Coming Back Into Self: Cancer, Dissociation and Psychedelic Healing

During my round of chemo, I learned to leave my body.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Not literally. I was there, sitting in the infusion chair, watching the nurse prepare the chemo, waiting for the interminable drip-drip-drip. And then I made a choice. Not a conscious choice. But unconscious survival choice. I left. I went somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn't feeling this bodily violation. This fear. This nausea. 

That day, I discovered dissociation as a coping mechanism. And for the next two decades of cancer treatment, that mechanism saved me. It got me through surgeries and radiation and chemotherapy and countless medical procedures that required me to be disconnected from my body while strangers did necessary but traumatic things to keep that body alive.

But here's the paradox: the dissociation that saved me during treatment is now preventing me from truly living after treatment. Because you can't stay dissociated forever. Eventually, you have to come back to yourself. You have to re-inhabit your body. You have to feel your feelings. You have to reconnect with your soul. This is survivorship. This challenge is not unique to me. Nearly every person who manages to survive cancer faces this same challenge.

Cancer impacts all dimensions of self: physical, emotional, spiritual. And cancer treatment often requires disconnection from all three. Dissociation becomes survival. But after treatment ends, we face a different challenge: coming back. Re-embodying. Reconnecting with ourselves.

I recently sat down for a podcast conversation with Anne Hamilton, founder of The Survivorship Collective, an organization providing psilocybin retreats specifically for people living with cancer. We talked about our parallel cancer journeys—both diagnosed young, both requiring aggressive treatment, both learning to leave our bodies as a coping mechanism. And we talked about the challenge that comes after treatment ends: how do you come back? How do you re-inhabit a body that feels unsafe? How do you reconnect with yourself after years of necessary disconnection? How do you live as a survivor? 

I'm deeply grateful for Anne's vulnerability in sharing her story during our conversation. For her willingness to describe painful experiences that so many of us recognize but struggle to name. For her honesty about both the necessity of dissociation during treatment and the profound difficulty of re-embodiment afterward.

And I want to acknowledge that our experiences aren't unique. Dissociation during cancer treatment isn't rare. It's common. Nearly universal among people who've undergone aggressive interventions. The specifics differ—the particular moments when we learned to leave our bodies, the individual triggers that still send us fleeing—but the fundamental experience connects us. Cancer impacts all dimensions of self: physical, emotional, spiritual. And cancer treatment often requires disconnection from all three. Dissociation becomes survival. But after treatment ends, we face a different challenge. We have to come back. We have to re-inhabit our bodies. We have to reconnect with ourselves.

I'm still learning how to do this. And psychedelic medicines are helping me to rediscover myself. Anne has had a similar journey. And I hope our experiences can help other cancer survivors seeking to find their way home. 

Physical Dissociation: The Body That Tried to Kill Me

I had a mantra during cancer treatment: "My body is sick, but I am not sick."

This was necessary psychological quarantine. A way to separate my true self from my objectively failing body. A way to protect my identity from being consumed by disease. When your body is producing malignant cells and requiring poison to stay alive, you need some distance. You need to believe that your essential self—your consciousness, your identity, your soul—remains untouched by what's happening to the flesh.

That separation got me through treatment. But when treatment ended, I realized I'd created a dangerous split. I was physically disembodied. Living outside my body. Watching it from a distance rather than inhabiting it.

Anne had a similar experience and described her own moment of physical dissociation during her first biopsy. She shared how she was present . . . until something shifted. "I remember there was this shift in my brain where I was just like - don't be here, be somewhere else," she told me. "And that became a really helpful coping mechanism to get through everything."

For me, my physical disembodiment was amplified by pain that has persisted after treatment: post-surgical pain, neuropathy from chemotherapy, the dull ache of many scars. I live with pain every day. And one of the easiest ways to cope with pain is to go away. To step out of my body. To be somewhere else.

That means my daily reality is this: to be physically embodied means to be in pain. To truly inhabit my body means feeling sensations I'd rather avoid. How do you trust a body that literally tried to kill you? How do you come home when the intruder is in the house? How do you come back when that intruder left your body tattered and torn?

Psychedelics and other mind-body practices are helping me come back into my body. Not instantly. Not magically. But gradually. Beginning with simple awareness of physical sensations—noticing them without immediately fleeing. Gradually moving toward something that might eventually become forgiveness for the body that betrayed me. Beginning to interpret pain signals as past trauma rather than present dangers. 

And the pain itself might be shifting too. Not eliminated. But perhaps reinterpreted. Psychedelic experiences have helped me observe my pain differently. To notice it without immediately tensing against it. To recognize that my psychological resistance often amplifies physical sensation. 

There's emerging research suggesting psychedelics might reduce inflammatory signaling, might change pain processing in the brain. But I'm not making medical claims. I'm simply noticing that after intentional psychedelic work, my relationship with physical sensation has shifted. The pain hasn't disappeared. But I've started coming back into my body. Slowly. Gradually. 

Emotional Dissociation: Returning from Antarctica

My theme song during chemotherapy was Of Montreal's "Wraith Pinned to the Mist."

My wife and I would play it before I went into treatment. We'd sing the chorus together: "Let's pretend we don't exist. Let's pretend we're in Antarctica." That song represented the emotional detachment necessary to prepare myself to walk into the infusion center. To willingly sit in a chair. To willingly allow strangers to insert needles into my port. To willingly allow myself to be poisoned.

And that emotional detachment extended beyond chemotherapy to surgeries and radiation and countless medical procedures. You simply can't be emotionally present when you're wearing nothing but a hospital gown: mostly naked and often very cold. When strangers violate your vulnerable body with knives and pins and poison.

I know that therapeutic intent matters here. I know those ‘knives’ are scalpels removing tumors. I know that ‘poison’ is chemotherapy shrinking disease. But in any other context, being subjected to knives and poison while cold and naked would be considered torture. We endure that torture because the intent is healing. We willingly submit because the alternative is a slow cancerous death. We accept treatment, but we often emotionally detach to survive it.

Anne shared similar experiences during her radiation treatments. "As a woman with breast cancer, you're naked from the midsection up. And there are these men who are not doctors kind of moving you around all the time. And you just have to just not be there because it's traumatic," she explained.

She reflected on discovering later that some patients advocate for themselves, request different protocols, maintain more presence during these vulnerable moments. "Later I found out that some people fight against that and I was like - why didn't I fight? Why wasn't I more present?" she wondered. "And I think it was a surviving mechanism."

Yes. Surviving mechanism. Not weakness. Not failure. Survival.

But when treatment ends, when the knives and needles and poison go away, it's really hard to reconnect emotionally. With people you love. With yourself. With life. Because emotional detachment doesn't discriminate. After teaching myself not to feel the bad things—the fear, the vulnerability, the violation—I also lost access to the good things. The joy. The love. The connection. The awe.

When you stop feeling, you stop living.

Anne described this challenge in survivorship with stark honesty: "Getting back into my body was really hard and alienating. I remember trying to date and be authentic. But I just felt so hollow and horrified because I wasn't there and I'd rather not pretend to be there."

I know what it’s like to feel hollow and horrified. Hollow because we've learned to feel nothing. Horrified because we recognize what we've lost.

Psychedelics have helped me feel again. Not all at once. Not easily. But gradually. They have helped me rediscover the positive emotions I'd locked away for safekeeping. They helped me touch awe and joy and love without immediately retreating into protective numbness.

And perhaps most importantly, psychedelics helped me reconnect emotionally with people I love. They created—or maybe revealed—emotional bonds of empathy and connection that had been there all along, buried under layers of protective dissociation.

Spiritual Dissociation: Rediscovering the Soul

Somewhere in my cancer journey, I started to believe that my cancer was divine punishment.

Maybe cancer is punishment from God or the universe or whatever transcendent consciousness exists. Punishment for something I’d done wrong—sin, karma, cosmic imbalance—and that whatever I had done was so fundamentally bad that I deserved cancer. Maybe I can trace this back to my Catholic upbringing which was fraught with notions of sin and guilt. And so I stopped practicing religion around the time of my relapse. I thought God was mad at me. What can I say?

This belief was exacerbated by themes in the positive thinking movement. The idea that our internal thoughts manifest the world around us. Books like The Secret. Vision boards. The belief that we create our reality through our beliefs is accurate on some level. But it also means we're responsible for both good and bad outcomes. If our thoughts manifest all the good things, then our thoughts are also guilty of creating all the bad things. If I created my cancer through negative thinking or bad karma or divine disfavor, then I'm fundamentally to blame for my own suffering.

I know that all of this is irrational. But humans are irrational animals. I am human and I couldn't live with that cosmic guilt. So I detached spiritually.

I stopped practicing any religion. I became a radical materialist. Because in the materialist worldview, there is only biology and physics. There is only science and medicine. There are only random genetic mutations that cause cancer. There are only medications to treat cancer. There is no sin. There is no God. There is no divine punishment.

In a materialist world, I am not guilty for causing my cancer.

But that materialist world is cold and sterile and void of animating spirit. Empty of meaning. Devoid of connection to anything larger than molecular biology. I traded cosmic guilt for cosmic emptiness. Neither was sustainable.

Anne's journey with Survivorship Collective has taught her something important about integrating spiritual elements into healing work with cancer patients. When she first started organizing retreats, she wasn't convinced that prayer and ceremony mattered much. Her background is in law and philosophy—she's trained in rational analysis, logical argument and evidence-based thinking. 

But through working with indigenous wisdom carriers and observing what actually helps people heal, her perspective has evolved. Anne now incorporates prayer and sacred ritual into the Survivorship Collective retreats. Not as performance. Not as cultural appropriation. But as genuine reverence for spiritual practices that resist measurement and rationalization.

This matters for people learning to reconnect spiritually after cancer. Because survivorship requires crossing between worlds—accepting mortality while building meaningful lives, honoring both science and mysticism, integrating clinical knowledge with spiritual connection. Prayer and ceremony create language for that crossing. Those spiritual practices create a framework for experiences that transcend materialist explanation.

Psychedelics are helping me come back to spiritual connection. Not through dogmatic belief. Not through blind faith. But through direct experience. Because psychedelic journeys are firsthand encounters with the ineffable, the numinous, the transcendent. I've touched something that is very real, yet resists rational description or materialist explanation.

No, I haven't gone "full-woo." I'm not claiming mystical certainty. But I can't deny the spiritual element. I can’t deny my soul. Psychedelic experiences have helped soften my materialist worldview. Have helped me reconnect with dimensions of experience I'd abandoned for self-protection.

And that's starting to soften the cosmic guilt too. Not eliminate it—I'm still working on this. But soften it. Create space for the possibility that cancer isn't punishment. That my body's betrayal isn't evidence of cosmic karma. That maybe—maybe—I can reconnect with something transcendent without carrying guilt for my illness.

The Work That Continues

Psychedelics are not magic. They're not panaceas. They're not instant cures for disembodiment or emotional numbness or spiritual disconnection.

They've helped remove some barriers. They've helped start a process. But the work continues. I'm still not fully in my body. I still resort to emotional detachment when life gets hard. And at some level, I still believe the universe is punishing me for something I can't name.

After Anne and I finished recording our podcast, she invited me to attend a future Survivorship Collective retreat. I've already started thinking about my intentions for that experience. And one of them is to reconnect. Physically and emotionally, yes. But perhaps more importantly, to reconnect spiritually. To continue softening the cosmic guilt. To let go of irrational beliefs that my cancer represents divine punishment. To find my way back to my soul.

Anne's work creates space for this kind of healing. Not just the psychedelic experience itself, but the careful preparation, the intentional community, the ongoing integration. The recognition that healing happens in relationships, not in isolation. That we need witnesses for our transformation. That coming back into ourselves requires others who can see us—really see us—as we make the journey back home.

Cancer required dissociation from our bodies, our emotions, our spiritual selves. That dissociation kept us alive during treatment. But after treatment ends, we face a different challenge. We have to re-embody. We have to feel again. We have to reconnect with dimensions of experience that transcend biology and physics.

The paradox is real: we dissociate to survive treatment, but then we need to re-embody to truly live.

I'm grateful to Anne and Survivorship Collective for pioneering pathways back into ourselves. For recognizing that cancer care should address not just tumor size and survival rates, but the full dimension of human experience. For building infrastructure that helps cancer survivors reconnect—physically, emotionally, spiritually—with ourselves and with the community.

The work continues. The journey continues. The coming-home continues.

Let's journey together.