What really happens during a Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy session? People who have worked with a compassionately curious psychotherapist remember special moments of authentic, person to person connection with the therapist; moments that altered their sense of themselves. They tend not to recall specific interpretations but rather a feeling of knowing themselves while at the same time being known by their therapist. This is what Lawrence G. Fischman describes in his insightful paper Knowing and being known: Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy and the sense of authenticity.
The same thing happens in Ed Tronick’s Still Face Video as a beautiful baby girl discovers herself while basking in the loving gaze of her mother; just as the Piggle discovers herself while being seen and reflected in the gentle eyes of the pediatrician Donald Winnicott in his playroom. See my paper on Winnicott’s Work with the Piggle.
In Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, something similar happens between you and your therapist. You experience a special way of being with another that allows you to know yourself at the same time you’re feeling known by the trusted other.
Here’s what happened in a moving psychotherapy session I had with a young woman after she’d completed several sessions of sublingual Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy with me a short time earlier.
She arrived tense and frightened.
Yesterday I woke up dreaming as the news blared out of my clock radio, she told me. Images of a terrified three-year-old freezing in the rubble in Gaza; a deer paralyzed by flames in a forest in California. Weird how I take the most gruesome things happening in the world and weave them, still half asleep, into my dreams.
I wonder if those images might be hinting at something deeper in you, I answered.
I forced myself to the bathroom and splashed cold water into my eyes. Eyeliner clung to my lids and blurred the borders of my face. My breasts appeared bloated, my nipples darker in the mirror. I’m over a week late for my period.
As I approached the Margret Sanger Center, I saw a group of women in front hoisting a placard with large bold letters: Abortion Providers Are Heroes. The women, even the cop trying to help one of them hold up the placard when she didn’t really need his help, smiled their approval as I passed.
In the lobby I noticed a giant portrait of Margret Sanger. Her sharp, unambiguous eyes and pointed mouth seemed to shout the words engraved on a plaque below the portrait: No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. I remember reading her mother had 18 pregnancies and gave birth to 11 kids. She had 7 miscarriages.
Is a fetus the size of a poppy seed, four hundredths of an inch in length, a part of my body? I wondered as I approached the receptionist.
The nurse was brutally thorough. You couldn’t pay me to relive my twenties, she muttered as she methodically jammed the vaginal, cervical, and anal swabs inside me. How could that bitch have been so stupid to believe my only worry was being free of herpes, gonorrhea, or papillomavirus. How could she have missed the time bomb ticking inside me?
When I reached Washington Square Park, I settled on a park bench overlooking the fountain. The elm trees kissing the air helped me breathe easier. Two little girls on the park bench beside me squealed with delight as they portioned out bread crumbs to a gaggle of pigeons clustered around them. The pigeons let out a chorus of coos as they gobbled the bread crumbs. I watched them, thinking of a poem I once read about children, the tiny ones who live in a land of giants and never give pain to things that feel alive to them.
When I got back to my apartment, I at once reset the clock radio, resolving to take a break from the next day’s horror show.
This morning I flipped from side to side in bed, half dozing, and tried to blot out the day. But the sunlight streaming in through the window kept me awake along with children blabbing and giggling outside. I squinted down at them on the sidewalk in their little yellow blazers secured safely to each other by a long red chord, guided by two teachers in front and back. I was tempted to call Jeff.
The first time I laid eyes on him was in Wicked Willy’s on Bleecker Street. He stood out from the other NYU students, weird in his matted hair and threadbare tank top. He swaggered over to me, wordless, relying on his buff bi’s and tri’s. I played the angel whore to get him to dance with me. And it always had to be feet in the air when we fucked. He never had a clue that it was the fear in his eyes that moved me.
And that day we were leaving the Morton Williams weighed down with groceries. A homeless guy leaning against the building lowered his eyes like he was too ashamed to look at us. A scabby dog lying beside him jumped up and peered at us with imploring, bloodshot eyes. I pulled out a ten-dollar bill for the homeless guy.
You realize he trained the dog to do that, Jeff told me.
Yes, I thought to myself. Now they both can eat.
I’m not gonna call Jeff.
Last night the dream images battered me like huge wounded waves that moan and howl.
When I woke up I could only remember fragments: A little girl stops crying, hoping her mother will get bored and stop smacking her. A teenager punches her mother. How can the daughter avoid inflicting this ghost shit on a child, the daughter who slithers from one hook-up joint to another in the East Village?
Standing by my window in the warmth of the morning sun, I remembered my grandmother who birthed three stillborn babies and was the first to hold me. You were filled with such tiny, lovely things, she told me. It would have been hard to replace you. I still see her smiling at me tenderly, the boldness in her eyes, and the time she always took to tackle my questions.
Yes, there’s time. Questions well up inside me: What foods are off the menu? How much weight gain? Vitamins? Exercise? Sex?
I could barely catch my breath as I entered your office today. Sitting here with you, I remembered what my grandmother told me.
You remind me of my grandmother.
