes that can persist into adulthood.
From a physical perspective, the children of divorced parents are more likely to experience physical hardship that can manifest as headaches, asthma, a propensity to injury, speech impediments, and other chronic health problems.
Boys of divorced parents tend to die at a younger age, while girls are more likely to experience a teenage pregnancy. Adolescents from single-parent or blended families are 300 % more likely to need psychological help, driven by factors such as the trauma of separation, loss of identity, and changing financial status.
The children of divorced parents are twice as likely to attempt suicide. Schoolwork and later success suffer too: According to one 2016 article, parental divorce reduced college attendance by 9 to 10% and substantially lowered the level of educational attainment for both boys and girls.
Finally, divorce can also significantly stress the relationship between parents and children as the process of marital dissolution can direct emotional and financial resources away from children. Divorced homes are less cognitively and socially stimulating than married homes, and often show a decline in language stimulation, pride, affection, supportive academic behaviour, and warmth directed towards the children. Divorce can also make it challenging for children to trust and confide in their parents, further fracturing the parent/child relationship.
The Impact of Divorce on Extended Family
The negative outcomes of divorce also radiate out to the wider family, significantly affecting family members such as grandparents.
Grandparents may see their grandchildren on a more infrequent basis compared to never-divorced grandparents. Grandparents experience the ramifications of divorce differently: Divorced paternal grandparents are less likely to play a mentoring role in the lives of their grandchildren than divorced maternal grandparents.
In the context of the wider systemic family unit, family members may feel upset, betrayed, or confused by the divorce. Members of the wider family may side with their family member, or demonise them for not trying harder to make the marriage work. Extended family members may no longer wish to see or feel comfortable seeing the ex-spouse, fracturing relationships that may once have been robust.
It’s undeniable that divorce is accompanied by multiple repercussions that far exceed a simple, singular economic setback. While divorce is often touted as the most incisive, effective fix for two individuals experiencing relational trouble, the truth is that for many, it can represent a passage towards compromised health, vitality, happiness, prosperity, and longevity.
The Transformative Potential of Psychedelic-Assisted Couples Therapy
Psychedelic-assisted couple’s therapy represents another passage toward a resolution.
A psychedelic trip teamed with integrative relationship wellness therapy can offer a couple in conflict a transformative, empowering path towards healing and moving forward. The reach of traditional couples therapy can be limited, with many couples relapsing back into old patterns and styles of communication. Integrating a psychedelic journey into evidence-based couples’ therapy, however, can be life-changing and consciousness-shifting.
“Tripping together has healed past wounds and allowed us to be open to all sorts of ideas. For myself, personally, mushrooms on the macro dose level put me in a very vulnerable state that I do not always share with my partner. Showing her this side of myself and her doing the same has built a ton of trust and a tight bond between us. We have had a few experiences where we don’t talk out loud for hours but communicate throughout.”
Psychedelics in Enhancing Interpersonal Empathy and Communication
Psychedelics shake up stagnant neural networks, forge new pathways in the brain and temporarily dissolve the ego, offering fresh ways of seeing the world.
From a relational perspective, the use of psychedelics can profoundly impact interpersonal empathy, communication, openness, attachment patterns, and social connection.
Psychedelic-assisted couples therapy can constitute powerful relational healing medicine, helping the couple in crisis to lower walls and bring truer versions of themselves to the table. The potential for deep-seated healing and resolution is intensified when challenging topics can be broached in a spirit of curiosity, openness, and connection.
The Impact of Psychedelic Therapy on Individual and Relationship Health
Research exploring the impact of psychedelic-assisted couples therapy has found it to be a potent tool to navigate relational issues, yielding benefits such as improved communication and introspection, a reduction in the fear of emotional hurt, increased intimacy, and enhanced relationship satisfaction.
While psychedelic couple’s therapy undeniably focuses on the dynamic of the dyad, it also turns its gaze to the individual. Psychedelic-assisted therapy creates a safe space to explore individual mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, substance use disorders and PTSD that may also be weighing heavily on the relationship.
Beyond mental illness, however, psychedelic therapy can also allow the individual to explore the unexamined terrain of the psyche.
Ann Shulgin, a pioneering psychedelic researcher who experimented with MDMA for couples, emphasized the need to allow the “shadow” to surface. The shadow includes aspects of the self that are suppressed from consciousness, protecting the ego from unacceptable inner tendencies, feelings, and fantasies. Shulgin reflected:
One of the problems that most human beings suffer from is the suspicion that the core essence of who they are deep down is a monster. There is terrible fear….During psychedelic therapy, . . . what we do is we go into it and look through its eyes so that we become it.
Psychedelic-assisted couples therapy creates a safe space for these shadows to be unearthed and explored; the very same shadows that can wreak destruction on a relationship and lead to divorce if left unchecked.
Psychedelic-Assisted Couples Therapy as an Alternative to divorce
Psychedelic-assisted couple’s therapy represents a radical alternative to cutting one’s losses, leaving a marriage, and the trail of destruction that can be left impacting the couple, their children, and the wider family unit.
This unique form of therapy creates a container to explore the depths of the self, the other–and the space in between–allowing issues to surface and conversations to take place that can facilitate the healing of the relationship.
It’s helpful to understand that psychedelic couple’s therapy doesn’t constitute a panacea or quick fix. While the psychedelic journey can provide a potent departure point, the ongoing self and shared work compounds and crystallises the benefits gleaned from attaining altered states of consciousness.
‘‘My significant other and I have done it (journeying with psychedelics) together several times, while we were on a 6-month break, each time getting closer and having deeper conversations that needed to happen. It's definitely been the best way we were able to face and talk through all topics that were usually hard to have otherwise.’’
The Beautiful Space approach to Psychedelic-assisted couples therapy
The Beautiful Space program for couples takes each individual through a 14-module journey of interconnected components of relational wellness, profoundly exploring themes such as power dynamics, feminine and masculine energies, personal purpose, the inner child, communication skills, trauma, conscious parenting, and sex and consensual non-monogamy.
Delving into these topics, aided by psilocybin truffle dosing sessions, enables the couple to probe topics in a safe environment that can help heal sources of conflict, hurt and misunderstanding.
Informed by contemporary consciousness-shakers and relationship wellness experts such as Gabor Mate, Esther Perel, Jessica Fern and Ian Kermer, our integrative therapy program traces a directional journey that upholds freedom within the relationship as the primary goal.
Facilitating relational freedom means shaking up the container of the relationship. Staid models taught by parents and society that no longer serve are released, and couples can explore consciousness-expanding questions both individually and together, developing the skills to navigate conflict, develop compassion and cultivate intimacy in the process.