me
caitriona McGarry BA hons MA iACAT registered
Founder/ART THERAPIST
I grew up in a pretty religious household. Not just your standard culturally Catholic Irish household, of the 90’s I went to evangelical bible camps in America where we wore long skirts and raised our hands as we sang our praise. On Saturday evenings we did Lord’s Day prayers as my dad passed around a goblet of wine.
As a teenager I rejected all that, as teenagers do, and became a devout materialist. If someone tried talking to me about the soul; I would have smirked. If they had mentioned emotions; I would have made my excuses to leave. I took my science-worshipping-self off to the University of Limerick and studied Psychology with a minor in Sociology.
After some travelling and a few years working in a primary school in North London; I decided to return home and study a master’s in Art Therapy in C.I.T/Crawford in Cork. I had always been drawn to art, though never very good at drawing. A melting clock of Dali’s that I saw as a fresh teen in Barcelona, struck at something deep within. I never considered myself an ‘artist’ but had always instinctively turned to art whenever I was struggling emotionally.
The first year of the course I nearly lost my mind. All the emotions I had been ignoring for the past 25 years, saw their chance and escaped. Intellectually, I didn’t know what to do with all the ‘hippy-dippy shit’ they were teaching me. I was forcefully “encouraged” to take some time off before returning to complete the course.
It was during this two-year break that I first encountered psychedelics and their healing potential. I would attribute a lot of credit to MDMA for curing me of my social anxiety, which was a very welcome, if unexpected outcome of partying. But when I encountered LSD for the first time, it was truly transformative.
I had all the closed eye kaleidoscope of visual beauty that one hears about and I saw my then boyfriends’ face be both a baby and a skull and every age in-between, at the same time. But more importantly I felt that the universe was letting me in on a secret; that nothing and everything made sense. And I actually understood this, it made actual sense to me. And I couldn’t stop laughing. It was soul-full. After that experience, my hippy dippy college books, started to make sense.
But it wasn’t just the drug. I don’t think the experience would have been half as meaningful if I hadn’t done all the preliminary work on myself through the art therapy process first. There was something similar about the psychedelic experience and the process of art therapy. I definitely think having done the year of art therapy prepared me for the drug experience. And I feel like the drug vastly sped up the therapeutic process. It was like ‘ten years of therapy in one night’, hence why we’re here!
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