What Looks Like Rejection is Often Survival in Disguise
The room grew still. His voice dropped into the tone of a child, almost a whisper: “I knew no one was coming for me.” At that moment, his five-year-old self wasn’t a memory. He was with us.
In the middle of a ketamine-assisted couple’s session, his body began to shift. His voice thinned, shrinking to something softer, smaller, childlike.
I was seeing the boy in the room with us: shoulders curled, head down, already learning to disappear because his father never came to play, never reached for him, never looked for him.
And his wife wasn’t imagining it either. She saw him. Not as a story, not as a metaphor. Psychedelics have a way of making implicit memory present-tense, the young, hidden parts become as real as anything else in the room. She leaned forward and said softly:
“I see him. I see the little boy. And it’s not rejection. It’s survival. He was left alone, so of course he learned to do everything alone.”
For years, she had felt his withdrawal as abandonment. But in that moment, she didn’t see rejection, she saw the child who taught himself to survive.
This is the gift of psychedelic work. It bypasses the “trying.” It collapses the distance between past and present. It makes the unseen undeniable. And that’s where compassion is born not as a technique, but as a felt reality. She could still feel her own hurt, yes. But now she could hold it alongside his.
That shared witnessing shifted something between them. For the first time, they both saw the pattern clearly: her longing for closeness, her pain at being shut out, his instinct to retreat.
“The pain doesn’t go away,” she admitted, tears in her eyes. “It still hurts when he turns away. But now I understand why. I can hold both my hurt, and his little boy.”
Compassion creates a new language between them:
“When I feel myself retreating, I have more compassion for why I do that and I can speak to what’s happening inside of me.”
“When I feel you turn away, I notice the part of me that feels rejected and I can tell you that, instead of staying silent or reacting.”
This way, each partner names their own inner world, instead of blaming the other. That shift creates space for connection, even in the middle of an old pattern.
The pattern hasn’t disappeared. But now they can name it. They can speak to each other from the wounded parts witnessed, instead of accusations exchanged.
Healing happens when we dare to enter the room where the child still waits. With psychedelics, that room is no longer in memory. It is here. And when love arrives, even decades later, it still matters.
