Seven Signs Psychedelic Therapy is Not Right for You Right Now
Courtney Lochner is a leading expert in psychedelic medicine for treatment-resistant anxiety, depression, and trauma. An Eric Hoffer Award-winning author and founder of the Intuition Rehab Lab (IRL), she teaches her signature holistic healing method to students, healers, and retreat participants around the world.
Psychedelic medicine is having a moment. Podcasts, retreats, clinical trials, breakthrough therapy designations. The conversation has moved from the fringe to the mainstream, and for good reason. For many people, plant medicine has opened doors that a decade of talk therapy couldn't.
But this moment is not new. Ancient Greek and pagan traditions used psychoactive substances in ritual, from the Eleusinian Mysteries to seasonal rites honoring the cycles of nature. Indigenous cultures across the Amazon, Mesoamerica, and beyond have worked with these medicines in ceremony for centuries, guided by lineage holders who understood them as sacred, not recreational. In the 1950s through the early 1970s, Western medicine took its own serious look, with clinical research into 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and psilocybin showing real promise for addiction, couples therapy, anxiety, and end-of-life distress, before the work was shut down by shifting drug policy and decades of stigma. What we are seeing now is a resurgence, not a discovery, built on all that history. That context matters. It is part of why readiness and reverence are not optional.
Here is the truth nobody selling a retreat wants to put on a flyer–this work is not for everyone, and it is definitely not for everyone right now.
I have sat across from people mid-ceremony who were not ready. I have watched what happens when someone walks into a medicine space expecting it to hand them something they were not willing to build themselves. The medicine is not the danger. The mismatch is.
Before you book anything, here are seven signs it is time to pause:
1. You're not in touch with your anger
Anger is often the emotion people have worked hardest to avoid, and it is exactly what plant medicine will not let you avoid. If you have spent years managing your anger instead of feeling it, understanding it, letting it move through your body, the medicine will find it and bring it to the surface. That confrontation can be transformative. It can also be overwhelming if you have never practiced being with that much charge in your own system. Start building a relationship with your anger before you ask a medicine to introduce you to it.
2. You hope or assume the medicine will do the work for you
This is the biggest misconception out there, and it is the one that causes the most harm. There is no stop button. Once you are in it, the only way out is through. The medicine is not a treatment that gets done to you while you stay passive. It requires you to be an active participant, to engage with what arises, to stay present through the parts that are hard. If you are hoping to lie down and receive a transformation, you are misunderstanding what this is. There is no stop button with these medicines. The only way out is through. Going through your psyche is rarely lollipops and unicorns.
3. You lack a strong support system
What happens after the ceremony matters as much as the ceremony itself. Integration is not optional, and integration does not happen alone. You need people in your life, a guide, a therapist, a community, someone who can help you make sense of what surfaced and hold you while it settles. Walking into this work with no one to walk out with you is one of the clearest signs you are not ready.
4. You're looking for adventure, not growth
There is a difference between wanting a profound experience and wanting a profound story. If you are drawn to this work because it sounds exotic, intense, or like something to check off a list, that intention will meet you in the medicine space. This work asks to be entered with reverence and a genuine willingness to change, not curiosity about what it will feel like.
5. You're not doing work on yourself
Psychedelic medicine is not a replacement for the ongoing work of knowing yourself. It is an accelerant. If there is no foundation, therapy, somatic practice, self-reflection, or honest inventory of your patterns, there is nothing for the medicine to accelerate. People who get the most out of this work are already in relationship with their own growth. The ceremony deepens what is already moving. It does not start the engine for you.
6. You're not prepared for a complete dissolution of how you see the world
This medicine can take apart your understanding of reality and put it back together differently. Your beliefs about yourself, your relationships, what is true, what matters, none of it is guaranteed to look the same afterward. If you are not willing to have your worldview genuinely dismantled, or you are hoping to have a meaningful experience while keeping your existing framework fully intact, this is not that kind of work. Go in only if you are willing to let everything be questioned.
7. You haven't researched the origins and culture of the medicine
These medicines did not appear in the wellness world by accident. They come from specific lineages, specific cultures, specific peoples who have carried this knowledge for generations, often at great cost. Sitting with a medicine without understanding where it comes from, who has protected it, and what respect is owed to that lineage is not just an oversight. It is a disconnection from the very thing that makes the medicine sacred in the first place. Do the research before you do the ceremony. Don’t trust just anyone. Consider doing the medicine in the plant’s native environment. Trust your gut. The last thing you need is some back-alley self-proclaimed shaman who studied psychedelics over a one-weekend course and now claims they can serve it too. Or even worse, someone who tried it once and now thinks they can host their own retreat.
The bottom line
None of this is meant to scare you off the work. It is meant to protect it. Psychedelic medicine, approached with reverence, preparation, and the right container, can be one of the most direct paths back to yourself that exists. But readiness matters as much as the medicine itself. If you recognized yourself in any of these seven signs, that is not a failure. That is information. Start where you actually are, not where you wish you were, and the medicine will be there when you are ready to meet it fully. Feeling ready? Contact me, and I’m happy to discuss options.
Read more from Courtney Lochner
Courtney Lochner, Holistic Health Coach & Psychedelic Practitioner
Courtney Lochner is one of the foremost voices in psychedelic medicine for treatment-resistant anxiety, depression, and trauma. An Eric-Hoffer Award-winning author, board-certified health coach, and founder of the Intuition Rehab Lab (IRL), she has built a global reputation for turning the most complex healing modalities into accessible, life-changing practice. Certified in nutrition design from Harvard Medical School and medicinal plants from Cornell, and shaped by a career that has taken her across continents as a professional dancer and healer studying under various tribes in the Amazon, Lochner teaches her method to students and retreat participants around the world.
