Altered States, Animism, and the Art and Importance of Return

Lorado

 

What altered states, 

including psychosis, 

may reveal about 

descent, return, and 

unfinished experiences.

Animism begins with a rather different understanding of the world from the one most of us have been taught. It does not begin with the human being standing apart from the world, observing it, giving it names and identity and deciding what is alive and what is not. It begins with relationship.

Land is not merely something beneath our feet, a forest is not simply scenery, and animals, plants, water, weather, ancestors and places are not objects arranged around human life. We exist inside a living field of relationships. Whether we understand that literally, spiritually, ecologically or phenomenologically, it changes the position from which we meet the world.

This becomes particularly interesting when we speak about altered states, because one of their recurring qualities is that ordinary boundaries can become more permeable. 

People may experience an intensified connection with animals, trees, land, ancestors, symbols, dreams or forms of presence that are difficult to place within our usual categories.

Time can become strange. 

Coincidence becomes charged with meaning. 

The distinction between what is happening inside and outside may become less clear, and the world itself can suddenly seem extraordinarily alive.

I wonder…

Psychiatry has important questions to ask here: 

Is someone safe? Are they sleeping? Can they orient themselves? 

Is their experience becoming frightening or dangerous? 

But these are not necessarily the only questions worth asking. 

An animist perspective allows us to wonder what happens when a person temporarily enters a much more relational experience of reality, without requiring us either to pathologize everything that occurs there or to declare everything they experience spiritually true.

This brings me to something I write about repeatedly: the movement of descent and return. 

Descent exists everywhere in the natural world. The light diminishes, leaves fall, seeds disappear beneath the soil, animals withdraw, the moon wanes, tides recede and winter comes. 

Life does not perpetually expand, progress and rise. 

It contracts, sheds, dissolves, rests, composts and gestates. 

Yet these movements are part of cycles.

There is descent, but there is also return. 

Something comes back into relationship with the world, although it is rarely exactly the same as before.

I think we have become quite poor at this second part. 

Modern life gives us many ways of stopping an experience, but fewer ways of completing one. 

We can suppress symptoms, distract ourselves, get through the emergency, stabilize, return to work, move on. All of that can be necessary.

But completion is different from cessation. 

A return is not simply the moment at which something stops happening. 

It is the process through which an experience finds a place within us: the nervous system settles, the body begins to understand that the danger has passed, meaning reorganizes, ordinary time becomes available again and what happened no longer has to be happening everywhere at once.

Nothing simply disappears

Nature gives us endless images for this. 

A storm passes but leaves the landscape changed. 

A wound closes and becomes a scar. 

Fire leaves ash, and ash eventually enters soil. 

A fallen tree becomes habitat for another generation of life. 

Nothing simply disappears. It changes form and re-enters the larger system.

Perhaps human experience is not so different. 

When something cannot be metabolized or completed, it can remain active. 

• An emotion continues to search for an ending; 
• the body continues to prepare for something that is already over; 
• the same relational configuration appears with different people; 
• the same fear awakens at particular thresholds.

We tend to call these patterns, triggers or re-enactments. 

I sometimes wonder whether at least some of them could also be understood as ‘unfinished journeys’:

something was entered but never fully left, 

something opened but was never closed, 

something descended but did not find its way home.

There is descent, but there is also return. 

Something comes back into relationship with the world, although it is rarely exactly the same as before.

This is where the comparison with what we call psychosis becomes especially compelling to me. 

I want to be precise here, because psychosis is not one thing and I do not believe it can be reduced to a beautiful myth of descent and transformation. 

Experiences grouped under that word arise in very different circumstances: 

trauma, extreme stress, sleep deprivation, drugs or plant medicines, mood episodes, neurological and biological vulnerability, isolation, medication changes, spiritual crisis, and often several of these at once.

Psychosis can be profoundly frightening and disabling. 

People can lose their orientation, become unsafe or suffer greatly. 

To romanticize that would be as reductive as treating the whole experience as meaningless pathology.

And still, when we listen closely to phenomenology — to what the experience actually feels like from inside — the resemblance to descent is difficult to miss. 

Another great reason to learn to deeply listen without judgement.

During psychosis, the familiar architecture through which reality is normally organized can loosen dramatically. Boundaries between self and world, thought and perception, symbol and fact, memory and the present, the personal and the cosmic may no longer hold as they usually do.

Meaning can intensify and multiply.

A song is not simply a song anymore. 

A bird, a number, a television programme or a stranger’s gesture may become connected to a much larger pattern. 

Private history and collective story can begin to overlap. 

Some people experience this as terrifying fragmentation; with fear and confusion as a result. 

Others experience revelation, communion, awe or extraordinary beauty. Quite a few experience both.

Different gazes

If we look at this only through the lens of dysfunction, the goal seems straightforward: restore ordinary reality as rapidly as possible. During an acute crisis that may indeed be the immediate priority. Safety, sleep, nourishment, regulation and enough shared reality to find one’s bearings again matter enormously. 

But my concern begins with what happens afterwards. 

1. What happens to everything that was opened? 
2. Where do the images, fears, insights, encounters and enormous meanings go? 
3. What happens when somebody is considered ‘clinically stabilized’ while the experience itself remains existentially unfinished…?

Our systems tend to be much better organized around stabilization than around return. We ask whether the voices have diminished, whether medication is working, whether someone can eat and sleep, whether they can leave hospital, go home or eventually return to employment.

These are important markers, but they do not tell us whether someone has found their way back. 

A person can be physically home and still be suspended somewhere between worlds. 

They may have lived through what felt like the most consequential event of their life and then discover that there is almost nowhere to speak about it without somebody either dismissing it as meaningless or affirming it too literally. 

Neither response necessarily helps.

Silence is not the same as integration

Sometimes the message after psychosis is essentially: 

‘Do not go there again!’ 

‘Do not think about it too much’. 

‘Do not give the experience significance’. 

‘Learn the warning signs and move forward’.

I understand where this caution comes from, especially when returning too quickly to highly charged material might destabilize someone. But silence is not the same as integration. 

If the only way someone can return to ordinary life is by abandoning the part of themselves that underwent the extraordinary experience, something may remain exiled. 

It is no longer openly present, but neither has it truly become past.

Perhaps this is one reason the image of return matters so much. 

In old stories, a descent is rarely complete merely because the traveller leaves the underworld.

Something must cross the threshold back into life. 

Sometimes it is knowledge, sometimes grief, sometimes a wound, a changed responsibility, a different relationship with death or a new understanding of what matters.

This does not mean that every psychotic experience conceals wisdom waiting to be decoded. I do not believe that. Sometimes what happened was principally confusing, painful and destructive. Yet even then, it happened to a person and became part of their biography. 

Integration is not the same as finding a spiritual explanation. 

It is allowing the experience to become part of a life without requiring it to remain the whole life.

There is an important distinction here between validating an interpretation and validating an experience. 

Saying, 

“Everything you perceived was objectively true,” 

is very different from saying, 

“Something very real happened to you.” 

The latter leaves space for curiosity without abandoning discernment. 

1. Perhaps an image arose through trauma. 
2. Perhaps sleep deprivation dramatically altered perception. 
3. Perhaps spiritual or cultural language shaped the form the experience took. 
4. Perhaps a symbol carried a profound personal truth without being literally true. 
5. Perhaps several layers were present at the same time. 

I am increasingly interested in our capacity to hold those possibilities beside one another rather than rushing to make one explanation defeat all the others.

Remain in relationship

This is also why animism interests me in relation to mental health. 

Not because I think we should exchange psychiatric certainty for spiritual certainty, but because an animist orientation reminds us how to remain in relationship.

Relationship is not indiscriminate belief. 

It asks for reciprocity, attention, boundaries and discernment. 

• A living forest is not therefore a forest in which every plant can be eaten. 
• A powerful dream is not necessarily an instruction. 
• An experience of presence does not automatically tell us what action should follow.

Being open to a world larger than ourselves should not mean surrendering our ability to discriminate, and this matters enormously around altered states. 

The alternative to psychiatric reductionism 

cannot be spiritual inflation.

Perhaps the more useful question is 

1. How we help somebody remain open enough to make meaning without becoming lost inside meaning? 
2. How do we honour what was extraordinary while restoring ordinary life? 
3. How do we accompany a descent without forgetting that there must also be a path home?

This is where return becomes a practice rather than an idea. 

Return may begin with very ordinary things: 

body, food, sleep, rhythm, daylight, familiar places, trusted people, shared language, small responsibilities, the sensation of feet on the floor.

In the beginning, these can seem almost insultingly simple next to the enormity of what someone has experienced, yet they are ways of re-entering relationship with the tangible world. 

Later, when enough stability has returned, there may be space to revisit the altered state from a different position — no longer entirely inside it, but alongside it. 

To tell the story, make art from it, explore what was frightening, differentiate symbol from literal fact, mourn what was lost, notice what changed, and perhaps discover what, if anything, is worth carrying forward.

Revisiting or reliving?

That difference between revisiting and reliving is important. 

When something remains unfinished, we do not always remember it as something that happened then. The body experiences it as now. A relationship recreates it now. A symbolic world opens again now.

This is familiar territory in trauma work, where reenactment can be understood partly as the persistence of experience that has never fully acquired a past tense. I wonder whether some experiences around psychosis may also benefit from being considered in this way — not as a complete explanation of recurrence, certainly, but as one layer of it. Perhaps what returns is sometimes not merely a symptom but material that never found somewhere to land.

That changes the questions we might ask after crisis.

Preventing another episode do matter, but alongside that we can ask 

1. What was happening in the lead-up to the experience, 
2. What became interrupted, what remains unresolved, what relationships were damaged, what helped the person come back and what made returning harder. 
3. We can ask what needs to be grieved, what needs to be restored, what requires clearer boundaries, what needs language, and what can safely remain unknown. 
4. Most of all, perhaps, we can begin asking what completion might look like for this particular person.

There is something deeply ecological in that question. Ecology reminds us that nothing vanishes simply because it has left our field of vision. 

Matter changes form. A disturbance continues to shape the system that received it. 

Human beings are ecological systems too, nested inside families, communities, histories, cultures and landscapes. Bodies remember. Relationships remember. Systems organize themselves around what has happened. When an experience cannot be metabolized, it tends to remain somewhere in circulation.

The importance of closing well

This is why I increasingly see the capacity to close well as an important part of mental health. 

We need ways of marking endings and thresholds, 

places in which story can be told without immediately being corrected, 

relationships sturdy enough to hold uncertainty, and 

people who can accompany someone who has travelled a very long way without claiming to know exactly where they went.

We need ways of saying: 

you experienced something immense; 

you are here now; 

we can help you find your feet again. 

We do not have to make the experience meaningless, and we do not have to turn it into revelation. 

We can become curious about what happened while continuing to protect the life that is here.

Human beings belong to cycles

Perhaps this is one of the gifts an ecological or animist lens can offer mental health care. 

Animism begins with relationship: not with the human being at the centre, looking out at a world of separate objects, but with the understanding that life is shaped through relationship with land, animals, weather, ancestors, place, season, and the more-than-human world.

This becomes especially relevant when we speak about altered states, because these experiences can intensify relationship itself. A bird becomes significant. A landscape speaks. An ancestor comes closer. A place suddenly carries enormous emotional, spiritual, or symbolic meaning.

There may be an encounter with God, the Devil, spirits, or other powerful presences. 

The universe can become intensely present, intelligent, connected. 

An awakening may unfold: a profound sense of unity, revelation, destiny, or of belonging to something much larger than the individual self.

In psychosis, these experiences can become overwhelming, confusing, or frightening, but they can also reveal how deeply human beings organize experience through relationship, meaning, and context. The question is not simply whether an experience is ‘real’ in a literal sense, but how it is being lived, what it is connected to, and whether the person can remain oriented within it.

From there, the ecological and animist lens opens another possibility: 

the recognition that human beings also belong to cycles. 

We are not separate from the rhythms we observe everywhere else. 

There are periods of expansion and contraction, opening and closing, descent and emergence. 

A crisis may end before the journey through it is complete. 

Return is not always automatic, and it cannot always be rushed. 

Sometimes it takes much longer than the acute episode itself.

Recovery, then, may not simply mean becoming who we were before. 

It may mean allowing what happened to find its proper place: 

neither denied nor permitted to occupy everything. 

The experience becomes part of the person’s history rather than the landscape they are still trapped inside.  

 

The descent acquires a return, rupture becomes capable of repair, and what once had to keep repeating itself can perhaps, slowly, become something that is remembered.

Something that happened.

Something that mattered.

And something that can finally be allowed to rest.

Anneke Sips

in, Wisdom of Psychosis