by Keith Miller, LCSW-C, Psychedelic Assisted Therapist and Founder of Calliope Health
Ketamine enhances your ability to see relationships and make connections
At Calliope Health we feel it’s really important to help you cultivate a relationship with Ketamine—an experience with it in which you’re afforded the time and skills to memorize how your mind works after it’s been exposed to ketamine.
When you add ketamine to your personal reflection, healing, and your spiritual and emotional development, it’s a little bit like getting a bird’s eye view of a maze that you’ve been stuck in. Some of you—painfully—know what I mean by feeling stuck in that maze of depression, anxiety, and depersonalization that goes along with depression.
Unsticking mental habits with ketamine’s neuroplasticity in the brain
As you know, the dissociative effects of a ketamine dose only last a short period—one to two hours is typical in a therapeutic dose—compared with other psychedelics like psilocybin or MDMA which can last 6-10 hours. In fact, ketamine’s so-called window of plasticity—that neuroplastic growth period after a treatment when scientists can literally see what they call dendritic spines growing in the brain—can last from 24 hours to 10 days. These dendritic spines start branching and networking as if they’ve been given fertilizer. This rapid neurogenesis, while brief, can allow major progress in therapy and insights about yourself that can far outlast the drug’s effects. We know that repeated and regular ketamine sessions causes an improvement in most people, and that can often be maintained, with therapy and by occasional or less frequent infusions.
For reasons we don’t fully understand, some people have an experience of heightened plasticity that does last much longer. Probably because our work is steeped in the idea that we can change, we’re not just dealt a hand of cards and that’s all we have, we believe that we can change our mental habits. Like one of my favorite books, The Brain That Changes Itself, the brain is a “recursive” organ—it observes itself and changes itself— and because we can change habits and behaviors we can literally reshape our brain. Ketamine seems to reboot the brain’s natural ability to learn and be open to new ideas and experiences, take risks, and have confidence, which is our goal in the treatment for depression.
Opening of new inner worlds with a ketamine journey
Every ketamine journey is a chance to add something to what you already know about yourself and this can get you one step closer to living symptom-free and getting your life back. After your first few infusions, you get familiar with the twists and turns and the altered sensory landscape that ketamine induces, and learn to use time immediately afterwards to look more clearly and calmly at your emotions, obsessive thoughts, or memories that normally interfere with your ability to be in the flow of your life.
Ketamine isn’t a cure for all of your problems. We’re not going to help you use ketamine to cover up, or numb or escape or chase a high. Its not like cannabis, helping you mellow out routinely after having “a day,” and it’s not an opioid that’s going to simply blast you off. Ketamine is a sophisticated tool that can open new worlds to view and experience about yourself and your relationship to others.
Mindset for a ketamine journey
Let’s talk about the mindset that can help you have the best experience with your ketamine infusion. Go into your experience with ketamine with a learner’s mindset—a beginner’s mind.
What am I here to learn?
Even if something comes up for you that you don’t like—a fear or a memory or a taboo desire—you can ask it what it has to offer you. You don’t have to get too bogged down with making sense of everything. In fact, it’s our experience, that intense analysis of the content of your mind during or after an infusion is not helpful. Instead, as like we say in IFS therapy, all you have to do is be in Self. Self is your Orchestra Conductor inside of you that is distinct from the emotions, thoughts, and sensations within your conscious mind. Remembering, for example, that you are feeling sadness, which is merely one state of mind, is far different than feeling that you are the sadness. There is a You and It. Sadness is one part of you and it is likely doing an important job for you. We do not need to fight or resist it…that doesn’t work. But instead you can get to know parts of you from your Self, and become a facilitator of your emotional states so they can function more effectively.
If something’s confusing, you can ask it to reveal more you. Interact with it. If it’s too intense, you can ask it to slow down. You extend love to your whole body through the whole process—beginning during and after. You extend love, trusting that the medicine is doing its job.
Ketamine turns down the brain’s fault-finding “default mode network”
Ketamine is a safe medicine that has an incredible ability to give what we call your Default Mode Network—that roving part of the brain that scans for problems—it gets a break from all that doing. A break from performing.
You can just be.
It’s pure existence.
It may be the quietest, most peaceful, true experience of your deepest Self, deep inside where the brain stem resides and just “knows” that you exist. Even your subconscious brain can reset itself, because during a ketamine journey you are less afraid and more open and curious.
How ketamine stimulates a “Big Mind” flow state
Ketamine seems to stimulate a very useful state of mind that’s well known to many of the spiritual traditions. In psychology we call it a flow state. A kind
of delicious version of executive function which you effortlessly perform at whatever level is demanded of you. You’re free from rigid limitations, and see old things with new eyes. You’re calm, compassionate and courageous. You can rapidly make connections that may have eluded you before.
In the vernacular of Internal Family Systems Therapy, ketamine expands your Self that I mentioned earlier. Don’t confuse the IFS term “Self” with the old
psychoanalytic term that means ego. Self or “soul” is the kind of core operating system, the bare bones of your mind that is somehow above and much more than any one part of you. It’s the whole itself. Self is not driven by your emotions or anxiety or fears but is simply able to focus on what’s most important—making connections, healing and balancing parts of you that carry pain. The Buddhists would call this a state of non-attachment. Psychologists would call it secure attachment: You can hold on to yourself and let go at the same time. You can let go of the compulsions to protect and to guard against pain.
How ketamine relaxes compulsions and makes you more “there”
For reasons we still don’t fully understand, ketamine seems to rapidly cause the brain to feel more cohesive, more “there,” and less tangled in the push and pull of seeking pleasure or avoiding pain.
Not everyone has a profound experience with ketamine. But it’s my belief that having the kind of caring and therapeutic support that we provide at Calliope Health will give you a chance to reset your nervous system, recalibrate your amygdala and thalamus—that gatekeeper in the mind that
determines what you pay attention to and what you can let go—and help you break debilitating fixations that no longer serve your whole Self.
It would be my honor to receive your trust and the trust of our team at Calliope, to do some healing work together.
I hope to meet you and wish you happy trails!
Keith Miller, LCSW-C
Founder, Calliope Health Ketamine
