Over the past several years, more and more therapists have been using Ketamine to help facilitate deeper change, transformation, and healing for clients who experience common but debilitating mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, OCD, and PTSD. You may also be turning to other psychedelics, which are legal in only some locations but are being researched extensively at this time, for deeper levels of healing and insight as well as ego dissolution.

What is Ketamine?

Ketamine is considered a generally safe dissociative anaesthetic, which also has psychedelic properties, and has been used in recent years off-label for depression, anxiety, chronic pain, self growth, addiction, and PTSD, with very promising results. A plethora of research studies are currently underway to learn more about which conditions can be helped by ketamine, and research to date has been very promising. 

How Ketamine Helps:

The mechanisms of change underpinning Ketamine’s high levels of effectiveness for treating mental health disorders are still in the process of being understood, although recent research seems to indicate several components to its helpful effect on the brain. 

In addition to regulating glutamate levels in the brain, an important mechanism of Ketamine’s effect on mental health seems to be Ketamine’s dramatic effect on neuroplasticity, which is essentially the brain’s ability to be open to new learning and to creating new pathways of change, thus reversing or overriding long-standing (painful) patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that were previously deeply imprinted or ingrained, with new learning.

Ketamine seems to unlock a window of increased neuroplasticity in the brain that can powerfully help you more easily make changes that previously were very difficult to make.

Ketamine also seems to inhibit the brain’s “default mode network”, essentially helping people “get out of their heads” in ways that previously seemed impossible. And it also appears to help people gain access to previously suppressed or unconscious aspects of one’s memories and life experiences so they can be reappraised and integrated into the overall big picture of one’s life in a new way.

Necessary Conditions for Healing:

Getting unblocked from patterns ingrained deep inside us; accessing memories and unconscious experiences that are normally blocked or repressed; and experiencing non-ordinary states of awareness can all be facilitated by the use of ketamine, and in the context of a trusted psychotherapy relationship, can lead to significant improvements in mental health, as long as certain conditions seem to be met: feeling safe and supported by your therapist; mentally preparing for your ketamine experience by setting goals and intentions for it; creating a proper setting for your ketamine journey together with your therapist; and processing what came up during the ketamine experience in integration sessions that follow. “Letting go” is very important to this experience; your ketamine experience will be most effective if you can allow whatever happens to just happen, without trying to control or fight any aspect of it; for those of you who have trouble letting go, I will also work with you on this.

My overall goal, as both a psychoanalytic and trauma-informed psychotherapist, with 20 years of experience, is to help facilitate the optimal and unique conditions you need for your ketamine experience to be all it can be as we work through whichever mental health issues you have been struggling with and want to heal from, as well as to help you integrate any psychedelic experiences you’ve had that you feel you’d like to talk about. 

Contact Us: 

Please call today at 973-348-9384 or email mirel@goldsteintherapy.com to get started and I will get back to you as soon as possible.