Case study: psychedelic-induced memory, eating disorder healed

'Why did the name of my primary school teacher appear?'

Tomorrow we’re organizing a free seminar on the sensitive topic of psychedelic-induced ‘recovered memories’ of childhood abuse (you can sign up here). We don’t know how often this occurs to people on psychedelics, but it seems quite common: in a 2025 clinical trial of psilocybin treatment for 10 women with anorexia nervosa, two of the 10 reported ‘therapeutic emergence of dissociated traumatic memories’. The trial researchers published a case study of these two participants. This is a sensitive topic because people who have this experience aren’t always sure if the memory is real. Some are sure it is true, others are sure it isn’t true, and many are somewhere in between. Researchers, therapists and guides are also divided on whether psychedelic-induced recovered memories are usually reliable or unreliable. This uncertainty can leave people feeling bewildered and destabilized. However, people do also sometimes feel they have found healing from the psychedelic experience, even if they’re not 100% certain what exactly occurred in the past.

Here’s a case study of Martha, a woman in her 40s who tried Ayahuasca during the pandemic in order to overcome anxiety and dissociation, which was blocking her acting career. During the Ayahuasca session, she was confronted with a sudden memory of a primary school teacher and feelings of intense fear, disgust and anger, as well as the strong intuition or inner voice: ‘He raped you.’ She had no previous suspicion of this and was bewildered by this information. Martha is still not entirely sure if the memory is real, and has tried to track down the teacher without success. Meanwhile, a 30-year eating disorder has cleared up since the experience, and she has also become more emotionally open, which has helped her life and her profession as an actor. Thanks to Martha for sharing her experience for the benefit of others. NB going to the psychedelic underground has risks, and psychedelics aren’t risk-free. Here is a list of red flags to look for if you go to a retreat or underground ceremony.

Jules: Had you done psychedelics before this experience?

Martha: No, I’ve taken recreational drugs, but I’ve never done psychedelics. I was too scared.

When was this experience?

Four years ago. I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, ever since 2015 when I had chronic fatigue. I was really unwell and not able to function, so I was trying to find ways to get better. I got better physically, and I started an acting career. I was doing this Meisner exercise when you repeat what someone’s saying in front of you. And I kept dissociating. My coach would say ‘it’s like you left the room’. I’d feel really sweaty and exposed. It shone a light on something going on in my body that had been going on forever. I realized my base level was high anxiety, and that I got high on adrenalin. The dissociation was stopping me doing this basic exercise that was the foundation of the acting training I wanted to do. So I guess that propelled me to try plant medicine. I’d done so much talk therapy, somatic therapy, Lightning Process, NLP. I thought finally, okay, I’m going to see if I can find someone to guide me. I found someone through a friend who had been to this woman, Rachel, a few times, and totally trusts her. She works in small groups of six, three men and three women, in Dorset. My friend put me in touch with her, we had a conversation and talked for about an hour. I felt really relaxed when I spoke to her.

Did Rachel do a screening?

Yes she vetted me.

Did she tell you about any risks?

I feel like she didn’t say a lot. She’d done so many ceremonies I felt she was confident she could do it. That’s what I wanted to hear.

What was the experience like?

So I got the train down to Dorset and met two men waiting to be picked up for the same retreat. They were so nice. One of the guys had never taken a drug before, he’d had cancer and wanted to live more fully. He was even more frightened than me. It was so random, there we were in the middle of nowhere, about to do something highly illegal.

We went to this cosy, inviting cottage. It felt safe. We met the other guests. Rachel told us how it would go. She’s a small, slight woman but with a real strength and presence about her, also very motherly. She told us to take it seriously, to set an intention, and if we got lost in the medicine, to open our eyes and remind ourselves we’re in the room.

We all sat in a circle in our white clothes. We drank the ayahuasca. It’s the foulest tasting thing. It immediately turned my stomach. Then I sat down, and nothing much happened, I just felt really present. Then later I took a second dose and sat down on the mattress. I immediately wanted to lie down and close my eyes, and it felt like I was being pulled underground, like, whooshing really, really fast, just blackness around me, going down and down and down, as if I was going through some kind of tunnel. I was like, Oh God, here we go.

And then the next thing, out of nowhere, 3D fluorescent green lettering rose up and started spinning in a circle. It was the name of my primary school teacher.

I was really confused, almost to the point where I was disappointed. What am I meant to do with that? The rest of that evening, I was crying, there were tears pouring out my eyes. The next thing I saw, I was sitting in a cinema with other people, watching a big screen, and on the screen was me at primary school. I’d switch between watching it in the audience and then being dressed in my school uniform in school. I kept saying four o’clock, four o’clock, four o’clock. I was like, why am I saying four o’clock?

And then, as it went on, I was a detective in the school trying to get evidence of what was happening. And it was all beautiful, almost too beautiful and sweet. And it was like, just be happy. Just smile. Don’t let him see you sad. Don’t be unhappy. Everything’s okay. And then there was this voice: you know what happened. I was like, I don’t know, give me some evidence, nothing happened. Did he do something to me? Did something happen? No, that’s ridiculous. He was my favourite teacher, everyone’s favourite teacher. He was charismatic, the only teacher I remember. He had this moustache and thin tie. And I wanted to please him. So why is this coming up? And why is my body having such a huge reaction to it? Honestly, up until that point I felt lucky that nothing had ever happened to me. What is it, one in three women who get abused. I’ve never had anything happen to me. So I was in disbelief. This does not add up.

It wasn’t like you had a sneaking feeling or an expectation that something might come up.

Not at all. I was just in shock and disbelief. It was almost like: this is someone else. I want my money back. But my body was obviously just doing its own thing. It was almost as if I knew the only way that I could even look at this stuff is by feeling beautiful and safe and happy, otherwise it was so disgusting and awful to even contemplate. So I was getting angrier and angrier.

At what?

It didn’t make sense, and also, what exactly happened? If something happened, then what? But all I got were these flashes, his face, and me being at school and then the cinema screen, it was all so unclear. But I can see now that I was dissociating from the memory. I didn’t want to feel what’s happening. What’s happening is, I’m being told. My body’s telling me, I’ve been weeping for four hours. I was rocking and shaking. I couldn’t stop. And then the last thing that I really remember is, I just felt this: he raped you. And then I was sick and sick and sick. And that was it. I felt nothing after that and we went to sleep.

The next day, it was like being told my sister had been abused. I couldn’t compute. I was talking to one of the other women about it, and she said, the exact same thing happened to me. She’s a therapist and she said, I’m not going to say it was real, but it sounds like this is something that happened to you. I felt like, give me a real memory, give me something I could see, all I’ve got is this feeling of fear and disgust and overwhelm.

Psychedelic memories of childhood abuse

How old were you at primary school?

I was nine. So the next day, we did the same thing, sat in a circle, set our intention. And I said, my intention is to let my body show me. I thought I was scared the day before, but I cannot describe to you the fear I was feeling at that point. But I thought, the only way I can leave this is this way. I’ve got to do this. So I took the medicine, and this time round, I didn’t see anything, I just felt really scared, like, really, really, really, really, really scared. Every time there was a sound in the room, I jumped and screamed. But I just kept staying with my body, opening my eyes, being in the room, closing my eyes again. The weeping started.

And then Rachel, she was being quite gentle, but quite firm this time. And she was like, let it out. And she sat behind me, and I was crying for a bit and shaking, and she was like, sit up. I’m going to give you this cushion and I want you to beat it. She was sternly encouraging me. So I started hitting it. And then suddenly it was like something took over. And I just started hitting it about a million miles an hour. And this sound started coming out of me, like an animal screaming and wailing. It actually felt like I was on my back, and I was screaming and wailing and crying and shouting, ‘Get off me, get off me. Stop it. Stop it’. And I felt disgust and shame, just this horrible, horrible feeling. I’ve never felt it before. Finally I ran out of energy. I did feel a bit aware of being in the room, and being really, really loud. I’ve never heard anything like it. And then I lay down, and I was sick, and I just started crying. And Rachel was, like, well done. And then I felt this release. I saw my mum and dad, and me as a baby, and them just loving me so much, because I never felt like they loved me, and I just felt this intense love for them, and I felt so sad for myself. And I saw this thing that had been in the way. I’d not felt this love from people who wanted to give it to me, or I wanted to give to them. And I felt really sad for that, like I was weeping at how sad that was. And I felt sorry for my parents, and I felt, like it’s all there. It’s always been there, and I haven’t known it or felt it and, and so it was really beautiful.

I said to myself, I never need to feel this awful feeling again. And then this voice was like, no, feel it, sit with it, because you can handle it. And you know what, you’re going to be an incredible actor because of your depth of feeling. And I was like, really? Okay wow! [laughing] But then I sat with this disgust and this awful, feeling, and I thought ‘I can feel that, I can handle what is unspeakably awful’.

So I left there feeling that something important had happened, and I knew it was good, but I also left feeling quite traumatized. I couldn’t tell anyone, I didn’t even want to tell my own husband. Because I thought no one would believe me. What was I asking them to believe?

Eventually I started telling people about it, people close to me, and I wouldn’t be able to get past the first sentence without breaking down, and feeling really like, what the fuck am I meant to do with this information? I was trying to process something that part of me didn’t believe was real, and I couldn’t really put a stamp on it being real. I tried to find the teacher, I spent hours looking on Safari and couldn’t find him. So there was part of me that was like, accept that this could be an interpretation of something to help you process something else, or maybe something did happen, but look at the benefits.

The benefits were: I felt this openness. I went back into acting class, my teacher was like, You’re so open. It was amazingly positive. I had an eating disorder from about 14, bulimia basically. When I was at university, I think I was anorexia because I didn’t really eat anything, so swinging between the two. But definitely this feeling of wanting to stuff myself and then let it out, and feeling relaxed after that. I never told anyone, and I tried to stop. I tried and tried and tried, and hadn’t told anyone. I’d always thought ‘I haven’t got an eating disorder. It’s not real’. But blatantly it was. I just thought I’d never, ever be able to stop. Well, since the retreat I haven’t wanted to do it. And I cannot tell you how amazing that feels, having had the disorder from age 14 to 40. It’s the biggest gift, honestly.

Have you wanted to do try plant medicine again?

I did do it again a year later. I wanted questions answered this time. It’s not like I was fixed. My anxiety was really bad. Acting is incredibly confronting, every five steps you go forwards, you go back three. And my career, I was doing okay, but the things that were tripping me up were to do with self confidence. So I just thought, it’d be cool to go back and work on stuff. And this time around, it was weird. Overall, it was really unsatisfying. A part of me was like, you’re just one of those ayahuasca types, self-indulgent, there’s nothing wrong with you, why are you here? I was basically being attacked. Then I did go back to the school [in her vision] but this time it was all disgusting and rotting, with these gross tunnels and these huge caterpillars. But the second day I got more encouraging messages, like ‘use your voice, stand up for yourself’. I wanted more answers about the past. But what I got was what I needed to hear, which was actually something that I have noticed has developed in the last couple of years: if you want to be an artist, if you want to be a human being that’s living a satisfied life, you need to speak up, you need to stand up for yourself.

Overall it sounds a healing experience, even if there’s a part of you that wants to confirm what happened and can’t, at the moment. It helped alleviate your symptoms.

Yeah I can’t deny that. Two years ago I was a bit more confused about it, but I think now I’m much more accepting that I don’t need solid facts. It would be nice to know for sure, and a part of me wonders, is someone going to ring me one day and say ‘I was in a class with you’. I did recently try and find the teacher again, because I was struggling with anxiety and did EMDR, I think it’s really good. Every time I do something like that, it kicks off again and I want to track him down. But I’m 90% sure, if I phoned him up, he’s not going to be like ‘I’m really sorry about that’.

When psychedelics trigger visions of childhood abuse