How Mushrooms Healed My Catholic Guilt

When I was a kid, my brother and I would play a game. After our regular confession (the ‘Sacrament of Reconciliation’ in Catholicism), we would compare each other’s penance (the prayers we had to say to receive forgiveness), and whoever had to pray the most was the loser. We made up these games because, particularly when we were really little, it was hard to take confession seriously—most of the time, we couldn’t even think of enough things we’d done wrong. I would sit in the confessional and make up sins like fighting with my brother and failing tests, just so no one would think I was a liar. It never occurred to me that it was okay to not have any wrongdoings to confess. 

When I got older and began high school, however, the list of ‘real’ sins to confess regularly grew. I remember signing up for a ‘teen yoga’ class, but after going to the first two classes, my priest told my mother that yoga was a form of ‘demon worship’ (an echo to racist, colonial narratives against non-Western spiritual practice). I thus had to confess my ‘sin’ and, of course, stop doing yoga (which I now regularly practice). 

My life was an ongoing Rorschach test—an exercise of looking at my everyday thoughts and actions, and finding what I had done wrong, the underlying belief being that ‘sinning’ was my resting position. There’s a joke Catholics sometimes tell that goes something like ‘I can only tell if I’ve had fun if I feel guilty afterward.’ When I left my community, I found myself second-guessing my intuition and developing panic attacks from fears that I was giving into unknown ‘demonic forces’ when I was enjoying myself with normal, young adult activities. It wasn’t until I began interrogating these feelings, with the help of psychedelic mushrooms, that I realized I was experiencing religious trauma, a common outcome of spiritual abuse.

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