Plant Medicines, Conditioning, and the Stories We Live Inside
What if some of the things we accept as normal are quietly harming us, while some of the things we have been taught to fear are actually trying to help? What if our certainty about what is good, dangerous, or irresponsible has less to do with evidence and more to do with what our culture has decided is acceptable?
Most of us move through life assuming that legality, morality, and health largely overlap. We tend to believe that what is legal is mostly safe, that what is illegal is mostly harmful, and that the systems governing medicine, mental health, and public safety are designed primarily with human wellbeing in mind. Those assumptions allow us to move through the world without constantly questioning the structures around us. But they also make it easy to stop noticing when something does not quite add up.
Every so often, an issue surfaces that disrupts that sense of certainty and asks us to slow down and widen the lens. It invites us to consider whether familiar rules and long-held beliefs deserve reexamination. Not in a reckless way, but in a thoughtful, human way. The kind that values curiosity over certainty and lived experience alongside data.
I am not interested in provoking outrage or drawing hard lines between right and wrong. I am interested in what helps human beings suffer less. I am interested in what allows people to feel more at home in their own bodies and minds. And I am interested in whether some of our strongest reactions are not signs of truth, but signs of conditioning. That curiosity has been quietly reshaping how I think about healing, trauma, and what it means to genuinely help people come back into relationship with themselves.
There is an idea from Erich Fromm in The Sane Society that I return to often, one that suggests a society can be deeply sick while those living inside it experience that sickness as completely normal. That idea invites a pause. What if some of the things we take for granted as good, right, or responsible are simply familiar rather than true? What if some of the things we have been taught to fear, dismiss, or outlaw are not dangerous because they are harmful, but because they challenge the stories that keep our systems intact?
It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.
–Erich Fromm in The Sane Society (pp. 14-15)
I am not asking anyone to abandon discernment. I am inviting a slower, more spacious kind of reflection. A willingness to notice our immediate reactions before we commit to them. A curiosity about where our certainty came from in the first place.
What if some of our strongest opinions are not conclusions we arrived at thoughtfully, but inheritances we absorbed without realizing it?
What if examining them is not a threat to who we are, but an act of care toward ourselves and one another?
What if pausing long enough to question what we have been taught opens the door to deeper understanding rather than chaos?
With that posture in mind, I began paying attention to a body of research and lived experience that challenged many of my own assumptions.
I have watched many documentaries and read a great deal about the benefits and healing properties of plant medicines often labeled as psychedelics. I read How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan and found it deeply compelling. I have listened to dozens of podcasts where people openly describe profound personal transformations following a single plant medicine experience. I have followed studies and clinical trials where the FDA is actively considering the therapeutic use of substances that were once dismissed outright. I have also been paying attention to the research emerging from respected universities examining the effects of even a single guided dose on PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, substance use disorders, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis.
As Pollan discusses in his book, many people rank their first experience with a plant medicine among the most meaningful events of their lives, placing it alongside the birth of a child or their wedding day. What stands out to me is that in many cases, one experience is enough. There is no ongoing dependency. There is no pattern of craving. Unlike many pharmaceutical interventions, these substances are not habit-forming and do not produce addictive behaviors.
More recently, I watched the Netflix documentary In Waves and War, which follows the stories of three Navy SEALs struggling with PTSD and TBIs after multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The film depicts their difficulty assimilating back into civilian life after being trained as elite killing machines for the United States. Their vulnerability is striking. I found myself in tears multiple times as these men shared their pain and their desire to help fellow service members who are also suffering.
The film states that we lose approximately twenty-two veterans per day to suicide and it also highlights a sobering reality. Since 9/11, more than thirty thousand veterans have died by suicide, a number that far exceeds the roughly seven thousand service members killed in combat during that same period.
Why do we accept losing more veterans after the war than during it?
What does that say about how we care for those we send into harm’s way?
The entire premise of the film is to show how these SEALs were able to reclaim their lives through a treatment program that included psychedelic medicine administered under the careful supervision of trained healthcare professionals. A research team from Stanford University followed their progress, conducting pre- and post-interviews with multiple follow-ups. In nearly every case, even a single week-long treatment resulted in profound and lasting positive change, with ripple effects that extended into their families and relationships. Read about Marcus Capone’s transformation here.
What I found particularly interesting was that many of the men expected to revisit combat trauma during their plant medicine experiences, yet instead found themselves returning to childhood wounds they had long forgotten. As a therapist trained in Internal Family Systems, this resonated deeply because the nervous system does not always present trauma chronologically. It reveals what still needs healing, often pointing to the earliest places where the story began.
Another piece that often gets overlooked is that many of these plant medicines come from traditions that have been passed down for thousands of years. Indigenous cultures around the world have long used them in sacred, intentional ways to support healing, meaning-making, and connection. At one time or another, these substances were even intertwined with nearly every major religious tradition we subscribe to today.
Mystery, awe, and wonder were not side notes to human life. They were central.
Much of our modern culture, however, seems designed to strip those qualities away. We are taught to value productivity, efficiency, and output above all else. Shift work, production schedules, and profit margins are treated as the highest priorities. Sometimes I wonder whether our progress as a species has cost us some of the most beneficial aspects of being human, while amplifying some of the most harmful, all in the name of greed and profit.
This concern becomes even sharper when I hear consistent reports of middle and high school students vaping fruit-flavored nicotine or smoking THC pens throughout the school day. These kids are conditioning their nervous systems to avoid discomfort at all costs. Any difficult feeling can be escaped instantly. Over time, this erodes their ability to tolerate any emotions, build resilience, or sit with themselves. Meanwhile, corporations secure lifelong customers who will generate millions in profit.
This is legal.
This is normalized.
And it exists alongside the criminalization of substances that, in therapeutic settings, appear to help people face themselves rather than escape themselves.
Think about the substances we already accept as part of our culture. Alcohol is celebrated socially even though it is responsible for a staggering amount of harm each year. Opioids have been prescribed in quantities that have devastated families and communities. Tobacco is sold at every gas station in bright packaging that sits near the checkout where children stand. These substances are addictive. They damage the body. They destroy relationships. They often shorten lives. Yet they are legal and normalized.
On the other side of the legal line are medicines that do not create dependency and do not require daily use. When administered in controlled therapeutic settings with trained professionals, they have helped people with PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, substance use disorders, and deep personal trauma. They have reconnected parents to their children, restored marriages, and allowed people to step back into their lives with clarity and purpose. These experiences are not about escaping reality. They are about facing it with new understanding.
Why are pharmaceutical companies allowed to generate billions of dollars from substances that we know are highly addictive, substances that create dependency and destroy lives, while treatments that show the potential to restore meaning, repair relationships, and reduce suffering remain illegal?
What does it say about our culture that substances proven to cause harm are legal and even marketed to our children, while substances that may offer genuine healing are not?
As a counselor, I want to be clear that nothing I am sharing here is medical advice or an endorsement of illegal activity. Psychedelic-assisted therapies are still being studied and evaluated, and any engagement with them should occur only within legal, ethical, and professionally supervised settings. My intention is not to promote a particular treatment, but to invite thoughtful reflection on what we consider acceptable, dangerous, or taboo, and why.
I do not believe plant medicines are a cure-all. I do not believe they are for everyone. But I do believe that human suffering is real, and that much of it has been shaped by forces far larger than individual choice. Cultural conditioning, early wounds, economic incentives, and inherited beliefs all play a role in how we suffer and how we attempt to heal.
What concerns me most is not whether a particular substance is legal or illegal. It is whether we are willing to examine the systems that decide those categories in the first place. Whether we are willing to notice when profit, fear, or convenience have quietly replaced care, wisdom, and reverence. Whether we are willing to ask why so many people feel disconnected from themselves, numbed by substances we normalize, and suspicious of experiences that invite depth, meaning, and honest confrontation with pain.
At its core, this conversation is not really about psychedelics. It is about what we value as a culture. It is about how we define health, sanity, and responsibility. It is about whether we are willing to acknowledge that something in our current approach to suffering is not working, and that the answers may not come solely from the systems that helped create the problem.
Beneath the research, the controversy, and the conditioned reactions are human beings trying to feel whole. Trying to make sense of their pain. Trying to remember who they were before they learned to disconnect from themselves in order to survive. If we can approach that reality with humility rather than certainty, curiosity rather than fear, and reverence rather than dismissal, then perhaps we create space for something genuinely healing to emerge.
Not because we have all the answers, but because we are finally willing to ask better questions and stay present long enough to listen.
What if the invitation is not to decide, but to stay curious about whether what we accept as normal is helping us heal, and whether what we fear deserves a second look?
Peace my friends,
~Travis
