Psychedelic memories of childhood abuse

How can one tell if they're real?

Amy Griffin, author of the memoir The Tell, with Oprah Winfrey

Trigger warning: contains multiple accounts of sexual assault

One of the smash-hit memoirs of the year is The Tell by Amy Griffin. Since it came out four months ago, it already has 4500 reviews on Amazon, 30,000 reviews on Good Reads, it’s a New York Times bestseller, an Oprah book pick, and has glowing reviews from figures like Adam Grant and Bessel van der Kolk.

Amy is a competitive runner, a successful venture fund investor, and the wife of John Griffin, a hedge fund centimillionaire. They are a good-looking, wealthy couple with beautiful children, multiple homes and celebrity friends. From the outside, it looks like they’re living the dream. But Amy felt there was something wrong within, and she was encouraged to try underground guided MDMA therapy.

During her first session, she uncovered a memory of being sexually abused as a teenager at high school. This was incredibly disruptive to her identity and her life, and for several months she felt deeply destabilized. But, through her connection to MAPS (her husband has given $1 million to the psychedelic NGO) she was introduced to an unnamed expert psychedelic guide, who helped her uncover further memories — it appears she had been abused by this man for several years throughout high school. She discovered some confirmatory evidence in the external (as opposed to inner-psychedelic) world. Her book reads like a detective story — like Oedipus bit-by-bit uncovering the secret of their inner self. By the end of the book, after months and months of anxiety and inner work, Amy feels in a better place, more authentic, more real.

It might sound strange that such a vivid and intense experience as being sexually assaulted could be completely forgotten, buried and suppressed, even more so that multiple such episodes could be suppressed, only to turn up years later in mid-life. But this happens surprisingly often to people on psychedelics — they have visions or somatic experiences of being abused as children, perhaps by a family member or someone else from their childhood. Then they emerge from the trip and have to figure out what they do with this content. Is it real, is it a hallucination, or a metaphor, or a narrative suggested to them by psychedelic culture?

Three case studies

I wrote on this topic before, in 2023, and came across multiple examples of this phenomenon, including among readers of EI. And I keep coming across other examples. Here are three more case studies I recently came across and interviewed.

Sarah

Sarah is a middle-aged English woman with grown-up children. She has been exploring wellness and, more recently, psychedelic inner healing. She took Gabor Maté’s course in Compassionate Inquiry, which presents a model of healing through uncovering early trauma. She noticed herself regressing, ‘acting out’. Then, in a ceremony, she found herself in a hallucination, screaming at her mother ‘how could you?’ She then went to a psilocybin centre in Holland. In the first ceremony, she found herself with her brother in their basement childhood bedroom.

I came out of that ceremony dumbfounded, because it was unlike any ceremony I’d been in before. There’d been metaphors, but this was a memory. My body was in a state of horror.

In the second ceremony, she started screaming. She had the memory of a neighbour from the street she grew up in, abusing her. Then she remembered being abused again, a few years later, by two builders.

She was in shock afterwards. ‘These were memories. But how could I have forgotten?’ She felt very destabilized in the months afterwards, caught between two equally difficult options — either she was going mad, or she had genuinely been abused. She didn’t get help from a therapist, and instead spent 22 months self-guiding herself through a process, uncovering further memories through psychedelic sessions and also through discovering more about her childhood and her family. She felt like a detective, piecing together the shards of the past.

Now, she feels a lot better, she is grateful to psychedelics for the healing she has experienced, and interested in working with others. She says:

I feel very strong. I feel if I can do it, so can others. And I want to inspire them to do the work. I want to say to people, if things come up, you will weather them. You can sit in the darkness, and it will pass, and you will come out the other side. I know it is possible. I’m so grateful I did. Now a lot of my life makes sense, my sexual hang ups, my physical and psychological issues, the odd panic attack I’ve had over the years. Everything makes sense.

Susana

Susana is a Spanish psychologist. She has a history of anxiety, but is usually highly functional. She has very few memories of her childhood. ‘There are fragments, but it’s scarce, and as a psychologist that bothered me. I knew there was something off’. Some years into her marriage, after the birth of her daughter, Susana was struggling emotionally, and also in her relationship. She started couples therapy with her husband, and the therapist hinted that something might have happened to her in childhood, but she dismissed it.

During COVID, she decided to try a guided psilocybin session. She took 3.8 grams, and was guided by a friend of a friend. She went into the trip feeling fearful, felt a lot of agitation during the trip, and cried throughout the trip. The guide was not really properly trained to hold space for this sort of reaction, although he did his best. During the trip, she had images — ‘not super well defined’ — of her sister’s godfather. She tried to see clearly what had occurred, but couldn’t. She says:

It was just glimpses, and some stuff that was more symbolic. I will never know for sure, because those memories may be reconstructed. They’re not false, because I’ve taken steps to understand that it might have happened in reality, and I think it did. I’m pretty sure it did, but I don’t know to what extent, what kind of abuse, for how long. I’ve no idea.

The fallout from the trip was intense — like Sarah, Susana felt destabilized, anxious and unsure of her identity. She was unable to work for some periods of time. She says:

In the beginning I thought it was really important to find out the facts. It turned out I’d spent two summers with this man and his family. He was a friend of the family, and then he just disappeared. When I told my family my suspicions, they didn’t dismiss it — they thought it was possible. I gave the man a phone call, and he was nervous, he understood something was up, and he babbled something like ‘one day I’ll get the courage to talk, we’ll talk someday’. But we never did, he disappeared again.

Today, she feels grateful to psychedelics for helping her heal, even if they rather ‘blew the doors off’, as she puts it. She says: ‘The things that helped me recover most were dancing and spending a lot of time by myself in nature.’ Psychedelics also helped her recover, particularly ketamine in a clinical context and ayahuasca in a ceremonial context:

My view is that despite this very challenging experience, psilocybin brought me what I had asked and intended with the trip (“recovering fragments of my childhood”), which in turn set me on a personal transformational path I doubt I would have ever taken (or it would have taken decades). I could not have made sense of my life without this piece of information. Now, what I wished and wish for others is that they are informed and have the chance to do it safely, with someone qualified and able to deal with such heavy material and, most importantly, people don’t underestimate the importance of seeking appropriate therapy afterwards. My point is that especially when one suspects something is off (which I did) use of psychedelics should not be taken lightly.

Steve Elfrink

Steve grew up in the Midwest of the US in a conservative family and from an early age he was suicidal. ‘Aged four or so, I would lie down to sleep, say the Lord’s Prayer, and end with ‘please God, kill me in my sleep’. I’d wake up angry at God.’ He tried to commit suicide for the first time at age seven, and other times beyond that, ending up in a psych ward at 19, followed by five more suicide attempts and then a lot of substance abuse.

Somehow, he got himself to college, where he did really well, and he also had some positive spiritual experiences on LSD. ‘One time, I took a high dose, and became this shimmering pure white light, just love flowing out of me into the universe. It was like I was reborn. From there I was just on a mission to change my life.’ In that moment, Steve says, he realized the love he had longed for had always been within him.

Steve seems to have had ebbs and flows in his life, when he has been more on an inner healing search for deep trauma, and when he has followed more of a conventional career-and-family life and kept the trauma at bay by keeping busy. In his late 40s, after a high-performing career, a marriage and four children, he started to explore psychedelics again for inner healing, and he started to uncover a lot of early childhood trauma.

After a three-night ayahuasca ceremony, he experienced a year-long breakdown. ‘Sometimes I was shaking so bad, it felt like I was being ripped in two. I would lie in bed feeling pure terror, sometimes for several hours. Then I started to get depersonalization and derealization, to not know who Steve was or what planet Earth is. I was also feeling very suicidal.’

It was only on his father’s 80th birthday, when Steve was 52, that he asked his mother about her experience giving birth to him. ‘She said ‘oh it was awful. They had to use forceps to try and pull you out, then I didn’t want anything to do with you’. I felt ‘things are finally starting to make sense’, and I went back to my room and Googled about Stan Grof and early birth trauma. I was like ‘my God, I have birth trauma’. That was a huge piece of the puzzle for me.’

By 2021, Steve was working professionally in psychedelic therapy advocacy and education. With clients and on his own, he began working with a method of somatic therapy based on the work of Peter Levine and Eric Wolterstorff, which he has used ‘literally hundreds of times’ over the last four years with guided and solo sessions, to explore and process early trauma, ‘just going through pure horror, terror, insanity, suicidality, and you stay with it and let it go.’

The method he uses is to take a psycholytic dose of ketamine and then keep his body still and see where sensations arise, then stay with those sensations and see what associations they lead to. Through this method, he tells me, he has uncovered years of abuse by family members and others from the age of three to his early 20s, the memory of which had previously been repressed. He says: ‘I sometimes get flashes of images but it’s mainly sensations. It can be incredibly painful sometimes but you stay with it and it gets released.’ Is he sure the recovered memories of abuse are literally true? ‘I would say yes. Body knows, the sensations and somatic memories one feels are undeniable.’ While some clinicians remain skeptical of recovered memories, Steve’s work focuses on what the body holds and what it needs to release — truth as experienced somatically, not as literal narrative.

Now through his new psychedelic therapy organisation in Oregon, OmTerra, Steve works with clients using the ketamine somatic therapy technique. ‘Most people come on the edge of suicidality. They’re at their wits end and are maybe 55 to 70, they’ve kept busy, maybe they had an inkling that something happened in their childhood. I’d say that 100% of the clients I work with, something comes up that they weren’t aware of, and it’s pretty much unequivocal. You can’t deny the sensations.’ Steve co-authored a journal article on structural dissociation exploring some of these topics.

‘I’d say that 100% of the clients I work with, something comes up that they weren’t aware of, and it’s pretty much unequivocal. You can’t deny the sensations’

- Steve Elfrink, OmTerra

Research on resurfaced memories of early trauma and abuse

I’ve come across several testimonies of this sort of psychedelic experience, and it’s beginning to show up in the research as well. For example, in CPEP’s 2023 survey of over 600 people who report post-psychedelic difficulties, we asked ‘Was there a traumatic experience in your childhood or youth which you think may have played a role in the difficulties that arose during or after the psychedelic experience?’. 243 (41.8%) responded Yes, 180 (31.0%) responded No, and 158 (27.2%) responded Unsure. We then did an interview study, led by Guy Simon of Bar-Ilan University and the Impulse Integrative Clinical Center, interviewing 18 people who reported ‘resurfaced trauma’ — we are finishing this study to submit to a journal.

All 18 participants described their past trauma coming to conscious awareness during a difficult psychedelic trip, but the mode of resurfacing varied — seven described vividly re-living the traumatic event as if it were happening again, sometimes uncovering experiences they had not entirely recalled before; four did not see an explicit memory but instead had a sense of feeling the trauma in their body or encountering it through symbolic visions and intense emotions. The experiences of nine participants were often disjointed or confusing, with fragments of memory or feelings that were hard to piece together. Approximately 40% of participants (7/18) reported directly re-experiencing childhood trauma during their psychedelic session, often with vivid sensory recall. As one participant described:

The ayahuasca, just the entire trip, was like, yeah... your father sexually abused you. It was just like 100%. It put my entire life in context [...] Every single thing made sense after that.

Half of the participants described fragmentation and confusion during their experience, struggling to make sense of emerging trauma content or questioning the authenticity of recovered memories. One participant expressed this uncertainty:

I can’t trust it. I don’t know if that was real... The challenging thing is, like, that’s a horrible thing to not know if it’s real or not.

So what we see is a range of therapeutic / epistemological outcomes, from the high certainty of ‘finally, everything makes sense’ (comparable to Sarah and Steve’s experience of knowing) to the low certainty or confusion of ‘I can’t tell if this is real or not’. And it may be the case - this would be worth a future investigation - that the therapeutic outcome is correlated with the degree of certainty a person feels about their psychedelic revelation.

Another soon-to-be-published study from Dr. Ricarda Evens’ team at the University of Humboldt surveyed 234 people who all reported challenging or traumatic psychedelic experiences. 12% of this data-set said the psychedelic challenges emerged from recalling or resurfacing a memory of a past event. Of that 12% subset, 38% remembered a sexual assault, and almost half say they had no previous memory of that event. What the survey didn’t ask was how certain people were that the memory was real.

In a 2025 clinical trial of 10 women with anorexia nervosa, all of whom were given a dose of Compass Pathways’ formulation of psilocybin, two of the 10 (20% of the trial participants) reported ‘therapeutic emergence of dissociated traumatic memories’. The trial researchers published a case study of these two participants.

One participant, Heather, had a black-out experience on New Year’s Eve, waking up outside her apartment, feeling drugged, with her pants around her ankles. During the psilocybin experience, she recovered some memories of what occurred during the black-out. Although this raised her anxiety levels in the days afterwards, she ultimately felt the trip and the resurfaced memory helped her understand one of the ‘root causes’ of the anorexia.

The other trial participant, Angela, was a 31-year-old white female. The case study authors write:

She did not endorse any traumatic experiences that she noted as key life events during screening and preparation visits. During the dosing session, she described being exposed to “repressed memories” related to being sexually molested by a sibling (age and birth order unknown), and other significant events within her family that occurred surrounding those experiences. She reported feeling like the experience allowed her to “process the trauma” in a way that led to healing and resolution during the experience.

In Angela’s words:

I did have the benefit of sort of recalling maybe repressed memories and had the opportunity to sort of get the full context of the memory … So, I was able to resolve a lot of traumas that I had experienced, and of course that was extremely profound.

Was this memory real? The case study authors write:

It is unknown to what extent the events recalled were substantiated by outside sources, and to what extent the emergence and processing of traumatic content was related to improvements in eating disorder symptomatology.

In Imperial College’s Psilodep (psilocybin for depression) study, one participant had a vision of his mother smothering his face with a pillow when he was an infant. Initially, he was ‘relatively untroubled’ by the vision and experienced six months of relief from depression. But then he became ‘quite preoccupied and confused about whether the suffocation event had happened to him’. The participant reflected:

So it’s [about] trying to move on, it’s all very well people saying “it’s all totally symbolic”, I don’t think it is. When it happened it felt more real than the here and now … I do think that something must have happened. Something pretty severe in my childhood for this treatment to take me back there … But what do you do with it? Do you just deal with it? (Timmermann et al 2022)

According to public comments by the head of Imperial’s psychedelic lab, David Erritzoe, two other participants in the same 50-person trial of psilocybin for depression also reported resurfaced memories or visions of childhood abuse — that’s 6% of trial participants.

A 2022 paper from the Imperial team (Timmermann et al., ‘Towards psychedelic apprenticeship’) further explored this thorny topic. The authors write:

Prevailing models of psychedelic therapy rest on the assumption that psychedelic-induced insights about the self (psychological and biographical information) arise from “intuitive knowing”, or some form of “inner intelligence” (Grof, 1975; Richards, 2016). Often patients will have a strong “felt sense” that their insights are true and real for them, although this is difficult and often unnecessary to prove. However, when an insight relates to biographical revelations, the issue of validity may become very important and preoccupying. For example, a woman with a scar on her hand may receive the insight that her now deceased mother put a cigarette out on her hand when she was an infant. The insight feels true, but whether it is believed holds serious consequences for the woman's life. Such instances are quite frequent in psychedelic therapy, and the way that these insights are “held” by the session facilitators can have important consequences for the patient. Patients primed to believe that everything they see or feel will be “the Truth” may feel preoccupied by any strange or upsetting revelations they might encounter. At the same time, trusting “the inner healing intelligence” is a foundational principle in many models of psychedelic therapy, and the frequent experience of patients and therapists alike is that insights received do hold some important “realness”, and are coming from a place of “deep knowing”. How to hold this space of gentle agnostic respect for the messages that arise is one of the challenges of psychedelic therapy.

What’s going on?

There are various things to keep in mind, when individuals and / or their families or therapists are trying to make sense of a psychedelic-induced vision of childhood abuse, and are grappling with the question ‘is this real?’ and wondering how to integrate the experience and move on with their life.

First, the idea of repression of memories of childhood abuse is a controversial topic that has been debated and discussed by psychologists going back 130 years to the birth of psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud found that many clients under hypnosis seemed to uncover early memories of incest. Freud decided either there was an epidemic of childhood abuse in fin-de-siècle affluent Vienna, or the ‘memories’ were really some sort of primal incestuous fantasy. He decided on the latter explanation, which developed into his theory of the Oedipus Complex, but some psychoanalysts later thought this was the wrong choice and in fact, these weren’t fantasies but rather genuine memories (see Janet Malcolm’s wonderful short book, Inside the Freud Archives, for more on this).