Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy

Hey there! Welcome to my KAP page! I'm sure you're here because you're curious about what Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is all about and how it might help you with your healing journey. 

Read on! I've tried to compile information here from trusted sources, and have added a little of my own perspective on KAP and religious trauma. 

Reach out if you have questions. I'd love to chat with you about it! And make sure you find the KAP FAQs page. There are resource links there.

-Julia

Why Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy?

Sometimes, it can feel like you’re stuck in your healing journey. You may be feeling like you have tried all of the approaches – CBT, Internal Family Systems, EMDR, Journaling, Meditation – and all of those have been helpful. However, it still feels like there is still a part of you that these approaches don’t touch – a deeper, more existential place inside yourself that feels unhealed, and continues to show up as depression, trauma responses, and anxiety.

KAP can offer hope of rapid relief from symptoms of PTSD,  Depression, and other psychiatric conditions when combined with psychotherapy. The research is showing that this modality has produced extremely effective, lasting results in many cases. KAP can amplify the healing effects of psychotherapy. Recipients often say that it feels like years of healing have been accomplished in 1-2 sessions. 

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
 for Religious Trauma

Religious Trauma is two-fold.

1. Indoctrination of harmful beliefs about yourself leading to developmental, relationship, and emotional trauma.

2. The trauma of leaving the religious community, a belief structure, and understanding of reality.

Trauma of the Indoctrination of Harmful Beliefs

High-control religion destroys your relationship with yourself, indoctrinating you with the belief that you are sinful (worthless, shameful, unholy) and need to be fixed by someone or something outside yourself. It teaches you to surrender your will and live a life of sacrifice. It promotes an insider/outsider way of viewing humanity that is filled with judgment and shame. It limits your access to healthy understandings of human development, and relationships.

These beliefs are enforced by a controlling and judgmental community that uses shame to control your behaviors.

This can result in:

- A negative and internally judgmental relationship with yourself.

- A loss of your sense of identity.

· Experiences of terrifying and painful trauma responses.

- Anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, people-pleasing, perfectionism, and self-abandonment.

The Trauma of Leaving the Religion

Leaving your religion, or experiencing a crisis of faith, results in loss of the comfort and reliance upon your faith, loss of your identity (who am I now?), loss of connection to community and oftentimes family and friends, and a loss of your understanding of reality itself (What is the point? What is reality?)

Results:

· A deep, disenfranchised grief – a grief that others do not understand or support.

· Difficulty trusting others out of fear of judgment.

· The belief that you don’t matter.

· A struggle to access a continuous and stable sense of Self.

· Existential trauma – trying to figure out what actually is real, and how to reclaim your own values, and difficulty trusting your understanding.

· Relationship difficulties with people you love.

How Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Can Help

The ketamine experience can lead to breaking down old, indoctrinated beliefs, and replacing them with your own internal truths. It leads to access of self-compassion, re-connection to your sense of Self, relief from depression, and a reduction in anxiety replacing with it with the deep and abiding understanding that you are okay exactly as you are. You find a new way to radically accept others.

It can reconnect you with joy, with an understanding of humanity as interconnected. You can access purpose, belonging, and self-understanding in profound and healing ways.

Reconnection to a Healthy Spirituality

Much of the pain in religious trauma is a spiritual wound – a separation from your understanding of your own unique and healthy spirituality. In high-control religions, your spirituality is defined for you by someone else, and you twist your internal orientation to meet those expectations and definitions. KAP is able to restore a sense of spirituality to its rightful owner - you. You can heal by beginning to define for yourself what your version of "spiritual" is.

Reach Out

If religious trauma is something you are experiencing, please understand that you are not alone. Help is available in many ways. Ketamine is one of many modalities that can be helpful in healing religious trauma.

Please reach out if you have questions or would like to talk further about Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy.