Dan: Can Letting Go Become Part of Healing?

A Note About This Story

This story reflects one person's experience.

Personal accounts can illuminate aspects of treatment that clinical measurements may not capture, but they cannot establish that a treatment caused a particular outcome or predict what another person will experience.

Dan's spiritual interpretations belong to Dan. They are presented as part of his experience—not as scientific evidence about consciousness, spirituality or the nature of reality.

When Achievement Isn't Enough

Dan was 35 and living in Miami when depression disrupted a life built around achievement.

He was a businessman.

Driven.

Goal-oriented.

Accustomed to identifying a problem and finding a way through it.

Those qualities can be extraordinarily useful.

They can build careers.

Companies.

Financial security.

A sense of identity.

But depression presented Dan with a different kind of problem.

It could not simply be outworked.

As his depression became more severe, he began researching alternatives to the approaches he already knew.

That search eventually led him toward psychedelic medicine.

Searching Outside the Usual Options

Dan explored both psilocybin and ketamine.

The two substances are often grouped together within discussions of psychedelic medicine, but pharmacologically they are very different.

Psilocybin primarily acts through the serotonergic system, particularly the 5-HT2A receptor.

Ketamine primarily acts through glutamatergic mechanisms involving NMDA receptor antagonism and downstream effects associated with synaptic plasticity.

Their legal and medical status also differs substantially.

Dan wasn't particularly interested in those distinctions as an academic exercise.

He wanted to know what might help him.

His experience ultimately led him to continue with ketamine.

He felt it worked better for him within the context of the medications he was already taking.

That is Dan's experience, not a general rule.

Medication interactions with psychedelic compounds are complicated, depend on the substances involved, and should be evaluated medically rather than inferred from another person's treatment story.

But Dan's experience illustrates something important.

The question isn't always:

Which psychedelic is better?

Sometimes the real question is:

What makes sense for this person, with this medical history, at this particular moment?

Twenty Sessions

Dan's relationship with ketamine wasn't defined by a single extraordinary experience.

According to his original account, he underwent approximately 20 ketamine sessions.

That matters because psychedelic narratives often focus on the trip.

One experience.

One revelation.

One moment when everything changes.

Dan's story developed over time.

And the number of sessions should not be interpreted as a recommended ketamine treatment schedule.

Treatment frequency and duration depend on individual clinical circumstances and medical decision-making.

What matters editorially is that Dan's account was not built around one dramatic breakthrough.

It was cumulative.

A process of self-examination.

Discovery.

And eventually, a different relationship with control.

When the Strategy That Built Your Life Stops Working

Achievement usually requires some degree of control.

Define the objective.

Develop the strategy.

Execute.

Measure.

Correct.

Repeat.

For someone accustomed to operating this way, control can become more than a strategy.

It can become part of identity.

Dan described himself as a perfectionist and an achiever.

There is nothing inherently pathological about striving for excellence.

Perfectionism itself is not one simple psychological characteristic. Researchers distinguish between dimensions that can sometimes support achievement and more maladaptive forms associated with excessive self-criticism, fear of mistakes and psychological distress.

The interesting question in Dan's story is not whether ambition is good or bad.

It's what happens when the strategy that helped someone succeed begins operating in places where it no longer serves them.

You can optimize a business.

It is much harder to optimize being human.

Learning to Let Go

Ketamine introduced Dan to an unusual situation.

During an altered state, maintaining ordinary control can become difficult.

Perception changes.

Time can change.

The usual boundaries of the self can become less stable.

Thoughts may become unfamiliar.

For someone accustomed to directing experience, the experience begins directing itself.

Dan gradually came to describe something different emerging from that process:

surrender.

That word can easily be misunderstood.

Surrender does not necessarily mean passivity.

It doesn't mean abandoning responsibility.

And it doesn't mean giving up.

For Dan, it came to mean loosening the demand that every situation conform to an expected outcome.

That distinction became increasingly important to him.

What Does It Mean to Surrender?

There is a paradox at the center of many altered-state experiences.

The harder someone tries to control what is happening, the more difficult the experience may become.

Letting the experience unfold can feel completely counterintuitive.

Especially to someone whose ordinary life has rewarded the opposite behavior.

Dan began carrying that lesson outside the treatment room.

Not as an instruction to stop pursuing goals.

But as a different relationship with those goals.

Growth without demanding perfection.

Effort without believing every outcome could be controlled.

Ambition without making achievement the sole measure of a life.

What began as an altered-state experience became, for Dan, a way of examining how he had been living.

Opening a Spiritual Door

Dan also described another change.

He became more spiritually open.

That doesn't necessarily mean he adopted a particular religion or suddenly acquired certainty about the nature of consciousness.

Rather, his ketamine experiences opened him to questions he had not previously approached in the same way.

Meaning.

Connection.

The self.

The possibility that life might contain dimensions that cannot be reduced to achievement.

Dan interpreted aspects of that process spiritually.

That interpretation belongs to him.

Science can study what happens to the brain during ketamine administration.

It can measure dissociation.

Changes in perception.

Mood.

Neural activity.

Functional connectivity.

It cannot take one person's altered-state experience and establish that the spiritual interpretation of that experience is objectively true.

But that doesn't make the experience psychologically meaningless.

Does an Altered State Have to Be Spiritual to Matter?

This question sits at the center of an emerging scientific debate.

Ketamine's antidepressant effects have historically been explained primarily through pharmacology—particularly glutamatergic signaling and downstream processes associated with synaptic plasticity.

But ketamine also changes conscious experience.

That raises an obvious question:

Does what happens during the experience contribute to what happens afterward?

The evidence remains unresolved.

A systematic review and meta-analysis examining ketamine and psilocybin found that subjective effects explained only a modest proportion of therapeutic outcome variation for ketamine.

More recent real-world research combining ketamine with psychotherapy has reported associations between experiences such as ego dissolution, psychological insight and subsequent symptom improvement. Association, however, does not establish that those experiences caused the improvement.

And a 2025 synthesis of qualitative studies found that people's experiences of psychiatric ketamine treatment are highly varied—before, during and after administration.

Dan believed the subjective experience mattered to him.

Science has not established that everyone needs such an experience for ketamine to work.

Both statements can be true.

From Perfection to Growth

Over time, Dan began describing himself differently.

Less attached to perfection.

More oriented toward growth.

The distinction may sound subtle.

It isn't.

Perfection asks:

Did I get it right?

Growth asks:

What can I learn from this?

Perfection tends toward a destination.

Growth assumes continuation.

For Dan, that shift affected how he understood both success and himself.

He could still pursue goals.

Still build.

Still improve.

But the objective no longer had to be an idealized version of himself who finally had everything under control.

What Changes Outside the Treatment Room?

This is ultimately where stories about altered states become more interesting.

An extraordinary experience can happen in an hour.

Life resumes afterward.

Emails arrive.

Relationships continue.

Businesses still have problems.

Bills remain due.

The ordinary world returns.

The question becomes whether anything from the extraordinary experience survives contact with ordinary life.

Dan described becoming more reflective.

More interested in self-exploration.

Less dominated by perfectionism.

More willing to surrender to circumstances he could not completely control.

And more open to spirituality and meaning.

Those are difficult outcomes to measure.

They also cannot be attributed exclusively to ketamine from an individual story.

But they were the changes Dan considered meaningful.

Feeling Better and Living Differently

Modern depression research increasingly recognizes that symptom reduction and functional recovery are related but distinct.

A 2026 systematic review found evidence that esketamine can improve measures of functioning in treatment-resistant depression, including aspects of workplace productivity. The review also highlighted an important research gap: controlled functional-outcome studies of racemic ketamine were lacking.

A 2025 systematic review similarly found improvements in quality-of-life measures associated with ketamine and esketamine, while noting the relatively small evidence base and methodological limitations.

That distinction matters.

The objective of mental-health treatment is not necessarily just to produce a lower score on a depression scale.

It is to help someone live.

Dan's story pushes the question one step further.

What if living differently also means reconsidering the standards by which we have been evaluating our lives?

Surrender Is Not a Treatment Mechanism

It would be tempting to turn Dan's experience into a theory:

Ketamine teaches surrender, and surrender treats depression.

We don't have evidence to make that claim.

Nor can Dan's story establish that becoming more spiritual, experiencing ego dissolution or relinquishing control is necessary for ketamine's antidepressant effects.

Research into ketamine response continues to show how difficult it is to predict who will benefit. A 2026 systematic review of clinical and demographic predictors found that most variables studied have not consistently predicted antidepressant outcomes.

So Dan's story should remain what it is:

one person's account of what became meaningful during treatment.

Not a mechanism.

Not a protocol.

Not a prescription for someone else's experience.

The Difference Between Surrender and Giving Up

There is another reason the language matters.

Dan sought treatment because he was depressed.

In that context, telling someone to “surrender” could easily be misunderstood.

Clinical depression can already involve hopelessness, withdrawal and loss of motivation.

That is not the surrender Dan was describing.

His version was almost the opposite.

It meant continuing to participate in life while loosening his insistence on controlling exactly how life unfolded.

There is a difference between:

Nothing I do matters.

and

Not everything that matters is under my control.

Dan's story sits in the space between those sentences.

What Dan's Story Can Tell Us

It cannot establish that ketamine causes spiritual growth.

It cannot show that ketamine reduces perfectionism.

It cannot prove that surrender is responsible for antidepressant effects.

It cannot establish that ketamine is preferable to psilocybin for people taking psychiatric medications.

And approximately 20 ketamine sessions in Dan's individual treatment history should not be interpreted as a treatment recommendation for anyone else.

But his experience raises questions that extend beyond ketamine.

What happens when achievement becomes identity?

What happens when the methods we use to control the external world are turned inward?

Can someone pursue excellence without requiring perfection?

Can an altered state help expose assumptions that ordinary consciousness rarely questions?

And what happens when someone discovers that letting go and giving up are not the same thing?

The Question That Remains

Dan spent much of his life learning how to achieve.

Set the objective.

Work harder.

Solve the problem.

Control the outcome.

Those strategies can build businesses and careers.

They are less reliable when the problem being solved is ourselves.

Dan describes his experiences with ketamine as helping him become more comfortable with uncertainty, less consumed by perfection and more open to questions he increasingly understood as spiritual.

Science cannot tell us from Dan's story whether ketamine caused those changes.

Nor can it determine whether what Dan experienced as spiritual reflected anything beyond the altered activity of his own mind.

But perhaps his experience raises a more useful question.

Control can protect us.

It can organize our lives.

It can help us build extraordinary things.

And sometimes it can become so familiar that we stop noticing how much of ourselves we're trying to control along with everything else.

Dan did not stop achieving.

He began questioning what achievement was for.

And that leaves a question much larger than ketamine:

If control helped build the person we've become, how do we know when it's also preventing us from becoming someone else?

Research Context

IV racemic ketamine is used off-label for psychiatric conditions including treatment-resistant depression. Current evidence supports rapid antidepressant effects in some studied populations, while questions remain about durability, optimal treatment strategies, long-term outcomes and predictors of individual response.

Research examining whether ketamine's subjective or altered-state effects contribute directly to therapeutic outcomes remains mixed. Such experiences may be meaningful to individual patients without being established as necessary mechanisms of antidepressant response.

Disclosure

Dan received treatment through Ketamine Lounge.

The founder and publisher of The Brazen Word is also a founder of Ketamine Lounge.

Dan's statements about his response to treatment and the meaning he attributed to his experiences represent his personal account. They should not be interpreted as evidence that another patient will experience similar results.

Experience Disclaimer

This story reflects one individual's experience. Individual experiences should not be interpreted as evidence that a treatment or approach will produce similar outcomes for others.

Medical Note

This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Ketamine treatment requires appropriate medical evaluation and supervision. Psychiatric medications should not be changed, reduced or discontinued based on another person's experience or without consulting the clinician responsible for their care.