Navy Veteran Credits Psychedelic Retreat With Healing Childhood Trauma

Michael Giardina sat cross-legged on a cushion on Mexico's west coast and drank tea brewed from ground psychedelic mushrooms. He was blindfolded when the psilocybin took hold, his body trembling as the compound moved through his system. What followed was what he would later describe to Anderson Cooper as both terrifying and necessary—a descent into darkness that somehow became, paradoxically, a path toward light.

"I went somewhere very dark right away," Giardina said. "I was terrified." But even in that fear, something shifted. "I kept coming back to... 'what a beautiful experience I'm having... I'm finally able to deal with these things.'" The retreat, organized by the nonprofit Heroic Hearts Project, was designed to help veterans process post-traumatic stress using psychedelics like psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT. What 60 Minutes discovered while documenting the 2024 retreat, however, was that the trauma these veterans carried often predated their military service by years or decades.

Giardina's story exemplified this pattern. His father, a military veteran and undercover police officer, had been emotionally volatile throughout Giardina's childhood—prone to explosive anger and yelling. The man had witnessed things in his own life that he never learned to process. As a teenager, Giardina turned to drugs to escape the chaos at home. He watched friends die from overdoses. At twenty, seeking structure and belonging, he joined the Navy. He served as an operations specialist in Oman and Bahrain, rising quickly through the ranks. "Wearing the uniform made me feel really proud about myself," he told Cooper. The military felt like family in a way his actual family never had.

But civilian life hit differently. In 2009, his father took his own life. Giardina found the body. The discovery fractured something inside him—he emotionally shut down, withdrawing from the world. Then, just months before the retreat in October 2023, his younger sister died by suicide as well. Giardina had contemplated ending his own life. When Cooper asked what he hoped to gain from the retreat, Giardina's answer was simple and desperate: "Peace. Like, freedom. I feel like I'm stuck."

When the psilocybin began working, Giardina's body responded involuntarily—his foot shaking, then his hand, then his entire frame trembling. He described it as an exorcism, a purging. He raised his hand for help, and a staff member from Heroic Hearts sat beside him, offering reassurance. "I just needed someone to say, 'It's OK,'" Giardina reflected afterward. "It helped." That simple permission—to let go, to release what he'd been holding—seemed to unlock something. He spoke of childhood trauma accumulated across decades, all the way into adulthood, finally finding a way out.

The Veterans Affairs Department has since invested in twenty clinical trials exploring psychedelics as treatment for mental health disorders. Dr. Shereef Elnahal, the VA's top doctor at the time, expressed optimism about the approach. "The trauma they've accumulated, not just from their military experience but even since childhood, is brought back," he told Cooper. "They're able to deal with it during these therapy sessions with psychedelics. We think this therapy and these drugs actually get to the root cause of the trauma." In one VA study, most participating veterans surfaced and processed trauma from before their military service—abuse, sometimes sexual abuse, experiences that may have contributed to their decision to enlist in the first place.

Almost a year after the retreat, eight of the nine participants, including Giardina, reported that the experience had been life-changing and that their PTSD symptoms had improved significantly. For Giardina, the transformation carried a specific weight. Through the darkness of the experience, he heard a refrain that stayed with him: the importance of being present for his two young daughters. Not just showing up for holidays or special events, but being there every day, offering love consistently. "It was a lot harder than I expected. A lot darker in the beginning," he told Cooper. But somewhere in that darkness, he found his way back to what mattered most.