As ambient music filled the air, I lay on the mat under a thin sheet and closed my eyes behind an eye mask. I was in a room full of 30 people, half on mats and the other half sitting next to me. My “sitter” held my hand while one of the doctors administered an intramuscular (IM) injection of ketamine into my right arm.
There was a momentary tingling pain, and as I faded into space, the sitter held my hand and whispered, “See you later.” Anxiety and fear of the unknown soon disappeared, and I melted into myself, drifting from the present into a timeless place.
I became a baby again. Her mother was carrying me on her back. We were running through the jungle to the beat of drums overhead. I felt safe, connected, embraced, and attached to this woman who had been a stranger to me for most of her life.
A few weeks ago, I learned about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) and attended an experiential training for mental health and medical professionals looking to become KAP practitioners. I spent a week glamping on a farm in Napa, California, learning about the benefits of using ketamine in conjunction with psychotherapy to treat clients. suffering from various problems – post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar I and II depressive phases, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), psychological reactions to physical illness, personality disorders, life-threatening illnesses, substance use problems, etc. , relationship and existential issues.
What began as an interest in extending my personal therapy practice into the psychedelic world turned into the most life-changing therapeutic experience of my healing journey to date.
My first memory with my mother was at LAX. I was her 3-year-old and had just flown across the Pacific for the first time. I remember sitting on her father’s shoulder as the glass doors slid open in the arrivals terminal. We found her right away. She is a lonely Korean woman who looks just like me. I knew she would be thrilled to see her. I felt her father’s joy, so she tried to match it, but it didn’t come naturally to me.
A year before us, my mother could not speak English at all and left for America with several hundred dollars. It was one of the many sacrifices she made for us and was the beginning of a lifetime of feelings of guilt, gratitude, love and resentment.
My mother worked non-stop from the moment she arrived in the United States to provide for not only us but also her widowed mother and young siblings in Seoul. As a nurse, she spent her life caring for many people, but very little time for me. For about 30 years, she left home at dawn every weekday and came back around dinnertime.
All my life I felt her absence. She couldn’t help but feel resentful, but she soon felt guilty that she hadn’t given thanks, given how much she had sacrificed. . I repeated this trauma over the years, not only to her, but also to her relationship with her emotionally incapable partner, her sadness turning to anger and back again to her sadness. . I wanted to feel noticed and selected, even by those who can’t.
I have grieved our relationship in many ways: with my therapist, family therapy that didn’t go my way, at an ayahuasca retreat, during my psilocybin journey, and by venting out to family and friends. I was there. i tried everything.
But I couldn’t shake the anger and resentment inside me. Every time she called me, I wanted to throw her phone against the wall. I hated our superficial conversations and couldn’t forgive her for not being there for me over the years.
And ketamine changed everything. Ketamine opened my heart.
Ketamine was born as an anesthetic Research began in the 1960s and in the late 1990s began investigating the potential antidepressant effects of ketamine. In the mid-2000s, psychiatrists began administering intramuscular ketamine within the framework of psychotherapy. Ketamine is becoming more and more popular as a treatment for mental health disorders, especially for people who have been suffering without any improvement for some time.
Ketamine has both antidepressant and dissociative effects. Taking ketamine allows patients to time out from their normal thought processes, which may lead to relief from negative thoughts and access to their observing self. Ketamine also promotes neural plasticity ― The brain’s ability to change and adapt. These effects can enhance a patient’s ability to participate in meaningful psychotherapy during and after administration.
At the workshop, we first experienced ketamine using a sublingual lozenge. Later, one of my sitters, a refugee who fled Vietnam by boat, and the only Asian woman there shared the revelations of the trip that changed my life.
She recounted how she realized that her mother’s nervous system had stopped since she reached shore. Maybe because of the post-ketamine glow, this hit me hard. I never thought I would see my mother as traumatized and with a hardened survival response.
I knew we had to hit it off and work, so I asked her to be my sitter for my next intramuscular injection experience. I wanted this trip to look at her mother with her compassion. And I knew that I needed correction experience for that.
Ten years ago I was hit by a taxi while waiting to cross the road. My mother flew to Chicago to care for me for a month. She bathed me, fed me, slept next to me in bed and took care of me much more than when I was a child. It was a ray of hope in an otherwise terrifying and traumatic experience.
But these memories were tainted by another trauma.
After several weeks in the ICU, I had to return to have surgery to put the fractured bone under my eye back in place. I was frustrated and annoyed, but was told that the procedure would be mild and, above all, aesthetic.
As I lay in a hospital bed about to undergo surgery, my mother, a conservative Christian, asked me: “Can I pray for you?” I sighed and said yes reluctantly. She knelt down next to me and started praying. “God, if Sharon dies, please take care of her in heaven.”
I felt a wave of anger rushing up from my stomach. I started crying. Her last memory before she died was of her mother leaving me to go to the operating room. I was afraid that this moment would be my last. This memory overshadowed the weeks she spent in my care.
So I asked the sitter to hold my hand as I went down and reassure me that I would see you soon. I knew I was going to be fine, so I was able to relax and surrender to the meds right away.
IM, which is an injection into the muscle, is much more potent than lozenges, takes effect within minutes, and is absorbed three times higher. As I began to sink deeper, the sound of my breathing led me into a meditative state where I could let go and just observe.
Negative emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and resentment were removed, leaving me with compassion and curiosity. Suddenly I knew her mother’s innocence. She was as lost, confused and frightened as I was. She had a brave face because she was an adult and I was a child.
My heart opened up to her and we cried as we comforted each other as we spoke in Korean.
“Umma” I called out.
“I’m here. I’m not going anywhere,” she replied.
I felt a wave of euphoria running through my body. I flew through beautiful colors, skies and sun. This must be what heaven feels like,I thought. And then I realized – that’s all her mother wanted. She just wants me to go to heaven.
In this dissociative, meditative state, my brain made new connections that had previously been blocked by all the anger and resentment that had not yet been fully metabolized. My heart was filled with love. I took a deep breath and radiated this love outward, extending it to every inch of my body and inch by inch.
When I got back from training, the first thing I did was call my mom. My mother was surprised to hear from me. I told her all about KAP training. I told her “She didn’t realize how depressed she was before, but now she feels how happy she is. Umma, I love you. I am no longer angry with you. ”
she started crying. “I have prayed many times and realize how much I have abandoned you over the years. I didn’t.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I appreciate the validation and the apology, but I don’t need it anymore. I don’t need to see you. I see now… you’ve lived your life in response to survive.”
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s how I dealt with it. I’m so sorry I didn’t see it until now.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I want you to do whatever it takes to feel safe and happy. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine now.”
Another woman who participated in the training said to me on the last day. “Sharon, you looked like a young man when you first came, but now you look like a woman.” In less than a week, I went from being an angry, angry teenager to a mature, caring woman.
My mother and I had dinner alone for the first time in almost a year.We shared updates, had fun joking about her sisters, and bonded over our love of the cold. donchimi I had noodle soup at my favorite restaurant in Ktown. It felt like the space between us was brightened. I feel lighter.
She prayed quietly before she started eating, but I thought nothing happened. How nice This is how she has survived. For the first time in 30 years, I showed my mother the unconditional love I’ve always wanted from her. Once she was able to do this without expecting anything from her, I finally felt like I deserved to receive just as much love.
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