Deborah's story: the ones who dream of tigers

A story of recovery from an MDMA-induced spiritual emergency

This is the first chapter of Breaking Open, an amazing account by Deborah Martin of her recovery from an MDMA-induced spiritual emergency. I recently interviewed Julie about her recovery from an 18-month post-ayahuasca crisis. Julie tells me:

Deborah’s chapter was one of the key elements in helping me regain solid ground in my life, helping me find myself again, and helping me heal. I felt like she was telling my story. Despite all of the differences in the details of our experiences, she was able to write in a way that left me feeling understood, less alone and hopeful. Deborah became a lifeline for me by her willingness to so intimately share her story in the book, and by her selfless, deeply compassionate and encouraging personal communications with me.

Here’s Deborah’s story

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I don’t know why you are reading this. But for one reason or another, something has brought you to this particular book and this particular page at this exact moment in your life. Maybe it’s because something has shifted inside of you — drastically, dramatically and shockingly. Or perhaps it feels like the world itself has shifted, as if you have slipped through an invisible mirror where everything looks the same yet feels completely different. All you know is that the things you were once so sure of — about the world around you and your place in it — no longer seem certain at all.

If so, I don’t know what specifically caused your — actually, what shall we call it? Spiritual emergency? Psycho-spiritual crisis? Perceptual shift? Mystical experience? Psychotic break? — whatever you choose to call it, I don’t know what caused it and maybe that doesn’t even matter.

Maybe you drank the fairy wine of forbidden substances. Maybe a spiritual path took you into strange, unknown territory. Or perhaps a tiny key turned in your mind, spontaneously and without warning. The point is that you have now found yourself adrift, the world abruptly insubstantial, your narratives unreliable, your constants no longer constant. All that’s solid feels like it is melting away. Worst of all, no one understands, not friends or counsellors or medical professionals. They might even think that you’ve lost your mind entirely.

Or maybe you are even keeping the whole thing secret from others, trying to hold yourself together, hoping it will all go away. I understand how confusing it all is, as I have been where you have been as well (or my own version of it, at least). That’s why I want to share my story, so you can know that you aren't alone and that there is a way through it all.

Around fifteen years ago, when I was in my 20s, I went through my own tidal wave of the mind that left me shattered for months. On the June evening when it all happened, you would have found me at my boyfriend Cameron’s place in the West End of Glasgow. I was curled up on his bed, wearing my red & white summer dress and reading the Tao Te Ching. We were getting ready to go out, and I remember closing the book wistfully, longing to really see the single unifying fabric beneath everything that was described in the book. The fact that I might be rattling some magic bottle with a vain and dangerous wish didn’t occur to me for one moment.

At that time I considered myself to be on some sort of spiritual quest. It had started a few months before, while I was doing my teaching postgrad at Cardiff University. Looking back, I think I went to Cardiff to hide from everything back home, as it felt like too many people who I loved were sick or hurt or struggling in some way. My mum suffered from depression and anxiety. My dad was prone to dark, withdrawn moods. My younger brother had severe cerebral palsy. My mum’s best friend had died slowly of lung cancer. My grandparents were growing more fragile by the day. And just the summer before, my boyfriend at the time (the one before Cameron), had undergone life-threatening surgery for a chronic disease and had almost died.

I just couldn’t make sense of anything, so in Cardiff, I’d channeled that confusion into a desire to escape. And somehow, that escapism, my nights of clubbing and my days of lounging around smoking weed with friends in the park, had slowly deepened into a haphazard, drug-fueled search for meaning, a quest for a transcendent experience. When I returned to Scotland that summer, I saw no reason to pause and take breath from it all.

That said, on that night when everything changed, as Cameron and I made our way to a warehouse club in Glasgow, I was mainly just focused on having a good time. My plan was as follows: we would go to the club, find a dealer, get a couple of Es, dance till the early hours, grab a taxi, go back to Cameron’s place, light incense, watch Hair the musical and fall asleep. The next day we’d get up late and, drifting in the after-haze of the night before, find a cafe that did all-day veggie breakfasts. After that, we’d sunbathe in the Botanical Gardens. If there was better weekend plan on the whole of Planet Earth, I wanted to know it.

The first part of the night went exactly to plan. We tracked down the secret club, bumped into people we knew, and danced. At some point, Cameron went to the bar and left me chilling out on a corner sofa. I definitely felt the effects of the pill but nothing any different from usual, nothing particularly trippy, just a heady glow.

My mind drifted off. Suddenly, it felt as if a hatch opened above me to show me a vision of my future, not a visual image but an inner knowing, a prophecy. The oddest thing about it is that it all felt so familiar, like I was remembering something essential I’d always known, rather than being shown it for the first time. I won’t share what the vision was, mainly as I’m not sure whether to trust it or not, but I will say that it was nothing bad and it hasn’t come true yet.

When it faded, I turned and gazed around the club, and at that moment something like a white-hot asteroid collided with my mind, shifting it on its axis into an entirely new rotation. It was as if a rapid rewriting of my brain took place in a single moment. I suddenly saw my own eyes staring back at me through every single atom of the room, through every single person. It was as if I had stretched and curved into all infinity.

Even now, the hardest thing to explain is that this wasn’t a ‘bad trip’, or at least, it wasn’t just that. It was bigger, more shattering and, ultimately, more lasting. The difference between a bad trip and the start of a spiritual emergency is that one is a dark alley, the other a labyrinth. One a snarling dog, the other a wild predator. One a fall down a well, the other a tumble into a black hole. One is one thing and the other is another, that’s all I can say.

All I knew was that I had seen behind a forbidden curtain and that the consequences were going to be severe for me. I knew, even then, that there would be no simple, straightforward come down, no levelling out. The chemicals could exit my body but I wouldn’t be able to exit this, because instead of it being something inside of me, I had been dragged inside of it. My perceptual safety net had been torn. The world was no longer home.

Somehow, I found Cameron and told him that we had to leave straight away. It was dawn by then and I clung to him tightly as we walked down the street, trying to find a taxi. Above me, the red Glasgow tenements no longer seemed made of stone, or rather, ‘stone’ seemed like a construct with nothing but air underneath. Nothing was solid, nothing was real.

‘You’ll be fine tomorrow’ Cameron reassured me, hailing a taxi. He was feeling no ill effects at all. We climbed inside the cab and I pressed my face to his coat, afraid to look at anything. Something was very wrong. But maybe he was right, maybe I would be fine the next day. Maybe I was overreacting.

But I wasn’t fine the next day, or the day after that, or the days or weeks or months after that. The morning after the club, I woke to a world that looked entirely different. Everything in the room — the clothes, the walls, the chest of drawers — seemed strangely insubstantial, as if woven from air, as if I could huff and puff like the wolf in the storybook and blow it all down.

It didn’t go away, although I willed it to. Instead, a chair, a table, the book on the table, the mug beside the book, the tea inside the mug, all seemed to be made of the same substance, one that wasn’t wood or paper or ceramic, but intangible. And my hand that lifted the cup was made of this substance, as were my lips that drank the tea and the throat that swallowed it. Otherness — the otherness of objects, the otherness of people — was just an illusion (or at least, that’s how it seemed). Yet I wanted those illusions back, as I suddenly understood their necessity.

Everything, even my parents’ cosy suburban home where I was living at the time, felt sinister and distorted. My mum and dad themselves, seeing me pale, shaken and withdrawn, wanted to know what was wrong, so I told them I was suffering from panic attacks. This was completely true: I had started to have up to six a day, sometimes walking up in the night to a wave of cold terror. But the underlying reasons felt impossible to explain to them as I didn’t understand it all myself. If there was a name for this nightmare, I didn’t know it.

Over the days, weeks and months that followed, the experience ebbed and flowed in intensity. At its worst, I would feel a sudden surge of realisation and it would seem then that everything existed in one single moment, one endless energetic form, all of existence flowing, shifting, mutating. Those were the moments when the panic attacks came.

I was tortured by twin fears, the first being that I was always going to be this way, that there was no going back, that I would always be broken. The second was that this perceptual shift was somehow going to result in the entire world disappearing in front of my eyes, as if, now that I’d seen how flimsy the fabric of reality was, it could suddenly be pulled away like a stage curtain to reveal nothing but a void. I felt flayed by fear and the world itself seemed to have undergone an internal flaying, stripped of the marrow, stripped of the bone, nothing but flimsy skin.

I went to my GP for help with the panic attacks and he prescribed Diazepam. My days, which had become punctuated by attacks, were now also punctuated by pills, which had become little white lifebelts to stop me drowning in fear. My life revolved around when I could next take one, meaning it revolved around the ticking of the clock (ironic, considering how distorted time had started to feel). But the peace that the Diazepam brought me wasn’t real, it was just sweet and sickly and numb.

And while the medication made me feel detached from everything, Cameron grew detached from me. This wasn’t what he had signed up for when he’d started going out with the shy and sweet girl who wanted to be a writer. Somehow, she had become a spiritually paranoid, trembling wreck who was both clingy and distant. When I ended it, he didn’t argue.

One night, in the middle of it all, I had a vivid dream. In this dream, a tiger was mauling me. It had me pinned to the ground and was swiping at me with it claws, tearing into my skin and flesh. Unlike a normal dream, I felt all of the sensations of this attack. It was physically painful, yet it was not a pain of the body but a spirit pain. I never dreamt anything like that again.

More than anything, I wanted to name this monster that had taken over my life. So I spent a lot of time on the internet, looking for an explanation. It was the unknowingness of my condition that scared me the most; I had no context for it. Eventually, I stumbled upon the term ‘spiritual emergency’ and found out that other people had been through it as well. Although it was a huge relief, I realised that naming the thing wasn’t enough. I wanted to return fully to the real world, to stop being a refugee and exile.

I referenced Alice Through the Looking Glass before, but actually, I think that it was more like The Wizard of Oz. In that story, Dorothy longs to escape her humdrum world for somewhere more vivid and technicolor. But when the twister whisks her away all that she wants, more than anything else, is to get back home. It was exactly the same for me: there really is no place like home.

In the end, my experience lasted around six months, fading away gradually day by day. During that time I was determined to haul myself back into reality, to find solutions in the middle of the fear, panic and disorientation. I went to see another GP, a kind woman doctor who helped wean me off the Diazepam. I also briefly saw two psychotherapists, one who didn’t really understand, the other (a former LSD dabbler) who did. And I went to visit my uncle, a spiritual healer living in the Highlands, who listened, sang me a folk song on his guitar and then told me that he’d been through a similar thing in his 20s. I was beginning to understand that the healers who can help us the most are the ones that have been to a similar place. They are not easy to find, but they’re out there.

Every day I tried to tell myself that I would get better no matter what it took, that I would find a way. But what was the turning point for me, in the end? When did I cross the line into getting well? I think it was when I finally hit the bottom of the bottomless black hole. One day, maybe two or three months into it all, I sat at home crouched in the corner, having yet another panic attack, crying out in fear at…what? Nothing. Nothing at all. That was my sudden realization: there was nothing in the room that could harm me. At that moment, I saw fear for what it really was, an absence and a vacuum, a ghost that shrank and vanished under my eyes. I know how horribly cliched it sounds, but I really understood then that fear was the only thing to fear.

I didn’t get better immediately after that, but the panic attacks lost a lot of their power. The strange raft on which I’d been adrift reached land again and I dragged myself to shore. I began to get through whole days, weeks and even months without an attack and even started a part-time job as a college lecturer. The next summer, maybe a year to the day after it all began, I took a six-week solo trip by Greyhound bus across the United States. My first stop was New York, where I had my only panic attack of the trip and was talked down by a kind-hearted news vendor. One of my last stops was Arizona, where I spread a blanket out beside the Grand Canyon, lay down beside it and breathed in its vastness.

If you were to ask me what the whole experience meant, I can honestly say that I have no idea, and in the end, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I learned that I was someone who could overcome things. That was an important thing to know when, nine years later, I was trying to heal from a physical illness.

Eventually, the tidal wave in my mind subsided and life returned to normal, but I’ll be honest with you: my experience has never truly ended. I view the world through two lenses now, but I’ve got so used to it that I hardly even think about it.

From time to time, I’ll be walking down the street, or sitting in a cafe, or talking to a friend, and that altered state will return. Often, it will happen when I feel happy. I’ll pause, look around me and realise that I’ve entered the eternal moment again, where the all flows into the all. Sometimes it frightens me, sometimes I embrace it and sometimes I try to ignore it. But always, after a few moments, I return to the everyday clatter of reality and start worrying about bills and groceries and to-do lists again.

And if I want, I can slip into that mirror world at will too. Just a little tilt in perception and I’m there. But honestly, it’s all just mystical flotsam in the end. Because I know now that the ‘spiritual quest’ of my 20s was really just about a broken girl running away the brokenness of the world, trying to flee into the light. I was looking for God on some higher plane, as if he was a distant and swirling galaxy, which is just another way of saying that I thought love was something that had to be earned.

Looking back, my desire for a ‘perceptual shift’ was narcissistic, naive and avoidant, but also completely forgiveable. I’ve learned that what truly matters is to connect with what is real and solid and breathing, in all of its flawed, messy, confusing, chaotic, dog-eared wonderfulness. And most of all, to connect with scary, hurtful, complicated human beings. Even although I’m still not always very good at it.

I don’t think that the human heart is designed to be airy and detached. I think it has endless cords desperate to plug into everything, even the very smallest things. The blossom that lands on your shoulder, the dog on the street wagging its tail at you, the random smile of a stranger. The heart has cords small enough for all of these things and those little connections are practice for the bigger, more lasting ones.

But if you refuse this call to connect, you will find yourself, like I did, chasing lofty and foolish spiritual goals instead. You will imagine that transcendence is the highest human quest. You will be become Icarus, soaring for a moment before your tinseled wings singe and you tumble into the ocean.

I think that’s why, nowadays, I’m not interested in mystical experiences, partly because I’m scarred by it all but also because I know that my true challenge is to learn to be a proper human being in the world. Right now, just like in the children’s book, I’m the battered velveteen rabbit that’s only halfway to being real. However, I think that without the shock and trauma of my spiritual crisis, I would still be chasing some fool’s gold fairytale of enlightenment.

It’s not about becoming enlightened, it’s about becoming whole. It’s not about becoming whole, it is about accepting your brokenness. It’s not about accepting your brokenness, it’s accepting that you are perfectly loved in your brokenness.

At least, I think so. Ask me again in a year though.

But maybe right now, the experience that you are having is all still scary, shocking and raw to you. If so, then try your best to pause and connect with what’s solid and ordinary. There is a real gift to be found in the ordinary, it’s like a package wrapped in boring brown paper that’s filled with colourful and lovely things. Also, take each day at a time, give yourself a chance to heal and let go of the fear that you will feel this way forever (I promise that you won’t).

I don’t think the worst part of this experience is the fear, if that’s what you are feeling. I think the worst part is the loneliness. It’s possible that you might feel really alone right now and you might also think you’ve gone crazy.

Well, you are not crazy and you are not alone. There is a way back, but it takes a commitment to grounding yourself, to digging your hands into the soil, to letting the dirt get under your fingernails, to leaning down and inhaling the earth, to planting a seed or three. So try to embrace the small things for a while. Cook a simple meal, watch a favourite film, meet a friend for a cup of tea. Ditch any bigger spiritual quest for now and focus on the more important quest of getting better. Take a walk and feel each footstep landing firmly on the ground. Press your hand against a wall, feel the bricks and the moss and the cracks. Celebrate the solid and breathe. The old world is still as it was, just where you left it.

And be gentle with yourself — your mind will settle eventually, but it does take time.

Just please don’t make the mistake that I did. I spent years feeling ashamed and afraid of my experience. I kept it secret, buried whole parts of my personality and avoided situations, certain parties, clubs and festivals, where I feared I might bump into my old hedonistic and questing self. A wilder part of me went into hiding that night, but she is still out there somewhere, sitting cross-legged in the park in her flared jeans, desperate for me to make a home for her in my current life (and I promise I’ll try). So don’t disown the part of yourself that you think caused this, the part that’s an eccentric explorer. Instead, let this experience bring more parts of you to the surface, even the messy bits. Especially the messy bits.

Ask yourself: why did I suddenly take flight with such a force that I crashed through the invisible looking glass? Was I truly flying towards something? Or was I trying to escape from something? Only you can know.

This will leave you changed. It’s too big a thing not to. But you can choose to let it change you for the better.

The truth is, you might not bump into many people in life who have been through this same experience, as it is strange and rare. Yes, you might meet people who, when you try to explain it all to them, will say ‘Yeah, I’ve had my own set of mental health problems too’ or ‘Yeah, I’ve had bad drug after effects as well’ or ’Yeah, I’ve also had spiritual experiences.’ But they don’t fully understand, not really, because what happened to you is essentially different from all of those things.

But I want you to know that you are not alone. You are holding a book filled with stories of other people’s experiences. You are reading this particular page and on the other side of the page is me. And other people like you will also hold this book.They have drunk the fairy wine. They have voyaged through the mirror and all the way back again. They have hitched a ride on a twister to Oz and on arrival, found it wanting. They are the ones who dream of tigers, just like you and I. You are not alone.

After the paywall, a video list of essential talks: ‘What to do in a spiritual emergency’. NB, not everyone finds the term ‘spiritual emergency’ helpful, not everyone resonates with that label or the ‘spiritual emergency’ frame. It is not necessary, essential or ‘true’, it’s just a frame that some people find helpful to cope with the unusual symptoms they’re experiencing. There are other frames and I’m not wedded to any of them - whatever helps people get through the day and, hopefully, enjoy life again.