Ten Months into Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
& some days I am right back in the deepest trenches.
When I first sat in the chair last August — legs tucked up, head phones on, eyeshades equating the world to black, and a stranger - my new therapist - sitting just a few feet away, I didn’t at all know what to expect.
I’ve done years of therapy. Talk therapy. EMDR. Somatic work. I’ve done medications, medication changes, medication resets. I’ve tried breath work, meditation, yoga, journaling, trauma-informed everything. Some of it helped. Some of it held me steady.
But nothing had cracked open the part of me that felt stuck… that place where all my trauma seemed to pool and harden.
When ketamine was suggested to me, I hesitated.
It felt like a last-ditch option.
Like admitting defeat.
Like saying out loud, “I can’t do this on my own.”
But the truth?
I couldn’t.
Not anymore.
Not with the weight of what I was carrying.
The losses layered on top of each other.
The way my body, after more than two decades of medical trauma, had forgotten how to feel safe.
The way my brain had, far earlier than I had previously recognized, learned to retreat, to close off, to protect me by keeping me disconnected from everything - including myself.
I couldn’t feel enough to start healing.
I couldn’t even commit to staying.
So, I said yes to Ketamine.
I said yes to the therapeutic container.
I said yes to the combined assisted psychotherapy.
And then I said yes again. And again. And again.
Ten months later, I’m still saying yes.
Today, I’m saying yes.
I’m saying I know I needed this.
I’m saying I know I still need this.
I’ve covered a lot of things through KAP. I started both medicine and the process carrying so much - so much trauma and tragedy and grief and pain and loss and fear spanning a large portion of my lifetime and a significant number of separate categories of work.
At the beginning, we honed in on the most pressing matters, the most pivotal issues.
Surviving.
Loss of three babies and several close friends.
The places where my body failed me.
The things that made me afraid to live inside my skin.
The moments that created an intolerable situation in my life.
A life that at the time, I was completely ready to walk out of.
And I made progress. So much progress.
I can see that - I’m not blind to the work, the effort, or the lasting changes it’s created in my life.
But I also realized over the last 6-ish weeks that while I addressed and processed a lot of trauma through KAP, there is still so much left that went untouched.
And recently, what I thought I was feeling about one thing really turned out to be a cadence of tangentially related survival patterns from different ages and versions of myself buried deep inside, tangled up in a way that felt too messy and too unpredictable to wade through on my own.
I started to feel like I was slipping.
Then my wise adult brain admitted out loud that there’s a real need, a semi-urgent need, to return to the work at a fiercer, more consistent, more intentional cadence. Some of the versions of me that have surfaced are young. They’re loud, and they’re afraid. They once perfected survival mechanisms that are unfortunately no longer helpful to me, and they’re terrified that without them, adult me can’t protect myself.
They’re petrified that adult me won’t know how to survive without their voices.
These parts, they need different things. They elicit different somatic reactions in the moment they surface. Theres desperation and combustion, there’s fear and vulnerability, there’s rawness and there’s pain, there’s shame and there’s feelings of failure, there’s immobility and there’s the urge to run.
And when felt all of these things are felt at the same time, one’s skin is pretty intolerable to stay within.
Here’s what I want to share with you from the thorough and intentional preparation I did for my medicine session earlier this week:
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) isn’t a miracle cure.
It’s a process.
A long process.
An evolving process.
A deep process.
A continual need to adjust the approach, the dose, the frequency, the cadence, the goals, everything.
It’s a process that requires deep trust, not just in the clinician holding the space, but in yourself— in your capacity to go inward, to feel the hard things, to meet them without judgment {when possible} and then… to sit with them, even when they feel highly intolerable.
This is still the absolute most agonizing and challenging part for me.
And I’ve given it everything I’ve got.
For me, it started with eyeshades and headphones. A curated playlist. A small, carefully measured dose of medicine. And then… the float.
The float is kind of how I think about the first part of the medication infusion… To me, it feels physically similar to the sensation of being in a saltwater therapy float pod. There’s a healthy sense of sensory deprivation, a way to slowww down my mind, and then the sensation of my mind and body disconnecting just enough that I’m not tethered to the age old patterns in my brain of immediate fear or shame or grief.
It’s not dissociation.
It’s not numbing.
It’s more like widening.
Like opening a window that’s been sealed shut for too long.
In one of my first sessions, I saw myself in a hospital room I’d never been to in real life — but in that moment, it was where I delivered my twins too early to survive. In that space, the familiar gut-wrenching devastation started to rise in the back of my throat, my stomach sank and tears welled up in the corners of my eyes, but this time, I didn’t turn away or disassociate.
I stayed.
I sat beside the version of me on that bed.
I told her she wasn’t alone.
And for the first time, I believed it.
I’ve visited other places too - too many to list, some real, some pulled from my memories, and others created based upon the need of the experience being unfolded or the story being told. I saw the NICU where I whispered songs to my daughter after being awake for nearly 72 hours. There was the sterile room in the IVF clinic where I held my breath every time they called us in to review our results. The empty nursery in our home. The couch where I once wondered if I’d make it through the night. There was also a nondescript beach in a country I briefly visited, the reminder of an encounter that taught me more in retrospect than in real time. There was a child’s bedroom - not mine, but one where I found my smallest self waiting. And a family’s backyard - again, not mine, but one where I watched a whole scene unfold. There was our present day living room with our living children, all four of them, and there was my body, strong and standing and breathing and whole.
In these sessions, I’ve physically felt and emotionally experienced years worth of moments, of memories, of gaps and gashes and holes and hopes.
What ketamine does is let me revisit these moments, revise my relationship with these moments, and redefine these moments through today’s eyes with a different nervous system.
With a softness I didn’t know I could offer myself.
It {sometimes} lets me feel the grief without immediately drowning in it.
And it helps me release some of the stories I didn’t know I was still carrying.
It affords me the opportunity to decide what comes next, how I transition from carrying the hard to being changed by the hard to being shaped by the hard, and it reminds me that even when I’m absolutely terrified, I am likely still capable.
Each session is different.
Some are intense—memories crashing in, tears slipping under the eyeshades, my hands clenched into fists as I navigate what surfaces, my body writhing in discomfort or unease or pain or even fear.
Others are quiet. Spacious. Like sitting in a forest of my own making, listening for something I can’t always identify or name.
After each session, I journal. The first several months, my thoughts and visions and memories were captured for me, scribed by my therapist - literally the very first person in the world with whom I’ve now repeatedly practiced the art of uncensoring. Now the journaling is less of a science and more of a feeling. Sometimes it’s filled with incoherent scribbles or references to quickly recorded, whispered vague voice memos. Other times I find myself writing or dictating pages and pages of clarity.
Whatever it is - it’s helpful. If not in the moment, than in the hours or days to come.
Afterwards comes integration.
The hardest, most critical part of the work.
That’s the key—what happens after medicine.
The conversations with both of my therapists.
The connections we draw.
The ways I begin to observe patterns, to notice changes…
How I respond to triggers differently.
How sometimes, I can sleep a little more soundly.
The ways (with help) that I can identify when my feelings are coming from something in the present, or from something in the past.
The slow and painful acknowledgement that sometimes my body is bracing so hard for the next catastrophe that I ignore all of the things in my body that are begging to be untangled.
How sometimes, I feel like I can actually stay in my body at the first sign of discomfort.
Note: In truth, this one is the absolute hardest. I still need a lot of help and support with this. And I’m so so grateful for the reminders that sometimes, only I can slow down and listen intently enough to know what the parts of me actually need to feel seen enough to release their powerful grip.
Ten months in, both ketamine the medicine and KAP the practice have become essential parts of my mental health toolkit.
It’s not something I take lightly. The emotional labor is real. The physical preparation and recovery matters too. But the gift?
The gift is working towards healing, uniting so many versions of myself that I thought I’d lost.
There’s the one who can sometimes trust her body.
The one who is willing to practice listening to her intuition (even in short spurts).
The one who feels grief but also, somehow, sometimes joy.
The one who recognizes that connection is more important than retreating.
The one who knows it’s no longer healthy to prove to herself that she’s strong by staying silent about her pain.
Ketamine hasn’t erased my trauma. But it has helped me befriend the parts of me shaped by it.
And still, it’s hard.
It’s messy.
I’m not on the other side. In fact, I’d say today, I’m in it, in the thick of the unraveling and remembering and relearning.
There are days it feels like I’m back at the beginning, trying to remember how to stay.
But the truth is, I keep choosing this.
I keep saying yes.
Not because it’s easy, not because it’s linear, not because I have it all figured out, but because something inside of me knows this is the way through.
Even when I don’t know what’s next.
Even when the path feels foggy and unforgiving.
I’m still walking.
I’m still saying yes.
