Ketamine and Psychedelics

Katrina Mondragon, MS, LPC, LMHC and Special Guest, Christina Conrad, LPC, SEP, KAP!!!

Sponsored by Katrina Mondragon, PLLC (Est. 2016)

Join us as Christina educates us on Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy and the Oklahoma Psychedelic Collective and the upcoming Psychedelic Symposium on this week's episode of I Don't Know, streaming everywhere under the artist name katrinadragon

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Greetings, fellow humans. Katrina here, and I have Christina with me here today. So this is I don't know, and I don't know what we're going to talk about, but nothing to talk about today. Should we take as medical, legal, or otherwise advice? This podcast is failure for education and amusement. What percentage of people would you say that it helps?

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Yeah, so how I describe that is on a spectrum. So you have, I've had clients who were go agoraphobic, could not function in their life, could hardly keep up with anything, and they do one session or follow the protocol, and they are thriving now and out and back to themselves post-trauma. So we have the we have the side where it's day and night. Ketamine is excellent for suicidal ideation. It can, with one session, come in and interrupt suicidal ideation and completely shift that for somebody. And so we do do use it for that when it's needed.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Would you say acute or chronic?

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Ideation. Acute. I mean, it would help with chronic too. It's just known for when somebody's really in a acute crisis, that one session can completely interrupt suicidal ideation.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

But when you think of something fairly new like prolonged grief disorder, is that something that people have been dabbling in for that?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, we've used it for a variety of, we're able to use it for anxiety and for grief and for trauma. And really, that's just going through the process with each individual client. When I'm doing that, I'm getting to know their nervous system, I'm getting to understand what the struggles are, how it's showing up in their body, so that I can make a better assessment of how helpful it might be. And then it's always just we have to we try it and see how helpful most people. I mean, I would say almost 100% of people end up feeling feeling it to be helpful in some way. Some dramatically shift in results, and others have it's more about the content they're getting out of it that does a lot of work.

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Anecdom, I've heard it described uh by others as taking the depression goggles off. And that just is a great metaphor for me because you think goggles in the pool, like dark, and you can barely see. That's the lens through which you're seeing the world.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Right.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

I imagine it's very different.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Another way they describe it is that rut that we can get into with depression, where we're just so far down we can't even access our coping skills to function. It's it fills in that rut. So for some people, it's dramatic how much better they feel. For other people, it gets them back to the place where they can begin employing, doing the steps that would help them continue to continue out of depression.

SPEAKER_01 2:39

Their coping skills, their activities, living, all the things to survive, but not just survive, but then maybe drive. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I gotta ask, is that yoga maths behind you? It is, yeah. Does your practice also incorporate movement?

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Well, I'm a somatic therapist and I'm trained in iRest Yoga Nidra. So occasionally I'll do meditations with that, or when we do, I do I train therapists to offer ketamine assisted psychotherapy so that they will be in circle and will have they actually have an experiential process with ketamine they have to go through to get trained in it. And so we have lots of good supplies over here for stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Nice, experiential. So then I I gotta ask, have you experienced the mood? Is it mood altering or like state of mind altering that the ketamine does?

SPEAKER_00 3:32

We call it altered consciousness or altered state.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

State of consciousness, okay. Almost akin to neurolinguistic plasticity, like or neurolinguistic programming is what I'm thinking. I'm confusing the words.

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

But back to the ketamine. Have you experienced that change in altered consciousness? Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah. Yeah. I've attended a variety of trainings and done some work with facilitators as well. And how would you describe it from your own experience? It is an interesting medicine. Like with uh, you know, there's a lot of common things. People will talk about the ketaverse, there's a certain feel to it.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

And is that the kaleidoscope, the close-eyed visuals of fractals and colors?

SPEAKER_00 4:23

It can be. Some people, a lot of people have visuals on it at the higher doses. And then some people, there's occasionally somebody just doesn't have visuals, but they might not have visuals on any medicine. But it it's it, you it's an anesthetic. So usually the first thing you feel is a little bit of relaxation in the system. You're never doing enough where if something happened and you needed to get up and move, you're still able, but it can be really disorienting, like your thoughts might have a hard time completing. So during the thick of the journey, the client is just laying there and having a journey and where they're supporting until they're ready to start talking. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

And once people do start talking, have you noticed the difference between somebody who's had the academy experience and someone just coming in for regular old psychotherapy?

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because they are still, we do we do three-hour sessions. So they about an hour of that is their computer.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

Comparison, normal psychotherapy is like 45 to 50 minutes.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Yeah. And so for about 45 minutes to an hour, they're usually quiet and very still laying there having a journey. And then as they start to come out, it's going to be a bit before they can really have a super back and forth conversation. So the approach that's used is different. We're not that that's part of the training that happens is you understand how to use that space. And a lot of times we're just recording any details they want to share about it that we can talk about in integration circles, but there are integration sessions. But there are quite a few people who come out and we actually are able to do some therapy and we tie it back into the stuff that we've been working on in our regular sessions. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, it's a really lovely space afterward.

unknown 6:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:08

Well, what about that symposium you mentioned? If somebody wants to find out more about that, how would they?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Yeah, they can go to, so it's the Oklahoma Psychedelic Collective we formed about a year ago, and it's a nonprofit. So you can go to okopc.org and go under the open planes tab. You can read about our nonprofit, but if you go under the open planes tag, you can see we have a community ticket. We have a CEU ticket, which is just for people who need CEUs for therapists. The community ticket is just for anybody else who wants to attend.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Very cool. And I'll probably put links in the description for all of that. Anything else you want to plug before we wrap up?

SPEAKER_00 6:47

Well, we're having Friday night up at Wampa. We're doing before the symposium, so June 26th, we're doing a psychedelic salon. And okay, so Tulsa, I don't know if you've heard of that. It's like it's a curated story event, and they are curating. The storytellers have actually worked with coaches to curate five to seven minute psychedelic stories that talk about their healing process with it. And it's a lovely event that's up here at Wampa on Friday night. And then Saturday is our full day symposium.

SPEAKER_01 7:16

And Wampa is the other event center.

SPEAKER_00 7:18

Oh, Wampa is just west of downtown Tulsa. It's it's a renovated warehouse, huge warehouse. And if you haven't been out here, you should come check it out. It's beautiful. Oh, you should absolutely come. It's real artistic. There's a lot of creative people out here, and you definitely need to come check it out.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Awesome. Well, thank you for joining me today on I don't know, and I didn't know what we were gonna talk about, but I really liked what we did.

SPEAKER_00 7:41

So thank you so much for having me. Yeah.