Healing Is Not Linear: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

There is a version of the psychedelic healing story that goes like this: you go in, you do the work, you come out the other side transformed, and the hard part is over. I believed a version of that story, at least for a while. I want to be honest about how it actually went, because I think a lot of people are walking into this work with expectations that set them up to feel like they did something wrong when healing turns out to be more complicated than that.

It did not go wrong. It just did not go in a straight line.

What Ibogaine Did for Me

When I went to Beond in the spring of 2023, my ibogaine journey was oriented toward my future. Not my past. There were no deep dives into childhood wounds, no excavation of everything that had broken me before. What I found instead was hope. A reset. The PTSD symptoms that had been running my nervous system for months quieted in a way that nothing else had been able to touch. I came home different, in that specific and measurable way, and the difference held.

I spent some time after that assuming the work was done. That was not a crazy assumption. I felt better than I had in years. I thought maybe everything had been addressed, that the medicine had taken care of all of it at once.

That turned out to be pretty far from the truth.

Why I Think Ibogaine Works Where You Need It Most

This is my own speculation, not a clinical claim, but it is what I believe based on my experience: ibogaine works where you need it most. For me, what I needed most was hope for my future and relief from PTSD. That is what the medicine found. That is what it addressed. And it did it more completely and more quickly than anything else I had tried.

What it did not do was reach into my past and resolve everything I had been carrying from earlier in my life. I think that is because, in some sense, I did not need ibogaine for that the way I needed it for PTSD. Those were different wounds requiring different tools.

The Longer Work

After ibogaine, I worked with a therapist. I explored modalities like EFT tapping. I sat with things that were slower to move, older wounds that had nothing to do with what ibogaine had healed so quickly. It took longer. It was less dramatic. There was no single session where everything shifted at once.

But I got through it.

That longer, slower process taught me something that I think is worth saying plainly: different healing tools are built for different things. Ibogaine is extraordinary at what it does. It is not required to be everything. Expecting any single modality to resolve every layer of what you are carrying is a setup for disappointment, and it undersells what each tool actually offers when you use it for what it is best at.

What I Wish Someone Had Told Me

Healing is not a single event. It is not a before and after. It is a series of openings, each one revealing the next thing that needs attention. That is not a sign that something went wrong. That is just how it works.

If you come out of a profound experience feeling transformed in some areas but still carrying things in others, that is not a failure. That is the beginning of understanding what else needs tending to and what tool might be the right fit for it. The work continues. That is not discouraging. It is honest, and I think honesty about this serves people better than the cleaner story does.

If you are trying to figure out what your next layer of healing might look like, that is exactly the kind of conversation I have with the people I work with. Contact me for more information about microdosing coaching or integration coaching.