A couple recently shared this with me during an assessment session for ketamine-assisted couple therapy:

“We’ve been stuck in the same place for years. We love each other, but we don’t know how to move past the hurt. There has been too much pain and we’ve built our walls too high. We don’t understand each other and any attempts to tell our perspectives result in conflict or more distance.”

Ketamine is a legal psychedelic in the United States and is emerging as a promising therapeutic medicine. It has been used to effectively treat a range of mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicidal ideation (Walsh et al., 2022). Ketamine’s precise mechanisms are still being explored, but theories suggest it increases neuroplasticity, dopamine, and serotonin, and alters brain connectivity (Aleksandrova & Phillips, 2021) to promote more flexible thinking, greater perspective taking, empathy, openness to experience, and reduced avoidance. These cognitive, emotional, and behavioral shifts are important for moving through relationship pain, creating new patterns, and building healthy connections. Indeed, across different couple therapy approaches, the primary goals typically include identifying harmful patterns, increasing understanding and empathy, and improving communication in order to build closer and more fulfilling intimate connections.

So how do we use ketamine therapy to help couples heal?

We begin with one couples’ assessment session and one individual assessment session for each partner, where we discuss your goals for treatment, where you have been feeling stuck, and your individual history and sensitivities that influence relationship interactions. For example, if your parent or caretaker interacted with you in a way that made you feel undesirable and worthless, you may be particularly sensitive to feeling rejected. This is something that it is........

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