Into the Deep End

How Ketamine-Assisted Therapy Changed My Life, Pt. 1

The first time I heard about psychedelics and mental health, I was nineteen, sitting under the stars in the Silver Peaks of New Zealand in the fall of 2016. Students sat around the fire, drinking beers cooled in the nearby stream, a few of them lighting up joints. I barely drank and had never touched weed, but the laid-back atmosphere of hikers and campers always felt like home.

The guy sitting near me regaled anyone who would listen about how he found his purpose doing psychedelics in a random cave. Slightly tipsy, he insisted that the experience had changed his life, showed him how he was connected to everything in the universe, and revealed his true calling. I remember smiling in a bemused way—I wasn’t sure what to think. I definitely still had psychedelics confined to the “dangerous” box in my brain, but who was I to tell this dude that his story wasn’t true?

Fast forward to the fall of 2022. I had just attempted a mini thru-hike of the Tahoe Rim Trail in Nevada, which failed after around 60 miles because of intolerable pain levels. When I returned home to Virginia, my physical and mental health inexplicably crashed. I’d struggled with both for years, but this was a new low. I could talk about the journey that would ensue for multiple books worth of stories, but the bottom line —I was in crisis.

I finally received an accurate diagnosis of complex PTSD, which enabled me to pursue trauma-specific therapy. As I was pulling together an emergency intensive outpatient therapy program, which involved a different kind of therapy almost every day, one of my doctors mentioned Ketamine-assisted therapy.

After doing some research, I was officially intrigued. Considered a new field for psychiatry, researchers aren’t sure why Ketamine often prompts positive change in clients with trauma and treatment-resistant depression, but when it does work, it is sometimes nothing short of a miracle. Their guess—it has something to do with increased neuroplasticity. Besides, indigenous peoples have been using psychedelics for centuries.

But—I was nervous. Still working on deprogramming my religious “good kid” conditioning, I’d never been drunk in my life, never been high, never… well, a lot of things. Ketamine? That was like jumping head-first into the deep end without knowing if you could swim. I’d always been taught that drugs would take over your mind and make you do things that were entirely out of character.

And yet… after my PCP recommended Ketamine-assisted therapy, so did my other doctor, and my therapist, and my other therapist, and then random friends started talking to me about people they knew who’d done it, out of the blue. Talk about a sign. On top of all that—a practice I trusted was offering a Ketamine-assisted therapy group for the first time that was about to start.

So I signed up.

I attended individual and group therapy sessions with three other womxn, where we did meditations, visualization, journaling, and setting intentions for what we wanted to explore in our three upcoming doses, or journeys. We dug into our trauma and wrestled with what questions we still had about what happened to us.

The day of the first dose of medicine, I felt like I was going to a sleepover. Encouraged to bring familiar items, I packed the stuffie I sleep with every night, my pillow, and lavender essential oil, one of my favorite smells, along with the journals we’d been provided.

Walking in, the waiting room had been transformed. Candles winked. Fresh flowers burst from vases. The air was fragrant with burning Palo Santo. Sleeping pads were laid out, complete with cozy alpaca blankets, eye masks, and headphones.

Our blood pressure was taken and individualized doses confirmed. We pulled tarot cards, did some breathwork, were given a strip of paper dipped in fragrant oil to smell as we dropped in, and rehashed what to expect. Listening to the instrumental soundtrack, we settled in, slipping on masks.

I focused on my breathing, waiting in the dark. All nerves and shivering anticipation. What would I discover? What would I explore? Would there be answers? I held my intention in my mind, hoping it wouldn’t slip away once the medicine took hold.

I felt a hand on my arm, and then a slight prick as the Ketamine was injected. “Have a good journey,” was whispered in my ear.

And I was swept off into the deep end.