The Journey of Remembering with Ketamine
(Coming Fall 2026)
Ketamine and its History
Ketamine is classified as a Schedule III dissociative anesthetic. It is widely used in hospitals and emergency medicine today for surgery, pain control, and sedation. At higher doses, it produces anesthesia (loss of awareness and pain sensation). At lower doses, it can create a sense of mental distance from thoughts or emotions, altered perception of time or imagery, reduced intensity of depressive or traumatic symptoms, increased neuroplasticity (the brain’s ability to form new connections).
Ketamine was first synthesized in 1962 and approved as an anesthetic in 1970. Its use in psychotherapy began to be explored in the 1970s, when a small number of psychiatrists investigated its potential to facilitate deep psychological work. One of the early pioneers was Evgeny Krupitsky, who studied ketamine-assisted psychotherapy for alcohol use disorder in Russia during the late 1980s and 1990s.
Interest expanded significantly in the early 2000s, after a landmark 2000 study by researchers at Yale University showed that low-dose ketamine produced rapid antidepressant effects in patients with major depression. It works primarily by affecting the brain’s glutamate system, particularly NMDA receptors which plays a role in mood, learning, and neural flexibility. This action appears to “reset” or disrupt rigid neural patterns associated with depression, anxiety, and trauma. That finding shifted ketamine from being viewed primarily as an anesthetic to being studied seriously as a psychiatric treatment.
Over the past 15–20 years, research has grown rapidly, particularly for:
Treatment-resistant depression
PTSD
Suicidal ideation
Anxiety disorders
Today, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) combines this newer psychiatric research with structured therapeutic support to enhance and integrate the effects. Many clients experience:
A sense of emotional distance from painful thoughts or memories
Increased openness and perspective
Greater self-compassion
Access to material that may feel blocked in traditional talk therapy
This temporary shift in awareness can make it easier to process difficult experiences and explore new ways of thinking and relating.
Is It a Psychedelic?
Ketamine is sometimes described as having psychedelic-like properties because it can alter perception and awareness. However, it is pharmacologically different from classic psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD. Its mechanism of action and subjective effects are distinct.
How Is It Used?
When used therapeutically, ketamine is provided in a controlled, supervised environment at much lower doses than in surgery. It may be administered in forms such as Intramuscular injection (IM), Intravenous infusion (IV), Nasal spray (such as Spravato, the FDA-approved form of esketamine for treatment-resistant depression), or Oral Lozenges. This practice only uses oral Lozenges at this time.
Is It Safe?
When prescribed appropriately and monitored by qualified medical professionals, ketamine has a strong safety record. It is not appropriate for everyone, and careful screening is essential to determine candidacy.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
KAP is a therapeutic approach that combines carefully prescribed ketamine with structured psychotherapy sessions to support deep emotional healing and symptom relief.
Ketamine has been used safely in medical settings for decades. At lower, carefully monitored doses, it can help reduce symptoms of depression, trauma-related distress, anxiety, and other mood challenges—often more rapidly than traditional medications. When combined with psychotherapy, ketamine can create a state that allows clients to access emotions, memories, and insights in new ways.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy & the PSIP Model
PSIP stands for Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy. It is a body-based approach to healing trauma and emotional distress. When combined with ketamine, PSIP focuses less on insight or storytelling and more on what is happening in the nervous system in real time.
PSIP works from the bottom-up by understanding that trauma and depression are not just psychological — they are stored in the body as unfinished survival responses (fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation).
Ketamine helps temporarily soften the defensive patterns that keep those survival responses locked in place. PSIP then guides you to gently stay present with the sensations that arise, allowing the nervous system to complete and release what has been held.
How PSIP Is Different
Unlike insight-based or narrative approaches, PSIP:
Does not require retelling trauma stories
Focuses on the body rather than cognition
Targets dissociation directly
Works with survival energy and your inner healing intelligence rather than analyzing meaning
In this model, ketamine is not the treatment by itself. It is a catalyst that helps the body connect to and access our inner healing intelligence to release deeply held protective patterns and allow the nervous system to complete what was interrupted — while the therapeutic relationship provides safety, guidance, and containment throughout the process.
The goal is not to relive trauma, but to allow the nervous system to complete what was interrupted.
Is It Right for You?
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy may be helpful for individuals experiencing:
Treatment-resistant depression
Trauma or PTSD
Anxiety disorders
Existential distress
Persistent negative thought patterns
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is not appropriate for everyone. Careful medical and psychological screening is required.
You may not be a good candidate if you have:
Active psychosis (hallucinations, delusions, schizophrenia-spectrum disorders)
Unstable or untreated bipolar disorder, especially recent mania
Uncontrolled high blood pressure or serious heart conditions
Current pregnancy or breastfeeding
Active, untreated substance use disorder
Certain significant medical conditions (e.g., serious liver disease)
Some individuals may require additional preparation or medical collaboration before proceeding.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is not about “escaping” your feelings. It is about creating a supportive space where your nervous system can process trauma, your mind can become more flexible, and healing can unfold with intention and care.
The Body Remembers-and it also Knows How to Heal
Precise-Somatic-Transformative
What a PSIP Ketamine Session Looks Like
You will complete a thorough medical intake with our Provider to ensure Ketamine treatment is safe and appropriate for you. This includes reviewing your medical history, current medications, and any relevant health concerns.
Build strong safety and grounding skills
Clarify intentions
Assess readiness for somatic processing
Discuss how dissociation and resourcing show up for you
PSIP places special importance on nervous system stability before beginning.
Your Ketamine session will take place in a private, comfortable room with a dedicated Ketamine therapist. The medicine is administered via an oral tablet which will dissolve under your tongue for about 10-15 minutes. The session typically lasts 90-120 minutes, and our therapist will be with you the whole time.
During the session:
You take the ketamine lozenge under supervision (dissolve in mouth 10-15min)
You remain sitting up in a quiet, supported setting with an eye mask
The focus is on tracking body sensations rather than analyzing thoughts
As the medicine takes effect, protective defenses may soften. You may notice:
Body sensations (tightness, shaking, pressure, heat)
Emotional waves
Urges to move, push, cry, or tremble
Periods of numbness or dissociation
Instead of distracting from these experiences, PSIP gently guides you to stay present with them — without trying to fix or escape them.
The therapist may:
Invite you to slow down and notice sensations
Track sensations
Support you in allowing incomplete survival responses to move through
There is often less talking than in traditional therapy. The work is experiential and somatic.
Days after the session, we meet to:
Make sense of what the body released
Strengthen new patterns of regulation
Build capacity to stay present with emotions
Anchor the changes into daily life
Integration helps your nervous system consolidate what shifted during the session.
Trauma is stuck life energy. Creative, natural, playful life energy that was not allowed to flow when it first emerged and it tried to flow. It wasn’t safe to let it flow and you didn’t know how. And so it got stuck in your body. It’s not your fault, dear one.
The words you wanted to scream. The ways in which you wanted to move your body. The healthy human feelings you intelligently squished in order to protect yourself, get love, be “okay”, stay alive. The truth you needed to express but couldn’t.
But it’s a new day, and anything stuck in you yesterday can be given permission to move again today. This will take courage, the willingness to feel old pain and breathe through it, to trust the body now instead of giving in to the mind and its fears. To tell the truth. To come out of hiding and let yourself be seen.
In the safety of your own presence, or in the safe presence of another who can hold you and trust your process, can you turn towards the sore place, the tight place, the dark place, the aching place, and bring to it the light of your awareness, the light of love?
Life only wants to play in you, dance, tremble, vibrate, surge and move through to completion. The rage, the terror, the impulses and urges and desires you learned were ‘sick’ or ‘dangerous’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘shameful’ were always natural, and normal, and healthy, and they won’t damage you as you turn towards them now and give them the love and attention and safe passage they always deserved.
You don’t have to act them out. Just feel them, shine light on them, bow to them. And allow, allow, allow. Moment by moment.
Be a vast Heart now, a loving curious welcoming Heart, and trust this intelligent storm of feeling as it emerges, roars and passes in its own time.
Your wounds, your turbulent and sorrowful places, your traumas, are not mistakes; they are the sacred places in you desperately yearning for love, waiting to be penetrated by your curious Light.
So scream, shake, tremble, weep, vomit, make a holy mess - you are a warrior and you are alive and you are healing and learning to play.
Through the pain, to the glory!
And behold:
The place in you that was never traumatized.
Your innocent Heart.
Your indestructible Self.
- Jeff Foster