We are a highly-intelligent species and yet we are often not able to resolve or often even recognize the stuff going on in our own heads. Why is that?
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Your mind is like a forest. Footpaths (neural pathways) are developed in the forest a few different ways: repetition, trauma, pleasure, etc. Once you receive a stimulus, you generate a response. After a few times (or only once if it’s something super traumatic) you develop a neural pathway: If I see this, I do this. Or, if I hear this, I feel that. You’re the only person in the forest, so you go where you please and think what you want. When you invite a 3rd party to walk your forest, you’re allowing them to point out things you can’t see because you’re only ever likely to traverse your own existing paths. Talking to you in your own forest, a therapist might say “I’ve noticed that every time you get to this point in the forest, you always take this path that leads to you feeling sad. Let’s try this other path.” Your willingness to talk to a therapist in the first place is your license to try a new path, or at the very least to observe and understand the fact that you are indeed traversing the same paths over and over.
If you’ve come this far in my analogy, perhaps you’d be willing to go a little further: Cannabis lifts you above the treeline so you can see your destination more clearly and perhaps a better path to get there, but when you come down, you’re still in charge of walking those new paths yourself. Psychedelics like psilocybin are a like a massive rain storm on your forest that washes away some of your pathways and lets you create new ones. Take a peek at any emerging psychedelic therapy and you’ll see that we’re finally just barely starting to understand the brain a little.
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