Psycholytic Therapy

Doing medicine work with Deep Awakening can involve using a "psychedelic" and/or "psycholytic" approach. You and your therapist can discuss whether working in a psychedelic or psycholytic context may be the best fit for you.

Regardless of the approach, the initial phases of therapy - establishing trust, understanding the process, and clarifying your intentions - are done online and without medicine. Medicine sessions generally occur in person (in Campbell River, BC).

Further information about psycholytic therapy is provided below. For further information about psychedelic therapy, follow this link.

Psycholytic Therapy uses a low to moderate dose of a psychedelic medicine over multiple sessions to temporarily soften psychological defences and enable a person to deeply explore and process emotional material, conflicts, and memories within a traditional psychotherapy context. Clients in psycholytic therapy experience a mild, non-ordinary state of consciousness, but also remain fully oriented to their external environment and in relationship with the therapist. In essence, the psycholytic dose of medicine acts as a tool to enhance and accelerate traditional talk therapy by making the unconscious mind more accessible and the client more open to processing and integrating deep emotional material.

Psycholytic therapy typically involves multiple medicine sessions, sometimes interspersed with non-medicine integration sessions. The number and frequency of sessions is variable and depends on multiple factors, including client preference and clinical need. When doing psycholytic therapy, my approach typically (but not always) involves Inner Parts Work, which is discussed further below.

Inner Parts Work - including, but not limited to, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) - is a psychotherapeutic approach that views the human personality as made up of multiple "parts" or subpersonalities, each with unique emotions, beliefs, roles, and traumas. The goal of Inner Parts Work is to help individuals heal emotional wounds, experience greater self-compassion, better understand inner conflicts, change unhelpful behaviours, and more effectively navigate external relationships by fostering harmony amongst their inner parts and helping these internal aspects release traumatic burdens.

In my experience, psycholytic therapy lends itself very well to Inner Parts Work, with many clients easily accessing and working with their inner parts while in the psycholytic container. The psycholytic dose of medicine helps to lower psychological defences and foster openness to inner exploration with heightened courage, curiosity and self-compassion.