I am currently involved with a number of organisations in developing training frameworks to prepare psychotherapists in the provision of psychedelic-assisted therapy. My involvement in this work often leads people to ask if I offer psychedelic psychotherapy to clients.
Do I offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy?
The short answer is no, and one reason is simple: for the time being, psychedelic psychotherapy is illegal. My psychotherapeutic work with clients is my life’s work - my vocation - and I am not willing to risk that by engaging in practices that could see me deregistered and unable to work. But wait, there’s more…
Each week I am contacted by one or more people looking to undergo psychedelic psychotherapy. In general they have been suffering for quite some time, have tried working with psychologists, used anti-depressants or anxiolytics, but to little avail. They have heard about psychedelics, and see a potential antidote to their “stuck-ness”.
In these conversations I will start out by asking them what they think psychedelics can offer them. They share some of their story and experience of treatment. I hear about psychologists who tried to get them to do this or that, employing CBT or ACT. I hear about psychotherapy sessions that seemed to go around and around, but never achieve anything that felt like significant change. I hear about various fringe healing modalities that they have tried. I also hear despair, and their own sense that they are beyond “normal” help.
I will then share with them some of the ways in which I work, and some of pros and cons of psychedelic psychotherapy. I will usually offer to work with the person, and sometimes they decide to give it a go. In the vast majority of these cases, we do good work, and the person experiences very real change over the next 1-3 months. On the whole, I rarely feel that a client of mine needs psychedelics to do the work - however complex their trauma or situation might be.
WORKING IN A PSYCHEDELIC PARADIGM - WITHOUT PSYCHEDELICS.
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy - as it is emerging in trials around the world - follows a very different healing paradigm to mainstream psychology. Rather than seeking to manage, suppress or simply cope, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy aims at a deeper healing born of opening up and moving directly toward and through our pain and stuck-ness, in a safe and well-held environment. This way of working depends on a deep trust in the psyche’s own wisdom. One of the mechanisms of the psychedelic itself, is to radically soften defences and temporarily remove obstacles that stand in the way of the psyche’s own “inner-healing intelligence”. I would suggest that psychedelics are just one - very convenient and powerful - way of doing this work.
While the use of psychedelics can seem fairly radical from the perspective of contemporary psychology, the use of non-ordinary states in healing is as old as humanity itself. For more ancient - and land-based - cultures, psychedelics were but one technology among many that were used to access non-ordinary states. In the modern world, such practices are the domain of process work, depth psychology, and transpersonal psychology. Over the last ten years, alongside a traditional training in many schools of psychotherapy, I have studied, explored, and taught various transpersonal and “neo-shamanic” healing modalities including trance dance, nature-immersion, and psychedelics.
My work under the banner of Wild Mind is entirely informed by the recognition that psychological health and flourishing is directly related to the way in which we relate - consciously and unconsciously - to the wild, unknown and powerful places within us. Through this frame, mental illness is understood to derive from our unconscious control of the wildness (depression) or our unconscious fear of the wildness (anxiety). Often the two go together.
So, while I do not offer psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, I do offer a psychotherapy that is very aligned with the psychedelic paradigm. That is, a psychotherapy based upon a deep trust of the psyche’s own healing intelligence. In this way, the psychotherapy I do with these clients often feels like a slow-burn psychedelic journey - with optimal preparation and integration.
I generally feel that clients seeking psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are following a profound and accurate intuition. On some level they believe that healing is possible, but they also know that simply talking, or doing, or taking psych-meds is not going to get them there. They need a radically different approach.
For a companion article that looks at some of the psychotherapeutic pitfalls of underground psychedelic psychotherapy, read my 2015 article: “Ayahuasca Is My Therapist, Or Is It?”