Ketamine assisted psychotherapy is gaining more and more traction in the world of mental health treatments and Ketamine therapies. As the name reflects, Ketamine assisted psychotherapy combines two very powerful tools for purposes of healing, expansion and growth.
Ketamine and psychotherapy combined create an atmosphere that is conducive to exploration that is often hindered by defenses, avoidances and our ego’s. If administered correctly, safely, and under the right conditions, Ketamine can profoundly improve mental and emotional health that can break down barriers and quicken our understanding of deep seated conflicts. Studies show that differing methods of administration that range from Intravenous, Intramuscular, Sublingual, Oral and Intranasal can drastically help with various physical and psychological health conditions. It is also known to help with existential dilemmas.
If you are a clinician and are considering seeing clients as they are administered Ketamine, you may want to explore and educate yourself about the benefits of guided psychedelic therapy.
You may be wondering what guided psychedelic therapy is all about. Simply put as the name suggests, guided psychedelic therapy is like taking a journey into the wilderness with a guide who knows the terrain. Imagine hiking in New Mexico with a Shaman, who accompanies you as you explore the mountains of the Rio Grande Valley. Your guide is there to make sure you don’t trip on a jagged rock, and that you don’t fall off a cliff. He or she is also there to make sure you don’t slip off a mountain into the rapids below of the vast, racing and dizzying river. A therapist is the guide who makes sure you don’t get flooded with emotion during the administration of Ketamine. A therapist who accompanies their client on their trip will make sure that they don’t shut down or get completely lost. And they will help their client’s arrive safely from the place they began. T.S. Eliot said that “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And to know the place for the first time.”
Mind expansion in a supportive and safe environment is like a marriage made in heaven. Given all the various benefits of Ketamine therapy, there seems no better way to take a “psychedelic trip.” Scientific research has shown Ketamine to improve conditions such as depression, general anxiety, social anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and substance abuse. Under the guidance of their psychotherapists, clients who opt for the dual experience of talk therapy and Ketamine can access trance like states that are liberating and mind expanding. They can experience the dissociative effects with someone who becomes a witness and a guide, a support and a helper.
Ketamine helps free the minds of inhibitions and clutter. It has the potential to remove barriers that have been preventing growth, freedom, and fulfillment. The optimal dose of Ketamine can assist in breaking up stagnated and hackneyed thought loops, that repeat over and over and create mental fatigue and exhaustion. Ketamine and psychotherapy offer possibilities for real break throughs. And these breakthroughs come at a quicker pace than mere talk therapy without the psychedelic component.
Because Ketamine provides access to the unconscious mind while the client is lucid, the ability to take advantage of the brain’s neo plasticity is greatly enhanced in order to forge new pathways. It has been said that psychedelic medicines increase our sense of well-being, love and connection. And while love, connection and bliss are states often reserved for yogi’s mystics and guru’s, Ketamine assisted psychotherapy offer’s our clients the potential to achieve these states safely within a relatively mainstream setting. We can help those with deep seated anxieties, depression and trauma to reconnect. The combination of these two modalities offers the hope of happier and more fulfilling lives. It also offers the opportunity to see our lives and relationships with a new set of eyes, often “arriving where we began and knowing the place for the first time.”