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“There’s somebody here. Her name is Wrecking Ball. She wants to hear ‘Let the Bodies Hit the Floor.’”
My therapist played the song “Drowning Pool” on her JBL speaker.
“She wants it louder.”
The therapist increased the volume.
“No, louder!”
The speaker was already maxed out.
While this was my second psychedelic-assisted therapy session, it was my first introduction to Wrecking Ball—an imaginal character my psyche had conjured to teach me about anger.
My observing self watched the waking dream unfold:
Wrecking Ball’s tucked chin and clenched jaw amplified the intensity in her eyes. She glared at my mother, who was curled up, passively, on the floor, emotionally detached from the moment. The sterile white room contrasted starkly with Wrecking Ball’s black clothes, boots, eye makeup, and dyed-black hair.
Without restraint, she hurled aggression toward my mother. She was pissed, and she expressed that anger loud and clear.
Anger wasn’t an emotion I had much experience with. While growing up in a home with two alcoholic parents, loads of chaos, and significant neglect, I hadn’t allowed myself, hadn’t dared, to feel anger at the parents who failed to provide love and a sense of safety.
Instead, my kid-mind decided I was the problem. Rather than come to the terrifying realization that the adults in my world were unable to care for me, I reached for the perversely more comfortable conclusion that I was unworthy of care. If I were the problem, at least I had some ability to control the situation.
It wasn’t until middle age, after years filled with talk therapy, that I finally began questioning that conclusion. I understood, at least theoretically, that everyone deserves love and care. With psychological distance and clinical detachment, I observed that my family had provided little of either. But I still didn’t feel anger.
Then Wrecking Ball arrived to show me that I had some work to do.
Shortly before my psychedelic-medicine session, I absentmindedly doodled an image of a woman’s head in profile. The head was filled with wobbly ringlets, each nested inside the other. A line of bubbles rose from her throat, across her forehead, and back to her crown.
When I showed the drawing to my regular therapist, she observed that the largest bubble blocked the woman’s throat. What, she wondered, hasn’t yet been spoken?
The night before my session, I created linoleum prints of the bubble-filled profile and strung them together with a pretty ribbon. They hung on the wall in my den as psilocybin and MDMA ushered Wrecking Ball into my awareness. That was in January 2020.
A few months later, COVID isolation now a familiar part of our everyday lives, I took an online yoga class in the den. At the end of class, as we transitioned into our final resting pose, the linoleum prints, still hanging on the wall, caught my eye. My therapist’s question came to mind. What hasn’t been spoken yet?
Suddenly, the answer revealed itself with startling clarity: As a child, I should have been loved, cared for, cocooned by safety. Separate from wanting those things, I deserved them. In that moment, the realization clicked—what I understood theoretically suddenly became known and accepted at a deep, personal level. It felt fantastic. I was making progress.
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Then came Mother’s Day, four months after the medicine session and 20 years after my mom’s death. I looked at the linoleum prints again. This time, a wave of rage worthy of Wrecking Ball’s sledgehammer surged from my core and rose through my throat. For possibly the first time in my life, I felt unbridled anger.
Shaking, I grabbed my journal. There was something I needed to say that I had never said before: “It’s Mother’s Day. You want me to celebrate you? When you’ve never noticed me, held me, loved me, much less celebrated me? No, you are the ungrateful little bitch. You are the one who couldn’t appreciate what she had—an adoring little girl who tried so hard to please. You couldn’t see me. You ignored me. You neglected me.”
Finally, there it was. Anger. Hard-earned and long overdue.
My therapist once told me that anger is the difference between what you deserve and what you get. After 10 years of therapy, I had only just started to understand the variables in that equation. Now, with the help of psychedelic medicine and the patient unfolding of post-session integration, I found healing in the freedom to be furious.
