When Depression is in your bed

My Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) Journey: From Self-Hatred To Self-Care

• Trish Sanders, LCSW • Episode 42

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What if real rest isn’t zoning out, but learning to feel safely still in your own body? Trish takes you inside her year-long journey with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, sharing what KAP actually looks like—from medical screening and at-home setup to music-guided sessions, dosing with lozenges, and why a simple request for lip balm became a breakthrough in receiving care.

We walk step by step through the first session nerves, blood pressure protocols, eye mask and playlist prep, and the gentle inner experience that led to two anchoring insights: "the most beautiful place in the world is inside of me" and "I can breathe here". You’ll hear how integration sessions transformed fleeting moments into durable change, pairing neuroplastic windows with practical rituals so self-compassion moved from concept to felt sense. Along the way, Trish unpacks the difference between therapeutic and recreational use, clarifies common misconceptions about ketamine, and frames the work through a polyvagal lens—contrasting shutdown with true slowdown and naming the blended state of safety and stillness that makes rest restorative.

This is an honest, grounded account designed for the KAP-curious, the clinically minded, and anyone navigating depression who wonders whether healing can stick. We talk best practices, chaperones, virtual care, dosing methods, and the very real variability in risk across different ketamine models. Most of all, we focus on what lasts: trust, integration, and nervous system learning that helps you choose rest without shame and return to center more easily.

If this resonated, subscribe for weekly releases, share it with someone who might need hope today, and leave a review to help others find the show. What question about KAP would you like us to explore next?

If you and your partner are ready to co-create the roadmap to the relationship of your dreams, join us for the next in-person "Getting the Love You Want" Weekend Couples Retreat!

For support in how to have deeper connections and better communication in the relationships that matter most in your life, follow the host, Trish Sanders on Instagram , Bluesky or LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, and welcome to the When Depression is in your bed podcast. Kenamine Assisted Psychotherapy, or CAP, has been coming up more and more in conversations about healing and mental health. For some, it sparks curiosity. For others, hesitation, questions, or even concern. No matter where you stand, if you've ever wondered what it was actually like, this episode is for you. I'll be sharing my first hand experience with CAP, how it became a doorway into nervous system healing, and how it taught me what it truly means to rest in a way that I wasn't sure was possible. At least not for me. I'm your host, Trish Sanders, and I am delighted that you are here. Let's get started. Before we dive in, I do want to just give a quick heads up about what I'm sharing today. I am a licensed clinical social worker and I will be talking about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. I will be sharing my own personal experience and what I've learned professionally, but everything that I share is for educational purposes only. I am not giving medical advice, making any treatment recommendations, or suggesting that anyone try ketamine. And I certainly can't guarantee that the effects that I experienced will be the same or could be guaranteed for anyone else who might be trying to use the same or similar treatment. If you're thinking about ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, please check in with a licensed healthcare provider who can guide you safely and address your unique situation, questions, and concerns. In the next episode, I am going to be sharing more information about the history of ketamine, why it has seemed to just jump on the scene with such popularity these days, and what has come up in some of the research about ketamine, about its actual impact and why it has been such a breakthrough medicine and why it's being used more and more in mental health, particularly with depression. But for today, I'm just going to be talking about my own personal experience. So if you're looking for more information, you can tune in to next week's episode. So for me, I started hearing more and more about ketamine a few years ago. And the thing that kept coming up that was very interesting and appealing to me specifically was that I was hearing that ketamine assisted psychotherapy, CAP, I'll frequently be referring to it as, helped people in a general sense with love and compassion. But what was particularly appealing to me was that it helped with self-love and self-compassion. As a depressed person, and I've talked about this, I now see my experience as a depressed person as being very related to my nervous system experience. But a few years ago, when I was hearing about CAP, I actually was just beginning my path of really getting into nervous system work. So this was all kind of actually happening for me in a similar timeline. There was a lot of new information that I was connecting to and really helped shape my lens or reshape my lens on my own experience. And that led to more understanding about what I wanted to do to heal through that experience. So as a depressed person, and I would say that I had on depression goggles a huge amount of my life, that when I looked at the world, sometimes that seemed pretty bleak. But when I looked at myself, that was far too often a very negative perspective. I have carried a lot of self-hatred and guilt and shame, certainly feelings of being unworthy and not good enough, and feeling like there was no path for me to ever become good enough, that no matter what, I was sort of destined to be this failure for a lot of my life, which is pretty bleak, I have to admit. Certainly, there were absolutely more and more windows when I wasn't seeing myself that way. And now I can attribute that to my nervous system healing. But at the time, I didn't realize that the windows where I was able to see myself with more positivity and more hopefulness, they were happening more and more, and the windows were staying open a little bit longer, but they would always shut. And I would go back to seeing myself in this incredibly negative and quite honestly painful way. And when I started hearing that some cap sessions had the potential to change that in some people, it got me curious. And so I started looking into it and doing research. And I actually got so incredibly excited about it that before I even tried it, I was like, hey, I want to get trained in this and I want to become a therapist who can provide CAP sessions. And the more I started looking to that path, the more I was getting feedback of before you jump into training, it's probably a good idea for you to try it yourself, which of course made a lot of sense to me. And so because I was really interested in this experience for myself of increasing my ability to hold self-compassion and self-love, which is kind of interesting as I say this, because this is how it unfolded for me. My original attraction to CAP was personal. But as soon as I learned more about it, I actually went in the direction of wanting to use it to help other people and kind of almost forgot that it was me that I originally wanted to start helping. But luckily, I was re-guided and coming back to myself and being able to do my own healing was actually the first steps that I took. And I just want to say here very briefly, and I will talk about this more in the next episode, ketamine is often grouped together under the umbrella of medicines known as psychedelics. However, ketamine is not actually a psychedelic. And again, I'll talk more about that next time. But what I want to say just for myself, my own personal journey without going into too much detail, is that as a teenager, I did have some experience with psychedelics in a way that I would call recreational. And I'll talk about my experience and how I have come to define the difference between recreational use of substances or medicine and therapeutic use of the medicine. But again, I will talk about that either later today or perhaps more in the next episode. But I had not had any experience with anything under the umbrella of psychedelics in decades. And so as I was considering ketamine, there was perhaps less trepidation or fear than maybe someone who has never had any experience with anything under the umbrella of psychedelics. But I was still pretty anxious because I didn't know what it was going to be like and I didn't know what it was going to feel like. And when I grew up in the 90s, what I had heard about ketamine was that it was a horse tranquilizer and there was talk about K-holes, which sounded more scary than relaxing or fun, to be quite honest. And that's really what I grew up hearing. And so you may, depending on when you grow up, may have also grown up hearing things about ketamine that really didn't sound so appealing. And so I wasn't put off, that's for sure. I was very curious, but I was still nervous. So much so that in my first ketamine session, my blood pressure was really quite high. And I had to work with my therapist to do some breath work and some meditation for quite some time before my blood pressure came down to a level that was safe enough and we were following protocol. Because had it not come down to a safe enough level, then we would have had to have canceled the session and rescheduled. So I just want to put it out there that I was not just excited and thrilled and completely open to this experience. I had a lot of questions, I had a lot of wondering, and I absolutely had some anxiety around it. But just to back up, just to tell you a little bit more about what I actually went through to get to that very first CAP session, I had gone to a company that was kind of like an all-in-one for CAP. So I was able to connect with this company and then I was able to meet with a prescriber, which in my case was a nurse practitioner, and they did an initial evaluation session that you would have with any psychiatrist or nurse practitioner in mental health. And they did all of the things that would normally happen in a session like that, my mental health history and why I was curious about CAP in the first place and what I was hoping to get out of it. And it was determined that it was a good fit for where I was. And then I was able to connect with a CAP therapist. And I would have preferred to have done a CAP session in person, but unfortunately at that time I didn't connect with a local CAP therapist, but I was able to find somebody who was in my state, which is New Jersey, and we decided to have virtual sessions. And so that means that I was going to take the medicine while my therapist was live in a virtual session with me. And I had to have a live in-person in my house with me, chaperone, who in my case was my husband. So in case there was any emergency, which for me there never was, I never even experienced any nausea or anything. I had zero negative side effects, but certainly there is possibility for people to have some sort of side effect or things like that. So I was required to have a chaperone present for all of my sessions. And before our first session, before our first cap session, where I took the ketamine, I did, of course, meet with my therapist so that we can get to know each other a little bit better and she could get to know me and my intentions. Intention work is very important with ketamine. You heard me reference psychedelics earlier, and again, I'll talk about that more next time. But with psychedelic medicines or things that are grouped under that heading, such as ketamine, intentions are very important. So we did preparation before our first session where I went to actually take the medicine. And to prep for the first session, I was sent a playlist that was recommended by my therapist. I had earbuds that I could listen to the music and also hear her voice as she talked to me during the session. And I was invited to use an eye mask if I wanted. And I actually sleep with an eye mask, and so it felt very comfortable and familiar to me to use an eye mask. And so I did use an eye mask. And then I just had other little things like a water bottle and tissues, and which by the way, I mean, certainly could be if you start crying or something, it's nice to have tissues nearby. But actually, the way that I took the medicine was in a lozenge, and you have to put it into your mouth, and then it dissolves, and you have to swish it around in your mouth for 11 or 12 minutes. And that process you can kind of just like drool a little bit. So it's helpful to have tissues nearby and a garbage can and also a little cup to spit out in because after you swish the medicine, you actually spit, or at least in my case, I don't know if this is always the case, but I spit the medicine out after the 12 minutes that helps control the dosing. I'm actually not yet trained in cap, although I still plan to become trained in cap. So I don't know all the ins and outs of all of this. This really is my experience as the client, but I imagine if you swallowed the ketamine, you would have a longer experience. I don't know if you'd have a more intense experience, but anyway, I can look into that and I can share that information with you another time. So I was already my chaperone was there. I had all of the little tools and things that I needed around me nearby. I was going to do it laying down in my bed because ketamine is an anesthetic. So even though I was able to get up, for me, I don't think I ever actually got up during the session. I would make sure I went to the bathroom beforehand and then afterwards. The sessions were two hours-ish, uh, maybe a little bit longer, some of the sessions. But then my husband would help me if I felt a little unsteady on my feet to be able to go to the bathroom. But certainly I could have gone to the bathroom if I needed during the session, but I would have probably needed a helping hand, even if it was just for safety. Not that I couldn't, I didn't need to be carried to the bathroom, but I certainly was a little wobbly on my feet. And as I already shared, the very first thing that we had to do after kind of touching base was take my blood pressure, and it was really high the first day. And so we took some time to be able to calm my nervous system down. My blood pressure did come down, so that was great. And of course, just as like a little side note, in the initial session with the nurse practitioner, the prescriber of the medication, we did go over like my health history and all of that kind of thing, which would be considered as well for your appropriateness if ketamine was a good fit for you. Oh, and I will also say that for me, the prescriber sent a prescription and the lozenges were mailed to me and I had a sign for them. And so that's how I actually got them. So I saw the prescriber virtually, she sent in the prescription, it got mailed to me, and then I had the medicine in my hand. And from what I understand, I do believe that if you're working with a CAP therapist who is not a prescriber, who is not a medical professional, you're always self-administering the ketamine. If you're going to a hospital or a clinic, there's IV and there's other options that could be different. But if you're working with a therapist, my understanding is you would be self-administering. And again, in my case, I certainly was. And of course, I was home. But I think had I been in the office face to face with my therapist, I also would have been self-administering the medicine. I told you that what I was really looking to get from these cat sessions was a greater sense of self-love and self-compassion. And in my very first session, after some experiences, again, I'm wearing an eye mask and listening to music. Your experience is guided by the music, and you kind of go in and out of your experiences. But I was laying still in my bed with the eye mask on, and I was having these some visuals, but under the eye mask, behind my eyes. I don't mean like I was seeing things out in the world in my room. That's not what happens with ketamine. Again, it's an anesthetic. It is actually not a true psychedelic, which is another conversation that we can have. But I was seeing colors and sort of shapes and images behind my mask as my eyes were closed. And I was having thoughts and experiences, and I was kind of like following them. At the beginning of the session, my therapist had read something that kind of encouraged me to go with the flow. I don't think those were at all her words, but it was something like, if you see a door, go through it. If you see a flight of steps, climb up them, right? It's very invitational, like wherever you are, lean into it. And so I was just leaning into wherever I was, and this thought came up so clearly to me, which was astounding. And the thought which I said out loud to my therapist, because she was also a scribe for me, but I also, at least in the first session, I had my journal next to me. But I quickly realized the reason that the therapist was my scribe and offered herself from the very beginning to write down anything I wanted her to write down is because I was on an anesthetic and holding my pen was quite a challenge, but it was okay. I was able to do it. I was able to write because in that moment it felt important to me to write myself, even though my therapist said, I can write that for you. And I said, Okay, thanks. After that, by the way, I never use my journal again and I just let my therapist be my scribe. Writing was available to me, but it was just more difficult than it needed to be. I had a focus on holding the pen too much, and my writing was huge and messy, and it was just easier to tell her what I was thinking. But all that aside, and then this first cap session that I had, I wrote down the most beautiful place in the world is inside of me. And please note, I have been a very depressed person for most of my life. I would not describe before this moment many places inside of me as being beautiful, dark, painful, empty. Yes, definitely. Strongly identified with those words for my entire life. But to have this thought emerge that I felt deeply connected to. It didn't seem crazy in the moment. It actually seemed the opposite. It seemed so incredibly true that the most beautiful place in the world was inside of me. I mean, for me, it was a revelation. And after the experience, I was like, uh, pretty sure that worked. You know, like I think I got what I was looking for. It was pretty amazing. And again, the actual experience, just like mechanically, was me laying in a bed, listening to the music. My therapist would respond to me if I talked to her, but a lot of the time I was quiet and sort of just having my own internal experience and again, seeing whatever I was seeing behind my closed eyes with the mask on. I could sit up and take the mask off. And sometimes I did, and sometimes I conversed a little bit more with my therapist, and of course, then she was available to me. But sometimes I would just say a word or a phrase or whatever was coming to mind, and she would write that down so that I was able to have like kind of a little transcript of my experience, which I think also was really helpful because for me, uh holding on to things, like fear of losing things, like abandonment kind of fear, I think, is present. I want to hold on to things. I don't want to run out of stuff. I want to make sure I have enough. That's like a thing for me. And being able to let go in this way and know and trust, and I did in fact trust my therapist. I felt connected to her to trust that she was going to be there for me. And that was also just a side note. A huge part of my experience with CAP was this process of trusting my therapist from one session to the next, that she was going to be there. She would let me know if we had more time or if we didn't have time. I didn't have to worry about managing. I trusted her. I have a lot of, I don't want to take up too much time. I don't want to be a bother. So I had a lot of trust in that. That she was like, no, we have plenty of time. If there was some sort of a limit on our time, you would know. But the session's going to end with plenty of time, you know. This is your space, this is your time, which was really healing for me. And it took several sessions for me to be like, is it okay? You know, because it offered a booster. It's sort of like a second dose, a smaller dose than the first. That I wouldn't say intensified my experience of it really. I think it just made it last a little bit longer. And it was a similar process. You put the lozenge in your mouth, you swirled it around for 11 minutes or something, and then spit it out. And then, like I said, I think it just prolonged the duration, the length of time. I didn't really have a more intense experience. But sometimes she'd say, Oh, you know, now's the time for your booster if you'd like it. And I'd be like, wait, are you sure? Like, do you have enough time? Like, what time's your next client? You know, like I was very worried about taking up too much of her time. And over many sessions, that I really worked with that a lot and my ability to trust her in many ways, certainly around time. But that she was there for me. I felt really supported, uh, intended to and cared for. And I think it was the first session, maybe. And it seemed so silly, but I was like, I realized I forgot my lip balm on my dresser, which was, I don't know, 10 feet away from where I was slaying. And I could have gotten up for it, but they had told me, don't get up on your own. You should ask for help if you feel like you need to move for any reason. So I said to my therapist, like, Oh, could you like ask Ben to bring me my chapstick? He was downstairs working online and he had to come upstairs and get my chapstick that was far closer to me than it was to him. But we worked on, like, yeah, no, it's okay. You can ask for help and we're gonna be here for you. My therapist was there for me, Ben was there for me. And I am like literally talking about him getting my lip balm. But I have to tell you that this little tiny thing felt so profound to me because I'm not really used to asking for help, quite honestly. I'm gonna do it myself, largely because I don't expect people to be there for me. I don't expect that people want to help me or can help me. That's old, old stories for me. And so I'm self-reliant, not necessarily because I want to be. Some people hold the story of like, well, I have to do it myself because others won't do it right. And I definitely have some of that. I can't lie. I do have a flavor of if I want it done right, I have to do it myself. That's definitely true. But really, much more for me, it's like, I just don't expect anyone to be there for me. No one cares enough. I'm not lovable enough. I'm not deserving enough of having somebody support me. So to ask out loud to my therapist, who then communicated to my husband, and then all of a sudden, magically, you know, within a minute or two, my lip balm appeared in my hand, right next to me was this little tiny but huge moment of like, ah, people are there for me and they can help. They want to help, as a matter of fact, which was really powerful for me. So, yeah, and so then eventually I kind of just started feeling less. I don't know how to explain that more clearly. I'd have to really think about it, but you know, kind of like the being connected to the music and being connected to my internal experience kind of just faded a little bit more that I wanted to be connected externally. I think that's how I would really best describe it. And I would kind of like take off my mask. And like I said, there were times when I would take off my mask during the height of the medicine when it was most effective. But a lot of the time I really wanted to be internal. And then I would kind of just get to a place where I felt like taking off my mask and we would start to talk a little bit more, you know, not just about the weather, about my experience, but I kind of had a more external focus, or maybe even a better way of describing it as actually a more relational focus. I wanted to be connected and I wanted to have the back and forth and feel my therapist's presence. I even had, I don't know how many times, definitely a couple, not every time, but there were times where I would ask my therapist to invite my husband up. I would say, like, oh, do you have a little window? Is it okay that you spend some time with me? And I would sometimes just want to sit with him, or sometimes I would say something that felt important that I wanted to share. And so I had moments where I really felt like more relational, but a lot of the experience while I was actually sitting with the medicine was much more internal, at least for me. I would just kind of feel like more present in the world and less focused internally. And then I would kind of just know the session was coming to a close and take my blood pressure again to make sure that it was in the normal parameters and I would get the little medical thing in case of whatever feeling dizzy or anything happening over the next few days to reach out to my therapist or go to an ER or something like that. But like I said, I never had any negative experience at all, no negative side effects at all with the ketamine. And again, that's certainly possible, just that was my experience. And then the other thing that we would just make sure we touch on, it was already scheduled, but we also had scheduled what was called an integration session uh within a few days. So I didn't schedule it while I was actually in my ketamine session. I scheduled it previously, but we would just say, like, oh, we'll talk to each other Friday or something like that. So we already had a session for integration set up afterwards. And integration basically just means a session where you talk, in my case, my therapist who was trained in integration and ketamine work. And we would take what happened as part of my experience when I was with the medicine, the thoughts, the feelings, the experiences, the perspective, and we would work on integrating that into my regular life. And I mentioned earlier how I have come to see the difference of what recreational and therapeutic substance use looks like is that recreational use can be actually amazing and you can have profound experiences. I don't think that it's a less than experience in any way. But what I think is different as I have come to see it from recreational and therapeutic is that recreationally, you don't have a trained professional or healing person. Like I had my therapist with me for the whole duration of my experience with the medicine. And recreationally, you do not have integration follow-up. So you might have a profoundly amazing experience working with, and again, I'm talking about perhaps all the medicines that are under the umbrella of psychedelics, even though ketamine is not actually a psychedelic, it is often grouped with psychedelics because of how they impact the nervous system of the brain, even though the actual processes are different and the experiences certainly can be very different. But recreationally, you don't have a trained professional sitting with you while you're with the medicine and you don't have integration follow-up to help you bring it into your real life, into your regular day-to-day life. And so for me, that's the difference between recreational and therapeutic use of these medicines. And I think that that makes all the difference. It certainly did for me because I was able to talk about the themes that came up and not so much put a plan in action. Sometimes it was that, sometimes it was like a specific thing, but it was really like looking how to hold on to and keep these themes and really my lived experience of being with the medicine where the most beautiful place in the world was inside of me. How do I take that and continue to hold that in my life? And this for me was really the magic of cap work because I was able to actually carry this new experience with me because it wasn't that I thought, oh yeah, the most beautiful place in the world is inside of me. Okay, that's true now. It was that I felt that. I had a felt sense in my body that this was true. And all of a sudden, this new perspective opened up for me of what was possible for me. I've been talking about rest quite a bit in my recent episodes. I also had an experience, and I think this was in my second cap session, but where I literally had this experience where I took a deep breath and the thought that came with it was I can breathe here. This is a place where I don't have to hold my breath. I don't have to push hard and be out of breath. This is a place where I can settle in and take an expansive, full breath. And that became a theme of my integration as well. That was an important theme of I can breathe here. And how do I bring that experience into my everyday life? How can I create more space for me to breathe when I often felt very constricted, very out of breath, very pushed, uh, very shallow in breath. And it became this lived experience. Like it wasn't a thought that I was like, oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. My body actually knew, oh, yeah, inside of you is beautiful. I feel it, I've seen it, it's there. It wasn't a concept, it wasn't an idea. It wasn't even just a thought in my head. It was like a true lived experience that I had felt in my bones, as well as the I can breathe here idea that this is a space that's safe for me to breathe. I will also say I've done nine cap sessions over just about a year. So I wasn't doing them super frequently. And I haven't had a cap session in probably almost a year now. Maybe I don't remember the exact date of my last session. And I probably will have another CAP session in the future, but I don't at this moment feel the need to have another CAP session. I had them as it made sense and as it felt like, oh yeah, I'm feeling like a it's a good time for a CAP session to be scheduled. And there is a protocol of like how frequently or infrequently, I can't remember exactly what those details were. Maybe it was four to six weeks or something. I don't exactly recall for what I was using it for. There's all different protocols for all different modalities of how you can have CAP sessions that I won't go into right now, but that was just how it worked for me. But there was a sustainability of really being able to carry with me these new experiences that shaped and transformed, and I would absolutely say healed my nervous system and I think also my brain, my neuroplasticity. I think my brain did a lot of growing with this work. And again, I'll talk more about sort of the research on that next time. But my perspective shift and I felt healed. And I would, I will say that when I am regularly meditating, and for me, regularly meditating means 20 minutes a day. And maybe after, I don't know exactly, I've never like tracked it, but maybe three or four months, I would say, uh, if I am meditating every single day, I have had similar experiences. That is definitely when my window of self-love and self-compassion has been open and stays open and has felt the widest. And where accessing those parts of myself has been possible, it has been through continued meditation. However, I often fall off the meditation wagon, often when I'm stressed or depressed, or you know, the times when I really need it most. And then that window would close again. And with CAP, I have to say, so far, a few years into the experience, I'm still human. I have bad days, but now I would actually say I have dysregulated days. My nervous system does what nervous systems do, my brain does what brains do. But the healing experience and what I've been able to carry has been something that I can actually carry with me and has stayed with me in a very different way. Again, if I'm consistently meditating, that has been more available to me. But if I'm not meditating, then that has fallen away. This is also true, and I will not speak to it now, but this is also, I think, similar to when you're on traditional prescription medications for anxiety or depression. They work generally when you're taking them, and when you stop taking them, they don't work anymore. So again, I won't talk about that more, but I'll touch on that in the next episode or two. But ketamine was something that provided a healing experience for me, and I was able to take it with me in my life and sustain it, which has been pretty extraordinary. So, after, like I said, about a year of doing CAP work, and by this time, again, I was also doing a lot of nervous system work and had new language for what I was experiencing, which just happened to work really well together. But I really came to look back at my year of ketamine-assisted psychotherapy work as having given me a new experience of what is known in the polyvagal world by Deb Dana as safely still. And it is this beautiful nervous system blend of safe, grounded ventral energy, which is our that's the safe state of our nervous system, ventral energy, combined with regulated, and because it's combined with ventral energy, that's what makes it regulated, but regulated dorsal energy. And dorsal is when it's regulated, our rest and digest state of our nervous system. Dysregulated dorsal is when ventral energy is not present, and then that dorsal survival energy, and that's collapse, shutdown, withdraw. And I would also say when you're stuck there, that's depression. But when you are regulated and you have this beautiful blend of this dorsal energy and this ventral energy, like I said, Deb Dana's term is forward is safely still. And that's what for me, Cap gave me was this experience of feeling my body to be safely still. Because for me, again, as a depressed person, I have realized when I began to slow down, I often would just jump right into shutdown. I would say, Oh yeah, like I know how to relax. People were like, oh no, I can't relax. I'm always go, go, go. I for years was like, I know how to relax. I have no problem relaxing. And I was so incredibly wrong. I didn't realize that at the time, but I felt really committed. Like, no way, I have no problem relaxing. But what I really meant is that I could shut down at the end of the night, like no one's business. I could zone out often with my beer or my wine and you know, watch Netflix or whatever TV show years and years ago or movie that was on, and I could be totally disconnected. That was not rest. It took me a really long time to figure that out. And that's why I'm talking about ketamine today in the context of the fact that I've just had some recent episodes on rest. Because for me, cat, I was gonna say it helped me connect with my ability to rest, but I think it was more than that. I think that it healed my nervous system so that it wasn't fried, so that I could actually move into slowdown and rest and relaxation and renewal in a way that just really hadn't been available to me for decades. It just wasn't an option. So in my head, I would say, like, oh yeah, I totally can rest. You know, when I heard people talking about not being able to slow down, I was like, not me, I can slow down. But I subsequently realized that really shutdown is actually not the same thing as slowdown. And I am happy to report that today, certainly from my experience with CAP and other things, and a lot of it has to do with my nervous system work as well, and many other wonderful healing experiences and many wonderful healing people that I have had in my life over the last several years. I definitely am in a place where my system knows how to actually slow down without shutting down. And I can enjoy these beautiful, abundant moments, nourishing moments of stillness and quiet that actually really give me rest experiences. And I also notice that I can identify when I need rest. Like if I like recently I've been traveling and doing all these really wonderful things that are fantastic, but it's been pushing my system because I've been busy and having to do all these things. I mean, not having, I really have been getting to do these really cool things recently. But when I come home, I notice that I'm a little bit run down. And I have found that, again, I would attribute this very largely to my experience with CAP, that I can say, oh, I need to rest today. Maybe I don't feel my first day or two back from traveling with the 7,000 things that, yeah, are on my to-do list. Maybe I say, hmm, not today. I actually need to give myself space to rest. And I can do that with compassion instead of shame, which is what I used to do. If I took time to rest, if I was sick or really felt exhausted or depleted, there was this like, oh my goodness, like, what's wrong with you? There's so much to do. You never have enough time to get everything done anyway. Like, what are you doing? Taking a nap in the afternoon. There was so much shame, again, with depression goggles and the perspective that I used to hold that I just don't hold anymore. And again, my nervous system goes into dorsal. I certainly have experiences that I won't talk about at length now, although I've touched on them before on my podcast, and I certainly will again in the future, but they're just completely different than what they used to be. But my experience with CAP really has been something profound. And again, it came to me in a time when it wasn't just CAP. There was a lot of things going on. I've certainly done a ton of therapy prior to working with ketamine, and I also was working with a therapist the whole time that I was. Having ketamine sessions, the same therapist, my cat therapist. So I had professional support throughout the whole thing. Like I said, integration was key in being able to really support and sustain my transformation, I would say. So I don't want this to be a ketamine commercial. I hope that it doesn't land that way. I do really think I've had amazing results with it. But and I'll touch on this a little bit more next time. The way ketamine can be used currently in the mental health world varies a lot. And sometimes it can be risky or more risky than other times. I think the way that I did it was pretty low risk. And also what I was going for. And again, the amount of therapy I've had and the amount of support I had and my therapist and all of that, I think lowered a lot of the risks for the way that I did it. And I personally, if someone was interested in ketamine, would recommend going that route, the supported route with a trusted professional who's going to be there with you during the session and after the session. So I don't think that all ketamine assisted therapies are equal. I think that there's a lot of different ways that they could be done. And again, some of them are come with higher risk than others. But for me, it's been a really integral part of my healing journey. And that's why I'm sharing it and also why I'm choosing to share it after these several sessions on rest because I think it was a part of my healing experience that was really significant. And perhaps, since it worked so well for me, perhaps it could, of course, work well for others. And that's not anecdotal. I mean, there's a lot of research on it, but again, there are no guarantees. And just as I said at the beginning, I'm not giving medical advice or treatment. And I certainly, although I wish I could, I cannot guarantee that someone's experience with ketamine would be the same as mine. So I can't guarantee that it would quote unquote work the same for you as it has for me, which I think is important to remember. But if you're struggling and feeling really stuck in some places around being depressed, around never feeling well rested, not being able to get sleep, never feeling renewed, those kinds of things, ketamine might be something that you choose to look into. So I will continue to talk next time a little bit more on the research and really how ketamine is impacting the nervous system in the brain. So if you're interested in that, please join me again next week. As our time comes to a close, I ask you to keep listening for just a few more moments because I want to thank you for showing up today. And I want to leave you with an invitation as you hit stop and move back out into the world on your own unique wellness journey. In order to move from where you are today to the place where you want to be, the path may seem long or unclear or unknown. And I want you to know that if that seems scary or daunting or downright terrifying or anything else, that is totally okay. Know that you do not have to create the whole way all at once. We don't travel a whole journey in one stride. And that is why my invitation to you today is to take a step, just one. Any type, any size, in any direction. It can be an external step that can be observed or measured, or it could be a step you visualize taking in your mind. It can be a step towards action or towards rest or connection or self-care or whatever step makes sense to you. I invite you to take a step today because getting to a place that feels better, more joyful, more connected than the place where you are today is possible for everyone, including you, and even when depression is in your bed. If today's episode resonated with you, please subscribe so you can be notified when each weekly episode gets released. I encourage you to leave a review and reach out to me on social media at trish.sanders.lcsw. Your feedback will help guide future episodes, and I love hearing from you. Also, please share this podcast with anyone who you think may be interested or who may get something from what I have shared. Until the next time we connect, take care of yourself and take a step.