Psychedelics Are Relatiogens

A New Frame for Psychedelic Healing Through Relationship

For years, many of us in the psychedelic field have used the word “medicine” to describe psychedelics. I understand why, as the word carries reverence. It speaks to the potency of these substances and their healing potential.

It also honors the depth of these experiences. For many people, psychedelics can open encounters with grief, trauma, memory, the body, nature, spirit, and meaning that feel profoundly healing and transformative.

I remember once asking a friend who grew up in Peru, “What do you know about ayahuasca?” Their response was simple: “It’s medicine of the jungle. When you’re sick, you go to the jungle, and the shaman gives you the medicine to heal.”

They did not refer to ayahuasca as a psychedelic. They did not lead with its visionary qualities, the colors, the fractals, or the intensity that people often associate with ayahuasca. They did not talk about it through the language of neuroscience, therapy, or non-ordinary states. It was simply understood as medicine.

That really stuck with me throughout the years. It was such a different way of understanding ayahuasca from how I was hearing people talk about it. Things have changed (this conversation was over 15 years ago), and now you often hear people refer to ayahuasca as medicine.

But back then, when I asked many people what they knew about ayahuasca, they often started by talking about DMT, visions, purging, or the intensity of the experience. But my friend’s response pointed to something different. It reminded me that the word medicine does not mean the same thing in every context. In some traditions, medicine is not just a substance. It is a relationship with plants, place, ritual, lineage, spirit, story, and community.

I still use the word medicine at times when talking about psychedelics. I do not think it is wrong to categorize these plants and substances as medicines. Psychedelics can be medicinal. They can help people heal. They can help us access parts of ourselves and the world that often feel hidden, exiled, or forgotten.

But I have also started to wonder whether medicine is too narrow of a frame for what psychedelics actually do.

In Western culture, the term “medicine” often points us toward the medical model: diagnosis, treatment, symptom reduction, pharmacology, clinical outcomes, and FDA approval. There is value in that, as research, accessibility, and safety matter. Regulated models may help create access, accountability, legitimacy, and public acceptance.

At the same time, when psychedelics are discussed primarily through medical claims — treatment, efficacy, symptom reduction, clinical indication — the conversation can quickly narrow toward clinical use, drug development, and regulatory approval. That pathway matters, but it is not the only way people relate to psychedelics. There are many contexts of use, which are all valid.

There is also another subtle issue. When psychedelics are framed primarily as medicines, we can begin to locate the healing power inside the substance itself. The drug heals. The compound does all of the work. The medicine becomes the central agent of change and gets all the attention.

That is where I start to get uneasy.

Not because I think the substance is irrelevant. I do believe there is power in the substance, as they produce such powerful effects on the psyche and body. But a psychedelic experience is never only about the substance. The ingestion of the substance is one part of the experience. The experience unfolds inside a much larger field: the person’s body, biography, expectations, relationships, culture, community, environment, preparation, support, and integration.

It is the relationship between all of these factors that shapes what happens.

A substance-oriented view can also potentiate harm when preparation and integration are minimized, or when too much power is placed on the substance itself. I’ve seen this throughout the years with ketamine clinics - just hook someone up to an IV because ketamine is the agent of change, vs the preparation, support during, and after the experience. Psychedelics are not like taking Advil for a headache, where the expected effect is usually narrow and predictable. Psychedelic experiences can be far more open-ended. We do not always know what material will emerge, how someone will relate to it, or what kind of support they will need afterward.

People also use psychedelics for many reasons: healing, self-exploration, spiritual or religious practice, creativity, community, rites of passage, existential inquiry, and sometimes simply for joy, beauty, or play. If the medicine frame becomes the only legitimate frame, we risk narrowing the range of human experiences these substances can support.

So I have been sitting with a more personal question: What is actually healing about psychedelic experiences?

For me, the answer I keep coming back to is relationship.

Healing Is Relational

When I think about my own experiences with psychedelics, breathwork, my near-death experience, and other non-ordinary states, I can see that these experiences helped me change my relationship to something.

They changed my relationship to my past, my body, grief, fear, purpose, and the larger mystery of being alive.

I remember one breathwork experience in particular where I was reliving a past experience and saw that I was not only suffering from what had happened in the past. I was suffering from the relationship I had formed with that past: the story I kept telling about it, the meaning I had built around it, the way I continued to orient toward it, and the way I let that past experience influence my decisions, emotions, and thoughts.

After that session, I found myself asking, “What would happen if I changed my relationship to that story and that experience?”

That question changed something for me. It helped me see that healing is not always about removing the wound. We cannot remove what happened. The past already happened. What can change is how we relate to it, what meaning we give it, and how much power it continues to have over the present.

Bringing Forth Relationship with Psychedelics and Other Non-Ordinary States

As I’ve been thinking about the relational aspect of healing, I’ve been looking for language that describes psychedelics beyond the word medicine. Psychedelics and other non-ordinary states have helped me examine, repair, and cultivate relationships with different parts of my life and experience.

This is where I want to propose the term:

Relatiogen.

What Is a Relatiogen?

A relatiogen is a substance, practice, or experience that reveals, generates, brings forth, intensifies, or reorganizes relationships - with self, body, others, memory, meaning, nature, spirit, and the wider field of life.

The word is a hybrid neologism. “Relatio” points toward relation, and “-gen” evokes generating, producing, or bringing forth. Like terms such as entheogen, empathogen, and psychoplastogen, relatiogen names a process.

A relatiogen is not simply something that causes an effect. It is something that brings relationship into view. It may reveal the relationship we have with our body, our past, our grief, our creativity, our fear, our family system, our sense of purpose, or the larger world around us.

The experience itself may open the door. Integration is where that relationship can begin to change.

This may sound abstract at first, but I think many people can recognize it from direct experience. It may even be helpful to pause and ask: How have my psychedelic experiences changed or made me more aware of my relationship to things in life?

Psychedelics often change how people relate to grief, family history, the body, the Earth, death, love, creativity, purpose, or whatever they hold sacred.

Someone may enter a psychedelic experience wanting relief from anxiety and find themselves confronting a family story they have carried for decades. Someone may come in hoping for relief from depression and discover that their grief is not only pain, but also love that has not had a place to go. Someone may reconnect with their body, not as an object to manage, but as a living intelligence they have been ignoring. Someone may encounter nature not as scenery, but as alive, intelligent, and something they are part of, not separate from.

In these moments, the substance may open the door. The healing is often in the new relationship that becomes possible.

This is why the word relatiogen feels useful to me. It names something many people know from experience but do not always have language for. Psychedelics do not simply heal in a mechanical way. They can reveal the relationships we are living inside of. They can intensify what has been hidden or avoided. They can reorganize how we relate to ourselves, our histories, our communities, our bodies, and the larger world.

Psychedelics are not magic bullets that heal everything in one session. Yes, sometimes transformative shifts happen quickly. But often, healing is a much longer process. Psychedelics can open beauty, insight, compassion, and connection. They can also amplify confusion, fear, grandiosity, avoidance, and unresolved pain.

A relational frame helps us stay honest. It reminds us that the experience depends on much more than the substance. It depends on context, preparation, support, trust, integration, and the person’s own participation.

This is also reflected in psychedelic research. Researchers and clinicians have long emphasized the importance of set and setting: the psychological, social, cultural, and environmental conditions that shape psychedelic experiences. Contemporary clinical models usually include preparation, the acute session, psychological support, and integration. The medicine is never only the molecule. It is the larger ecology of the experience and how the person relates to what emerges.

That is part of what I mean by relatiogen.

A relatiogen does not do the work for us. It reveals the work. It may show us the relationships that need repair, the stories that need reimagining, the grief that needs tending and expression, the body that needs listening, or the life that wants to be lived differently.

I think of my first psilocybin experience after years of struggling with depression and existential distress following my near-death experience. That experience did not magically fix or heal my life. But it allowed me to revisit my near-death experience and relate to it differently.

I began to see that some of my suffering was connected to the parts of that experience I had not fully integrated. Psilocybin helped me reorganize my relationship to something I had not been able to metabolize. It allowed me to develop a different relationship to the story I kept telling myself.

That changed the trajectory of my life. Not because the substance did everything. Not because of the visions I had. But because the experience helped open a new relationship to my own story, and that new relationship created movement.

This is where integration becomes so important.

Integration is not just remembering what happened during a psychedelic experience or extracting a few insights. Integration is the process of reorganizing life around what was revealed. A person may need to change how they relate to work, conflict, their body, loved ones, friends, peers, creativity, grief, community, spirituality, or responsibility.

A powerful experience has limited value if it never becomes embodied in action, communication, care, boundaries, or practice.

This is why I believe the term relatiogen can help us think more clearly about psychedelic work.

Psychedelics can be studied as pharmacological agents. They can be honored as sacred plants or fungi. They can be understood as entheogens, empathogens, psychoplastogens, hallucinogens, or consciousness-altering substances, depending on context.

Relatiogen names a specific dimension of their action: the way they change how relationships are felt, perceived, and lived.

For me, this feels like one of the most important contributions psychedelics can make to modern healing culture. We live in a time of profound disconnection: from the body, from nature, from community, from meaning, from the sacred, and from one another. Psychedelics may help us understand the relationships that need repair. They may help us see what we have been avoiding, what we still love, what we have forgotten, and what we are being called to participate in.

So the next time we ask whether a psychedelic experience was healing, maybe we can ask a more specific question:

• Did your relationships change?

• Did you become more aware of the relationships that need attention?

• Did the experience help you relate differently to your body, your grief, your past, your community, your purpose, or the world around you? Did it create more participation, more responsibility, more compassion, more aliveness?

The substance may catalyze opening and insight, but it is the relationship that carries the transformation forward.

Psychedelics are relatiogens: catalysts of relationship, meaning, story, and becoming.

Further Reading

Carhart-Harris, R. L., Roseman, L., Haijen, E., Erritzoe, D., Watts, R., Branchi, I., & Kaelen, M. (2018). Psychedelics and the essential importance of context. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 725–731.

Hartogsohn, I. (2017). Constructing drug effects: A history of set and setting. Drug Science, Policy and Law, 3, 1–17.