Contributed by Kelli Maxwell

I ate magic mushrooms… and stopped hating myself. No, really, it is true.

I was raised by Christian Nationalists. I don’t mean that as a fun buzzword for the Erika Kirk praising, red hat wearing, Fox News watching die-hards. It, of course, was all those things and so much worse.

In fact, it was the worst evangelism has to offer. More than one therapist has used the term “abuse” to describe the physical, mental,
emotional, and religious trauma I’ve spent my whole adult life healing from.

I thought it was just another Tuesday in the home of a family who claimed to follow Jesus.

Religious Trauma Taught Me to Believe I Was Bad

That’s what started my deconstruction journey when I was seventeen years old. I read the Bible over and over. I highlighted and memorized the red text. I prayed, I went to church, I went to youth group, I dressed in a way that wouldn’t cause men to stumble.

Still, I could not rectify the fact that no one’s actions matched Jesus’ words. Not one person I’d ever known spoke or acted like Jesus.
Then I turned eighteen and went out into the real world and was grossly underprepared. I was set up to fail. Because the rhetoric that my brain was hardwired to believe since birth is that I am evil. I am born full of sin. My heart is wicked.

Because a naked lady ate an apple, I have to spend the rest of my life serving men and a god that never answered me to atone for the original sin of being born a woman.

I can tell you what that does to a child’s psyche, but we don’t have the time.

I Left the Religion, but I Still Hated Myself

Fast forward a decade and now I have two failed marriages, multiple failed relationships and friendships, thousands of dollars spent on talk therapy and healing modalities and retreats and… I still hate myself.

I still can’t look in the mirror without picking my flaws apart. Without reminding myself I am worthless and wicked and undeserving of love.

All I’ve ever known is hate. And shame. And fear. No amount of talk therapy could dig up that core belief and root it out. I was healed enough. I left the cult; I removed myself from the social groups who spread the rhetoric.

I surrounded myself with people who are good and kind. I made friends with “non-believers” and tried to understand how their actions were more Christ-like than anyone I knew at church.

Yet, I still couldn’t accept a compliment. I still can’t look in the mirror and say one nice thing about myself. But I was given the opportunity to break the cycle.

I had daughters.

Breaking the Cycle of Religious Trauma for My Daughters

Daughters who will never know what it feels like to be told they are inherently bad and worthless and need to redeem themselves for the sins they were born with.

Daughters who will never know how it feels to be shamed at the dinner table for eating or for their body type. Daughters who will never know what it feels like to be told their outfit or their female bodies cause men to sin.

So, I existed this way for several years. Those horrible, hateful thoughts on repeat in my head, while the opposite came out of my mouth.

Then in my early thirties, the fungi found me.

I was offered an opportunity to experience a journey, and I took it. For the first time in my entire life, I felt true, unconditional love.
If you’ve ever experienced plant medicine, you understand. There are no words to describe it. I had been living in the dark, under a rock, and now I am on a mountaintop.

Then Psilocybin Changed the Way I Saw Myself

I can see. I know. I feel.

It blew my deconstruction wide open.

That first trip set me on a new path, one of true soul healing, and I’ve never looked back. Fast forward a few more years, and I prepared for the real journey. The soul-shattering ego death. The macro dose set in ceremony and intention.

Centered around rectifying the last of my deconstruction, I am almost there. I am ready. I went through it. It did shatter the last of what needed to break. It answered the questions I went in with.

That trip changed my entire outlook on life, on my belief system, and my views of the world.

But the integration afterwards is where the real work is done. For months I noticed the new thought processes, the new perspectives, my new reactions to situations. One morning, four months after my trip, I looked in the mirror, and my brain said: “Did you notice you haven’t picked yourself apart the last few days?”

Healing Religious Trauma Did Not End With the Trip

That revelation took me weeks to process. Without fully consciously knowing I was no longer berating myself in the mirror, I started to take notice. I started to say nice things to myself. The things I say to my daughters. The thoughts that always looped in my
head on repeat; they were suddenly gone. No more undertone of being evil or worthless or someone who causes others to sin.

I still had insecurities. I still didn’t like seeing myself in pictures. I still thought my body type was “wrong.” But I was no longer vicious
with myself.

Then over a year after my trip, the last bit of integration clicked into place. I checked my doorbell camera notifications, and I saw my daughter on the porch, talking to the dog and looking at the flowers. I couldn’t help but think how cute and precious she was. I
gushed over how sweet and perfect she looked in her pajamas, enjoying the flowers.

And then she turned towards the camera, and it wasn’t my daughter. It was me. My brain broke. This ten-second experience became the biggest mind fuck of my entire thirty-six years of life thus far.

The old thought patterns came rushing back in to defend the narrative. “That can’t be you.” “You got confused.” “You don’t look like that.” “You aren’t that small.” “Your hair is the same color, it was an honest mistake.”

The Moment I Saw Myself the Way I See My Daughters

I spent two days reasoning with myself that yes, that was me, and yes, I can think those things about myself too. And yes, I finally saw myself the way everyone who loves me says they see me, despite my attempts to tell them they’re wrong.

I probably could have been institutionalized the way I was arguing with myself out loud.

But I won.

I killed that little patriarchal voice inside my head that wasn’t ever mine to begin with. Since then, I choose every day to see myself like I see my daughters. Since then, I haven’t had one negative patterned thought.

It didn’t come easy; in fact, nothing about deconstructing is easy. It’s an incredibly painful and long journey to undo the damage that was done. It’s taken me almost twenty years to get here.

Here is where I am gently reminded daily that I am worth giving and receiving love. That I am inherently good, not evil. That there is nothing wrong with my body or the way others perceive it. Here is a place of true healing and the ability to actually open myself to accept thoughtfulness and kindness, and even a compliment, from others.

And it was a little mushroom that taught me more about unconditional love than the church ever did.