Spiritual Emergency Support

It happens that people experience psychoactive substances and are completely disturbed for days or weeks, no longer understanding the world or their lives, and no longer knowing how to function. This especially happens with spiritual experiences, because they usually lack any framework for classifying and therefore integrating an experience.

This is not a consequence of the substance itself, but rather of the environment and circumstances in which it is consumed (setting). In very rare cases, it is due to overdosage or improper mixed use; more often, however, it is related to the intended, but deeply misunderstood, purpose: namely, that we (want to) reach states that we have never consciously experienced before – and which therefore frighten us or cause us to panic because we believe we are losing our identity, our ego, or our self, precisely because they are so different from everything we have experienced before.

For such people, it is helpful and often urgently necessary to discuss and process the experience afterward with experienced and trained people. Using a metaphor, one could say: the psychedelic experience can lead to something shattering into numerous pieces (disintegration). Integration then means that the pieces are put back together to form a whole. Growth is possible when the pieces no longer have to be put back together exactly the same, but the picture can change – perhaps only slightly.

The Institute for Substance-Assisted Therapy offers support in spiritual emergencies and draws on a network of therapists, all of whom have many years of relevant experience. What is special about this is that the IST does not, as many others do, dismiss encounters with other beings as purely inner psychological fantasies, thereby contributing to the devaluation and further destabilization of the client, but takes them seriously.