How Ketamine Helped Me Experience My First Miracle and Stop believing in Magic

I used to believe that magic could happen in therapy. I used to believe that I would help people rid themselves of their problems. I also thought I could learn enough, be a good enough therapist, and work hard enough that I could even help people experience dramatic change in next to no time. I thought maybe I could get good enough at this that I could be the therapist that could help people get these almost miraculous results from therapy. I don’t think that I was alone in that either, I think a lot of us therapists probably want to believe in these things and some training programs are pretty bad about setting students up with very bad expectations of what helping people is actually like. I was one of those, my bad expectations about therapy came from my grad school experience because I didn’t really know anything about therapy before that. I attribute these bad expectations to one man…

Or I guess the stories that people told about him, really. That is Milton Erickson and he was one of the best psychotherapists and hypnotherapists to ever practice. Or at least that’s what I was taught, for no apparent reason. It’s not like his model was ever really expressed in a cogent way, and it’s not like anyone even ever measured his outcomes to see how much he was ACTUALLY helping people, but god, the stories about him are phenomenal! 

I remembered one story about a woman who struggled with social anxiety. She came to Erickson for help and he ended up giving her a strange prescription. This woman had a gap in her front two teeth, which had been part of her struggle as it was part of some of her self-image issues. So Erickson tells her to start messing with people by shooting water at them through the gap in her teeth. And not only did it help, it’s how she ended up meeting the person that she married. Like I said, great stories right! And that’s just one of the quick ones. The story of the African Violet is another good one…

So Why Did I Like this Weirdo?

Aside from the fact that his sense of fashion spoke to me, Erickson had a direct line to some of my deepest desires and insecurities back then. I kind of wanted to grow into the type of therapist that could emulate this guy. I wanted to help people with their suffering, and he sure seemed to do that. If he focused on a symptom it went away! I really wanted therapy to feel like art, and he was so creative. I wanted to put some craftsmanship into the way I was practicing, and no one was more unique than him. Finally, I needed to be smart, and he was so darn clever. My experience of myself at the time was that I was stupid and someone had made a mistake for me to even be in grad school. I’d call it imposter syndrome, but I was a student. I DIDN’T know what I was doing, and there’s no reason I should have at that point. But I was still terrified a lot of the time that I’d be found out. That I’d be exposed as an idiot, so I just NEEDED to be seen as intelligent and clever. 

And for a time, I actually got decent with some Ericksonian techniques. One of the professors in my program saw me taking an interest, so he gave me extra books to read since he was a bit of an Ericksonian himself. Hell, I even had a couple of my “miracle cure” sessions while in the student clinic. One of them was a client who came in for insomnia and shame around how they felt they couldn’t manage their life. We did some exploring and they brought up how letting their apartment get messy and dirty was a point of shame because they felt they couldn’t have friends over ever. So, I had all my ingredients for a therapeutic bind and I told them that I had an idea for them but I didn’t think they’d like it. I told them I needed them to convince me that they actually wanted homework since changes around sleep are so hard to make. They did convince me, so I told them that if they do not fall asleep within an hour of laying down, they had to get up and clean a room of their apartment. After the room was done, they could then decide if they wanted to try to sleep again or if they were going to move on to the next room. 

They said they cleaned their entire apartment the first night. Second night, they cleaned a room then fell asleep. Third night they cleaned two rooms before they could fall asleep. Fourth night…straight to sleep. And when they came in for their second session they said they had just been sleeping through the night from that point on and it felt silly to them to over-focus on cleanliness like they had been. I think we had 2-3 more sessions maybe before they were just saying that things felt good and they didn’t really need anything other than maybe to transition into couples therapy.

How I Lost the Magic… 

A few other instances like that happened and it was intoxicating! For me, not believing I could handle this, it meant the world that I could help someone so quickly with something that had been bothering them for so long. And as someone who has had their past struggles with substances let me tell you, THAT was the highest I’ve ever been. I had never met a dragon that I wanted to chase more! And that’s exactly what I did for the first few years of my career. I chased these moments where everything in a client’s world could crack open and their pain could dissolve. The problem is that those highs were never the day to day. They were the exception to the rule, but I couldn’t see that. I didn’t know I was chasing a fleeting high, I thought I was a magician! I just felt like a bad one, like I thought I just didn’t know how to perform the magic correctly every time. 

I got so focused. I was trying so hard to dial in my understanding and use of these techniques…that no one had ever researched extensively or formed into a cohesive model. I was on a fool’s errand and I just kept beating myself up the longer that I kept unsuccessfully trying. I eventually started to measure my outcomes and review videos of sessions, and that’s when I had my little heart broken. Sure IF these techniques worked, it was like magic. But what I learned was just how few people it helped. With the numbers I was looking at, my intervention as a therapist seemed to help an insignificant amount of my individual clients. So I abandoned it all! I started learning new models of therapy and kept getting more and more bitter about the amount of things I felt I had been taught that were worthless. I got so burned out and cynical that I was approaching a place where therapy felt like a pointless endeavor because I couldn’t find anyone who could help me learn what actually worked for people. I began to resent the field for how much it seemed like it was all about hero worship and personal world views instead of helping people. I felt so alone because everyone wants to talk about the warm fuzzies we get from therapy and no one wants to talk about skill development. All while I’m sitting and re-watching whatever I deemed to be my worst therapeutic performance of the week, trying to figure how to be better all by myself in my office. Until at one point, I found myself in tears filling out a job application for a position in HR…

Looking for Hope

I just couldn’t bring myself to finish the application. I just didn’t want to leave the field, but I felt so hopeless. Even more than that I felt powerless to help my clients in a meaningful way. On top of that, I struggled to find relief in my own therapy. I finally stopped chasing those moments. I stopped believing in magic because I never experienced any of those miracles myself. It all just started to feel like it was fake and all those Erickson stories floated back into the same part of my mind where I keep fairy tales and fantasies.

But then something started to shift. I had been looking to broaden my practice. I had been working mostly with couples for a few years at that point and it was just becoming tedious. I was getting tired of doing the same thing ALL day, so I wanted to start working with individuals again more. The problem was that I was so burned out, finding something new to be passionate about felt like a pretty big task. I couldn’t really be moved by much at that time and I started to wonder if my passion for the work had just run out and I didn’t want to admit it to myself. 

I started to do some reflecting though. At that time, I had still not found help for my own struggles in therapy, but I had found some relief through ketamine injections. I started to ask myself what had really shifted for me in those treatments, what difference had this actually made for me? And it was so interesting because the change had been so subtle. The message that my depression had made me unlovable was ever present in my ruminations back then. And you know the funny thing, I don’t think the things I said to myself changed that much. The content stayed mostly the same, but the message seemed to change. It was now a sense that I had been in a lot of pain, for a long time. I’d pushed a lot of people away in that pain, and it made sense that I did because I just needed to feel okay. There was no more believing that I was unlovable or that no one cared. Now there was just a sense that relationships are hard, and I had been a hard person to connect with while I was going through a lot of suffering.

There wasn’t a moment for me. There wasn’t any magic. I was getting better. I think meaningful change is actually kind of rare and very difficult. I’ve blogged about that before, I just had this new realization that it still felt like a miracle even though there was no moment. The more that I did my own emotional work, and ketamine helped relieve some of my ruminating, things were able to shift over time in moments, just not in a moment. And this felt so miraculous because, up until then, life had shown me repeatedly that things do not get better with time. Little by little, I could separate my sense of self from my pain. I could start to experience myself as something other than some angry, mean, cynical monster. I am just a guy who struggles with being harsh because I spent a lot of time beating myself to a pulp as a young person. I had stopped looking for that 180 moment, and I had a sense of power now that I could chip away at the ice on my frozen emotions. And that power meant I could keep doing it. I could have my life back without having to solve this impossible problem that was my pain. I got to experience my first miracle because I stopped looking for magic.

So I started training in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. I started using this modality in my practice and it changed how it felt to be a therapist. And I’ve even found a few uses for a few of those old techniques in preparing and integrating the psychedelic experiences that clients have in medicine sessions. I’m done chasing the highs, even if that means the changes I help people go through in therapy aren’t so dramatic. I get to help people make whatever shifts they need over time. I get to help put people in touch with a sense of power that they’ve lost. It helped my clients have more of those moments, and it helped me stop looking for that magic moment that just wasn’t real. And that’s how I learned that there’s a difference between magic and miracles. Because on the off chance you get to see or experience one of them, miracles are unmistakable and very real…

I hope you aren’t misled by any magicians and I hope you experience miracles in your lifetime

-Ryan