*Editor’s Note: Elephant is not your doctor or hospital. Our lawyers would say “this web site is not designed to, and should not be construed to provide medical advice, professional diagnosis, opinion, or treatment to you or any other individual, and is not intended as a substitute for medical or professional care and treatment. Always consult a health professional before trying out new home therapies or changing your diet.” But we can’t afford lawyers, and you knew all that. ~ Ed

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What Ketamine Therapy Showed Me About Grief, Masculinity, And The Shame Of Coming Undone.

I was undergoing ketamine therapy for treatment-resistant depression, a last-resort option after years of medications, when deep into my first treatment I experienced my first psychedelic vision.

I float toward a giant martini glass and disappear—not just into the alcohol, but into the glass holding the liquid, the table holding the glass, and the ground holding the table. To be clear, I don’t just disappear into these objects. I become them.

I am the liquor. I am the glass. I am the table and the ground, looking out into the world, happy to see I’m not in it.

I’m conscious enough to know the impossibility of what I’m experiencing. I’m a table that thinks? A martini with opinions? The ground relieved I don’t walk on it?

And then a conscious thought: Why do I want to disappear so badly?

The weight of the sorrow in that question breaks me. I cry in relentless waves. Each one rises and crashes harder than the last. My desire for self-erasure is so intense, I’m willing to become anybody or anything—alcohol, glass, wood, earth. Grief grips me like a vise and refuses to let go, forcing me to confront something I was never fully conscious of: I don’t want to exist anymore.

A Flood I Couldn’t Control

I’d wept through the entire ketamine journey, choking on a grief that made no sense. I felt like a human faucet, as if someone had twisted the valve on my soul and left it running.

I’m not the kind of guy who cries. I might get misty a couple of times a year, maybe during a sad movie. I didn’t even cry this way when my brother Robert died in a horrifying car crash decades earlier when he was only 24.

But now, it felt like something deep inside me had cracked, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop the flood from pouring out.

The crying would shadow me through nearly the entire course of my ketamine treatment, like a relentless tropical storm hovering overhead, drenching me in a downpour that never let up.

I was embarrassed by it, hid it when I could, and apologized when I couldn’t. Every time the tears came, I’d think, What the hell is wrong with me?

It wasn’t just the loss of control—it was the fear I was breaking some unspoken code of masculinity. You meet sadness with stoicism, I felt, not tears; crying was only acceptable in moments of private defeat.

Crying Over a Metaphor

My therapist, listened to my complaints patiently. “Why doesn’t ketamine give me literal visions—something I can actually make sense of?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for me to emotionally process the reality of what happened to me rather than all this symbolic imagery that takes so much work to figure out?”

He started to answer, but I cut him off. “I’m crying over metaphors! How does that make sense?  I can’t cry over the actual events of my life, the real traumas I lived through, but I f*cking lose it over a drug-induced cartoon?”

And with that, I exploded in tears. Not about the things I’ve experienced. Instead, I cried about how badly I wanted to disappear into that f*cking martini glass, the liquor in it, the table holding it, and the ground underneath it.

What He Didn’t Do Made The Biggest Difference

I cover my face with my hands. Therapist or not, I don’t want another man seeing me this weak and vulnerable.

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t tell me it’s okay I’m crying. Doesn’t hand me tissues. He doesn’t even seem surprised. He just stays with me—his voice calm, his posture steady—asking questions as if nothing unusual is happening.

It was, maybe, the most healing moment of the entire journey.

I had never cried in front of another man like that. Never without being punished for it. Crying was dangerous. Crying was weakness. Crying made you a target.

But my therapist just sat there. A big guy. Strong, masculine, grounded. The kind of man who, in another life, might have terrified me. But he didn’t flinch. He didn’t shame me. He didn’t fill the silence with reassurance.

And because he didn’t react, I didn’t feel like I had done something wrong.

Something about that—the contrast between what I had expected and what I got—hit me harder than the vision itself. I’d spent my life associating male strength with danger. Here was a man who used his strength to hold space, not dominate it.

The Strength of Not Looking Away

I didn’t realize how much I needed that. To be a man crying in front of another man, and not be diminished by it.

Being witnessed and not corrected—something in me shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But quietly, like a locked door cracking open.

Later, he said, “Your visions expressed a desire to become something that cannot be harmed, judged, or emotionally scarred.” He explained that the psychedelic visions weren’t riddles. They were a language. A kind of emotional buffer. A way for my psyche to speak without showing me everything all at once.

“It’s not that you’re avoiding grief,” he said. “You’re processing it in the only way your psyche allows right now—through the safety of metaphor.”

Maybe he was right. But here’s what I remember: I cried in front of a man. A strong man. A man who didn’t flinch, didn’t rush to comfort me, didn’t shrink from the weight of what I was feeling.

For the first time in my life, I came undone—and no one made me feel like less of a man for it.

I think that was the start of my healing.

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