Ketamine - Assisted Psychotherapy is much more than just taking medicine in a therapy office. Explore what makes the KAP experience unique.
Preparation
Just by contemplating ketamine- assisted psychotherapy, your inner healer is guiding you in deciding whether KAP is right for you. But you don’t have to figure this out alone. Amethyst Integration’s thorough screening and intake processes not only help us determine whether you are a good fit for our services, but we aim to be transparent in our treatment model and approach so that you can decide whether Amethyst Integration is the right fit for you.
If together we decide to move forward, careful attention is given to your hopes and intentions in taking this step. We listen to your preferences from music to physical touch and proximity from your clinician. You are provided guidance but also encouragement to listen to your own intuition about what feels right as we prepare you for your ketamine journey. Treatment is individualized and feedback is requested every step of the way.
Ketamine - Assisted Psychotherapy
Often one of the goals of traditional talk therapy is to help make the subconscious conscious. It is through this increase in awareness that we uncover suppressed emotions, motivations and past experiences that continue to guide our behavior and mood. Talk therapy is often a long and slow process as we have psychological defense structures that resist the uncovering of subconscious material. Although there to protect us from becoming overwhelmed, defenses also keep us stuck in the same patterns of behaving and relating which contribute to mental health symptoms.
Ketamine has the potential to lower the psychological defenses in such a way that subconscious material is accessed much easier and with less risk of overwhelming the individual. In KAP, the psychotherapist helps by creating a safe space so that the psyche feels secure in letting down those defenses. Often new revelations about ourselves, our pasts and the roots of our mental health struggles become more clear. Sometimes embodied experiences of belonging or being one with the universe occur which can provide new hope and perspective on life. It’s the psychotherapist’s role to help participants hold onto these experiences so that they can apply them to their life outside of the therapy room.
Integration
Although KAP sessions themselves often get highlighted as transformative, it is within the integration work where genuine, lasting change takes place. To integrate means to combine parts into a cohesive whole. Within the KAP model, integration is seen as the process of taking the new information or lessons gained during KAP sessions and incorporating them into one’s larger understanding of their past, present and future.
Another important part of integration is to take advantage of the neural plastic effects offered by ketamine to work on establishing better habits and practices to support our mental health. True recovery from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress occurs when we nurture every facet of our lives that make us human. By identifying which areas of life have been most impacted by our mental health and taking small, incremental steps to foster growth in these realms, we build up hope and resiliency for the future.