The Group Ketamine Experience
In a dimly lit room, ethereal music plays as you lie on a cushion. A soft mask covers your eyes. You've just had a profound reflective experience with a high dose of ketamine and slowly remove your mask, fluttering your eyelids to see the seven others around you doing the same. Before this, let's say you'd held a somewhat lonely worldview-perhaps that “people are unsafe and I'm better off alone,” suggests founder of Brooklyn Psychedelic Therapy, Sybil Ottenstein. Now, with this group ketamine-assisted therapy session ending, “you find yourself sitting around a circle…processing what you felt and seeing it reflected back to you in the warm and caring eyes of your fellow group members,” she says. You think, “Maybe it is safe to be with other people.”
The Healing Power of Group Therapy
Besides the enticing price point (group ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, or KAP, sessions are much cheaper than individual ones, which can cost thousands of dollars), therapists say this type of realization gives group KAP its value. Ottenstein insists, “The healing power of the group” stems from the interpersonal nature of most people's traumas. Group KAP helps resolve this by more closely mimicking everyday life than an individual therapy session-especially in cities, where the constant throng of people can cause discomfort and stress. In group KAP, founder of Third Nature Therapy Julie Goldberg says participants must confront the “edginess of being around something that's agitating and calming yourself at the same time.”
Setting the Stage: How Group Sessions Work
Edginess abates, however, in Goldberg's tranquil new Williamsburg office where she plans to host group KAP (even as a Task Rabbit assembles tables when I visit in August). Overlooking a Russian orthodox cathedral framed by exposed brick walls and a gangly cactus, Goldberg explains the process for her upcoming groups. After screening members-eight per two facilitators-to ensure they're right for the group and medication, she'll host a couple of in-person meetings without ketamine, allowing participants to get comfortable. Other practitioners, like Ottenstein, use Zoom for introductory sessions. Goldberg offers some psychoeducation, like on ketamine's studied benefits, but focuses on questions that facilitate connections: “What does your heart desire? Can you see your heart's desire in another group member?”
Creating a Safe Container
When it's time to take the ketamine, facilitators ensure the session runs smoothly, as Ottenstein describes, by “holding a container”—a space where participants feel protected and free to reflect. “I try to model principles,” she says, like “listening with care,” for example.
The Journey Back: Integration and Connection
When participants rustle on their cushions, signaling the ketamine's dwindling effects, Goldberg likes to incorporate an added “sensory experience,” she says. Having asked clients about their childhood snacks, she'll stock a fridge in her office with apples, peanut butter, and jelly to keep clients feeling connected to their bodies after dosing. Following sessions, without ketamine, group participants discuss their plans to incorporate what they learned into their daily lives.
“Ketamine is heart-opening,” says Goldberg. In group therapy, “you're in this vulnerable space with people,” and ketamine “accelerates and aids” in the connection with group members-and, ideally, other community members going forward.
