Hi Tom,

Re whether i "accepted the presence of RJ thoughts and came back to the present" through the trip - no. I didn't have any RJ thoughts throughout the trip. I definitely had to accept a lot of uncomfortable feelings which came up, but not necessarily any thoughts. I did cry a lot though!

I think being able to accept thoughts and "not believe them" is an important step. By accepting thoughts and not believing and/or responding to them, it shows your brain that you don't need to pay attention to every thought it gives you. You become more uninterested in your thoughts as they take up a smaller and smaller part of your life.

There's also a bit of a "hardcore" approach which works well for mental images/movies. Here, instead of just accepting the image/movie in your head, you imagine the worst case scenario. So you imagine your partner in scenarios which almost certainly didn't ever happen (hopefully I don't need to get too descriptive here!)

What that does is help show your brain that you can't ever really know for sure all the details of the events you've been fixating on. So you're left with more uncertainty (which is a good thing) and the realisation that your original images/movies are as imaginary as the ones you just envisioned. I did not try this on shrooms though, this is just a technique I used after the shrooms.

Sounds like you're well along in your recovery. Getting to acceptance is crucial – freedom lies on the other side of all the thoughts and feelings you pushed away for so long. Acceptance totally dissolves RJ.

Best of luck with the trip - let me know how it goes!

Michael