Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy

Getting to the heart of what’s troubling you…

Sometimes our issues are so deep and protected that talk therapy barely touches them.

You know they’re there – if they weren’t, you wouldn’t have bouts of depression that keep you isolated or paralyzing anxiety that prevents you from enjoying your life.

You wouldn’t be having flashbacks of traumatic events that send your body into a panicked state or feel so numb that life feels removed from you.

Talk therapy may have helped a little, but it can only go so far – and your pain is deep.

It’s easy to notice the symptoms…

… but it can be hard to pinpoint the roots of your issues because they’re usually buried deep in your subconscious.

The root of anxiety, depression, and trauma responses might even return to infancy, stemming from the way your caregivers were or weren’t able to meet your needs.

As we go through life, we gather information from events that happen to us along the way, and we adjust our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors accordingly.

For example, if your cries were repeatedly ignored as an infant, you may have taught yourself to suppress your feelings of distress. You become so good at this strategy that as an adult, you don’t even know you’re doing it. But you have noticed that it’s hard for you to cry, and you wonder why others seem more connected to life than you do. This lack of connection makes you feel numb and lifeless, the result of a lifetime of emotional suppression.

The ketamine-assisted psychotherapy model I use…

… combines low-dose ketamine with somatic methods of processing. If we go back to our example:

When you suppressed your feelings as a baby, you did it through your body. You physically stopped your tears and buried your cries to squelch the distress from emerging. Each time this happened, these unexpressed feelings got stored in your body.

Somatic therapy brings you back to those storage areas so that you can unpack those feelings and let them go. For the baby who learned not to cry, it might look like crying out all the suppressed tears, which can then open the door to feeling more emotion and life force.

This type of psychotherapy is a cutting-edge technology…

Ketamine acts as a fast-track to your storage areas.

Since you’ve had years of avoiding emotion, it can be difficult to open back up to it. We develop a lifetime of strategies that keep us away from difficult emotions, and ketamine helps us bypass our strategies so that we can reach the storage areas.

This is what sessions look like…

Medicine-assisted sessions are typically two hours long.

Clients first spend a few minutes checking in with me about their previous week. The check-in often feels like a regular talk therapy session: clients report their challenges, victories, and latest thoughts and feelings about the process.

Next, clients self-administer the medicine, which takes 5-10 minutes to kick in. As clients lay down, I gently encourage them to stay focused on their bodies. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations begin to emerge with the onset of the medicine.

Clients spend most of the session focusing on their internal experience, allowing old memories to resurface, feelings to express themselves, and parts to emerge. I stay in verbal contact, encouraging clients to explore and process that which arises.

Ready to get started?

Call now to set up an intake appointment, where I will assess whether this type of medicine work is right for you. If it feels like the right fit, we will schedule several non-medicine sessions to prepare for medicine work. I will refer you to my provider who can prescribe ketamine.

Once you have your prescription, we can begin with medicine sessions. These sessions will be interspersed with 1-hour integration sessions in which we discuss your general process, the difficult feelings that are emerging, and how you make sense of it all.

It’s time.

You’re done with talk therapy.

You know it doesn’t work for you, and you’ve had the sense for awhile that you need something that goes deeper. Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is one of the most cutting-edge therapies available, going deeper than you’ve ever been before.

It’s time to give yourself your best shot at healing by traveling to the source of your issues with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. Call me today at (970) 673-0846.