Unlocking Healing: Beyond Talk Therapy for Women
Talk therapy is a wonderful thing, if it works for you. Thing is, it doesn’t work for everyone. Sometimes recounting trauma can be more damaging than helpful. A trauma informed therapist is key, but the issue is that there is no “standard” for a therapist saying they are “trauma informed.” Yes, we do receive a lot of training in school, but you need to know more than what school teaches you about.
To understand trauma, you have to understand the science of it. Luckily more information is available about trauma and its impact on the brain than ever before. There are ways to scan the brain, ways to actually see how trauma impacts it. And there are differences between a brain of a person who has experienced trauma and someone who has not. Memories are stored differently and coping mechanisms are completely altered. Someone who has experienced trauma is in a constant state of anxiety. Anyone who has anxiety knows that is not easy to live with. With trauma or chronic stress comes damage to the neurons in the brain, which help you be able to look at something in a reasoning way instead of immediately acting because it’s triggered something. If you have trauma and are reading this; do you notice that sometimes you see things in a biased way? You aren’t able to see the good intent behind someone’s offer to help? Perhaps your first instinct is to protect yourself in situations that being on the defense is unnecessary? This could mean that you have some things to process. But as you can imagine, these things are not controllable. If you could control it, you would, but you can’t. I know that not everyone is as interested in this stuff as I am, but if you are, check out the work of Dr. Bruce Perry. It is fascinating.
Sometimes people who have experienced trauma need a different approach to healing than talk therapy. Enter Psychedelics.
Psychedelics, Ketamine in particular, connects the neurons that have been damaged by trauma and chronic stress. This is called Neuroplasticity. Each time you use Ketamine, the results are permanent. Often in talk therapy, a person may have defense mechanisms that step in to keep the person feeling safe but actually impede progress in therapy. For example, you may have learned from being deceived by a trusted adult as a child, that you can’t trust anyone. Therefore you lie to your therapist. Your therapist isn’t a mind reader, so we don’t know you’re lying, and your therapy progress is impeded. Ketamine takes away the defense mechanisms. Although Ketamine looks a lot different in my office or on the screen than it looks with a talk therapy client. Ketamine is an individual experience. It is a session that I leave 3 hours for, typically 2 hours for Ketamine to kick in and come down and 1 hour to process if you are able. Everyone’s experience is different, but mostly the experience is gentle. It is you lying down on your bed at home or in a recliner in my office. You have an eye mask and headphones on. You are typically not talking, listening to special music that enhances the Ketamine experience. Your experience will show you different things. Sometimes it is visual, sometimes not. What most people emerge with is that they were able to get a different perspective on something really difficult. Something they maybe didn’t remember or something they hadn’t been able to see the other side of. Often times, people get a perspective that helps them feel stronger and more capable. They are able to see that what has happened has impacted them deeply and what they learned from it.
Because I know that talk therapy isn’t the only thing that helps people is why I have incorporated other modalities into my practice like psychedelics and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Sometimes I use both EMDR and a low dose of Ketamine, which pushes EMDR along much faster because emotionally charged things are easier to process with Ketamine. Sometimes my talk therapy clients have hit a wall and Ketamine might shake things up and break the plateau. We become partners to help your life become something you don’t need to escape from.
Whatever it is that you need to do to heal from trauma, sometimes it’s not always right on the first try. The most important thing is that you have a partner who is willing to be patient and try different things with you. The right therapist for you will definitely do that.
