Healing Through Psychedelics: Insights From Leaders in Ketamine and Trauma Therapy

Many people struggling with trauma, anxiety, or emotional blocks have turned to alternative therapies for healing, but are these methods truly effective? With growing interest in psychedelics like ketamine and MDMA, questions remain about how these substances are used, who they help, and what actually happens during therapy. What does safe, effective psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy look like in practice?

Various medical and psychiatric professionals share their lived experiences and clinical insights into this emerging field. Veteran psychedelic researcher Bill Richards maintains that the psyche can heal itself when supported by empathy and presence during psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy sessions. Internal Family Systems creator Dr. Dick Schwartz believes each individual is composed of distinct parts with trauma impacting their individual functions. Emergency medicine provider Mel Herbert details therapeutic environments that promote psychedelic integration, while MDMA researcher Michael Mithoefer emphasizes the importance of preparation and post-session dialogue and reflection for long-term impact. 

In this exclusive compilation episode of Living Medicine, Dr. Signi Goldman and Dr. Sandy Newes of Living Medicine Institute reflect on their most insightful interviews. Featuring conversations with Bill Richards, Dr. Dick Schwartz, Michael Mithoefer, and Mel Herbert, these guests delve into therapeutic safety, the role of integration after ketamine sessions, and promoting healing in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

This episode is brought to you by the Living Medicine Institute.

LMI is a training, resource, and membership program educating providers about the legal and safe use of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

To learn more or participate, visit https://livingmedicineinstitute.com.

Intro 0:00

Welcome to the Living Medicine podcast, where we talk about ethical medical use of psychedelic psychotherapy, teaching skills, examining the issues and interviewing interesting people. Now let’s start today’s show.

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:19

Hi everyone. This is Dr. Sandy Newes of the Living Medicine Institute

Dr. Signi Goldman 0:23

and I’m Dr. Signi Goldman, also from the Living Medicine Institute. 

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:27

On this special edition of the podcast, we’ll take a look back at some of our favorite conversations from past episodes.

Dr. Signi Goldman 0:32

It’s brought to you by Living Medicine Institute. We are a group of medical providers and therapists dedicated to combining a neuroscience based understanding of mental and physical health with ancient traditions. 

Dr. Sandy Newes 0:44

Living Medicine Institute offers guided experiences with nature, connection breath work and psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. After years of clinical practice in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, we began offering concierge level training programs and supervision to cohorts of therapist trainees

Dr. Signi Goldman 1:02

to learn more and participate in our programs. Visit LivingMedicineInstitute.com.

Dr. Sandy Newes 1:07

now, as promised, we take a look back at parts of our favorite conversations from previous episodes. Ketamine

Dr. Signi Goldman 1:14

assisted psychotherapy is technically a subset of what we call psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. So even though ketamine itself is a substance with multiple uses in medicine, it does have the ability to induce a psychedelic altered state. And ketamine, as opposed to some of the more traditional psychedelics people think of, like LSD, for example, is legal. And so if you want to induce a therapeutic psychedelic state for someone in a clinic, and if you have the skill set to do that and the training and the then ketamine is the one that you can legally use. And so it’s been this sort of early adopter psychedelic for most of the people in this space right now, my clinic included. And so it is a form of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy using ketamine. And the term psychedelic assisted psychotherapy really means what it sounds like, which is, you’re doing psychotherapy with someone. So this is this does involve being a skilled psychotherapist, but you’re using the psychedelic altered state to kind of enhance the therapy process in a clinic.

Bill Richards 2:18

Yeah, in my experience, really, what happens in a well grounded session with the major psychedelics anyway, is like ingeniously choreographed by the mind of the patient, yeah, and usually what happens turns out to be better than anything you could have planned and tried to facilitate, you know, like if I thought, Well, this guy needs to regress to age 12 and relive his father coming Home and like, if I tried to meddle and manipulate and do my hypnosis, it would be ridiculous if you just provide this atmosphere of respect, unconditional acceptance, genuineness, the psyche emerges and heals

Dr. Dick Schwartz 3:19

so basic idea is that we’re all multiple personalities. And I don’t mean we all have multiple personality disorder, but the people get who get that diagnosis aren’t really different from the rest of us, except that because of the horrific trauma they suffered as children. They’re what I call parts. Are called altars in the MPD world got blown apart more so they they don’t communicate much. They’re these amnesic blocks between them. But the phenomena of having multiple inner people really what other systems call sub personalities, from my point of view, and this is after 40 years of researching, this whole inner world is normal. It’s the way we’re meant to be. We’re meant to have many different minds trying to help us in our lives with different talents and different resources for us and and if they never got traumatized or didn’t pick up what we call burdens from the culture or from our ancestors or from traumas that happened to us, they would always be in their naturally valuable states, and they would just be helping us in different ways as we go through our lives. We

Mel Herbert 4:45

would do therapy beforehand and talk about what maybe things that I needed to explore that day, yeah, and then lie on a really comfy couch and put on some ice. Shades and a really comfy blanket and some really nice low music on the side, yeah, and then I would be sent off into the K hole. And I was instructed that if I needed to say anything, or or needed to be held, or whatever it was, that the therapist was going to be there the whole time. And for me, I didn’t need that. I was just experiencing the ketamine effect. And then when I came out, that was a very powerful time, as that started to wear off, and I was coming back to the real world. I call it the donut world, because my wife would always bring me donuts after we did ketamine, I’m going back to the donut world. That’s when we really did a lot of great therapy, where I was still disinhibited and able to really talk. It was that time, so the ketamine hadn’t worn off, but I was very disinhibited, but now back in the real world, able to talk, and we really did some deep work during those short periods of time, and then spend the next week thinking about those, journaling about it, and then come back the next week,

Michael Mithoefer 6:06

and we tell people in the preparation session, and we may say it again right then, we don’t want to push you into anything that isn’t where you’ve you know. You know better than we do about whether you’re ready to go there. But would you be willing to go inside and with that question, always emphasizing the choice because it’s, it’s, there are a number of reasons for that. One is, it’s not going to work very well otherwise, but the other is, we actually believe that they know better than we do. On some level, there’s some levels on which we may have really good suggestions and we, in a way, may do way we, you know, we have more experience than they do, so we may have reason to think that something would be helpful. But there are also many factors that their inner protectors know about that we don’t know about. Yeah, yes, we want to honor those that inner protection and we don’t. You know, it may be, well be that there’s some block that would be helpful to remove at the right time, but there may be some reason why that’s not the right time that we don’t know about. So ultimately, we invite. We may have been encouraged, but we never push. So that’s the third element. Are you offering it in a way that they can either accept it or reject it easily?

Outro 7:38

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