Reliving painful memories during an ayahuasca ceremony was common, and the people who did tended to feel less emotionally reactive afterward — not worse.
A 2023 study surveyed people — including combat veterans — at ayahuasca retreats about whether they relived difficult past experiences during ceremonies, and how they felt afterward.
At three ayahuasca retreat centers in Latin America, 339 people — 33 military veterans and 306 civilians — completed surveys before, right after, and three months after their ceremonies. Reliving a painful past experience during ceremonies was common: about 6 in 10 veterans relived an adverse event, and combat memories were among them. Veterans, women, and people who reported having PTSD relived events more often than others. Across the whole group, a measure of how strongly people are gripped by negative emotion dropped modestly after the retreats — and the people who relived hard memories showed a bigger drop, not a smaller one. Because there was no comparison group and everything was self-reported, the study cannot prove ayahuasca caused these changes; but it suggests that difficult memories surfacing during a ceremony did not derail the benefit.
This naturalistic study surveyed 339 people — 33 military veterans and 306 non-veterans — before, immediately after, and three months after ayahuasca ceremonies at three retreat centers in South and Central America. Reliving adverse life events during ceremonies was common: 59% of veterans reported reexperiencing an adverse event and 47% a severe one. Veterans, women, and people with a self-reported PTSD diagnosis reexperienced at higher rates than others. Across the combined sample, trait neuroticism declined modestly (about 0.5 points on a 5-point scale), and participants who reexperienced adverse events showed greater reductions rather than worse outcomes.
This is naturalistic, self-report data with no control group, so it cannot establish how often memories would resurface without ayahuasca, nor that ayahuasca caused the neuroticism change. Trauma was not formally diagnosed — PTSD was self-reported — and the findings describe adverse life events broadly, which the authors caution may not generalize to clinically diagnosed trauma. Participants were self-selected people who traveled to retreats abroad, and the sample was mostly non-veteran; the 33-veteran subgroup was almost entirely male, so it says little about women veterans. The reexperiencing measure also depends on memories recalled during a psychedelic state. The authors frame the neuroticism result conservatively — reexperiencing did not appear to interfere with benefit, not that it caused it.
The veteran signal here sits inside a mostly-civilian sample, so it is best read as consistent with, not independent confirmation of, the small naturalistic veteran ayahuasca literature. Its distinct contribution is the question most retreat studies do not ask: what happens when hard memories resurface mid-ceremony, and whether that interferes with the outcome.
Read the full paper →