Spiritual & Psychedelic Integration in Therapy
Where we shine at Mirror Pond Counseling, is helping our clients to prepare and integrate their psychedelic journey. It is a great idea to have a relationship with a trained psychedelic therapist who can help you integrate wisdom gained from the journey into real life.
Especially if new to psychedelics, it is usually a good idea to establish a relationship with a therapist who has training in psychedelic medicine. This way, once the ceremony or administration session ends, your therapist has some history and perspective to help with the integration of the experience on a psychological level. Read blog post: Shifting Parts Post Journey. Most importantly, the ongoing work with your therapist, will help ground the journey and follow through with those important lifestyle changes that will ultimately help holistically mitigate persistent depression, anxiety, and PTSD. The integration work with a therapist will also include the clinical, evidence-based tools that can support relentless parts of self or patterns to find relief faster.
Mirror Pond Counseling is not a prescriber of any medication. We remain within our scope, committed to harm reduction, legal and licensed healing spaces. Although we will not prescribe, we can support you working with a prescriber who holds a schedule 3 license to prescribe Ketamine, or a facilitator who is licensed in the State of Oregon to facilitate psilocybin sessions.
Ketamine is a great example of how multiple journeys can be prescribed and completed, without lasting change in symptoms. This is often because there is a lack of integrating the experience, and often a problem with set and setting support. Our therapists can support the psychedelic traveller in the following ways: assessing ego structure prior to entering into the medicine space (we use the Table Technique), setting a clear as well as flexible intention, initially clearing traumas and connecting parts of self that may otherwise be resistent to the medicine space.
As therapists, we take thorough history, co-create a unique spiritual space, routinely assess activation and resistance within the EMDR structure, among many other things. Many of the tools we use as therapists can easily be used to support the medicine space as well, for harm reduction and also a greater likelihood of results and bang for your buck (journeys are not cheap).
The space to process challenging psychedelic trips has not typically lead to transmuting trauma within the context of a therapeutic relationship. But it is certainly happening now! Therapists are both destigmatizing and committed to reducing harm.
A trained psychedelic therapist is holistic and nuanced. They can support a journeyer in all of these ways, when truly partnering with the medicine (yes, we can do that indirectly without touching the substance). We can support in past awful experiences, beautiful soul-opening experiences, and new journeyers within the legal framework who are curious to learn more. We need therapists who can help heal psychological symptoms that have persisted for years by partnering with the medicine and the community of psychedelic providers.
Mirror Pond Counseling is really excited to do just that!
Kimberly Drew, MA, LPC
