Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Saved Her Life. Now She's Writing About It!

More info, resources & ways to connect - https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/diana-colleen

This one is for anyone who has ever hit a wall that talk therapy couldn't break through, or who is just curious about what it actually looks like when someone decides to stop surviving and start healing.

Diana Colleen did not have an easy start. Born into poverty, sexually abused as a child, abandoned by her father at 11, sexually assaulted as a young adult and then blamed for it by the RCMP when she reported it. She packed her cats and whatever fit in her car and drove from Canada to Seattle to start over. For decades, she did what a lot of survivors do: stuffed it all down and kept moving.

By 2018, there was nothing left to stuff. She became suicidal. What saved her was an underground psychedelic therapist and a single MDMA session that, as Diana puts it, wrapped her in a blanket of love she had never felt for herself. "I didn't know that I am love until that day," she says. "And that changes everything."

Diana joins Even Tacos Fall Apart to talk about her healing journey, her training as a psychedelic facilitator and her debut novel They Could Be Saviors, which imagines a world where billionaire hoarding disorder gets treated the same way any other mental illness would.

So what actually is psychedelic-assisted therapy?

It is not the same as taking mushrooms at a festival. The difference is set, setting and most importantly, integration. You go in with intention. You have a trained facilitator holding the space. And after the session, you sit with a therapist and work through what surfaced. The medicine, as Diana explains, has its own ideas about what you need to heal. Your plan and the medicine's plan are often two very different things.

She also makes clear: it is not a magic bullet. "You still have to do the work," she says. Think of it less as a cure and more like ripping off a bandage that talk therapy might peel back millimeter by millimeter for years.

Why isn't this mainstream yet?! Blame Nixon. Diana walks through the political history of how psychedelic research got shut down for decades, why veterans and people experiencing homelessness stand to benefit most from legalization and why her biggest fear is Big Pharma swooping in and pricing out the very people this therapy could help most.

Countries like Australia and Poland are already moving toward legalized psilocybin therapy. Diana believes full legalization is coming in her lifetime, and she is ready for it.

The big idea behind the novel is that billionaires are hoarders operating at a planetary scale. Her book flips the cultural script from celebrating extreme wealth to recognizing it as a symptom of unmet psychological need. Psychedelics, she believes, could reconnect people to each other and to nature in ways that no amount of money can replicate. "Once you've seen that you're connected to everybody, you can't unsee it."

This is a conversation about trauma, healing, plant medicine, wealth inequality and what it actually takes to change your life from the inside out.

Keywords: psychedelic-assisted therapy, MDMA therapy, psilocybin therapy, mental health, trauma healing, psychedelic facilitator, plant medicine, ankylosing spondylitis, chronic pain and mental health, psychedelic legalization, Even Tacos Fall Apart podcast

Psychedelic-assisted Therapy with Diana Colleen