I’m pleased to share that I have recently completed training in Ketamine-Assisted Therapy (KAT) through Field Trip Health.
This training builds on my ongoing work supporting people who are exploring psychedelic experiences as part of their healing, growth, or therapeutic process. I am now available to work with individuals seeking psychotherapy before or after a ketamine experience, including people receiving ketamine treatment through a medical clinic or another qualified healthcare provider.
My role is focused on preparation and integration. I do not prescribe, provide, or administer ketamine.
What Is Ketamine-Assisted Therapy?
Ketamine has a long history of use in medicine as an anesthetic and, more recently, has been explored in psychiatric settings for conditions such as depression and other mental health concerns.
In a therapeutic context, ketamine can sometimes create a temporary shift in a person’s usual way of experiencing themselves, their emotions, memories, or patterns of thinking. Some people describe greater psychological flexibility, increased access to emotion, new perspectives, or a different relationship with experiences that have previously felt stuck.
The medicine experience itself, however, is only one part of the process. What happens before and after the experience can be equally important.
What Is Ketamine Preparation?
Preparation gives you an opportunity to slow down and understand what you are bringing into the experience. Rather than trying to predict or control what will happen during a ketamine session, preparation can help you approach the experience with greater clarity, psychological safety, and openness.
Depending on your needs, preparation sessions might involve exploring:
What is bringing you to ketamine treatment
Your hopes, fears, and expectations
Intentions for the experience
Important life experiences or emotional themes that may emerge
Coping skills and internal resources
Ways of responding if difficult emotions arise
Your relationship with control, uncertainty, and vulnerability
How to approach the experience with curiosity rather than pressure to have a particular outcome
Preparation can also be a place to talk openly about concerns that may feel difficult to bring elsewhere. There is no requirement to have a profound experience, uncover a particular memory, or achieve a breakthrough. Sometimes one of the most useful parts of preparation is taking some of that pressure away.
What Is Psychedelic Integration?
After a ketamine experience, you may leave with new emotions, memories, questions, insights, or perspectives. Sometimes an experience feels immediately meaningful. Other times it may feel confusing, emotionally intense, strangely ordinary, or difficult to put into words. Integration is the process of making sense of what happened and exploring whether anything from the experience feels relevant to your everyday life.
That might involve asking questions such as:
What stood out to me?
Did I experience myself differently?
Was there an emotion, image, memory, or realization that keeps returning?
What feels important now that I am back in my normal life?
Is there something I want to do differently?
How can I translate an insight into an actual change?
Integration is not about forcing meaning onto everything that happened. It is about creating enough space to become curious about the experience and noticing what, if anything, deserves further attention.
Bringing Psychotherapy Into the Process
My approach to psychedelic preparation and integration is grounded in psychotherapy. Depending on the person, our work may draw from approaches including EMDR, Internal Family Systems informed therapy, trauma-informed psychotherapy, mindfulness, and other experiential approaches.
For example, preparation may involve identifying internal resources you can return to when you feel overwhelmed. Integration may involve exploring different parts of yourself that became more noticeable during the experience, working with emotional material that surfaced, or identifying patterns you would like to continue addressing in therapy.
The goal is not simply to talk about what happened during a ketamine session. The larger question is often: What does this experience mean for the life you are returning to?
You Do Not Need to Have Everything Figured Out
People sometimes enter psychedelic-assisted treatment feeling as though they should already know their intention or exactly what they want to work on. You do not. Preparation can be where we begin figuring that out together.
Similarly, you do not need to come into integration with a perfectly articulated insight. You may simply know that something happened and you want a space to explore it. There can be value in approaching these experiences slowly.
Ketamine Preparation and Integration in Ontario
I currently offer psychotherapy for psychedelic preparation and integration to individuals in Ontario, including virtual sessions as well as in-person options in the Niagara Region.
If you are considering ketamine-assisted therapy, already have an upcoming ketamine session through a medical provider, or have recently completed a ketamine experience and would like support making sense of it, preparation or integration therapy may be helpful.
Completing Ketamine-Assisted Therapy training through Field Trip Health has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the ketamine experience and strengthen the support I can provide to people navigating this emerging area of mental health care.
If you are curious about whether preparation or integration therapy might be a good fit, you are welcome to reach out for a consultation.
