Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy

I offer a therapeutic modality called Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). KAP is a holistic modality in which ketamine is used as a complement to coaching or psychotherapy to help clients experience more frequent breakthroughs and sustained improvement. KAP acts as a powerful disruption in default patterns, and allows clients to tap into true strengths in profound ways that exponentially accelerate the growth journey. Clients anchor in new internal self knowledge that supports health and happiness.

What is Ketamine?

Ketamine is a legal, safe and effective medicine used in a variety of ways for personal growth and healing, such as calming stress responses, or increasing creativity. Ketamine has rapidly-acting antidepressant and mood-enhancing effects, which can begin to take effect within 1-2 hrs. after treatment and last for up to 2 weeks. It works by blocking the brain’s NMDA receptors as well as by stimulating AMPA receptors, which are thought to help form new synaptic connections and boost neural circuits that regulate stress and mood. Ketamine has also been shown to enhance overall neuroplasticity for lasting behavioral changes.

How does Ketamine feel?

The effects of ketamine, which most patients find pleasant, last for approximately 45 minutes. These effects can make you feel “far from” your body, and facilitate shifts in perception that can often feel expansive in nature. Your motor and verbal abilities will be reduced, so you’ll be lying down in a comfortable position during the experience. Once these effects subsided, we’ll spend the remainder of our appointment giving you space to process and discuss your experience. While it may feel hard to articulate what happened during the experience, patients feel like the insights gained are none-the-less clear. Studies have shown that the benefits to mood and neurological growth can last up to two weeks after the Ketamine experience.

What to expect

A typical ketamine session lasts about 3 hours and takes place in-person at my office. You will be in a reclining position wearing an eye mask and listening to calming music. Although a KAP session may be largely an internal experience, I will be present the entire time to hold space as needed. We will meet before and after with he goal of aligning the process, setting intentions, and integrating insights that arose during your experience.

Pain Psychology

You’ve tried everything, medications, physical therapy, alternative treatments, surgery, only to find temporary relief but not lasting healing. OR you’ve been given these options, but you want to try a different way first.  Your pain has moved from acute to persistent after prescribed healing time is complete. You’ve been given a frightening diagnosis with no cure, including but not limited to degenerative disc disease, sciatica, carpal tunnel, fibromyalgia, migraines, pelvic pain, endometriosis, interstitial cystitis, IBS, GERD. OR your pain has no medical explanation. Your personality may lean toward perfectionism. You may have experienced stressors in your childhood, or have significant current life stressors at play. 

Your life is becoming smaller and more limited. Your pain is very real and debilitating. It is NOT “in your head.” You're ready to find another way.  

The Neuroscience

When pain moves from being acute to chronic, neural pathways develop linking the physical location of the pain with the emotional centers of the brain. This connection is how the sensation of physical pain can be perpetuated long after tissue damage is healed.  This is neural pathway pain.  The autonomic nervous system can trigger these neural pathways when in protective states (fight/flight/freeze). And with prolonged exposure to these states, neurological sensitization to pain occurs. Your pain becomes more intense, and the cycle continues. Neural pathway pain develops without your knowledge, by the same system that regulates your breath and heart beat. It’s an automatic and unconscious process, so there is no reason for shame, embarrassment, or guilt—you didn’t cause this. The research is also very clear these pathways can be unlearned and re-wired with a conscious process. You can heal your pain. Completely. I can give you the roadmap. 

A Modern Treatment Approach

Can our physical pain really be overcome with an emotional exercise? Yes! You can completely reverse your neurological sensitization to physical pain with targeted psychological techniques. Only treating the physical component will get half-way results, because we live in a mind-body system. We will treat your pain symptoms from this perspective with a process that impacts both your physical and emotional states of being. The pain is not in your head, or in your body, it’s in your brain. 

I know this story well because I lived it. This was me. I’ve recovered from debilitating back pain after being diagnosed with degenerative disc disease, using this science and this approach. When you’re ready, I can show you how. 

Women’s Wellness

“Inviting thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them.” - Dan Siegel. 

Individual Therapy

Feeling anxious, depressed, or just not like yourself? Finding that your inner critic is taking a toll on your ability to experience joy, or affecting your relationships? Is the pain overshadowing your present? Let me hold a piece of your pain experience with you, and together we’ll make it lighter, while developing an inner garden of healing, richness, resilience, and self-love to draw upon whenever you need it.

Our sessions will focus on the integration of the parts of your mind, body, and spirt that may feel disconnected, burdened, out of control, polarized, or just “off”.  As your coach or therapist, I serve as a compassionate mirror.  The parts of you that come forward, in the form of memories, emotions, thought patterns, and bodily sensations, are each guides for deep inner healing.  Every part of you is honored and seen in our work together, as I hold a safe and nurturing space for all of this to occur. 

Maternal Health

There are not many other times in life that you literally go through such significant and simultaneous physical, mental, and emotional changes—and that’s just when everything goes as planned. Fertility challenges, miscarriages, infant loss, NICU, birth trauma, adoption, postpartum transition, depression, anxiety, rage, and sleep deprivation can all compound your ability to heal and find your new self.  

I’m inspired by the powerful and all encompassing transformation of motherhood, so often dampened by the harsh inner critic, but so deserving of the experience of true self love. Having worked for many years in the fields of NICU/Labor and Delivery/Postpartum and Adoptions, and having gone through my own personal journey with fertility and postpartum depression, I have a deep understanding and compassion for this tender time in life, as well as the experience and expertise to help you find light amidst the haze.