“Just take it in one gulp,” she told us reassuringly.

She handed us a miniature wooden bowl and a mallet that we could use to stir the liquid. It looked a bit like coconut water — with little clumps of white powder.

We weren’t total noobs here. We’d done ecstasy (long before it was called Molly) in sketchy nightclubs in the Meat Packing district. And mushrooms, most recently, at a bougie Aspen hotel for a friend’s 40th. But these were always “party drugs” — not marriage therapy.

Now, it was 11 am on a random Friday. And while the rest of the world was responding to Slack messages and our kids were ordering their Yogurt Parfaits for lunch — mom and dad were about to ingest a “heroic dose” of MDMA and mushrooms.

“What if things get really scary?” asked Lisa with trepidation.

“Oh don’t worry, we have benzodiazepine,” the therapist-turned-healer said in an attempt to reassure us. “It’s what a hospital would use to sedate you if you had a bad trip. It would immediately stop the hallucinations and panic attacks.”

Lisa and I gave each other a look of modest reassurance.

“And just so you know, I’ve administered hundreds of these sessions and not once have we ever had to use it,” she said in a gentle attempt to seal the deal.

We each took our mini-cup and threw back milky liquid like a shot of Tequila.

YOLO, I guess?

“Is everything ok?”

“Did something happen?”

“Oh dear.”

We were getting a lot of questions about this weekend couples retreat. On the surface, it did seem like a big deal to fly your in-laws across the country, rent an AirBnB in the Santa Monica mountains for 3 nights so you could get an “intensive” 15 hours of marriage therapy from a husband and wife duo.

I deflected these friends’ concerns with a pithy answer, “Yeah, you know it’s just the every day wear-and-tear of a decade of marriage.” And I wasn’t lying. In our pre-therapy intake form I had summarized our well-oiled marital machine:

Heck, we had even sidestepped the loss of intimacy that hits couples in their 40s:

And while that was kinda true — it also didn’t paint the full picture.

Nothing specific had happened. No cheating. Barely any fighting. Two pretty sweet daughters who were well-behaved and (for the most part) drama-free.