Ketamine Assisted Therapy...The Rest of The Story

We all live in a story.

Often, it is an inherited story that we thought was ours, but in truth, it was passed down to us without our knowledge or even consent. Sometimes that story is passed down through family values or beliefs. “We’re down to earth, hardworking people,” or “Our family just has a history of bad luck.” Sometimes the story is passed down in more subtle ways like unwritten family rules that teach us that it is weakness to ask for help or that our value is directly correlated to our productivity.  At other times, the story is passed on through trauma that was unresolved in the generations before us, so the behavior just continues because everyone thinks it is “normal.”

Then there is the story that our culture hands us. Whether it’s through media or institutional processes or the pressure to conform to social norms, we have all been given a story of what our lives are “supposed to be” according to some standard. These can be subtle at first like when little girls are pointed in the direction of the pink things and the doll section while little boys are taught to be tough and somehow learn to turn anything into a weapon of war. However, over time, these stories can become more insidious as we hold ourselves to some impossible standard of beauty, or wealth, or masculinity, or whatever. It’s usually a good clue that it’s someone else’s story about you that you’re struggling with when you’re constantly “shoulding” yourself – “I should be farther along in my career by now,” or “I should have been able to get rid of those last ten pounds!” It has been said that SHAME is an acronym for Should Have Already Mastered Everything.

Inside your own head there’s a story that you tell yourself about yourself. For too many of us, that damn narrator just isn’t a very nice voice. In fact, most of us would never want that voice talking to anyone else the way it talks to us.  And honestly, we’d quit listening to it if it wasn’t the background music for our own lives and wasn’t so familiar. So constant. So normal.

That story that we tell ourselves about ourselves is what brain science calls “The Default Mode Network.” I know, it sounds like some sinister streaming service that we forgot that we subscribed to, but it is simply our brain doing what brains do so well. The brain is designed to create shortcuts - to simplify things so that we don’t have to think, “left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot.”

One of the basic rules of brain science is this – neurons that fire together wire together. What that means practically is that every experience we have, and particularly the experiences that we “survive,” creates a neural pathway, so the next time we are faced with anything that even looks like a similar situation, our brain says, “we already know the answer to this one,” and goes into autopilot so we don’t have to think about it, we just react or adapt to survive. And then we wonder, “why do I keep doing the same stupid stuff over and over again?” (That’s my very edited version of the inner narrator’s voice.)

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if we could reboot that internal computer and rewrite the narrative in a kinder more loving tone?

The good news is that we can. In fact, we have multiple pathways to do just that. I’ll simplify it a little and boil it down to two primary pathways. There’s the long, slow, and sometimes difficult path of inner work. This can include spiritual practices, meditation, somatic practices like yoga or tai-chi, visualization, self-help, or even therapy. Each of these can work wonders in rewriting the script that the inner narrator reads to us, and each of these can be deeply healing. But like I said, it can be a long process.

However, there is a somewhat different path emerging and becoming part of the mainstream conversation. It’s technically not a different path, but it can make the other path feel a lot faster – kind of like when you listen to your favorite podcaster on a faster speed to get the same information in less time.

That pathway clearing process is the combination of psychedelic medicines and evidence-based therapy. Specifically, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy is the only federally legal psychedelic assisted therapy that is currently available while other psychedelics are showing promising results in clinical trials around the globe.

The good news is that we do have access to this profoundly powerful disrupter to the Default Mode Network called Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). Inside a trusting, trauma-informed therapeutic relationship, Ketamine creates a window of neural-plasticity which means those deep neural pathways that keep the narrator running on autopilot can be rewired, or at least disrupted, in a way that allows for accelerated growth and healing.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a cheat code by any means. It will still involve deep work and deep commitment to change. The saying is, “the medicine shows you the pathway, but you still have to travel it.”

But you don’t have to travel it alone.

As a KAP certified therapist, it is both my honor and my desire to walk the path with you. I can help you as you do the work to give that narrator a better story. A larger story. A story that is big enough to fit your spirit so that you’re not stuck in that old, small, cramped story that you’ve been trying to shoe-horn yourself into all these years like that pair of skinny jeans from high-school that you keep in the back of the closet.

We’ll work together before, during, and after your Ketamine experience to find the pathway through the dark forest, so when you come out on the other side, you’ll find that you were never broken after all. And you’ll get to rewrite your own story, become friends with the inner narrator, and potentially change the story for generations to come and for those that you love.

So, what do you think?

Are you ready to do some story writing or re-writing?

If so, I’d love to help.

After all, we all live in a story. Might as well make it your own.