KETAMINE-ASSISTED PSYCHOTHERAPY
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is an emerging, research-backed treatment that offers a novel way to find relief from depression, anxiety, PTSD, and eating disorders, as well as for complex and developmental trauma stemming from childhood experiences.
Access Your Innate Capacity to Heal
I’m passionate about the benefits of integrating Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy with longer-term psychotherapy because I’ve seen them first-hand with my own patients and in my own personal work. Ketamine is a medicine with the potential to cut through the noise - of both our inner chatter and external demands - and make space for something new to emerge.
So often, the ways we are suffering and the symptoms we bear are flares from deeper places of pain and unaddressed trauma. The access to an altered state of consciousness during Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) may allow for a softening of the ways we habitually protect the places that need the most attention while giving us the breadth of perspective, creativity, and compassion that our mind naturally brings forth when we get out of its way.
The longer we go about our lives without making true space for unaddressed pain, the more we begin to identify with a sense of stuckness or being resigned to living from survival mode. It’s easy to become hopeless or caught in anxiety deriving from that sense of so much being out of alignment. KAP can provide both the literal time and space to address what is at the root of our suffering as well as the catalyst of the altered state of consciousness that means we can finally work with and resolve what’s underneath, and live more fully and authentically.
An altered state of consciousness accessed during Ketamine-Assisted psychotherapy can serve as a catalyst for major internal and external shifts, including:
What to Expect with Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Treatment
I work in a highly personalized way to develop a treatment plan that fits your needs and goals. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is a creative modality that can include working with lower doses to facilitate more verbal sessions for processing trauma and working with relationship, as well as higher dose dissociative and mystical experiences.
Please reach out to discuss your specific circumstances. We can then work together to design a course of treatment that best suits your psyche and circumstances.
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Reach out for a free consultation call, so we can learn more about one another and have an initial check in around eligibility.
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We will schedule an intake session with me where we will go over your history, needs, and what you are working with in this current moment to plan your Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy treatment.
You will also have an intake with the Journey Clinical medical team, usually a psychiatric nurse practitioner, who will assess for medical and psychiatric eligibility and prescribe your initial dose if you are eligible.
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Taking into account what we’ve discussed in the intakes, we’ll begin preparation for your first Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) session. We’ll go more in-depth into your hopes and expectations for the session, as well as any concerns or anxieties that are coming up. We’ll draw on psychotherapeutic approaches and what we’ve learned about the ways psychedelics and non-ordinary states of consciousness have been harnessed for healing in traditional and historical contexts.
If you are coming to my practice solely for KAP (compared with integrating it with longer-term therapy) we will dedicate at least 2-3 sessions to preparation as this is an integral part of the treatment and is part of what differentiates KAP from purely medical based ketamine treatment (like IV clinics for example). We are establishing a solid set and setting for your upcoming journeys and making sure that once you get to the day of your KAP session, you feel as comfortable as possible with both me as your guide, and with your own relationship with your intention in doing this work.
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Next we will go through a series of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) journeys together, each of which will include intention setting, guided meditation/somatic practice, a customized playlist, as well as the journey itself. We generally begin the process of integration towards the end of the session. You should expect to be in my office for around 3-4 hours for the session itself.
We will do two initial journeys, ideally at a 2-week interval, after which you will schedule a follow-up with Journey Clinical to reassess your dose.
There’s opportunity to be creative with the frequency and scheduling of the medicine sessions thereafter, but I generally recommend a series of 3-6 weekly or biweekly journeys for maximum benefit, followed by more spaced-out maintenance sessions.
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Integration is a hugely important part of Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy treatment. We will begin gentle integration as you are returning from the journey, and schedule an integration session within days of your medicine session to allow for for insights and feelings you experienced during your journey to be woven into your everyday life and consciousness. I will also support you in making space for integration outside of our sessions, and tuning into the different modes of integration that might be supportive — from journaling, to art, revisiting the playlist, movement, and so on.
Ketamine-Assisted PsychotherapyFrequently Asked Questions
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Common uses of ketamine in conjunction with psychotherapy include treatment of depression, addressing trauma (both early childhood traumas and single incident trauma), working with stuckness and rigidity that may be manifesting as eating disorders or OCD, and addressing existential and spiritual concerns and growth. Ketamine is a legally prescribed medication being used off-label for the treatment of psychiatric issues.
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Ketamine is a medicine with a long track record of safe use as an anesthetic and analgesic in surgical settings and for pain management. It is classified as a dissociative anesthetic and is on the World Health Organization’s list of essential medicines.
More recently, ketamine is increasingly used as an off-label treatment for mental health concerns that have proven harder to treat through traditional routes.
Ketamine can be administered through various routes, including IV, injection, and sublingual lozenges. In my practice, KAP sessions currently use compounded lozenges that are held under the tongue for several minutes to allow the medicine to be absorbed.
Sometimes people have concerns around ketamine because of its reputation as a street/party drug with serious consequences. And others have prejudices against it as a healing medicine because it is synthetic rather than plant-based. When used in a ceremonial, therapeutic setting with the guidance of an experienced therapist, ketamine is rarely abused, both because the access is controlled and we work together to relate to the medicine in a sacred and respectful way that very often facilitates profound experiences.
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One way to think of the effects of ketamine is like an audio mixer for your brain, where levels are dialed up or down. As the medicine is taking effect, some of the normal channels of perception are dialed down, and you might feel further from your body, and from the type of ruminative mental chatter that often clouds out other signals. Other forms of knowing and perceiving are clearer and dialed up, allowing for insights and experiences that are harder to achieve in regular consciousness. Your motor and verbal abilities are reduced, so you’ll be comfortably lying down for the duration of the experience. Both to support you staying inwardly focused and because of the sensory distortions, you’ll have your eyes covered for the journey if that feels safe enough to you. This may dial up the “inner eye” in ways that often feel expansive.
The effects of ketamine also vary depending on the dose and the intentions of the session. We may decide together to use lower doses of ketamine to access empathogenic, heart-centered states in conjunction with a more talk-focused session. Higher doses generally lead to stronger dissociative/out-of-body experiences and peak states that might include transcendent and mystical insights that have been shown to positively impact symptoms of depression and trauma.
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Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is a hybrid treatment that combines medically-prescribed ketamine with psychotherapy. The medicine and therapy work together to enhance the benefits of the treatment. Ketamine alone has been shown to have fast-acting anti-depressant and mood-enhancing effects within hours of use. But stopping there — as many off the shelf treatments do — misses out on so much that ketamine has to offer when facilitated within a therapeutic relationship.
The non-ordinary states of consciousness that are accessed during a ketamine journey have the potential for mystical and transpersonal experiences, as well as a temporary broadening of our window of tolerance for processing challenging emotions and gaining a new viewpoint of the ways we have been coping that are perhaps no longer working.
Your therapist can help you stay connected with yourself and your larger intentions during the ketamine journey, while the medicine catalyzes your connection with an inner healing intelligence and helps you navigate places that have been stuck or out of reach.
Ketamine also increases the brain’s ability to learn and make new connections for days after the KAP session, allowing for therapeutic insights to take deeper hold. We will help you integrate your experience and work with additional insights that come with the return to your day-to-day life.
Despite its many real promises, KAP is not a magic bullet, and treatment is rarely linear. Working with expectations and disappointments can also be a powerful part of the process, and another way to attend to and process attachment wounds, longings, and build depth in the therapeutic relationship.
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We will set up a consultation call to answer any immediate questions and to get an initial sense of eligibility. We will then schedule an initial session where I can get to you know you better, and get a deeper sense of your intentions around Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) and what you are needing.
I will then refer you to Journey Clinical, who I partner with for the medical side of KAP. You will set up an appointment with one of their medical providers, who will assess your suitability for KAP both medically and psychiatrically. If they determine it’s a good fit, you’ll be prescribed enough medicine for the first two journeys.
I require at least 2-3 preparation sessions for clients new to my practice and I may suggest more if I think that is helpful or necessary ahead of the medicine work.
We will meet for an integration session within a few days of the medicine session, as this is a hugely important part of making KAP effective. There is generally at least one additional preparation session before the next medicine session. If you are doing a series of weekly KAP sessions, a combined single integration/preparation session in between is often sufficient.
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When you arrive at the office for a medicine session, we’ll generally spend 15-20 minutes checking in, revisiting intentions and any feelings coming up in advance of the journey. Most sessions I offer some form of guided practice (meditation and/or body-focused) to help settle in more deeply. I design this specifically for you and for each individual session. I’ll invite you to discuss other elements of ritual beforehand which we can integrate as feels right to you.
Once you take the medicine, you’ll be holding it in your mouth and swishing it around for around 12 minutes. There’ll be music playing and I also sometimes guide if you would like help in navigating that time. You’ll spit out the medicine and then transition to lying down comfortably with eyeshades. Most people transition to using headphones at this point, but it’s also an option to stick with the music through speakers.
The active part of a ketamine journey generally lasts for 45-90 minutes. The peak, or strongest part of the journey, is generally within the first 15-20 minutes, with a long tail back to regular consciousness from there. This part of a journey varies a lot. You might be quite verbal, and processing what you are experiencing, or much quieter and internally focused for the duration of this time. We will discuss in depth in our preparation sessions how to approach this part of the experience.
I structure sessions to allow for a gentle and gradual return to the room and to ordinary consciousness. We will begin to integrate the session as we come slowly back into dialogue if you’ve been quieter and more internal during the main medicine part of the experience.
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Please see my rates page for more information about cost. I’m happy to set up a consultation call to talk over your needs and to get a sense of how ketamine might help and what type of time and financial investment that means.
The therapeutic relationship is so much about alchemy.
