How I Went from Being a Pastor-in-Training to a Psychedelic Therapist

“You made me feel like I am cool. The way you treat me just makes it easier to like myself…”

****Trigger Warning: This article discusses suicide****

That is one of the most touching things someone has ever said to me, and it did not come from a client in therapy. It came from a 16 year old kid who was pulling me to the side during a going away party that was being thrown for me. I’d been working at a church in Oklahoma during the summers of college. My undergrad actually had nothing to do with mental health, I was studying Bible & Religion and working with the youth minister at this church. That statement from that kid has lingered with me for years because it was a very intense moment for me. Through the tears, I could tell they meant every word and that I had a big impact on them. It was a difficult moment because I knew something at that going away party that no one else did. I was hearing that I helped in ways that I had always hoped I could. All the while, I also knew that I would never work for another church again…

Small Town Livin’

And before I go any further, religion and spirituality are different things. I think that spirituality is a human experience, and religion is a system created by humans. So that being said, let me tell you about the religion I was raised with. I was raised in the Church of Christ. For those unfamiliar, it’s a decentralized, fundamentalist denomination of the church that trends conservative in its interpretation of the Bible, meaning I grew up in a fairly restrictive environment with a very conservative worldview. There were a lot of sins that I needed to be staying away from, one of those being drugs like psychedelics or ketamine. (Some don’t consider ketamine a psychedelic, which is kind of splitting hairs in my opinion) 

It was not ALL restriction and negative experiences. I lived in a small town in Arkansas that was actually kind of dominated by this form of church…well that and meth. It was kind of a meth or church choose your own adventure situation. But all that to say it was a poor, small town in which those that struggled REALLY struggled. My dad was a minister at one of the church’s in this town, and so growing up I got a peak behind the curtain. I saw his effort in being there for people when he could, trying to care for people, and the sacrifices that it took. 

I wanted to be this kind of person, I wanted to be a caretaker. I saw and knew that it seemed like people were all dealing with more pain and hurt than they showed and I just wanted to help people feel okay. In retrospect, I internalized that sense of people’s pain too young. I had a kind of existential heaviness to me that I carried around by time I was getting to jr. high and high school. And around that same time I was starting to tell people that I was going to be a minister or a pastor. I was going to become that caretaker of my community. I was going to make sure everyone was taken care of, everyone had a place, no one was going to be left alone if I had anything to say about it! 

Losing My Religion

So I set off on my journey to become a pastor, and I went to a school at one of the Universities that was affiliated with this flavor of Christianity. I wrote that on purpose too, because a lot of people would fight me on the use of the word pastor. The Church of Christ doesn’t have pastors, it has ministers. And there’s a Bible verse they can point to as to why we use the one word over the other and you need to have the correct opinion about it. Same for musical instruments being used in worship and why the wine Jesus drank was different and that’s why drinking is a sin now. Do you kind of see what I’m getting at? There was so much energy dedicated to the policing of behavior and making sure to always be living “a life worthy of the calling.” But as I started to age, those things felt hollow. All this focus on the correctness of beliefs only felt like it took me away from caring for those that needed me. The Heavenly Father I was being shown seemed to have a bit of a “because I said so” style of parenting.

My family had moved away at this point, but that school was back in the small town I was born in. My view of the town changed as my understanding of my own religion did too. As I grew up, I also noticed that there were two distinct groups in the town, the Christians and the secular folks and the two never meaningfully interacted from my point of view. It wasn’t a strict division by economic standing although the Christians did tend to be made up of a more privileged class that could afford this private Christian university and stayed after graduation. Sure, there were acts of kindness here and there that you could point to as people “being Christ to the world” but those things all happened at a person to person level. I am not saying that is not important. What I am saying is that this 19ish year old kid started to wonder what happened to all the money that a private school and three megachurches with 500+ memberships generated. I knew it didn’t go to the church staff either because my family was broke. The baskets sure did seem full when they got passed around. I’m not saying something nefarious happens in the churches, I am just saying I never received an acceptable answer. It wasn’t going to my family or any other ministers families I knew, and it sure wasn’t going to the neighbor I would occasionally help into his apartment because he would pass out on his stoop. As a matter of fact, some would have just said that his need for my help was actually just the consequences of his sinful living. 

The final straw came when I was working at a church in Oklahoma in the summers between my last two years of school. A controversy erupted and dominated my final few months with the church. The scandal: should clapping be allowed in worship while we sing? I think I was 21-22 at the time. The fact that moving in that way by that age felt like an old hat just that much more makes me think I was too young for all the pressure that I’d put on myself. And I was starting to get a more solid sense of what I felt like were the actual social struggles around me. And since I was a pastor, I viewed my job description as “guiding the flock”. So I started bringing up these questions in the sermons I delivered, at which point I figured out people do not appreciate difficult questions from their preachers, they much prefer answers. I started to get talking-to’s from the elders following sermons where I’d ask questions like why “the role of women” seemed to always mean “following men”; stuff like that. These talking-to’s kind of became my Monday morning ritual, I could almost set my watch to them. I was not allowed to deliver sermons anymore after I pointed out in conversation with one of the elders that we had spent months at each others throats about clapping when we sing and I had never heard a congregant even wonder why the church in America is still essentially segregated. It was not an observation that seemed to be appreciated. While I felt good about the work I had done with the youth group and their families, I was done. I felt like I could keep trying to be the caretaker of my community that I wanted to be, but I was going to also have to consistently fight whatever church I was tied with too. I left that church in Oklahoma to wrap up the last little bit of this religious degree that I now knew I was never going to use. I made a couple more attempts at church communities after that, but honestly that’s when I left religion. (If you want my experience of spirituality, you’ve got to buy me a cup of coffee 😉)

A New Path

I stuck around that small town in Arkansas working construction and part-time at a sandwich shop so I could focus my energy on turning my regular, college-aged drinking into a real problem. That is until my roommate started going to grad school to be a therapist. He started going to grad school for Marriage & Family Therapy and I found the stuff he was talking about fascinating. He started talking about systems theory and systemic thinking and it all just tracked with how I made sense of the world at that point. Could this be my chance to help people in their suffering? Being a pastor involved playing church politics and arguing doctrine with people who didn’t actually know enough about theology or philosophy to even have a real position. But now there was this opportunity to help people, and I’m explicitly just supposed to accept them as they are and never force them into living any particular way. It felt like a hopeful shift for me, and for a time, the field of therapy made good on that promise. 

After a while, the honeymoon ended though. For various reasons, I dealt with burnout as a therapist. But the most heartbreaking part of this burnout was that I came to experience therapists as quite the “religious” crowd as well. The schools of therapy started to feel as obsessed with the correctness of their doctrines as any Baptist or Episcapalian I had ever met. I became cynical about therapy for the same reason that I couldn’t do religion anymore. There was no spirit in it…

Finding a Soul in Therapy

There’s several ways to say what I mean by that. It’s like when you hear a musician critique something by saying it has no soul. They’re talking about music in its lowest form in my opinion, technical proficiency. Jimi Hendrix was sloppy, messed around with feedback, and played an upside down right-handed guitar as a left-handed player. You can hear imperfection in his music, you can hear a human being playing it. That’s what I was missing at that point. Because the rigidity of all these different models took away the possibility of complexity, just like the rules of religion had. You either fit or you didn’t. If that secure attachment doesn’t make it all better like it says in the books, well then you’re shit-out-of-luck, friend. Or if catching the irrational thoughts, increasing your psychological flexibility, becoming mindfully present, or whatever the model says is the thing doesn’t work, the field just seems to blame the client with no admission of that being what’s happening. 

And I never want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I absolutely believe that there is a minimum level of skill that a therapist must develop in order to help their clients. It can’t be as simple as just connecting with people or else all that bad advice we’ve all got from friends over the years would have done something. Hendrix was all of those things I mentioned AND had technical proficiency. What I am saying is that there’s an art to sitting with someone in their pain that can be taught, it just requires us to be flexible with the edges of the models that we may be working with in therapy.

I’ve had some strange experiences with ketamine in the course of treating my own depression. One of those experiences was actually of my own death. It’s a strange experience because I find a lot of comfort in it actually. Even though for years I struggled with thoughts of suicide, an experience of my own death changed things for me.

I felt myself getting old and more tired. I was in an experience in which I was having a conversation with a mentor from when I was young. I was asking him a lot of questions, particularly about community, belonging, and just finding any sense of meaning in life. He looked at me and said “I don’t have anything for you, I don’t think I ever did.” And at that point I felt myself aging faster. I could see my hands getting wrinkled and becoming weaker. It felt like more energy just left my body with each breath until it all went dark. I was no longer in my body, I was just somewhere else. I couldn’t tell where I ended or began, and I was floating shapeless in a void that went on into infinity. There was nothing. There was no relationships I feared losing, no pressure to find financial security, no more existential dread that came from not being able to help with suffering…there was no suffering. There was just a stillness and a peace and a sense that I could just exist in that place. I’m not saying the thoughts of suicide never came up again, but I am saying that something shifted. There was a sense that I did not want to die because I realized I hadn’t actually lived.

None of that was intuitive. I was taught that when people are struggling with thoughts of suicide, you don’t want to have people indulge those fantasies, and you sure don’t want to make it sound like a peaceful, comforting option. But having that experience shifted something in me. I did not have a rosy view of life from then on, but I did want to give living a try. It worked, in a counterintuitive way, but it worked. I got trained in ketamine-assisted therapy, and I plan to keep getting training with other psychedelics like psilocybin and MDMA as they become legal and are re-scheduled by the FDA. I think there is a lot of potential for psychedelic- assisted therapies to help people that have been stuck for a while. I believe that because that experience helped me find the soul again. It helped me let go of some of the doctrines of my therapy. It got me in touch with a spirit of growth when I had only known stagnation. It helped me find the humanity in the help I offered, when I had lost it for a while. 

I don’t know exactly how the people who taught me psychedelics are a sin would make sense of the fact that a psychedelic experience has helped keep me alive. I hope they’d be flexible enough to learn the lesson I did. 

Things are not always what they appear, except for when they are, in which case they aren’t…

Sincerely, 

Ryan