Navy Veteran’s Journey With Alcoholism and Psychedelic Healing || Gringo

My name is Gringo. I’m a 20 year Navy vet. while I was in the Navy, I served on a nuclear powered submarines, retired in 2009. after I retired in 2009, I went into the federal government until I was medically retired two years ago.

I was meant to retire because of a, botched neck surgery and it gave me a little bit of a C5 palsy and I’ve lost a lot of, strength in my, arm right here. So I am no longer, working anymore. Before psychedelics, I lived in a dark place. It was, I was very, dark. It was, I alienated myself from people.

I drank a lot. I self medicated. I would look in the mirror. I didn’t like what I saw. I ended up drinking myself till I liked what I saw. And then when I liked what I saw, I had drank too much. By the time the rest of it caught up, I was pissed off that I was going through this.

I had a lot of suicidal ideations.

I was ready to check out.

How did you find psychedelics?

I found psychedelics through the president of our motorcycle club. He came down to Mexico, down in Cabo one time and he did some ayahuasca. he kept trying to sell it to me, but after you’ve been through the, the mental health program and the VA, it’s hard to think anything helps.

But he convinced me and I went down to Hermosillo and we did, it was an awakening. It wasn’t stuff that I wanted to see, but it was stuff that I needed to see. It changed because it made me aware. I was really scared afterwards. I did a lot of crying. Crying probably about a week every day. I didn’t know how to process it very well because there was a lot of stuff that I couldn’t run from.

I couldn’t run from once I was under the medicine. I couldn’t run from it and it brought to light where my issues were and I’ve never seen anything like that. It left me scared. It left me happy. It’s just, it was just a weird feeling.

How were you able to process difficult emotions?

The family I come from, it’s hard to talk about your problems because we’re under the, we’re under the thought that if you don’t talk about it, you don’t exist and you hide a lot of things. so it was really hard to talk to people, but the guys, my motorcycle club who did it with me, Chris, who has also been interviewed and my president chaos, we all went through it together.

So it was very easy. for me to talk to them because we have all experienced it. It was, it’s not like talking to some doctor or somebody on the street where nobody knows your experience. But the guys who were there with me and we went through it, it was easy for me to ask questions and do the experience with them and have them help me guide me through.

I think the community is very important because people are going through things for different reasons, but you always need support. And one thing that I found in this community is the support everybody, even if you’ve never met somebody and you go through a ceremony, when you come back, it’s like, they’re part of the family, the connection is there.

And it’s somebody who you can express yourself to, and you can talk to, and the stuff that you couldn’t talk to people before you could talk to them because you’ve experienced the connection. You’ve got the connection, you got the bond.

Speak on the stigma surrounding psychedelics

People talk what they don’t understand. You got a lot of people who are the old guard, and they don’t want to believe in this, but this medicine’s been around for thousands of years. It’s not like it just came out of a pharmacy. this has been around. People have used it. Native Americans, Native people to whatever country they’re from, they have their own brand of medicine, spiritual medicine.

People need to try it before they say anything or they make judgment. A lot of people, if you remember last year, they made fun of Aaron Rogers for doing his ayahuasca ceremony. And people were talking around it’s a joke.

And I knew exactly what he was doing, and people want to get run in their mouth and they don’t know what to do. So I was very encouraged by that. We need more people to speak up just to the naysayers because there’s a lot of people who do this medicine.