Anna and Jake had been together for over a decade and created a relationship built on mutual respect, shared dreams, and the kind of deep love that carries people through life’s challenges. But Jake often hid his deeper emotions from Anna which left her feeling deprived of him. Over the years they had drifted apart. Daily life had become routine, their arguments had become circular and beneath the surface they both felt an unspoken malaise. The three of us agreed that they needed something more than just better communication skills. They needed to reconnect on a deeper, emotional, non-verbal level.
In my work with them I’d used the Hendrix Couples Dialog and encouraged them to try it at home, acknowledging that it was a challenge to use it effectively on their own because, like Yoga, it requires practice. You can’t just glide from Downward Dog into a perfect Warrior 3.
They were intrigued when I suggested the Hendrix Couples Dialog could be enriched with Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy and they agreed to do two sessions using sublingual Ketamine.
In the first Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy session, Anna was on the medicine wearing eye shades, Jake was seated beside her, both listened to music Anna had chosen earlier from a playlist and I sat in the room with them serving as a compassionately curious witness.
In the second Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy session a week later, Jake was on the medicine wearing eye shades, Martha was seated next to him, both listening to music George had chosen earlier and I again sat in the room with them as a compassionately curious witness.
Anna and Jake used these two sessions to deepen their capacity to do the three things necessary in the Hendrix Couples Dialogue: 1) Mirror the other’s point of view without necessarily agreeing with it, 2) Acknowledge and validate the other’s words and actions, again without necessarily agreeing and, 3) Be compassionately curious and empathize with what the other is feeling and going through. They went on to do more Couples Dialog sessions with me without Ketamine.
Here’s what happened at the end of our last session.
Anna pulled up a poem on her cell phone titled Kryptonite by Ron Koertge, the fourth poem on the Poems to Love Smarter page of my website and read it to Jake.
Here’s the poem:
Lois liked to see the bullets bounce
off Superman’s chest, and of course
she was proud when he leaned into
a locomotive and saved the crippled
orphan who had fallen on the tracks.
Yet on those long nights when he wasn’t
readjusting longitude or destroying
a meteor headed right for some nun,
Lois considered carrying just a smidgen
of kryptonite in her purse or at least
making a tincture to dab behind his ears.
She pictured his knees giving way,
the color draining from his cheeks.
He’d lie on the couch like a guy with
the flu, too weak to paint the front
porch or take out the garbage. She
could peek down his tights or draw
on his cheek with a ball point. She
might even muss his hair and slap
him around.
“Hey, what’d I do?” he’d croak just
like a regular boyfriend. At last.
After she read him the poem, Jake let Anna take him in her arms and whispered tenderly: Better than Kryptonite.
