Trauma symptomology and the Ketamine Experience
Trauma, the more severe it gets, the more it relegates feelings, thoughts, sensations and other experiences related to it, to the layers below awareness. This is due to the psyche’s inability to process, digest and integrate these contents into the conscious mind. For this reason, the traumatized individual gets used to avoiding through distraction, suppression of mental and emotional content, as well as outward avoidance of people, places and objects reminding him or her of any of these feelings related to said trauma. On one hand, this can render the individual unable to function in various important areas of life, because avoiding important activities cuts them off from learning and personal development opportunities.
On another hand, given that the traumatized individual is on some level conscious that suppressing the mental and emotional content is only a bandaid for a bleeding emotional wound, they buy in to a pessimistic story. That is because they don’t see a way out of using an inadequate strategy for the problem they are vaguely aware of on a conscious level, but deeply preoccupied with from a “felt sense” perspective.
The Ketamine Experience allows the avoidant individual to bring all this mental and emotional content to awareness in a safe container, a therapy session facilitated by a trained and experienced professional. This is followed by an integration session, where split contents of awareness that came up during the ketamine experience, be it through voices, parts of dialogue or monologue, visions, or other sensations or sensory perceptions, are integrated and no longer acting like pieces of a broken mirror that poke and bleed the surface of awareness reflecting distorted and fragmented views of the patient’s internal world, only for the patient to externalize them to outward triggers of fear and avoidance.
Integration is done through art making, story telling, body movement and other interventions. Now the individual has an opportunity to enact any behaviors that these fragmented and suppressed parts would have needed to stay healthily integrated into conscious awareness, having positive and prosocial roles in the system that are neither internally nor externally destructive or maladaptive.
Are you ready to do the work? Reach out to me to experience KAP at Pathfinder Psychotherapy and Coaching.
KAP and Narrative Therapy
While the ketamine experience is ripe for bringing to awareness contents that lie in the unconscious mind, an experienced therapist knows that that is only the beginning of the work the patient is doing in the session. That is the part of the work, the patient is left to do in the privacy of their minds. However, at the end of that timed experience of bringing suppressed mental and emotional content to the surface of awareness, the therapist’s work begins. Here is where the many modalities we are trained in, become helpful for the patient’s healing work.
One helpful way to process and integrate this suppressed content that has now been mined from the subterranean layers of the subconscious mind, is Narrative Therapy. You might find that very often the patient might feel called to write a poem, a short story, or tell a story through a drawing or painting. The patient might share this narrative with the therapist, and when asked what the meaning of the poem is — to give an example— the patient might not be very forthcoming with words that are not as filled with literary images and symbols as their poem was. At this time it is crucial that the therapist use a tool such as free association — almost like a Google translate — for interpreting how the unconscious speaks through metaphore and image, to the patient’s lived experience and repressed memory. Further, the therapist uses cognitive processing, as a way of sifting for valuable meaning making of these repressed memories and experiences into a story. That creates room for the story to be “rewritten” several times, whether it is a poem, an essay or a painting, until the new narrative is one that helps the patient more than creates illusions or misunderstandings about past experiences and the meaning they carry in the patient’s current life.
The empty Chair technique in KAP
In integrating the Ketamine experience it can be particularly helpful to use the Empty Chair technique. Unlike regular life experience when a person can make recourse to the learned habit of mental and emotional suppression in order to move through situations and challenges in as effective a way as possible, the non-ordinary state of consciousness is one where contents that have endured age old suppression in the unconscious to the point of appearing external to oneself, arise in awareness. It can be both a fearful and wonderous experience. The fear arises when it seems like traits, qualities, thoughts, knowledge and skills start to become apparent, the possession of whose by the individual undergoing KAP defies all logic. It’s as if a new psyche or consciousness has embodied the body you knew to identify with. However, for the same reason this can be an experience of joy. It might be that you find out you are fluent in Mandarin Chinese and you never had a clue about it. My choice of illustrating the point might possibly be seen as missing the mark, but little does it matter, as it illustrates this important point with more efficacy for purposes of clarity and understanding, than a more realistic example would. There is a reason why metaphor and myth are such powerful mythopoetic tools in fiction and other literature.
The question however becomes evident, how do we integrate these aspects we never even suspected we could possess or identify with? There are various therapy modalities, such as art therapy, psychodrama, body movement therapy, narrative therapy that can work quite well to allow suppressed parts the freedom of safe expression and integration into the psyche without shocking the system of parts. The empty chair technique serves as a mediator. Think of a job interview or an acting or dancing audition. The dance school let’s say is holding auditions for its new students. They first have to allow them to audition to see if they are good candidates for the program. Similarly, through the empty chair technique, facilitated by a trained therapist, the person undergoing KAP projects the newly emerging part on an empty chair and has a conversation to see how to better integrate it in the psyche. It can be an ongoing dialogue of knowledge aquisition and further exploration of possibilites, and a trained therapist can make helpful suggestions and provide needed perspectives and prompts. To fully integrate the experience, a commitment might be made. Maybe an aspect has come into awareness that loves precision, so a committment can be made to integrate this part in the whole system by assigning it a role as scheduler and committing to give it space and time to organize one’s day more efficiently. Examples and ideas are endless.
Some of the feelings, visions and sensations that come up influenced by the therapeutic administration of ketamine, or in a non-ordinary experience not initiated by the external administration of any substance, have an opportunity to uncover part of the pre-verbal history of the individual, or go even further into the past. This aspect of the ketamine experience can be particularly helpful for people who have unexplained phobias or themes of anxiety making little sense given their life experience. Take in consideration someone who has a fear of being stuck in an elevator. They go to see a therapist, and during the assessment report the feared situation has never happened to them as far as they are able to recollect. They’ve never been stuck in an elevator, but it is possible that this phobia might have originated when they saw a scene in a sitcom, or heard the anecdotal recounting of someone’s experience with a similar event during a group conversation. They weren’t quite sure at the time, but something was triggered in them, something they couldn’t quite place words to, only experience the uncomfortable feelings. They started at that time, avoiding taking elevators, with the frequency of this avoidance increasing, until this became an obsession. They might now have frequent vivid nightmares and the thought alone of an elevator even at the mention of the word sends them into panic.
The therapy client’s phobia can be very effectively addressed through ketamine assisted psychotherapy. The non-ordinary experience allows for the decontextualized fear to be placed in a context (factually real or not — that might matter little) that allows the individual to make sense of it in a way that normalizes the experience. It demystifies the physical sensations and by virtue of that, it removes the emotional charge that keeps perpetuating the anxiety and panic attack. One story or vision the therapy client might be able to experience during the ketamine trip is one where their mother is in labor and there are complications during it, with the doctor having difficulty bringing the baby out. During the ketamine experience, the client is immersed as if it was in a virtual reality setting, where they see, hear and feel their birthing out of their mother’s womb, and the coming out into the hands of the doctor in the hospital room. They hear the nurses talking while the client has reverted back to prenatal time during the ketamine experience. The client hears the nurses saying the baby is stuck. The client perceives darkness all around and a sense of being confined. This all truly explains the phobia of being stuck in an elevator. The client comes out of the ketamine experience integrating it by deciding that they have uncovered a prenatal experience of having had a difficult birth and barely making it into a full lung cry, the vital sign of a healthy birthing. They might connect the dots with remembering their Mom saying something about it, or maybe this was never talked about. However the client’s vivid experience during the ketamine trip seems undeniably real. The factual veracity of this recovered memory might not be of utmost improtance, as long as the client is able to recover from their elevator phobia and integrate the feelings and sensations associated to it, through this recollection.
KAP and past life and prenatal trauma
A happy update
The start of August, brings to mind the next season, that of crackling yellow and brown leaves on sidewalks. For people in Florida, Fall brings once again the opportunity to spend time outdoors in nature parks, trails, and preserves, or long walks by the seashore before sunset. This year, I am looking forward to Autumn, for another, very different reason. I have been selected to present at the Florida Mental Health Counselors Association 2025 Webinar Series. My presentation is on October 3rd, between 2:00 and 4:00 PM. I already put together my presentation and chose to give it the title Creative Arts Therapy as applied to Active Imagination, an Analytical Psychology technique.
Visit https://fmhca.wildapricot.org/ to find out how to attend, or reach out to me directly. I look forward to seeing you there.
Strong personal intentions but flexible external expectations
With the many portrayals of psychedelic experiences in the media, it is easy for someone uninitiated in this realm of experience, to create expectations about what a ketamine-induced state might be like. You might expect sacred geometry designs and objects in fluorescent colors to dance around you to the music of an Ascended or mythological being playing the flute while you float above your body and see it all from a bird’s eye-view perspective. Those experiences are certainly a part of ketamine-induced states and states arising from taking other psychedelic substances. However, it is a very real phenomenon, that sometimes a ketamine experience might just be a feeling, such as a feeling of calm or clarity.
On the other end it might be a tight sensation around your chest or forehead that creates pressure and tension contributing to feelings of unease and anxiety. These less technicolor-like psychedelic experiences are not to be underestimated in regards to their benefits for healing work. They are the gateway to better self-knowledge and insight and initiators of the more life changing experiences so many of us are after when doing the work of healing and transformation.
To better harness the healing effects of even less awe-striking ketamine experiences, Jungian Active Imagination can be a most helpful adjunct. By using Active Imagination, the healing practitioner invites the client to focus on the feeling, sensation or thought that arises, and allow it to express itself in the way that feels most natural and seamless to it. The feeling might become an image or a sound, and it might want to blare out loud, radiate in waves, or bounce from one corner of the room to the other, to finally rest gently on the client’s lap. The practitioner might finally ask the client what the best thing to do with that blob of energy might be, of course with its agreement. The technique of Active Imagination is a great gateway to more spontaneous ketamine and other psychedelics experiences.
Non-Ordinary Experiences Through Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
I want to take a moment to discuss Non-ordinary consciousness as I am getting started with providing KAP. Non-ordinary experiences can arise in a person’s consciousness regardless of any substances being administered externally. This is because the pineal gland in the human brain, also known as the third eye, naturally secretes ketamine. There are factors in today’s post-modern world that can have an effect on these natural secretions. Coming into contact with fluoride that is used for various purposes, including water treatment both for tap water and pools among other uses, can contribute to the calcification of the pineal gland to various degrees. There are other factors too.
I want to shift here from speaking in generalities to my own personal experience with non-ordinary consciousness, by way of sharing with you why I feel so glad I am now able to provide this modality of treatment.
In July of 2024 I moved in to the apartment style rental property where I currently pay the lease for the place I call home. It was a time of major transitions. I was moving after sharing an apartment with my soulmate for almost 4 years. I was also transitioning between jobs and considering my next income opportunity. Most notably, it was the first time I was living all by my self.
This was in the context of receiving holistic coaching services consecutively between two local providers and one who provided services virtually from Australia. I make a point to emphasize the coaching, because it was through the practices that I learned from these health providers that I was able to garner the opportunity of living alone and having a dwelling all to myself, that I learned to welcome the non-ordinary experiences not as something to be suppressed, but as something to be allowed into awareness, and even expressed as a way to release it.
I started drawing the visions I was having, and took this as an opportunity to join an art therapy online club and even get my personal certification as an Art Therapy practitioner. I intuitively guided myself through visualizations to regulate the emotions I was allowing myself to feel for the first time that seemed to scare me with the risk I would be overwhelmed beyond the threshold of what I could cope with.
I was using Amplification, an Analytical Psychology technique masterminded by Carl Jung to exaggerate some of the feelings and thoughts that barely make it into conscious awareness due to suppression, but poke the surface enough to create a feeling of haunting unease. Jung and other Analytical Psychologists use Amplification to allow these thoughts and feelings fully into awareness, so that they can finally be released, instead of staying stuck and poking the surface of awareness like poisonous needles. Without this technique of exaggeration, they would stay stuck and frozen in unconscious layers, perpetuating pathology through ages and even generations.
On one occasion, I left the leaving room in the early morning hours to get some sleep in my bed, only to be caught in what I thought was a channeling of demonic voices that were screaming at me and “tearing me apart”. I cried aloud in the middle of the night until they were gone.
On another earlier occasion I had a vivid vision that seemed to be directly projected from footage I had been exposed to as a child of horrific war scenes, that I had completely and totally buried below consciousness (or so I thought).
If it wasn’t for my various Holistic Coaches and Empath Channelers I was working with, I would have not dared to let my self off the hook without committing myself to a psychiatric ward. But I took it as confirmation from them that yes, I could allow myself to treat it as a spiritual experience and not hold myself to any scientific medical obligation to pathologize my experience.
I knew something was happening. I was able to connect the dots with the monthly readings on psychedelic therapies I had been initiated on through my subscription to the Psychotherapy Networker. So, I said, I can allow myself not to be too mystified by this to the point of overwhelming fear.
I started getting used to referring to this as my psychedelic experience, in conversation with people close to me. It was only natural to want to learn more about Journey Clinical, a virtual mental health platform training a network of therapists in providing KAP, and resourcing them with what they needed to do so.
When I received an email from them to interview for the opportunity to join their team, I had no hesitation. I have now completed my training, gone through the onboarding process, and have my first case here at Pathfinder that has agreed to KAP.
If you are curious or have an interest in anything I shared in this post, feel free to reach out to me at teda@woundedhealerpsychotherapy.com or dm me on Instagram at @pathfinder.psychotherapy.
Blog Post Title One
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Two
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Three
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Blog Post Title Four
It all begins with an idea.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.