290: What if your husband entered The Void?
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services. Hi listeners. Before we begin, I want to address one aspect of today's episode,

which concerns the plant medicine, ayahuasca. Without going into details, if you're curious about a fuller perspective on the complex power of ayahuasca, we strongly suggest listening to this episode in tandem with our episode featuring Dexter Booth from 2020, which we rebroadcast two weeks ago.

titled, What If You Entered the Void? Today's episode, titled, What If Your Husband Entered the Void?, reflects a very different experience. We decided to release these two stories in close proximity to one another in order to offer a richer perspective on the tremendous complexity and diversity of experience that can happen at the juncture of healing, trauma, and psychedelic medicine. And now, we bring you today's episode, What If Your Husband Entered the Void?

As he came closer, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I remember distinctly thinking, what is happening? Because when I hugged him, it was like I was hugging someone I'd never met before. Something felt really different. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 290. What if your husband entered the void?

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I grew up in a small suburb of a big city on the West Coast to a father who was born on the train en route from Russia during World War II and a stay-at-home mom who is known for her super clean house and excellent peach lemonade products.

My dad was a little rougher around the edges. He had a boat in the driveway that he would be working on all the time and he'd be out there shirtless with a bunch of empty beer cans and I'd get a word or two out of him. Hello when I got home, not much else. I knew that when he drank, sometimes his mood would shift and I would kind of feel a burrow of discomfort and you know, dad's acting a little bit different right now. It has something to do with those Budweiser's.

I was always a pretty high-strung, nervous little kid, pretty quiet and into my writing. I always wanted to be the very best at what I did. Really pushed myself in school and sports with hopes of making my dad proud of me.

He required his kids to be successful in order for him to consider himself a success because his parents came here, had to restart their whole lives and learn English and work in gas stations because they couldn't use the skill sets that they'd had, you know, in Lithuania.

Everybody knew my dad in the neighborhood. He had a super loud, gritty voice and he was always chain smoking. He had a cigarette in his hand and one behind his ear. He was really an advocate of hard work and be the fastest and be the best and try the very hardest in whatever you do. And he was known for being the loudest dad at the track, chain smoking at the back and yelling, go get him, go get him.

And I was both embarrassed by his zeal, but also really focused on wanting to say, I'm so proud of you or you did good. I craved his approval so much because he was a wildly successful businessman and people respected him and he could be this incredibly charming and magnetic person. And when you were in the approval zone, life was really, really good. Yeah.

I was aware that there was different dynamics in my house than some of my friends. There was like this feeling of like you never know what's going to happen next and you're never quite sure what you're going to get in trouble for at my house. It escalated with my dad several times. He would hit us. He would lay me on my bed and get out his belt and it would leave marks and it was pretty horrific.

I remember screaming in pain in my room and my mom being somewhere in the house and pretending not to notice. I don't know if she could have stopped him if she tried. I'd like to think that she would have stopped it if she could have found a way.

I dove into track and field. I thought I'm going to just run figuratively and literally away from my problems. And I'm going to be really good at school and make this stop. I started developing a kind of codependent personality. Like I really believe that if I am smart enough, if I am good enough, then I won't get spanked.

I can be really fast at the 800 meters and I can be really, really good at writing stories. And then my dad will love me and not have to spank me. There was one particular race that I won against a girl in our little town who was my rival.

I remember being at the stadium and my dad was in the stands smoking his cigarette and I could hear him yelling at the end of the 800 meter race, "Go! You can get her!" And he was yelling so hard that the other parents had separated from them and I could see him in my peripheral vision.

I remember being behind Sam and seeing the little hat that she ran in and thinking, if I can find a deeper level in me, if I can leave it all on the table here and I can get a hold of Sam, my dad will be so happy. And that is the first and only race that I ever beat Sam in. It was by one one hundredth of a second and I collapsed at the end of the race and my body completely gave out.

And in the car on the way home, my dad said he'd never been so proud of me. It was a validation. It was a reconciliation of the suspicion I'd already had that performance was directly related to love. It was like a cement at that point.

Conversely, there was a cross-country race that I will never forget. I remember getting in the car, covered in dirt, and just absolutely deflated because I'd gotten fourth in that race, and I knew that that was unacceptable. I was too scared to talk when I got into the car, but I remember my dad rolling down the window, lighting a cigarette, and saying, you just didn't try. You just didn't try. And I was like, Dad, I'm so sorry. Like, I tried.

And he just wouldn't talk to me. He didn't talk to me for weeks. Around 12 or 13, when I had a growth spurt, I hit just under six feet and clearly did not have a track body. It became clear to everyone that I was not going to be an Olympic gold medalist. So the focus really shifted onto my brother and I could focus on my schoolwork a little bit.

My dad got a job transfer when we were 14 and I had to move cities just going into high school. And I had had a really closely tight-knit group of friends prior to high school and this really devastated me. Also coming from a small town and going into a larger city, I wore the wrong jeans and I had the wrong hair.

I started smoking cigarettes. I started drinking alcohol with my friends, just trying to escape from the pain of not only really not fitting in at home, but not fitting in at a new high school with a new friend group.

The guilt that I felt about drinking too much and chain smoking cigarettes when I used to be an athlete got worse when I really thought about how disappointed that would make my parents if they really knew who I was. I also kept my relationships with boyfriends from both my mom and my dad

There was an incident one night when everybody was wasted and I was blackout drunk. I passed out in my friend's car and I woke up and there was a high school boy on top of me and

I woke up the next morning, realized that he'd had sex with me and that I would need to go have a morning after pill because there was nothing used. And I didn't want to tell my mom because I knew that she would see that as disgraceful that I would get myself into that position rather than wanting to help me through it.

In the latter half of my teenage years, I was able to recognize that my dad's kind of withholding of attention based on sports performance was actually pretty messed up and was able to say, Dad, I don't want you to come and watch me at the track anymore or just not tell him about it.

I didn't actually have my parents even come to my high school graduation ceremony. So I started kind of not interfacing with my parents as much and more focused on my relationships with boys and with my friends. I started university and I went and headed towards a bachelor's degree in English because I knew that I could write

I could still get A's and B's and be like a total gong show who would go out till 3 a.m., get a couple hours sleep, write my paper, and then hit the bar the next night. Around 18 or 19, I had a job at a restaurant and guys started asking me out. My standards were fairly low. Like if they were remotely attractive and they wanted to actually hang out with me, like, my gosh, I just felt so privileged.

Everyone would get off their shift and sit in a booth and get totally shit-faced. And the goal for me really was acceptance. So I began to equate being more likable if I drank lots.

It wasn't lost on me that my dad drank a lot and it used to be a source of stress for me. But I also told myself, I'm young and this is what everyone's doing. And it's not hurting anyone. It's just making me more into the person that I'm meant to be. After university, I actually ended up meeting a friend of a friend at one of the bars that I was working with.

super handsome. He played sports and couldn't hold a job and still lived with his parents, but he had the shiny magnificent hair and he liked cool music. So therefore, he met my criteria. And I ended up actually getting pregnant. I was with him for a couple of months in my 20s. And I thought,

I want to keep this. I've never really even thought about having babies, but I want to keep this baby because it feels like maybe this is a person that I can love in all of the really good ways and all of the unconditional ways that I always wanted. Like maybe this is the way out of my destruction with myself and this kind of life that I don't really see going anywhere.

And so I did have my first son with this ex-boyfriend who left actually very soon after my first son was born because he also had pretty rabid alcohol problems and was clearly not ready to be a father himself.

I had my son who made my heart break open in a way that I never fathomed. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is what everyone talks about. Like, this is unconditional love. I didn't know. The next four years, it became really clear, really quick that I was going to be a single mom and that it was going to be really hard.

I had found a career with a little Silicon Valley startup. We moved back to my hometown and we had a new slate on life and it was going to be better now.

I remember when we moved into our own little place, my brother lived downstairs. He came upstairs and had a beer with me one night and he said, Danielle, you know, you still have your whole life ahead of you and you pick super shitty men, but you should get out there and get on some dating apps and start living your life again or you're going to end up like a crazy old cat lady and bitter at the world.

And I was like, but who's going to want me? Like I'm in my thirties. I'm a single mom. I have a destroyed relationship. I can't see that working at all. I went to bed that night. And then the next morning I started creeping around online and Googling dating websites and ended up on plenty of fish. And I went on a couple of dates. Mostly they were pretty benign.

But then on the third weird date that I had, I thought, you know what, I could leverage this into something, use my writing and maybe make some money off it. So I actually got in touch with an editor that I had worked with a little bit and I pitched a column that was really about single mom dating.

It ended up doing really well and getting a lot of people really interested in these dating escapades that I was having. And I actually went on the first date with Matt because I was looking for fodder for my column.

There's this plenty of fish profile picture of the most beautiful man I'd ever seen in real life. He had these green eyes that just were like shockingly beautiful. And he was wearing a mankini and had this perfect body.

If I can get a reply back from this guy and like go out on a date with him and then write about what is it like to go on a date with a total god slash the most beautiful person you've seen in your life, like when you're just an ordinary single mom, like what was that like? I was completely shocked when the next day I matched with him and he invited me to meet him for a walk on the seawall.

I saw him right away. He was hunched in the corner. He was bent over because he was going through something in his backpack. And he looked up at me and said my name and my heart stood still. He said, it's so nice to meet you. I was already thinking this is not going the way that I am planning because I expected there to be an arrogance about him or for him not to show up or something off-putting.

We were crossing the intersection to the seawall and I noticed people's jaw dropping as they were walking past him. And him like either not noticing or pretending not to notice, but it seemed like he was genuinely not noticing. He asked me to tell him about my life. Then he started talking about his life and I was almost immediately riveted.

He told me about his abusive childhood and he kind of fought through it and had become a model. Met this girl. They got married in their early 20s, but she left him super cruelly for this really rich man. He turned to drugs in order to fill up his pain.

He told the story of his life with just this frankness that I'd never seen before and such vulnerability that I just felt like I can't believe how open he's choosing to be with me and what is going on here because I don't want him to ever stop talking. We went back to the Starbucks and I said, I have to go, but it was so nice to meet you. And he said, I don't know the last time I've enjoyed a conversation this much. He gave me a hug and it felt like there were fireworks.

I'd never felt like this. I was a bit of a skeptic when it came to men. It was almost like a recognition of a kindred spirit. About a week later, I got a message from him and he said, "I can't stop thinking about our date. When can I see you again?" And at this point, I'd lost all interest in writing the column because I felt like there was something here that I had never experienced before and I wanted to pursue it. So I went on a second date with him

We went out for oysters and we also had some wine. And I was a little bit worried about the wine because he had told me that he'd struggled with addiction in the past. In fact, he'd gone to rehab for it. But he'd also said, look, that was over because that was sort of provoked by my ex-wife. But I'm really not an addict. And I thought that makes sense.

I probably drank too much for a long period of my life as well. And I probably still have to be careful. So for sure. At the end of that date, he asked me if he could kiss me. And then it was like just this amazing heart-thudding kiss. He said after, I haven't kissed anyone in a long time and I feel a little bit nervous. Like, thank you. I'm so excited about this.

I was so blown away by it because how does a man who has all of what a total catch looks like have also that degree of humility and that degree of nervousness? It was a couple of weeks after that, he told me that he had completely fallen in love with me. And it was about two weeks after that, that he moved in with my son and I.

I knew logically that, hey, you don't just like meet someone from the internet and then move in with them and you're like two-year-old son. But I was also like, but this is what I've been waiting for. When you know, you know. My mom said to me, this is the first guy that I've ever seen that is kind to you.

I was so ecstatic when Matt moved in with us. He would play games with my son. He would take him for skateboards down the street. He just became absolutely beloved. And I just couldn't believe my luck.

He was 29 when we met, and I was 33. So there was a bit of an age gap. And I thought, you know, if he wants to have more kids, at some point, we should talk about this in the next year. I brought it up fairly early. And I said, do you ever think that you might want to have kids? And he said, absolutely, with you, I would love to have kids.

I worried a little bit about Matt's drinking. Like, I knew that he drank faster than I did, but his addiction issues are in the past and they were with drugs. They were not with alcohol. Then there was a trip that I had to Los Angeles about four months after Matt had moved in with us. And I had all my meetings that day and was back in my hotel. And that night in LA, I couldn't get a hold of Matt on his phone, which was a little bit odd.

And I just texted him like, hey, like text me when you get home. I didn't hear from him at eight o'clock and then at nine o'clock and like something in my gut that was like, what is going on? Like, this is super strange. I called him. He didn't pick up his phone.

And so I called my brother. He didn't pick up. And so I texted his girlfriend and I said, hey, do you mind poking your head upstairs and just seeing if you can see Matt and my son? Because I haven't been able to get in touch with them. And it's just like a little bit weird. And she's like, yeah, sure, hon, I'll go look. And then she came back down and was like, no, I don't see them. And I was like, OK, something is really weird now. Like it's after nine o'clock.

And then at about 10 o'clock, I got a message from my brother's girlfriend. And she said, Nolan is downstairs with us. So don't worry, he's safe. I'm not totally sure what else is going on. But just try to get some sleep and know that your son is safe. I was up all night, completely frantic, couldn't do anything. And at nine o'clock the next morning, I get a text from Matt. And it just said, I'm so sorry. Something's happened. And

And he confessed to me that he'd had basically a relapse. He'd taken a bunch of Ativan and drank a bunch of wine and then taken my car and gone to his old drug dealer and ended up partying downtown. He had dropped my son off before it had gotten to that point.

So that was the first time that a major red flag was raised that, hey, this drug issue is not done and this could have impacts on my son and on me.

When I got home, he was in absolute tears and just said, you know, this had been such a life transition from where he was to being with us. And he was so sorry. And it was a one-time mistake. And he can't believe how much he hurt us and endangered Nolan. And this would never, ever, ever happen again. And I cried with him and said, I understand. And I'm just glad you both are safe. Let's just make sure this doesn't happen again.

Every business trip that I went on after that, I was a little bit nervous. And so I would have backup plans with like nannies to come get my son, but it seemed to be okay for the next few months. And I thought it was kind of a one-time thing.

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About a year after Matt moved in with us, we got married on a tiny beach with just my brother and his girlfriend and my son. We didn't include my parents because of Matt's mom. She was incredibly volatile. He'd shared that she'd been abusive through his childhood and he didn't have a relationship with her. And it was just a beautiful, simple ceremony.

But I had this inexplicable thing that happened to me on our wedding morning where I had this sort of like panic, like, am I doing the right thing?

I was like, why am I panicking? I've got this perfect man. Everybody loves him. Why do I feel this like profound sense of panic? And I talked to my brother's girlfriend. She's like, you're just a bundle of nerves. It's okay. This is what happens before you get married. And I was like, I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. Like something feels wrong.

But we went ahead and got married. And I remember thinking when Matt and I went to bed that night, it's weird that like, I'm so happy, but I feel so sick to my stomach.

I just had like this magical fairytale wedding on the beach with my dream man who was like quite literally the most beautiful person I'd ever seen inside or out who like decided that I was his person. And still I thought there's something so broken and so wrong with me that I can't even fully enjoy this because I'm suspicious that something is wrong.

I still didn't trust my gut. It was screaming at me. It was telling me there was something was wrong. And I still thought, it's me. There's something wrong with me that I can't fully appreciate this moment. It had been throughout my childhood. Like your dad hits you with his belt. Well, that's because you don't listen well enough. You don't get spoken to because you don't get first place. Well, that's because you're not trying hard enough.

It's sad to know that I just spent so many years not listening to myself because of a childhood that was rooted in not being accepted. About three months after we got married, I became pregnant with our first son together. I remember feeling really nervous about telling him.

We were in the kitchen when I brought the stick to him and said, we're having a baby. And he smiled. But before he smiled, there was a fraction of an instant where I could see a mix between panic and anger in his eyes. And I remember my heart plummeting and I could feel like a cement ball move through me.

And I was like, "Oh shit, he doesn't want this." And then he smiled and he wrapped his arms around me and he smelled like home and everything was fine. And I was like, "Oh, I imagined it." Then he was like saying all the right things and seemed to be excited. Everyone was happy for us, but I was nervous. I had a feeling that, "Oh God, is this going to be the change that he talked about that kind of initiated his last relapse when I was away?"

any drinking that he was doing. I worried that that could throw him over the edge, the increased stress of having a pregnant wife. But it kind of went away when Jude was born. I remember looking at Matt's face in the operating room. There was just this look of absolute joy. And I remember thinking, "Okay, now I can relax because now this is his own son and this love that he's never been able to experience before will be okay."

Matt went home that night that I gave birth because I had to stay in the hospital due to the C-section and he had to look after my other son. I remember him saying to the nurses, can you make sure she has enough painkillers? And I thought, oh, that's so nice, but also weird because I haven't been complaining about pain. But the nurses were like, yeah, she will give her meds for pain every three hours and she'll be fine. And I said, well, thank you for looking out to me. But I also felt like of all the things he would ask about, that seems like a strange thing.

And about three weeks after I came home with the baby, I had had some stitches that looked like they might be coming infected. I woke up in the middle of the night, kind of crept to our medicine cabinet where the extra strong painkillers were kept that they had given me post C-section. And the vial was totally empty.

I realized in that moment that Matt had taken all my painkillers from my C-section. This addiction is not actually over and this is worse than I thought. But I also had a baby that was a couple weeks old and a toddler son who was in love with this man. And I remember looking at myself in the mirror and holding that empty vial and I put the empty vial back in the medicine cabinet and didn't say anything.

Just prior to the beginning of the pandemic in late 2019, Matt had a fentanyl overdose. This was the second fentanyl overdose in two years.

I had known about his struggles with addiction off and on. There had been a number of close calls and had so many people relying on him. We had a little daughter who was four at this point and our son. They needed him so very badly.

I know that he's not going to rehab. He said that rehab was a total waste of time and they're all just money grubbers. He'd done that path once before. And I was finally at the point where I realized he's not going to get better by anything that I do. I thought, what do you do when you're about to lose the love of your life to addiction?

I had recently read Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics and some groundbreaking research that had been going on around psychedelics and addiction. I'd known a lot of people that had struggled with addiction and the prescriptions that are on the market don't fix it. Therapy doesn't seem to fix it. Could psychedelics possibly be the answer?

So I did some diving into it and I watched an episode of The Nature of Things with David Suzuki that had renowned Canadian doctor Gabor Maté. He has really gone into childhood trauma as a source of addiction and he was a proponent of ayahuasca.

And talked about it, doing wonders for people that had struggled, that were good people, but needed to get to the root of their childhood trauma in order to effectively mitigate it. And I thought, I wonder if we can get Matt to do an ayahuasca ceremony that might reset things for him.

Although he had his second fentanyl overdose in two years, and although it was only Narcan that saved him, although the doctors at the hospital pleaded for him to get some serious help, we just knew that he was so smart and so strong and so stubborn that he would say, no, no, I can kick this on my own unless we made this really compelling case of all of the people who loved him.

So I invited only a very small group of Matt's best friends and our family to a gathering to ask Matt to get help.

My mom was there. Our best friends and family were there. We all told stories about all of the things that we loved about Matt. He was an incredible father. We talked about his amazing patience and the way that he could put his mind to do something and get it done. By the end of it, there was no one in that room who was not sobbing.

This was a man in the prime of his life with young children who adored him. And they were all saying, do whatever it takes. And he said, yeah, I need to get some help. I will go and do this ayahuasca ceremony. And maybe this cycle will come to an end.

I don't think I've ever cried so hard in my life. I thought we have hope now that something is going to change because ayahuasca, from what I understood, basically repaves your brain.

I remember reading in Michael Pollan's book that it's essentially like a snow-covered mountain. Your brain has grooves in it from where the skis go down all the time. And the more grooved a slope is, the more ingrained a behavior is, the more likely it is to repeat. That's why the fresh powder days are so great. There's no ski marks. There's no pre-made pathways.

Maybe if we can get a little bit of ayahuasca snow into Matt's brain, then he won't feel like he needs to turn to substances when he's feeling hurt or scared or anything else. Maybe he just needs this repaving for everything to change. My friend knew of some healers on a nearby island that she was going to hook me up with.

I had a consult call with the head shaman. He asked me some questions about Matt's background and he basically said, look, he sounds completely ideal. I've done this kind of work and I've seen life changes that would blow your mind with people that have experienced addiction. And I think that I can help him.

I was like, how fast can we sign up and when can we get this done? And he said, well, there are some unknowns with ayahuasca. We will need Matt to fill in an intake form. And he sent over the intake form. It had a couple fields asking about Matt's mental health and his past addiction, his past history.

He didn't mention that his mom had been diagnosed with a mental illness, a cluster B personality disorder or anything else. But I mean, that seemed pretty moot. So we submitted the form back and we were told he could get him in with a healer that would be flown up from Los Angeles the following weekend for three nights.

My hopes were high that this represented a fresh new start, a release for myself from the fear of the repercussions of addiction and a whole new world for him. He left on the Friday night and then I was to pick him up at the ferry on Monday evening.

We had actually illicitly exchanged a couple of text messages over the course of the weekend because he wanted to tell me how much he loved me and how much he missed me and how much he recognized that I had been fighting for him and that I had loved him for so many years. He said it was among the most powerful things that he'd ever done, and he was so excited to come home. I could tell from the tone on the third night of the text messages that something was a little bit different already.

I drove to the ferry. My heart was flip-flopping and I was so nervous but also so excited. I came into the ferry station and he was wearing the blue coat that he always wore and he had the same hair. He is the same muscular handsome man that I can see from afar. But I remember thinking when looking at him, did they exercise there? Because he seemed to be walking a little bit differently.

And as he came closer, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I remember distinctly thinking, what is happening? Because when I hugged him, it was like I was hugging someone I'd never met before. Something felt really different. I was like, okay, well, maybe this is because it's good, like this new unpaved brain.

And I said, where's Eric? Eric was the healer that was also hired to come with him. And he said, we don't need him. We don't need any of that. And I looked into his eyes and they were black. And I remember thinking, why do his eyes look different? Is this like a remnant of the psychedelic? And he said, everything's going to be all right now. I know what I need to do and everything's going to be all right.

He was saying those words to me, but I felt in my gut that exact same feeling from our wedding day. Like something's wrong here and everything is not okay. I couldn't say, hey, why does it feel like you're a different person right now? Like, why do I feel so terrified?

So most of the ride home was silent. We held hands the whole time and it was like, good. But then when we got in the door, he looked at me again and he said, I know what I'm going to do. He had a big office and he had a big whiteboard and he started writing things. I noticed that his handwriting was different. He had a really unique cursive kind of way of writing that I've seen a million times. And the writing was completely different.

And then he turned to me and said, I am going to change the world. And I am going to do it with DMT. It's the key to biohacking humanity. And it is the way that we are all going to be saved. There's none of the spirituality bullshit that's necessary in fixing everyone's brain. It is just the DMT. And you can do it in an instant.

But it's obviously going to require some orchestration and coordination. I'll probably have to be out of the house in really long stints so that I can get it to the perfect amount that we can do these retreats where I can lead. We can charge $50,000 because this is life-changing stuff. We will never have to worry about money again. I need to go now and I need to buy some equipment because the stereo, the music needs to be just so. I'm on my way. I'll be back.

I was so flabbergasted. I didn't know what to say. Obviously, this didn't feel right. You don't come back from an ayahuasca retreat meant to combat addictions and any kind of childhood demons you had and figure out a way how to sell it differently. What? What about your job? And you said, I'm done with my job. That's just grunt work. This is my life mission. And it became clear to me the whole weekend.

My heart just sunk. I was trying to figure out what I could say that wouldn't anger him, but also that would make it really clear that this is insane. And then I was also still second guessing myself, thinking maybe this isn't insane and maybe I'm insane for thinking it's insane. And that's what he said. He's like, you know, you never support me.

When I make decisions about things, you are always second guessing my choices. You act like you're better than me because you think that I'm an addict. And I was like, no, no, no, no, stop. Like, not at all. I just I have some concerns about DMT specifically. I don't think you can just sell it to people. And from everything I've read, the spiritual part of it and like the ceremony, that is what makes it work. The work that you do around it, it's not just like you take it and you're better.

He didn't say anything, kind of looked at me and was like, I'm doing this. And I said, but what if it's between like me and the kids and doing this? And he said, again, I'm doing this. And he left the house. It was so fucking weird.

I expected a radical transition, but I didn't think selling DMT to the masses could possibly be a feasible one. Also, why is his handwriting different? And why does he seem to be this completely brand new human? Like it was so much to take in, but we had just suffered through a fentanyl overdose. My kids were in so much pain because since the overdose, their dad had kind of been in and out of the house and acting erratically. We were all kind of shattered and living on no sleep.

I was just like, okay, I'm just going to breathe through this and we'll see what happens when he gets back. He came back to the house and he had, I don't even know how much worth of stereo equipment and speakers that he was hauling into his office. And I was like, what is this? And he said, this is for the retreats. We need to get a tent and have these retreats where I distribute the DMT. And as I was trying to process that, he went out onto the patio and took a vape pen and

out of his backpack and like Matt had never smoked like in his life he was definitely not a person who had expressed any interest in vaping and he casually pulled out this vape pen and started smoking it smelled like grape clouds all around him it was nonchalant and as he's vaping I noticed that he's done a quick change at some point and he's wearing this gigantic pair of sweatpants

This was a man who would only ever go out in like fitted gym shirts or shirtless and shorts and he's wearing giant sweatpants and this loose orange hoodie but it was so beyond anything that he'd ever worn before and I also thought that's weird when did you buy those clothes? So the panic is rearing up.

I'm sort of going back and forth between the patio where he's vaping and explaining his life mission to my friend. And one of my best friends happens to be a doctor. And I'm explaining that he's come home. He has a life plan. He's quitting his job. His life plan involves selling what is still considered an illegal drug for an exorbitant amount of money. And she said to me, that sounds like a manic break. I didn't even know what a manic break was at the time, but...

I knew that it wasn't good. After a couple days of really erratic behavior, he was getting up in the middle of the night and staring out the window. I knew that he was doing psychedelics on his own and knew that that wasn't supposed to be happening post-ceremony.

So I actually did call the facility that did the ayahuasca retreat and said, "Look, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but I don't know if this is normal and it seems really strange, but he wants to actually go on this path himself like you're doing, but without the ceremony and I'm not sure what to do." And they actually ended up calling him and telling him that he needed to come back and talk through this. This was not a good idea to do without ceremony.

And that's when he left. He was like, fuck you. You betrayed me. You told the healer. I can't trust you. I'm on this mission by myself now. We'll have to find separate places to live. Even in the throes of the very most terrifying times of the last 10 years of our marriage, never had divorce been on the table or a separation or anything like that. He left the house. I didn't know where he went.

The next day I got a text message after he left saying he needed a divorce and he is on his path to healing. I started getting my text messaging blowing up, got messages on Instagram being like WTF. There was a picture that he posted the next day and he is shirtless standing in a gym with like his hands out on either side of the body like Jesus.

But with this blank stare, he was kind of anti-social media prior to this. Didn't post much, if at all. If he did, it was about our kids. So he started posting all of these things on social media. And then he wrote this bizarre post about his spiritual path as a father and a leader.

And I reached out to his best childhood friend and said, do you know where he is and what he's doing right now? I'm worried about him. And he's like, I wouldn't normally tell you. I'm his best friend. But I have to tell you for the sake of you and the kids that he is on a road trip. I think that there's a lot of drugs involved with it and that you need to look after yourself and your kids right now and not worry about what he's doing. Something is very wrong.

So his best friend had been at the intervention. Everybody had known that he had done ayahuasca and come back and now was on some sort of hell-bent road trip writing about his spirituality, posting half-naked pictures and sending me messages that fluctuated from, call the lawyers, I need a divorce, I fucking hate you. And then the next message might be, I can't believe what I've done.

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I knew that we needed help. I knew that this was bigger than the ayahuasca shaman, than any of our friends. So again, I called my good friend who's a doctor and she said, we need to find a way to get him into the psych ward and figure out what the hell is going on. It sounds like a manic break to me, but I am not a psychiatrist.

So the fact that he was like on social media posting pictures and doing strange things, it was attracting a lot of attention. But our friend was a paramedic and he happened to be the paramedic who saved Matt's life on the first fentanyl overdose. And so he had an invested interest in keeping Matt safe. And he was commenting on some of the social media posts saying, dude, you're

You need to get some help. Something's not right here. And Matt would then respond like, fuck you, go to hell. I never liked you. And like, just like crazy stuff. He was like this mild-mannered software engineer who was known as the friendly coach at the gym, the really weirdly good looking dad. But nobody could have predicted this strange turn. We were all just completely baffled.

My friend who works in the healthcare system was able to get him into emergency where they assessed him for a couple of days. He was upset that he was missing work, you know, and he wanted to get his project on the road and couldn't understand why he was being held in the hospital against his will.

I had a nurse pull me aside. I was at the hospital and he was on a good day with me. He wasn't mad about being there. He kind of wanted to sort it out. And the nurse said, you know, do you know how many patients I see after these ceremonies come in here? And I was like, what? What do you mean? Like after an ayahuasca ceremony? And she said, yes, if you have an underlying mental health condition and you do ayahuasca, it can result in a manic break.

And I was like, why have I never seen that in any of my research? Do you think that's what's happening here? And she's like, no, the psychiatrist has to make the diagnosis and he'll be the one to talk to you. But I'm just saying this is not the first time I've seen something like this happen. After he gets the diagnosis of bipolar disorder mixed with substance abuse disorder, he is allowed to leave the hospital with some medication.

So he got out of the hospital and came back home for a bit. But it was clear there was still major issues. DMT was being shipped to our house from Spain. There was a million red flags that made me think he's not safe here and the kids aren't safe. And they're asking me, why is daddy different now?

And it's not at this point just the way that he's acting. He's got his nails painted now, which is, again, like not problematic in any way, except for it's so out of character. He never had painted nails before. Also dyed his hair blonde and got earrings and started not wanting to eat, just only drinking green juice so that he could get to his ideal weight. So like dropping weight at an alarming speed.

I am scared to go to sleep because I don't know what he's going to do. And my friend, the doctor, she's like, you guys are not safe. He's really erratic. You don't know what he's going to do next because he's not the man that you've known for the last 10 years.

She and the paramedic that saved his life previously came over to the house and effectively kicked him out of the house for me because I couldn't, because I still thought this is just a demon that's come out because of the ayahuasca. Like this is just some weird dark spirit that's overtaken him. And he's going to be fine as long as I can get him on the right medication. We just need some time. Like something's happened here. But they told him that he needs to be sober and find his place until this can get rectified.

So that was when he left for good. After he left, there was a period of extreme confusion for me. My husband at the last 10 years for sure had struggled, but he was never a cruel person. He was always such a good father. So I didn't know how to reconcile with this man who now didn't seem to care about the kids, like wasn't trying to see them or ask about them and only sporadically liked me.

I kept thinking at first he was just going to bounce back to the person he was. One night, about three months after he left, he posted a picture of this woman and him, and she's wearing a sailor hat and a bikini. And he's got his arms wrapped around her and a smile on his face that I can tell he's high and drunk. And the caption reads, I am in love with this woman's name. Deal with it.

I was just like, shit, what an asshole. What is he doing? Like, what is going on with his brain right now? After I saw that picture, I realized there's no coming back from this. I just need to figure out a path forward with the kids. I, at that point, filed for divorce.

There was one night, about five months after he left, after this picture was posted of his new girlfriend, he said, I need help. And I was like, I can't help you. Like, you need to find your own help. But I still had this piece of me that remembered my real husband. I still didn't know for sure that this was all changed forever.

And I said, what is going on? And he sent me a picture of a back alley. And in the city that I live in, there is a part of the city where you can get drugs for very cheap in the back alleys. And I knew that he was out there about to go and buy some drugs, potentially another fentanyl overdose. And this time he might not make it.

Even though our relationship had disintegrated and he seemed to be this different person, I couldn't tell my kids that their dad had died of an overdose because he didn't have the support system he once had because he'd separated himself from his friends and family. So I said, I'll be right there. Like, don't do it. And I went and I met him at the hotel he was staying at. And he reeked like booze. And he said, come up to my room. And I did.

I think it was the next day that he had sent a message telling me he hoped I died of cancer. He also said that I'd always dated above my league with him. And it would go back and forth, too, with the kids. Like, he would want to see them half the time, and then he wouldn't want to see them at all. He basically cut off all his friends and family.

And he moved to a new house in a new city, found this new woman to be in love with and moved with her to Indonesia. He last saw his kids about two years ago. So they're pretty devastated. I was researching everywhere that I could, like trying to find answers for what can cause intense personality changes.

And then I went to our therapist. I had a session with her to get some guidance on next steps. And she's always very helpful in like, hey, take care of yourself, take care of your children, establish firm boundaries. And then she said, by the way, when you get home, Google narcissistic personality disorder. And so I did.

I'd read all the books at this point on bipolar, which was the diagnosis. But when I found a book on narcissistic personality disorder, I read two chapters and I could not stop crying. The beginning of our relationship when he loved me and moved in in the first couple of weeks, the denial of the substance being any kind of problem except for my problem,

The sudden change in personality, maybe that was not a demon that came out after the ayahuasca. Maybe it was the ayahuasca removing the mask that had been there the whole time. And maybe my entire life has been a total lie. Maybe I did not know at all who I was sleeping beside. Maybe it was all totally fake.

Everything that I thought was safe and kind and beautiful in him was actually just him mirroring me. And that came with the realization that I am the only person that I can ever fully trust. So the fallout from that and the amount of therapy that was required from that was fairly extensive. And to this day, it's a bit of a debate now.

Nobody who knows Matt will say that he didn't change significantly post-ayahuasca, but there are some people that will say, well, maybe it was the ayahuasca that changed his brain because of previous issues that he had that he didn't know about. Or maybe his brain was always like that and the ayahuasca just made it visible. So I don't think that that debate has been totally cleared up.

He doesn't talk to his mom, but I am close with most of his other family, including his uncles and his cousins. It was his uncle because I needed to know. And I was like, look, you know him better than anyone. Do you think he was this bad person all along and that nobody knew? Or do you think that this just happened because of like all the chemicals and that maybe the ayahuasca just exacerbated it? And he said, I think he's been this way all along and I'm so sorry.

I think that for the most part, ayahuasca can really help people. Done in the right circumstances with the right background in vetting and professionals and spiritual guidance from the people who the medicine belongs to, it can be absolutely life transformative. But for people who have things like narcissistic personality disorder, it removes the mask, all right, but then it shows the other side. The other side now becomes available to come out.

If you Google ayahuasca and narcissistic personality disorder, you'll be taken to a bunch of Reddit sub-forums and a bunch of people with a story just like mine. I can't think of anything worse than the person that you thought was the one person that you believed in and loved. Like, that actually didn't exist. Actually, that was a projection of yourself.

I spent a couple of years just sort of in sustenance mode. I have a full-time job and now three children that I have sole care of. They're all heartbroken. I lost something like 27 pounds. I couldn't get out of my house. My best friend would come in the mornings and literally pull me out of bed so that she could get me out for a run.

When you have kids and a parent becomes absent to them, your instinct is to say, "Daddy really loves you. He's not here right now, but he'll always love you. We can think good memories about Daddy." I now know that that's total bullshit because what you're doing when you say that is you're setting them up for being gaslit because love is showing up. Love is kindness.

Love is not hitting your kid with a belt. Love is not disappearing and fucking off and saying really mean things to the kid's mom. It's being there. So I don't say that anymore. You can point out all of the people that love the kids, but don't assign love where love isn't shown in action.

I have a therapist who specializes in breathwork and she's more holistic. And I've got another one who specializes in addiction. And he told me that I needed to work on my codependency and that my codependency was an addiction in itself. And the fact that I believed that by being really fit and

and taking good care of the kids and doing all the things right that I could keep my husband from being mean, from hurting himself, from doing all these things. That was its own addiction and, you know, no better than an addiction to drugs. ♪

The biggest revelation was figuring out how do I address my own core wounds so I don't keep repeating the same cycle. All of the therapy I had along the way hopefully will enable me from ever getting into a situation where I can't see someone for who they are again. There was a time about a year after all of this had happened where I passed a piece of graffiti when I was walking downtown and it said, you are enough.

I stood there and I stared at it and I was flooded with this feeling of relief. It was like all of the therapists that had been talking to me over the last four years and telling me to focus on myself, to stop focusing on trying to fix other people's problems and just be that I'm enough all on my own was this groundbreaking revelation that should be total common sense.

When I was in my teenage years, if someone had made me somehow understand that my inherent value is not at all correlational to how someone else reacts to me, I could have avoided so many mistakes and taken on the world. Now, I'm a woman in my mid-40s. Now, I'm finally okay with myself. That softness that I feel with myself has actually made me happier than I've ever been in my life.

When something is wrong in the family home, it's really easy to put up the perfect pictures on social media. And I can't tell how many people have said to me, but you guys were the perfect family. We would never have guessed. Bad things thrive in silence. When you don't tell your stories, when you don't share the trauma and the grief and the joys that shaped you, the same circumstances will continue to repeat themselves.

of violence, of addiction, of codependency. For me, I never would have known if I just kept taking pictures of my shiny life and posting them on Instagram. In hindsight, the falling apart needed to happen. Now I am breaking a cycle of staying and turning blind eyes and thinking that you can change other people with actions. And I'm hoping that in breaking that cycle,

My kids will grow up and be in an entirely different situation. We tend to think that if you're successful, if you look and act and have certain things, then you must be doing things right. I know now that's not the case. You are enough just by being the person you are. And that is way more important than all of the things that I was taught were important. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, Andrew Waits, and Aviva Lipkowitz, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westbrook.

Thank you.

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If you like This Is Actually Happening, you can listen to every episode ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey. She struck him with her motor vehicle. She had been under the influence and then she left him there.

In January 2022, local woman Karen Reid was implicated in the mysterious death of her boyfriend, Boston police officer John O'Keefe. It was alleged that after an innocent night out for drinks with friends, Karen and John got into a lover's quarrel en route to the next location. What happens next depends on who you ask.

Was it a crime of passion? If you believe the prosecution, it's because the evidence was so compelling. This was clearly an intentional act. And his cause of death was blunt force trauma with hypothermia. Or a corrupt police cover-up. If you believe the defense theory, however, this was all a cover-up to prevent one of their own from going down. Everyone had an opinion.

And after the 10-week trial, the jury could not come to a unanimous decision. To end in a mistrial, it's just a confirmation of just how complicated this case is. Law and Crime presents the most in-depth analysis to date of the sensational case in Karen. You can listen to Karen exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.