Setting an Intention to Unlock Anger with Ketamine: A First Person Narrative
For my 5th session participating in KAP (Ketamine-Assisted Therapy) as a recipient, our team incorporated yogic movement, therapeutic touch, and guided meditation. KAP is a burgeoning field in mental health which aims to utilize a very safe dissociative medicine to unlock mental health breakthroughs. While at higher doses a person enters a fully private psychedelic journey and then reemerges to do integration with their therapist, Ketamine can also be titrated down to lower doses that allow the recipient to be lucid and interactive if desired.
For this session, my team and I set an intention of tapping into anger. As a professional empath and a mother of four, I have long marginalized this emotion for myself. While I often encourage my clients to get in touch with their full range of emotional experiences, including anger, I myself struggle with intense repression of all negative emotions that are not sadness. Often when I am feeling frustrated, my automatic response is to start crying, and this morphs the anger into something more passive and defeated.
I believe that this behavior is both a function of my trauma and my OCD. As an abused child, I learned quite young the amygdala response to freeze. I was never able to defend myself, or fight back, because I simply shut down in a state of panic. Anger always came in waves after an event, when it was no longer useful and the danger was gone. Usually my anger would turn inward, and I began to find respite in self-blame. Anger did not seem like a safe emotion – it felt like chaotic, hurtful, random waves of negativity. When OCD onset happened in my mid-elementary years, repressing anger became compulsive.
Around this time, I began to have the intrusive thought: “It’s my fault.” Most of us cannot fully stop our intrusive thoughts from continuing to pepper our brains, but with proper treatment, I have learned to ignore this thought. Yesterday, working with a client on her trauma and self-blame struggles, I had a sudden memory flash of a night when a neighbor was assaulted at gunpoint in our alleyway garage (the door was broken and wouldn’t close all the way). I remember hearing the story and suddenly being overwhelmed by self-blame. That intrusive thought “It’s my fault” became a haunting mantra that followed me well into my thirties.
At the end of my day as a therapist, when I had to transition into being a Ketamine recipient, I decided to target this self-blame impulse, a form of internalized anger. Because anger is a natural human emotion, when we repress it and disallow it, it usually channels into a toxic attack on the self. “It’s my fault” is a form of compulsive mental self-harm. I needed to unlock externalized anger and re-channel that energy outward when the world merited it. I needed to be angry with my neighbor’s attacker or our negligent landlord or the City of Milwaukee for allowing our neighborhood to be as violent as it was, only because it wasn’t gentrified yet. I needed to feel into this anger, and release it.
In order to achieve this goal, my team decided to lower my dose down to 300mg (Note: Dosing is very individualized and needs to be decided under the guidance of a Psychiatrist). I held the medicine under my tongue while Jessa, our Therapeutic Yoga Instructor, led me on a guided meditation to find my anger in my body. We discovered that I sensed stagnant anger under my left shoulder, behind my heart. She pressed into this pain point and encouraged me to lean into the psychedelic imagery of anger that began to enter my consciousness.
My mind created a raging wildfire. At this point I had swallowed the medicine (some lozenges you must keep in your mouth for about 10-15 minutes for absorption) and was able to speak with her. She asked me to talk about those flames and sit with them, but before long a white shroud covered up the fire. I was immediately able to recognize this as my OCD. Jessa asked me to remove the shroud, and immediately the imagery of flames burning through the white fabric appeared and I continued to lean into my anger.
Later in the session, still laying down with my eye mask on, my psychedelic journey circled back to a moment of abuse, and my upper body shook in a primal way. We both noticed in the moment that I was shaking off my trauma in the animalistic response written about by Peter Levine. I was conscious, with all the psychological understanding that I possess professionally, but also dissociated enough to finally feel into my trauma.
When the disgust and pain turned back to anger, Jessa offered her hands for me to push her away. Over and over, we locked hands and I pushed her away. Suddenly the anger was welling back up inside me and Jessa offered a pillow into my hands and challenged me to take out my anger physically. I pounded the pillow and threw it across the room, still fully supine and masked, and in my psychedelic state. We repeated this perhaps a dozen times. Everytime I reached up, Jessa placed a pillow in my hands and I threw it across the room in rage. I felt a shift, and I realized that the fight left my body and the medicine had worn off.
This was by far my most meaningful and cathartic KAP experience I have experienced thus far, and I look forward to continuing to integrate. While the anger permeated through my evening and randomly flared up like a wildfire still burning underground, I woke up this morning with a renewed lightness of my being.
Rather than avoid the distress of anger, I had walked right into it and through it. KAP allowed me to release my barriers and feel a previously dangerous emotion. The fire has left fertile ground in my consciousness and I am ready to plant the seeds of my next chapter.
If you are wondering if Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy may be the best next step in your journey, we have a free KAP Q & A session coming up next week. Please contact us today to register!!
