Stacie and her partner were in a rough spot in their relationship when they first decided to take psilocybin together, the psychedelic drug in so-called "magic mushrooms." Long-term use of other drugs had caused Stacie to lose both of her jobs and her apartment. As a result, she moved back in with him, but they fought all of the time, she said.
Constantly triggering past wounds in each other created distance in their relationship. For Stacie, her past experience as a sex worker had ingrained in her the idea that sex was transactional.
“I was a prostitute for so long … that my heart and my sexual organs weren’t really tied together,” Stacie, who is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Salon in a phone interview. “It was a defense mechanism because of my past history.”
Stacie decided to stop using meth, crack and cocaine on May 31, 2023. Soon after, she and her partner started taking psilocybin. When they took the mushrooms, they could communicate about what was going on in their internal worlds openly, without either of them feeling attacked, she said. This allowed them to be vulnerable and feel safe to share with one another. Their intimacy improved because they could emotionally connect, she explained.
“It was hard for me to think about sex as being with just someone you love because it’s never been that way for me,” she said. “It started to become that way, though.”
Anecdotally, couples report psychedelics are saving their marriage or relationships, allowing them to connect in deeper ways, communicate better and reduce anxieties about sex. Psychedelic use has exploded in recent years with a wealth of studies pointing to their potential treatment for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction. They remain highly illegal in most places, however. Now, researchers have also begun to ask questions about how psychedelics could impact sexuality and relationships.
"It is incredibly important to discuss your sexual and emotional boundaries when you are sober."
“There are so many things they can do — from altering perceptions to changing people’s negative and distorted self-perceptions to bringing … greater interpersonal connectedness and even the feeling of being in union with your environment,” said Dr. Daniel J. Kruger, a professor at the University of Michigan studying psychedelics.
To investigate their impact on sexuality, gender and relationships, Kruger conducted a survey of people who had used psychedelics. In the results published last month, 70% percent of respondents reported that using psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD, as well as adjacent drugs like MDMA or ketamine had a positive impact on their sexual experiences.
Another study published last year also found that people reported improvements in sexual functioning after taking psychedelics in both a naturalistic setting, in which people used psychedelics on their own recreationally, and in a clinical trial of people with depression.
These studies were retrospective, meaning they were conducted after the psychedelics were already taken. Stronger evidence would compare these domains before and after they were used. Nevertheless, they suggests psychedelics could have a role to play in sexuality and relationships.
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Generally, research on how psychedelics impact relationships and sexual health is limited, although some studies have looked into the question, with some research looking at the role that MDMA, in particular, could play in couple's therapy. A clinical trial is currently underway to test how MDMA affects interpersonal interactions, which could help researchers better understand how the substance impacts relationships. Overall, psychedelics are involved in hundreds of other clinical trials as a potential treatment for all sorts of mental health conditions, leading some to argue that they have been hyped as “wonder drugs.”
While treatments are rarely a cure-all in medicine, part of the reason psychedelics have helped people with a variety of conditions may be because they affect unique domains of the mind like a person’s openness, mindfulness and sense of self. These domains also all play an important role in relationships.
In Kruger's survey, "people definitely talked about having much greater self-acceptance and being able to be their authentic selves,” he told Salon in a phone interview.
Yet feeling a greater sense of authenticity doesn't always result in bringing people together. Some people report that using psychedelics helped them move past a traumatic relationship or heal from a breakup. And while many people report transformational experiences with psychedelics, others have a more challenging time. In rare cases, psychedelic experiences can be traumatic, though the drugs tend to carry less risk than other substances.
The changes that psychedelics can bring may not be the right approach for everyone, and practitioners in this space constantly emphasize the importance of set and setting to ensure a safe psychedelic experience. Because psychedelics can increase a person’s empathy and suggestibility, it's important to have trusted individuals around if they are used, said Dee Dee Goldpaugh, a psychotherapist based in New York and author of “Embrace Pleasure: How Psychedelics Can Heal Our Sexuality.”
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“It is incredibly important to discuss your sexual and emotional boundaries when you are sober,” Goldpaugh told Salon in a phone interview. “People can end up agreeing to sexual things they normally wouldn’t have done because they feel an incredibly increased sense of empathy."
But these feelings can fade and it’s possible to experience regret afterwards.
Still, when used in the appropriate setting, psychedelics have been transformative for many people. Within a partnership, psychedelics have the potential to address underlying issues that are interfering with sex, as sexual dysfunction is closely tied to many mental health disorders, said Jeffrey Alvin Lundgren, a psychedelic therapy provider, sex therapist and author of “Unfolding Eros: A Journey into Psychedelic-Assisted Sex Therapy.”
“The vast majority of [sexual health] struggles that people experience are related to their life experiences, including trauma, dysfunctional social programming, and comorbidities like anxiety or depression,” Lundgren told Salon in a phone interview. He added that conditions like ADHD, physical conditions or addiction patterns “all have a potential impact on sexuality.”
Psychedelic use has also been associated with reduced trauma symptoms and lower levels of shame among adults who had experienced maltreatment in childhood, which could impact relationships, said study author CJ Healy, a psychologist at the New School in New York.
“Psychedelics can cause radical changes in a person’s core sense of self and their beliefs about themselves,” Healy told Salon in a phone interview. He explained that if a person was carrying around a lot of internalized shame, psychedelics may be able to increase the compassion they have for themselves or change their perspective on their past experiences.
Improving sexual health is an important aspect of overall well-being, but many couples do not discuss it. Yet sex with a trusted partner has specifically been linked to happiness and improved mental health outcomes. An analysis published in The Atlantic found people who are married and people who are having sex at least once a week reported being 75% and 35% happier than those who were not.
In the U.S., sex education is lacking, with some states not even requiring it in schools. Impossible beauty standards leave many feeling like they are not enough, which can affect sexual health or manifest into mental health conditions that affect sexual functioning. One in five women in the U.S. has experienced completed or attempted rape, and a quarter of men have experienced sexual violence, leading to sexual traumas that play out in relationships.
Psychedelics can help people address past traumas in the appropriate setting. They can also increase the capacity for communication by lowering defenses — which benefits a relationship, Goldpaugh said.
“I think what psychedelics do is this very particular synergy between helping to soften our defenses when we are indeed safe with our partner, and helping us to have insight about some of the kind of [protective defenses] that we enact in relationships,” Goldpaugh said.
For Stacie and her partner, psilocybin helped them deal with their own individual mental health challenges in addition to their dynamic as a couple. Stacie has not used drugs since she quit in 2023, and her partner stopped drinking, she said. She got a job that she loves and they moved from their trailer into a house. In March, they got married.
“It was an individual journey of helping ourselves to become better people because we wanted to be better people for each other, which in turn made our relationship better,” Stacie said. “With that changing, we have grown together to be happy, and I know that without mushrooms that never would have happened.”
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