u/sarj4

I am in the UK and recently had to visit A&E (ER for my American folk) for an unwell family member (they are okay now thankfully).

As we were waiting to be seen (6 hour wait time!), we were feeling agitated, anxious and hot. I remembered I had a Rose pulse-point spray in my bag and without thinking too much about it I applied it to myself and offered it to the 2 people I was with just as a little aromatherapy support for the stressful moment we were in.

I then started to read my book and I was already feeling calm and noticed the familiar gentle presence/atmosphere that I associate with Rose. Around 15 minutes later though I began to notice some disturbing intrusive thoughts start to appear out of nowhere. I felt a lot of disgust, panic and resistance and I was doing a lot internally to remain present and not spiral. I should mention at this point that intrusive thoughts aren't a new experience for me, I started to experience them last year during a difficult period and noticed it was during moments when I might be feeling disarmed sometimes at the start of a meditation for example. It hasn't bothered me for a long time, at least half a year, thankfully, so having them come up again has been really distressing.

I guess I am now trying to understand the experience without jumping to conclusions as to why it happened. Part of me has wondered whether there could have been some connection with me using rose and this worries me. One way I could describe it is like I felt quite open energetically and it felt like that softening made me less defended and then disturbing psychological material surfaced after that I couldn't reconcile. And because of the environment I was in I couldn't easily distract or soothe myself - I could have tried more rose but at the time I was worried that it had caused it in some way? So dealing with paranoia and helplessness I guess.

As I'm learning more about herbs and trying to figure out how to have a respectful relationship with plants I don't want a) to misjudge the appropriate times to reach for them for support or b) to assume that a traditional association with a plant will always affect me or someone else in the same way.

So I am really curious about how practising herbalists would think about this.

Is it possible that me using Rose at that time could have caused this? Do herbs when used in this way sometimes produce unexpected experiences? Like in this case it was the opposite of anxiety reducing!

I'm particularly interested in perspectives of people who work with the energetic side of plants but I'm open to other interpretations