I share the following so that the reader might get a sense of where I’m coming from, and the context in which I found myself drawn to the Tam Integration Psychedelic Integration Coaching Training Program.
I was born in Santa Monica, California in 1981. Before I came along, my parents pulled a Brady Bunch, so when I – their union’s only child – arrived, I had seven half brothers and sisters, between fourteen and nineteen years older than me. Our house was in beautiful Rustic Canyon, a short walk from the beach. In the summers we’d visit Yosemite, camping together as a big happy gang.
When I was four, mom, dad and I moved to Wilmington, Delaware for my father’s work. Shortly thereafter, mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. On September 22, 1988, my mother Carol died alone in a hospital in Philadelphia. My father showed up at my school that Thursday morning. Out in the parking lot, he told me she was gone. He asked if I wanted to go to lunch. I said I wanted to stay at school. It was pizza day. Back in the classroom, a girl asked me why my dad had come. “Oh,” I said, “my mother died. But I don’t care. What do I need a mother for?”
We’d recently moved to Hockessin, a semi-rural area outside of Wilmington, into a four-bedroom ranch-style house backed up against eleven acres of woods. Life there was a mixed bag. I felt isolated, and also enjoyed playing in the woods. I went to Wilmington Friends (a private Quaker school – Ashley Biden was my classmate), participated in sports, went to YMCA summer camp, and played the saxophone. We took trips to California, Europe and Costa Rica. My father played chess, frisbee, and ping pong with me. And in our relationship, there was betrayal, an absence of attunement, emotional and physical neglect, and a mountain of unprocessed grief.
When I was twelve, my father remarried. The wedding took place in the hospital, where my new stepmother, for whom I felt a combination of ambivalence and hatred, was receiving treatment for her newly discovered colon cancer. She and my father had been together for a couple of years by then, and she’d recently moved into the Hockessin house with us. A couple of months after the wedding, on route 52 in Greenville, Delaware, while driving our Plymouth Colt station wagon en route to school and work, dad had a heart attack. Somehow the car came to a stop on a small embankment by a gas station. I went in, asked to use the phone, and called 911.
Dad was in a coma for six weeks. When he woke up, he proved unable, and perhaps unwilling, to regain his former capacities. His speech was garbled, his gait halting, and his left hand was all but frozen in place, similar to the way one might grip a pencil. Shortly thereafter, his new wife died. Following his attempts at rehab, dad landed in an assisted living facility, and remained there until his death in 2018.
While dad lay in the coma, my half siblings gathered at the house in Hockessin. A man named Dave, a colleague of dad’s at the DuPont Experimental Station, presided over the meeting. I was somewhat familiar with Dave and his family. I’d stayed at their house a handful of times when my father had traveled for work. Dave explained that, prior to all this unfolding, my father had asked him, should circumstances such as this arise, to take me in. And so, from age twelve to eighteen, I lived with Dave and his family in their suburban Wilmington home.
To sum up my adolescence: the weight of all that had happened; the ongoing ambiguous loss of my father; a new school; a new (and, it turns out, dysfunctional) family; and puberty; created, I see now, an impossibly confusing situation. At the time, however, it seems my only option was to bypass it all, and work really hard to convince myself and everyone else that I was fine. How could I have known that I lacked the capacity and support to be the developmentally arrested, dissociated, ashamed, lost, lonely, angry, confused, and utterly brokenhearted person that I truly was?
Fast forward to early 2020. By then I’d been married for nearly six years, and we had a five year old daughter. We were living in a two bed, one bath guesthouse in Los Angeles. Mostly I was a househusband, while also finding work as an actor in commercials and independent films. Just as the pandemic hit, my psilocybin mushrooms fruited.
I’d done mushrooms once in my early twenties, with college classmates on the beach in Playa del Rey, and I had a vague sense they might have more to show me. I’d started the grow two or three months before. At that moment in lockdown, time, space and my first harvest all converged in great abundance.
Over the next two years, the mushrooms slowly introduced me to my grief. They began to show me, contrary to the defensive belief (“I don’t need a mother”) I’d constructed that September Thursday, that she’d in fact been my home base, my whole world, and I loved her and missed her with overwhelming intensity.
In early 2022 I began to undertake more traditional forms of personal development: Landmark programs, and online acting coaching with a woman I’ll call Flo. In September of that year I found myself at Flo’s place, crying on her guesthouse floor. She’d merely asked me a series of questions, while assuring me that no matter where her questions took me, it was all okay with her. Debriefing afterwards, I told her that working with the mushrooms had allowed me to access a similar emotional and spiritual place. She asked me if I’d heard of Bufo.
On Thursday, October 13th, 2022, I experienced my first toad medicine ceremony. What a gift. As a lifetime of egoic defenses dissolved, temporarily, into thin air, I was graced with a brief but exquisitely clear glimpse of the vast reservoir of underground pain I had been holding. The experience was both agonizing and liberating in equal measure. A few weeks later, while watching the film Slumberland – in which a young girl, grappling with the sudden loss of her father, must descend to the bottom of the Sea of Nightmares to retrieve wish-granting Magic Pearls – I wrote this poem.
The Pearl
o god my god
my god my god
o thank you
o my god
and fuck you
fuck you
o my god
o fuck you
o my god
oo
o
god
my god
More on the poem later.
A few weeks after that, I entered therapy. You see, toad medicine is relatively short acting. The ceremony took about an hour. So while I could see the pain, it wasn’t enough time to feel it all. Moreover, as I would learn, painfully, in the coming months, wounds like childhood neglect need to be addressed in relationship, requiring the presence of skilled, attuned, compassionate support.
I found two therapists. One practiced Bodynamic, a somatic developmental psych modality, and the other practiced PSIP (which stands for psychedelic somatic interactional psychotherapy) mostly with the aid of cannabis and ketamine. While both were amazing therapists who played vital roles in my process, the PSIP work completely blew my mind.
I did roughly 80 hours of PSIP work over the course of ten months. About five or six months into the process, maybe after an especially deep session, I thought, wow, doing this type of work would be a lot better than working as an actor. I’d long known, or at least suspected, that my acting obsession was some kind of trauma response, my subconscious attempt to compensate for the loss of my family and the absence of love I’d experienced in my development: Become a star! Win the whole world’s love! Problem solved!
LOL 😂 😭 😂
Anyway, to do their training, the PSIP folks want you to be a licensed therapist or certified in an alternative modality like Hakomi or Somatic Experiencing, and to have at least two years experience working with clients in a mental health setting. With the encouragement of my PSIP therapist, I applied to SE Professional Training as a psychedelic integration coach, which, owing to my experience with mushrooms over the last two and a half years, I’d certainly been doing informally with friends and family. But I wasn’t yet professional, and I worried that I wasn’t enough, that I wouldn’t be accepted, and I’d find myself moving away from acting without moving toward something else.
That’s when the gravitational force of instagram’s algorithm drew me toward the mouth of Daniel Shankin’s sales funnel. First it was an integration circle, then a coaching training info session, then a one-on-one zoom call. He seemed kind of sweet and goofy. I can’t say I wasn’t intimidated to some degree…by his follower count? His asking price? His big pro microphone? But we seemed to have a good rapport. After all, we are both tall, middle-aged white men, with young children and salt-and-pepper beards, who are into psychedelics, so maybe there was a certain sense of kinship? Instagram had also delivered me to Flo the acting coach, and that had worked out well so far. Maybe this was meant to be….
The main thing I remember about that one-on-one meeting with Daniel was expressing slight concern around the idea of meaningful certification. At the end of the year-long program, what was I going to get for my money? Daniel chuckled (his chuckle reminds me slightly of Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in The Princess Bride) and said something like “it’s just about doing the thing.”
Obviously, I bought it. I signed up the same day, paying the early-bird price of $9,000 up front, in full.