Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
Are you KAP-Curious?
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 compiled 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
How Can Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Help Me?
If you’re feeling stuck in your healing journey, KAP may be helpful. You may be feeling like you have tried all of the approaches you can think of and those have helped, but it still feels like there is still a part of you that these approaches don’t touch – a deeper place inside that feels unhealed, and continues to show up as depression and anxiety, and unchecked trauma responses.
KAP can offer hope for rapid relief from symptoms of PTSD, Depression, and other psychiatric conditions when combined with psychotherapy. The research shows 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.
Keep in mind that results do vary.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy for Religious Trauma
Religious Trauma is two-fold.
1. Indoctrination of harmful beliefs about yourself leading to a deep feeling of separation from yourself or a loss of identity.
2. The trauma of leaving the religious community, a belief structure, and your understanding of reality.
1. The Trauma of Indoctrination of Harmful Beliefs
High-control religion destroys your relationship with yourself by indoctrinating you with the belief that you are sinful (worthless, shameful, unholy) and need to be fixed. It teaches you to surrender your will and live a life of sacrifice. It promotes self-judgment and shame.
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.
2. The Trauma of Leaving the Religion
Leaving your religion, or experiencing a crisis of faith, results in a number of possible losses:
The comfort and reliance upon your faith as a guiding principle in life, the loss of your identity (who am I now?), the loss of being connected to your religious community, the loss of former relationships with family and friends, the loss of your understanding of reality, the loss of your marriage, home, and family structure.
This can result in:
- 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 can help you access re-connection to your sense of Self, your identity.
It is proven to provide 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 may find a new way to radically accept others.
It can reconnect you with joy, with an understanding of humanity as interconnected. It can help you 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, rather than fostering your own internal growth and self-understanding. 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.
Again, keep in mind that results can vary.
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.