Ketamine is an incredibly safe medicine that can catapult therapeutic growth and healing.

In the past couple of decades, ketamine has come to be recognized as a powerful catalyst for mental health. While it has perhaps become best known as an effective treatment for treatment resistant depression and PTSD, it can also be used at lower doses in therapy sessions to increase insight, promote neuroplasticity, and reduce some of the blocks that often arise and slow down the work.

The way I practice KAP involves you meeting with an outside prescriber who can prescribe you sublingual lozenges or troches at relatively low doses that you then bring to session and self-administer. At low doses, you are still present and aware enough to participate in therapy but with the benefit of a temporary reduction in the functionality of the default mode network. The DMN can be understood as the ego, or protector parts in the IFS tradition, and is responsible for those “I’m not good enough,” “I’m undeserving,” “I can’t trust others,” “I’ll be alone forever,” thoughts that can be so frustrating and persistent. Ketamine helps soften these thoughts and shifts our relationship to them while also boosting neuroplasticity, so we can begin to change long-held patterns that contribute to our suffering, promoting increased flexibility, self-compassion, relaxation, and creativity.

What I have seen consistently is ketamine’s ability to help people access their inner wisdom and healer and I am honored to witness this process.

I schedule 3-4 hours for KAP sessions. Lozenges and troches typically take about 20 minutes for you to begin to feel the effects, which then last 60-90 minutes, during which time we engage in what looks like a regular therapy session. We then have time after the medicine has worn off to finish processing and integration.