No one knows what it's like to live in your body the way that you know what it's like to live in your body, the thing that I hope that I help people to realize and understand that they are their best advocate. They're their best expert.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Uplift For Her, I am your host, Dr Mallorie Cracroft, and we are here talking all things integrative women's health. Today, we have a really great conversation. I'm actually really excited about this conversation because it fills in a lot of gaps in my own knowledge and answers a lot of questions that come up for people. So I have a great guest, Emilee Krupa. Emilee Krupa is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Substance Abuse Counselor specializing in psychedelic assisted psychotherapy and somatic therapy, and we're going to be talking about therapeutic approaches off the beaten path, other alternatives to traditional talk therapy. She's been a therapist in the mental health world for about 12 years, and has always loved the mind-body approach and connecting the two together, but a recent cancer diagnosis sealed her beliefs. Through her vast array of experience, she's learned to love experiential therapy models and alternatives to traditional talk therapy. So thank you for being here, Emilee. I'm so excited for our conversation?
Yeah, of course, I'm so honored and grateful to be here to have this conversation with you.
Well, start us off by telling us a little bit about yourself and about your journey and how you got to be interested in this type of therapeutic approach.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so you'll hear, you know, in my bio, not only am I a marriage and family therapist, but I'm also a substance abuse counselor. The whole reason I wanted to become a therapist is because I went through a pretty challenging experience when I was 16, really, really traumatic. And kind of was introduced to therapy at a pretty young age. And I think, like most people, you know, I went to some therapists that were not a great fit, and I thought this therapy thing is so dumb and it doesn't work, and I'm never going back. But I, you know, eventually continued to kind of go through a few therapists and found one that really saw me, that really, really helped me, that really, really changed my beliefs about myself and who I am and how I want to show up in the world. And so then I was really fortunate that when I was in college, they were wanting to bring in a program for substance abuse counselors to have a certification without even having your bachelor's degree yet. So I was one of the first people that went through that cohort. I got this certification, and I was 21 years old and a substance abuse counselor. And I have no idea why or how they let me do that, and I got to work with some really unique populations. But where I eventually landed was adolescent treatment, and got sort of into this world, in residential treatment for adolescent girls. And, yeah, it was so fun. I loved it.
So how did you transition from doing that sort of substance abuse counseling through your own struggles and through your own history, into this more experiential approach that you're dealing with now.
I think I got really lucky. So not only doing the substance abuse program when I was really young and having sort of a grown up job at a really young age, I got to work very closely and around these therapists that were very deeply rooted in attachment theory and relational models and different things like that. That sort of kind of opened the door for me. And then from working in residential treatment, I went and worked in a wilderness therapy program, and that is where all of the traditional ways of therapy just blew up, like you're not doing traditional therapy in the woods. We're going for hikes and we're going for walks, and we're sitting around the fire, and we're talking about meditation, and we're talking about visualization and burning sage and doing all these things, and that experience was so eye opening for me, of just a very different way of doing therapy, especially with adolescents. The wilderness was such a beautiful, wonderful way to do a little bit of therapy without sitting on the couch and talking about your feelings well, and I think it lends itself so well. My approach in medicine is very much, I have to remind patients that their body parts are all connected. Right? The conventional medical world makes us think that, like, our brain is over here on the left hand side and our ovaries are over here on the right, and then we've got, like, our gut over here in the back, and that's like, not at all what the case is like. In fact, our body is all interconnected, and the ovaries and the hormones are affecting our gut, which is affecting our brain, which is affecting our heart. And so just like what you're saying when we take therapy and we sort of isolate it down to let's talk through your thoughts. Thoughts, there is some benefit there, just like you know, focusing on the gut in an isolated way can be beneficial, but we're always going to get the best results when we connect all the dots, when we say there's lots of things that are influencing our thoughts, and our thoughts influence a lot of other things. So as we experience that and live in it, and make those adjustments while we're experiencing the whole change of nature and the change in our surroundings and the change in the effort that we're expending, and all of those things, we get such good outcomes. So tell us a little bit about your specific journey, about coming out of that type of therapy, working with the younger population into the current situation that you're in now with Koru wellness.
I mean, that journey is really interesting, right? So at the time, my husband and I were actually living in Las Vegas, and I was driving four hours from Las Vegas down to Kanab. I would have two days in the field to work with my clients, and then I would come home, and at the time, remember, I'm really young. I just had my undergrad. I had a substance abuse counselor license, and so I had sort of this very specific scope of practice that I had to stay in because I wasn't trained as a therapist. I was trained as a substance abuse counselor. And so being in that world and being surrounded by just the most brilliant therapists that I've ever had the pleasure of working with. You know, how many people go and sit by the campfire and sleep, you know, in a row, next to their coworkers every night and try not to freeze to death in the winter? So it was really bonding. It was really, really a beautiful experience to be able to do. There's many degrees that you can do to be a therapist. There's a bunch of different ways you can go about it, but I specifically liked marriage and family therapy because we take a more systemic, holistic approach. We're not super worried or concerned about diagnoses, and we're more sort of looking at the person and the people around them, and how we all play, you know, in that sort of world together. So we moved back to Utah, came back here, and I started my master's program. I was actually pregnant for the first couple of months of winter at the wilderness therapy program, and I knew I was like this, I will not survive. Survive this. So I left that job and started grad school. We started our family, and I honestly lost my way for a while, I feel like because that was a time I started as a substance abuse counselor, really young, and I worked with folks coming out of prison. I worked for a methadone clinic, so I worked with some hard populations, and then working with adolescents, of course, is really, really challenging as well. My husband and I kind of talked about it and made this decision of like, I'm going to step away from direct care, we're going to start our family, I'm going to go to grad school, and then I'll go back as a therapist. And that is when I sort of got introduced to ketamine, psychedelics, all of that kind of stuff. And ended up working at a ketamine clinic for about a year. But I was still in this like, Go produce, make money, like I have to justify the insane amount of student debt I now have. And I just, I was still so disconnected from what I was feeling in my body, from what was going on, my relationships were struggling, and I was just like, produce, produce, produce, produce, until one day. And I mean, at the time, my baby was maybe one and a half, and I had just finished nursing her, we breastfed for a while, and I had a ton of problems breastfeeding both of my babies. I got mastitis. So many times I was hospitalized. I was it just, it was rough. It was always my left breast, always, I always got mastitis, always had clogs. It was always it just, was my like problem breast, essentially. And when I stopped breastfeeding, I still had this, like, really, it felt like a golf ball in my breast. And I just thought, this is just a clot, and it'll, you know, anybody that's breastfed babies knows it kind of takes a while for it to all be gone. And you know, you still kind of have some weird body changes that last for a while. And of course, because I was in this mindset of, like, produce and I gotta work, and I don't have time to go see the doctor. And so I ignored it for a little while, for a few months, until I couldn't anymore. It got really red and it was really, really painful. And so I finally went and got a mammogram. And if anybody you know, if you've ever had a mammogram, those poor mammogram technicians, they're, you know, they're not someone that reads the report. They just take the report, and as soon as it came up on the screen, I will never forget the color draining from her face and her saying, I'm going to send this over to him right now. Can you stay here? And I. I was like, I had never had a mammogram. You know, I was 32 at the time. I'd never had a mammogram. I didn't even know what was happening. And of course, it happened very quickly, of mammogram, and then they did the biopsy and an MRI, and then, oh, you have breast cancer. And all of a sudden, my entire world came to a stop. Came to a complete halt. We closed the ketamine clinic. I stopped seeing clients. My entire universe came to a halt. And now it didn't matter how much money I made, or how much I worked, or this, like badge of honor of you know, I can produce all this stuff. Now, the only thing that mattered was, like, am I going to be around to see my kids, to see them get married or, you know, go to college or get a job, or have their own kids, or all of these things? And so, I mean, cancer is I will not one of those people that will say, Oh, it's, you know, it's a blessing, but it was something that completely halted me in like, what you're doing is not important, and you need to come back to this remembering of what is important. And so I had, you know, my breast cancer diagnosis, I did a very traditional approach. I did a clinical trial up at Huntsman, and it most definitely got rid of my cancer and saved my life. And then I had a lot of health problems after that, and got really sick, and that is when I sort of got tuned back into these different, you know, we call them alternative, but they're not alternative. They're original. These are the original ways of healing our body, all of these medicines that we have that are beautiful and life saving and wonderful in so many ways didn't exist not that long ago. And so it's not the alternative way. It's the original way. It kind of opened my eyes again. Of the only way, sometimes to survive the very intense fear or emotions that I was feeling was to get into a meditation, to sit in silence, to feel my feelings. That's the only way to heal is to feel through it. And so it kind of brought me back to like, remember all these things that you learned when you were, like, 20 years old and you were working with all these brilliant people. You forgot that. And hey, you should remember, remember all of these things that you knew. And so as soon as I got healthy enough, we opened Koru. We've been open since January, and we do private and group ketamine assisted therapy.
That's such an amazing story. Thank you for sharing that that's an incredible journey, and what a roller coaster. And like you said, it's not necessarily a blessing, but, but we're all benefiting from everything you've learned from that. And kind of shifting gears and shifting directions tell us a little bit more about you've mentioned this term experiential therapy. And also, I think when we talk about therapy, we think about talk therapy is what most people picture, right, even if they don't know those words of the therapist sits with me, and I sit on the couch, and they ask me questions, and I talk about my problems, and maybe they give me some solutions, which we both agree is a wonderful thing and it's a valid thing. But how does that differ from this other world of different types of adjuncts to that type of therapy, or or other ways that we can address that mind, body connection through therapy?
Experiential therapy is exactly what we were doing in the wilderness, where it's like we're not sitting on the couch. And, I mean, I want to, we'll give like, a, you know, a spoiler, like, if you take nothing else away from this podcast, hear this of no one knows what it's like to live in your body the way that you know what it's like to live in your body. So it's this whole that's sort of my, you know, my mission, or the thing that I hope that I help people to realize and understand that they are their best advocate. They're their best expert. Like we know, right? I know what I need. The hard thing is the world sometimes tries to tell me differently, or my friends try to tell me something differently, or my family and so we forget to listen, or we forget, yeah, we get so distracted and we completely forget to listen. And so, as you know, I talk about these different things. I just hope folks remember that, like, you know what you need, and hopefully find someone that can help you remember, because you've never lost it. It is always there with you. You know when you're a baby, you don't take, like, voice lessons to learn how to cry. You just know how to cry and get your needs met, and then you live through this world that's like, stop crying. Don't do that. And so remembering, reconnecting with who you are, is the most important. But there are. There are many, many ways of. Of healing right now. You know in this world, we are very, very lucky that we have so many different ways. We do have talk therapy, we have medications, we have medications plus talk therapy. We have CBT, we have EMDR, we have so many ways. And I am a true believer that no way is better than the next way. They're all absolutely wonderful, and the goal, or the mission, is to find what works for you. Yeah, and I'm not trained in CBT. I don't offer that, but I do have some brilliant friends that do that. There are folks that five sessions of CBT later, they're like, oh my gosh, this all makes sense, I feel so much better. I'm a new person, and I think that's where we can become our own advocates. Of like, maybe you do try talk therapy, quote, like, traditional, I'm going to go and I'm going to talk and we're going to see how that goes. Which, really, if you're going to a good therapist, they're trained in some sort of modality, learn about what modality they'd like to use, whether it be CBT or EMDR or somatics or ifs, or all of these different ways. But it is sort of this trial and error of find what works for you. Find something that's helpful, you know? And of course, I'm really biased, because I think my way is the best way, because it's the only research I follow up on. It's the only conferences I go to. It's the only people I follow up with. And so, of course, I'm really, in my fully biased opinion. I love somatics. I love somatic therapy. Psychedelics pair really well with that. You know, we use ketamine really well with that. Let
me back you up a little bit. So we get into the nitty gritty here. So when we think about talk therapy, usually it's a therapist sitting across from you and asking you questions and helping you understand the way that your brain is working. Right. Our brain tells us stories all the time, that it frames those stories, or it, I call it filters those stories, or tints those stories based on experiences we've had in our past, right? So some experiences in our past maybe put a blue filter or a pink filter, or an angry filter or a neglected filter, or right our past informs the way that our brain is currently seeing and perceiving our own set of experiences. And so talk therapy correct me if I'm not not saying this, right? But talk therapy, very frequently, these expert talk therapists like yourself will listen to you talk and listen to you explain those stories, and can help you perceive how you may be filtering this based on your lens of your childhood choice, right, or your past experience choice, and help you switch that lens. And it can be extremely powerful to then change your perception of your current situation, if you realize that the way that we view the world isn't necessarily fact based, right, the way we view the world is based on other experiences. We've had, other interactions. We've had the way that we were parented, the, you know, traumas we went through as children or young adults or whenever. So that's traditional talk therapy, and there are lots of different tools that therapists are trained in that have data behind them, that most therapists will have a set of tools that they'll be able to see what matches your situation. And the therapists tend to have tools of choice, right? The ones that they've that resonate best with them, and the ones they've had the greatest success with. And most of them have three letter abbreviations, so CBT and DBT And ifs and attachment theory. And there's lots of different modalities. And if you talk to your friends, a lot of your friends who have been in therapy will know those acronyms. They'll say, Oh, I did DBT, or I did CBT, or I've done EMDR, right? And so you can talk to your friends and say, that worked really well. I want to try that. Or now you can Google it and watch YouTube videos and see like that. That approach really resonates with me. I want to find a therapist who specializes in those modalities, and this is not sponsored in any way, but I really like psychology today. Psychology today.com. Is a really great resource for that, and I send patients there all the time. So you can go there and put in your zip code and put in it will say, what do you need help with marriage or trauma or other things, and then it will say modalities that you know, you can select the modalities so you could say EMDR, you could check the box for CBT, or ifs, so that's sort of an aside for talk therapy. And I think there's absolutely a place for it. And I think generally speaking, it's a really good place to start, especially if you're having relationship struggles, or life transition struggles, or when you feel like your brain is really jumbled and it's like I don't even know what's going on in my brain, or I have a lot of anxiousness about this circumstance, like my kids getting older, and I don't have control over them. Those are all things that talk therapy can have. Are huge benefits for so that's a really great place to start. Now we get into the fun stuff here, so we're not in any way against that and that there's lots of benefit there. On the other side of that is this wild wild west. And there are lots of different terms that we use here. Experiential therapy is one that you've used. Somatic therapy is another huge category of random things, and there's probably a lot of other less well defined categories there. So these sets of therapeutic approaches then correct me, are more focused on the mind and body connection. So instead of just focusing on your perception of the worlds and how do we how do we change our thought patterns to help really beneficial, this is actually saying, how do we come back in in line with that? How do we strengthen that connection of the mind, the body, the spirit, the soul, whatever you want to define it as. How do we connect those two? And I have found this to be very essential in my practice that's functional medicine based. Usually I have patients who have a lot of physical manifestations that we're dealing with, but very frequently have this deep root or deep core or spark buried deep in their soul or their mind or their past or their trauma or their relationship. So take us down that path a little bit of of maybe start by talking about the mind body connection and why that's so important, and how these different modalities can really help to strengthen that mind body connection and to heal that mind body connection.
There's sort of this idea Gabor Mate, if you've ever heard of him, where he has this great saying that trauma is not what happens to you, it's what beliefs you have after what happened to you, or something to that effect. I'm probably butchering it a little bit, but it's this idea that, let's say, that you and I go into a burning building, and we save a Box of Puppies, and we come out of the burning building, and maybe you come out and you're like, I'm a freaking rock star, and that was awesome. And we saved a Box of Puppies, and you that is your beliefs of like, that was so cool. And maybe you go on talk shows and podcasts about how you saved a Box of Puppies, and it was the coolest thing ever. And maybe I, in turn, am deeply, deeply traumatized by that experience, and I should have saved more puppies, and I didn't save enough puppies. And why did I live when other people in the planet die all the time, and I have all these other like beliefs, that's scary, right? Yeah, why was the building on fire in the first place? And so all these beliefs come back, right? And it all comes back to that idea of attachment theory, and how well that was formulated in our childhood, and how well we can balance our own nervous system. We all have this window of tolerance. And some, for some, our window of tolerance is very vast. Maybe your window of tolerance is really, really vast, because you went in and did this scary thing and you came out and you were like, that is awesome. Whereas for me, maybe my window of tolerance is very, very narrow, very short because of past childhood experiences that I had. And so the tiniest thing will shoot me up into fight or flight, or I will go down into freeze, right? And the only way to manage those symptoms is to expand that window of tolerance, but also, even just in the moment, doing things, doing tools, to come back into that window of tolerance.
Yeah, let me back up for a second, because I love this. I love this. So if we use that analogy of running into the burning building and saving the Box of Puppies, you had a belief system that you came out with in your brain, but it also was deeply integrated into your body, because the body is trying to support your brain the way that we perceive the world, the body is connected to that. And that's why this mind body healing becomes so essential when we have chronic illness or chronic things like chronic depression or chronic anxiety or, you know, these issues that become really chronic is because the body is taking cues from that belief system. So it's not just the belief system of I came out a hero. I mean, that's the first step, is I came out a hero, and you came out a victim or scared the body then is, like, got it. I hear you. I think of, I explain it as the body is, like, the world's best or worst personal assistant. You know, you have the personal assistant who's gonna read your mind and get it right. And, like, I organized your files and I prepared your presentation, and I got it before you ever asked, and then there's like, the world's worst assistant that's like, your desk was covered with papers and it was really messy, so I shredded them. Yeah, the desk is all clean now, right? And sometimes that's how our bodies feel. Like, why would you do that? Like, that's a really poor decision for you to make body Right, right? But the body is just trying to support that belief system. And so the more we can educate our personal assistant, the more we can educate our body and address it and heal it and retrain it, then the body and the brain really start to work together. So you mentioned processes that we can do at the moment. What are some I know this is a huge conversation. But what are some examples of things that we can do in what we feel like is a pretty important moment, either a moment of stress or a moment of fear or a moment of, you know, these moments that need to be processed. What are some things that we can do step one, and then, what would be the follow up to that of, what are some things that we can do to get our body back in alignment with where we want it to be, with where we want our belief system to be. So
step one, I think, is always recognizing it and naming it. Yeah, like maybe I'd come out of the burning building and I am having a panic attack. Yeah, right. And a panic attack is your body's ultimate shutdown method. It is like there is so much outside stimulus going on that I can't manage. The only thing I'm going to allow you to focus on is your breath, because everything else is too much, and I'm going to bring you to this one focus. Just focus on your breath. And so our bodies want to keep us alive. They will do anything to keep us alive, including turning off other bodily functions, like digestion, like all of these things and sleep. Yes, reproduction is so huge, because they want us to live. They want us to be alive. And so befriending, you know, the body, befriending, being able to name and know, what am I experiencing right now? And if we go back to that window of tolerance, if I go up, if I am in fight or flight, I have to consciously bring my body down. That's breathing, that scent, that's meditation, that's a slow walk, that's putting your bum and back, like on the floor and your feet in the air. This is I need to take physical action to calm and ground my nervous system. And I think sometimes that's why I say step one is naming it. Because I think sometimes we can supercharge our fight or flight? Yeah, right. If I go into the burning building and I come out and I'm having a panic attack, and I think or believe that, you know, like listening to, like loud rock music, or like going for a run or going to a CrossFit class is what's going to help me. It is most certainly not. Yeah, right. If I'm already in fight or flight, and I have to have this conversation with some of my clients, and I hate it, because we do have this culture, this idea of like, exercise is good for you, and I push back a little bit on it, and like movement, conscious movement is good for you. If you are a person that's already in a chronic state of stress. You are in fight or flight, your cortisol levels are high, and you go to a CrossFit class, you are going to be stuck there forever. And so instead, if you are that person, I need you to go to a kundalini yoga class, not a flow class. Kundalini or I need you to go on a slow walk with your slowest baby, you know, your two year old, because they'll be nice and slow. You're not going anywhere quick. So identifying and naming it, am I in fight or flight, or am I in freeze? If I am in fight or flight, I need to do things that are calming, that are soothing, to bring my body back into that window of tolerance. And those things are soothing. I'm talking like listen to Enya and light a candle and just breathe. So let
me recap that, because that's really powerful. So we are talking about the mind body connection, right? So our lived experience has both and there are some things that come directly from the body, like if I put my hand on a hot stove, or if I feel a physical touch, those things are coming as input from the body, but a huge amount of data is coming from our brain and our perception of the events around us and informing the body. So the body can inform the brain, and the brain can inform the body. Somewhere in there is like the spirit and the soul and the you know, but we'll simplify it for now. So when that happens and we have an event, then we need to address the body side of it and the brain side of it. And that's not homework. That's an opportunity to say we can heal the brain and the perception of the experience by changing our lived physical experience, and we can change our body by changing our brain's perception of it. So some of those physical activities are the ones you mentioned, sitting with your back on the floor and your feet up against the wall, shaking, tapping. Create,
doing meditation, Kundalini yoga, and
that's what I like to tell patients, is, don't, don't get fancy about it. Like if it feels like the opposite of fight or flight to you, then it's good. So grounding or hiking or stretching or but or along with what you were saying about the movement, one of the things that I bring up with patients is if you feel like you're using that movement to to drive your troubles into the ground, like to suppress them into submission, to get them back into control, right? Like I will control my life. If that's what your exercise feels like, then it's the wrong type of exercise or the wrong type of approach. But the type of exercise can differ. You know, if going for a trail run feels joyful and freeing and nature full to you, and you can feel like you can release those struggles that you're having and you can stop holding onto them, and you can say, I don't need to live in fight or flight, then that same exercise might be good for you. So I think there's some individuality. Okay, I really want to get into the in give us, just like, a quick list of specific approaches that people would hear about, of that are therapeutic approaches for mind body, but a little bit off the beaten path. What is just a list of things that people will hear about?
I mean, somatics is a huge word, right? Nervous system regulation, we've got, like, breath work. There's all kinds of folks offering breath work, psychedelics, sound bath. There's all kinds of sort of alternative, you know, quote, unquote alternative. So
tell us which ones are typically offered by trained therapists that that are have degrees and have because this, like we said, it gets a little wild wild west, right? And I'm I'm not opposed to the Wild West. I think that part of it is that our culture hasn't supported research in a lot of these areas, and so it's left us in the wild west. But I do think there are some safety considerations and some some reasonability that people need to have. I think we also hear about hypnotherapy and energy healers and energy work. And honestly, I'm not opposed to most of these things. I think if it resonates with you, then go for it. But from a trained therapist perspective, which of these modalities are trained therapists typically employing
so somatics, for sure, I've got some therapy friends that are trained in breath work, in Reiki, in all of these different things. So you can a therapist can be trained in all of these things, and they don't necessarily have to have a master's degree to do Reiki or to do sound healing, or to do energy work or things like that. And I think you know, Psychology Today is a wonderful resource to to find, yeah, yep, it'll have those specific things. But also, I think talking to your friends and family, right? I think sometimes that's our challenge or our struggle, is we think that we're alone in how we're feeling. We think we're crazy. We think that, you know, no one would be able to help us. So being able to talk to friends and family, that's where most of the clients that work with me now are direct referrals from friends and family, right? Because someone came to them and said, You know, I've been going to therapy, and I like my therapist, but I also I don't really know if I'm making movement, making progress, and I really am wanting more. I've been hearing this somatic thing, and I feel like I'm missing it. And then their friend says, Oh, I've been seeing this girl, Emilee, and this is how she's helped me. And they go, Ooh, that sounds interesting. And then they come to me, and I think it's the same with anyone, whether they're a licensed professional or not, but talk to your friends and family about their experience, about we have this crazy, you know, world where we have Google at our fingertips. Google it like, what is breath work, and what does that mean? And can you be certified in breath work? And are you, if you are, is this person that I'm going to certified in breath work? I am, you know, in all transparency, a little bit crotchety about it, right? Because I had to go to grad school, and I had to do all these things, and I had to do all this training, and I still, every single year, have to reapply at Doppel, I have to do continuing education. I am under a immense amount of like, I will scrutiny, yeah, the state will make sure that I don't do anything unethical. And the beauty of that is it does protect people. Sometimes the system fails. Sometimes, as you know, as all things do, but it is sort of this idea of, I am very much supervised and managed by a licensing board that makes sure that I'm doing ethical things for the most part. And
man, there are so many people now, and good and bad. I think there's good sides to it, put too, but there's so many people now. Who are they do a, you know, two hour certification, or a five hour certification, and they start practicing. And I just think it's worth having a certain degree of awareness as a client to. Say when we're when we're going, when we're saying, we're working on healing this mind body connection, right? Anything people advertise, nervous system regulation, healing, or, you know, these things, they're, in my mind, they're kind of doing one of two things. In one, they're dredging up old wounds and injuries and hopefully healing and releasing those and allowing the body to move past them, or they're I call it biohacking, which isn't completely appropriately described, but they're just using the body, the input from the body, specifically to retrain that old trauma response. So those are things that are a little bit simpler, like shaking or tapping or things like that. Some of these modalities get pretty deep into the psyche, and they're things that we I don't think we completely understand them all the way. You know, with some of the deeper breathing patterns that really start to put you into a somewhat hypnotic state, or hypnotherapy, these are things that are really diving into your most vulnerable areas. And I think we need to have a certain amount of awareness of if a person is not trained to support you in that it can go awry. You know, you're you're dredging up these old wounds, and that's possible to sort of feel a little worse after Hey there listeners, just a quick break to tell you about something that could make a big difference in your life or the life of a woman you care about. Here at uplift for her, we specialize in integrative women's health, offering comprehensive support for every stage of life, whether you're navigating menopause and need expert HRT advice, looking to shed those stubborn pounds or seeking for help with your mental well being, we've got you covered. We combine the best of traditional and functional medicine with personalized health coaching and dietitian support. Here at our salt lake city based clinic, we ensure that your unique needs are met with the care and expertise you deserve. At uplift for her, we are here to help you feel your best inside and out ready to take the next step in your health journey. Visit us at uplift for her.com, or give us a call today. We have services available for those of you living in the state of Utah, and some services available for those of you outside of Utah. Now let's get back to the episode. There
is this really beautiful quote about something about the healer does not heal you. They teach you how to heal yourself, yes. And so I think that is always a red flag for me. And I mean, I'm on social media. My business is on social media, and that is an important part of our marketing is on social media. But I think that is always, that is the biggest red flag for me as when folks say, like, hey, I can help you heal your trauma. Yeah, hey, I can, you know this modality of breath work, or this sound healing thing, or this hypnotherapy thing or Reiki thing, or whatever can heal you that I would never that would be so irresponsible for me to believe that I am so powerful that I know what's best for you. I think that's just so totally irresponsible. So I think that's such a red flag of like, if you're getting messages, of like, I know what's so powerful for you. Yeah, I'm so good, uh huh, I know how to heal you. That's a red flag for me, because I do not. I get to see my clients for if they're ketamine clients, two and a half hours a week, if they're therapy clients, one hour a week. How dare I pretend to know what's best for you? My whole focus and job and goal and mission is to help you know what's best for you, because I don't want you to be in therapy for the rest of your life exactly. I want to teach you how to know what's best for you. So then maybe even you know, you go to this random breath work class and you're like, This is not for me. Hopefully the skills that you have learned in therapy allow you to say, Hey, friends, this isn't for me. I appreciate the invitation, but I'm going to go home now, rather than staying in the breath work class, doing some of this breath and completely busting open things that are not ready or able to be busted open.
Yeah, yeah. And I've talked
to clients who know that they have some deeper I say trauma as a general term. You know, we say big T trauma or small t trauma. Sometimes we don't think of it as trauma, but if it caused a deep effect on your psyche and on your body, then that's trauma, even if someone you know, even if in a story, it doesn't seem that traumatic, still trauma. So I have patients who say, like, I know I have trauma. I know it's affecting me. I'm not going there. I'm not ready to go there. I don't want to go there. And I think I don't want people to have that fear. I want them to know themselves and know when they're ready, and I want them to keep approaching and asking the question, Am I ready to let this go? But I think the wording there is really important, and I really love to use the word release. Is healing. Is so much more of a release, rather than something that we exert. Worse towards, right? So as we're looking at some of these modalities of breath work or Reiki or energy or hypnotherapy or somatic work that we're saying, what gets me into the state that I feel the safest so I can let go, so I can release the thing that I was holding onto because it was helping me to feel safe, and that's why we do this, right? So we go through these traumas, and we're like, why would we do that? Like, let go of that and move on with my life. Why doesn't my body do that? And it's because if you imagine a saber tooth tiger, if you encounter one, you want your body to have that perfect memory of that experience. So you will track that tiger. You will understand the next time a tiger comes, you will understand how to beat the tiger next time your body cements that deep into a portion of your brain and then memorizes it and brings it up over and over and over to keep you safe. But our job now, in not the caveman era, is to release those memories to say thank you so much gay woman for reminding me that that terrible thing happened. I'm not going to hold on to that anymore. I'm going to go ahead and and set that one down. But the more we try to exert force to say, like, I'm going to bury that, I'm going to, you know, manage that, I'm going to get that one in submission. It will never work. It will never, ever work. And I stand by that. It will always make it worse. So I don't want to have people be afraid of doing this work, but I think it's worth again, like you said, being the expert on yourself and there. There really is no other way to find the best healing path for you, other than you learning how to intuit like there's there's, you can talk to friends and should, and you can ask your doctor and should and could. But really, what it comes down to is you using that intuition and almost being guided energetically. You know to say, like this feels like the next right step for me is to work with this Reiki practitioner or to learn some breath work. Right? There's going to be, there's lots of modalities. Like you said, we're so blessed with so many modalities, and so many of them are effective. But you want to make sure you get all the vibes right, because we don't have anything other than vibes for this world, right? There's no science that will guide this. So you're you're just following your vibe to say, this person, this human, who's doing this practice. It feels good to me. It feels safe to me, and avoiding ones that feel like you mentioned that they're trying to exert force to get you to heal and being your hero or being your savior, you don't want that type of energy and that healing relationship. You want to feel like, in my mind, someone's there standing next to you. They're going to hold your hand, they're going to put your put their arm around you and offer you support when you feel weak or shaky. But they're not trying to heal you, and they're not trying to do anything, right? They're going to be there and allow you right space
for that to happen, for the magic to happen, right? Because, yeah, I do have, even I have clients that come to me that say, like, I think I want to talk about this thing. I know that I'm going to tell you my story, and I have this huge other thing, but I don't want to talk about that. Yeah, and it's like, okay, yeah, I absolutely support you in that, because I know and I believe that when you are ready, you will
tell me a little bit too about the timeline with more of this mind body healing. I think we see it in talk therapy as well, but I have a lot of patients who, I think get really intimidated and overwhelmed by this, when they realize, like, gosh, this is hurting my body. It's causing me problems. I know I need to do the work, but I think sometimes it can feel like this is going to be years, and I really don't believe that I have seen it be really quite instantaneous. I think the more vulnerable we are, and the more willing we are to let go of crap, right? The more our body is like, okay, cool. I'll do that. But it's when we have so much resistance that we have to, like, peel these layers of the onion, and we just keep peeling and peeling and peeling. What are your thoughts about that timeline, and what are your your tips or ideas about how we can really make this process of healing these internal wounds or this, this, these wounds from the past which everyone has, by the way, how do we make this process easier on ourselves so that it can be as short and as productive as possible,
right? I mean, and it's so variable, right? Each person's experience is so different. I do have folks where they do work through things for years, and then I have folks that work through things like two three times, and they're like, Wow, yeah, I had no idea this existed. Yeah. I had no idea could live this way. But that is sort of how or why I got into working with ketamine a little bit, and that is why I do really like working with ketamine, is because it does happen fairly quickly. For a lot of folks, the results or the change or the feeling happens quite quickly, because with ketamine assisted therapy, it's not. Not just the drug, and it's not just the therapy. We are combining the two together. And so two is better than one in this case, right? And so we could do have the medicine that does the medicines job, and then we have the therapy part two, so it can make it quicker for a lot of folks. And that's what we do like about it.
Well, I'm glad you transitioned, because I do want to talk about ketamine. I want to go back just one step to get into that and say, okay, so someone's going to talk therapy or not going to talk therapy. When do they know they they should sort of look for some of these, these off the beaten path modalities.
If you're feeling like it's not working, yeah, right. You feel stuck, yeah? If you're feeling stuck. And, I mean, like I said, I think it's so beautiful. We all have Google in our hands, and so we can do a little bit of research. You know, go on Reddit, go on, you know, different things, and learn about different ideas and modalities. And as always, talk to your friends, talk to your family about what you're going through, because either they have a similar experience, or they know someone else, and just being able to openly talk about it, I really believe that in like the you know, the more vulnerable or the more open we can get, the more we can receive from others, and sometimes that is guidance or wisdom or different things, different modalities. So just being open to
it, and don't you also think that the more physical symptoms you're having that you feel like are related to fight or flight, or someone like your functional medicine doctor tells you it's related to fight or flight. Don't you feel like the more that it's affecting the body, the more likely you are to need support outside of talk therapy,
yeah? And it is, you know, healing is this holistic thing? Yeah? If someone is having a lot of physical symptoms, I want them to go to a really good functional medicine practitioner and get some labs and talk to someone about this physical stuff, of how much you could change, right? Because so much of our dopamine is made in our gut. And if your gut is out of whack, or your body is out of whack, your labs, your hormones, your all these things, and we're doing a ton of therapy, you might still not feel
well, yeah, I think that's right, and that's exactly I think there is this really lovely relationship of I see patients from a functional medicine perspective, that come to me with really big problems, and there are often treatments that are just, I think I mentioned This earlier, there are often treatments that are just really, really hard, you know, to say, like, Okay, eat this way and do this amount of steps, and make sure that you're doing this breath work and make sure that you're getting red light. And there are so many good tools, but, man, they can feel overwhelming, so especially if you're feeling chronically depressed or chronically anxious or feel like you can't make any progress. I call it a pit, right? You feel just stuck in a pit. I have lots and lots of tools, but sometimes we need additional tools to say, can I give you a leg up out of this pit? And sometimes that's medications, sometimes it's lifestyle, sometimes it's supplements, but I think that sometimes the somatic approaches, or the hypnotherapy or Reiki or other things like that can be such a nice adjunct that just sort of start to get that ball rolling, and then also things like ketamine assisted therapy. So I want to talk about that. Tell us first, what, what is ketamine and why? Why is it used in this way? Ketamine
is a drug, you know, that has been around an FDA approved since the 60s. It is used every single day, prescription medication, prescription medication. Yep, I don't do any of the prescribing. I have a fantastic nurse practitioner. Been used by anesthesiologists, yeah, for years, forever, and it's been FDA approved. It's used every day in the ER. It's even used in dentist offices. It's used in veterinary clinics, because ketamine, they have found is a very, very, very safe anesthetic when supervised by the private people,
not, not very safe, you know, willy nilly on the streets, when used appropriately,
when supervised by I mean, if you think about it, right, an anesthesiologist has an absurd amount of training. They have to why, because they work with the most powerful drugs in existence. So ketamine is very safe when used appropriately with the correct medical prescriber people. And we use ketamine on our babies in the NICU and our friends on hospice because it is safe and effective, and there's not a lot of side effects to just ketamine. So it's
used in all these different modalities. How is it used in your clinic for mental health?
Yeah, so they found, right in the past 2030, years, like the the research with ketamine is not that long standing. It is a newer modality of therapy, and I think that's why there is a lot of stigma around it, right? Because CBD or CBT, sorry, not to be confused by CBT. We have decades and decades and decades of research that CBT is an effective model of therapy for certain diagnoses and certain conditions, and ketamine is newer. We don't have a. Much empirical data that supports what we're doing. And therapy is hard, you know, and the way that I choose to work with ketamine is a little bit different, and it's a little bit woo, woo. And I can't empirically support that. The incense that I lit that day helped people, right? And so it is a little bit we don't have as much data we're working on it, and there is more data that is coming out all the time, and it's really wonderful, but we so they found that these much, much, much, much, much, much lower doses than what we're using for anesthesia could be really helpful in the world. The only thing that ketamine is FDA approved for today is treatment resistant depression, and you can get something called spravato that's provided by your insurance. That can be really helpful. But we use ketamine, what's called off label, right? So it's not FDA approved the way that we use it, but it is FDA approved for other conditions, so it's still very safe and very effective. But how we use it at Koru Wellness is we do it a little bit differently. There are lots of ways that people can work with ketamine. There are fusion clinics where you can go in, you can get set up with an IV, you sit in a room by yourself for about an hour and get a ketamine drip, and then you go home. You never drive, like, no matter what, never drive the same day of ketamine. And
what does it do to the brain? Like, why are they why are we using ketamine and depression? What is it actually doing? It's not necessarily an antidepressant, right? It
is not right. And there's this idea. So if you have depression and you told your doctor about it, it's very likely that they probably recommended what's called an SSRI, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and it essentially gives your body more serotonin. And if you are someone that is low in serotonin, you're going to take an SSRI and you're going to feel way better. You're going to be like, Yes, this is awesome. This works. I feel better if you're not someone that's low in serotonin, and you take an SSRI, it's not going to help you that much. It's not going to do a whole lot for you. And so ketamine is similar in the way of it does give your brain this surge of instead of serotonin, it's called glutamate. And glutamate is the and I'm not a neuroscientist. This is like the therapist perspective, right? If there was an actual neuroscientist, they'd be like, Oh, sweetie, you don't understand. But in my very simple therapist sort of language, how I like to describe it is ketamine will give your brain a surge of glutamate. Glutamate is the neurotransmitter that is responsible for allowing our brain to be a little bit more plastic, a little bit more moldable, a little bit more open to different neural pathways. Right? They say that neurons that wire together fire together, and if I have deeply rooted trauma of my initial response and reaction is this every time, and it is unconscious, right? If I to use a very, very simple example, if I get cut off in traffic, and before I can even think about getting cut off in traffic, I respond of like, oh, that suddenly like, what the like, I just have this physical reaction before my brain can even process what the heck happened. Ketamine can be really helpful. And like, hey, that neural pathway that is very cemented into your brain, not super helpful. Yeah, let's take a different look. And so another way I like to describe it too is, if you imagine like a sliding hill in the winter, we're rolling into winter here in Utah. Finally, I love the winter. I don't like the heat at all. But if you have this really, really great sledding hill, and you have a kid that is going down the same path over and over and over and over again, that path is very deeply ingrained, and now it's become icy and it's very, very deeply rooted, and it is easier to go down that path than it is to try and do something new. You could try, but it is going to be pretty challenging.
Thoughts are going to just automatically instinctively go and think the same thing that you've been thinking, and the ketamine then can sort of loosen that connection. It can sort of blunt the edges of that ingrained path to say, maybe there's some other paths, or maybe you could go just a little to the right. Yeah,
ketamine. Is that new fresh snow? Like, hey, there is this trail. Let's do a new fresh snow here so that we can develop new habits and routines and ideas and new ways of thinking about this old thing, right? That's what we do with trauma. We don't change the trauma. It's still there are still things that you can look back on your childhood and say, yeah, what happened to me was not okay. But the goal or the healing or the beauty is being able to say what happened to me was not okay, yeah, I didn't deserve that, and it is my responsibility to live a full life. Yeah, I will find a way to live a full life. So
the data behind ketamine therapy, it's, I think it's been studied for the last what I mean in this usage, yeah, last couple decades, not, not many, not a lot of decades. So it started to be used as this. Adjunct to depression, treatment resistant depression, but the data hasn't been very good in showing long, lasting effects. And I think that the current data right now is, how do we tweak this? There's such good temporary effects, how do we tweak this, and how do we continue to apply this differently so we get better results? And I think you and I both agree that using it with therapy can have more effect, because, as you said, if you just go in and have a ketamine drip, it may loosen some of those pathways that are deeply ingrained. But the idea behind doing the therapy with the ketamine is that you target those deeply ingrained pathways, so you as a therapist are helping them figure out which are the deeply ingrained pathways that are causing these recurrent issues, and can you blunt those? Can you smooth and can you give the brain alternative pathways to think about? Did I explain that?
Yeah, yeah, really, well, right? And I think, yeah, we've got a couple of decades, not many, many decades of research. But I think something that's really interesting is that with the research that we have, more often than not, it is infusion based, right? And so it's, you go and you get a ketamine drip, and then you leave, and they found most of the research says you're going to do between four and six of those sessions, and then, yeah, they're tracking the long term outcomes. And some of them are great, and some of them are like, not as well. So there is this idea of maintenance, dosing and things like that. But I think that's why, and again, take this from a completely biased person, right? But that's why we got to do therapy. Yeah, that is why, you know, going and getting a ketamine drip and then going home might make you feel better in the moment, but my belief is that we gotta process through some of this. So that's why, you know, if you come to Koru and do a ketamine session, it is two and a half hours long, and the first, you know little bit, they have to meet with the nurse practitioner. We're doing vitals. We're making sure no medical treatment. Yeah, it's a medical thing. And then they're coming into the treatment room, into my office. We're getting comfortable. We have these really wonderful they're called Moon pods. They're like a zero gravity bean bag, and they're sitting in those. Maybe we're going to have a weighted blanket, and we'll do something creating
the environment to create safety and relaxation, yeah, and
this is after we've done many prep sessions with no ketamine beforehand. But then maybe we will do a grounding exercise, do a body scan. We'll get into our physical body and feeling safe, and then our nurse practitioner will come in and provide them the medicine. It's an inner muscular shot in their shoulder. And the medicine typically lasts 40 minutes to an hour for most folks. And then we have an hour as the medicine is starting to wear off. Where they have, we call it the golden hour. It's this really beautiful time where some of those, we all have these, like, really big walls and protectors that are like, don't say this, or don't do that, or you should be doing this, or you should be doing that, or don't tell your therapist this, because she's gonna think you're crazy. And ketamine does a really good job of just very, very gently softening some of those protectors, some of those walls. And so you can dive into this thing for the next hour. We have an hour to sort of process, and you get to just stay in your moon pod, and you get to have your eye shades on if you want. And you get to just process through like this is what just happened during the medicine, during the experience, and this is what I think it means for me, and this is how I'm going to apply that moving forward in my life. We get to do all of that in a two and a half hour period, which is magic. Yeah,
I think some people could be really scared of that, of that lowering of inhibition. What does the experience look like for people? Are they like sobbing? Are they like, exposing things that you, that you as a therapist, are like, Ooh, maybe they didn't want to expose that. I think that could feel like, Am I just gonna bear all my secrets? I didn't want like, maybe I want some of those walls up. What is the actual experience of most patients? Would you say? So
it depends, right? Because we do have two different ways that we can work with ketamine, and all of this is going to be very deeply talked about in your preparation sessions, before any medicine is even given. But we do have two ways that we can do it. We can do what's called a psycholytic dose, which is a much, much, much lower dose. We can also do the psychedelic dosing, which is a little bit higher of a dose, still way lower than anesthesia, but a little bit higher of a dose those psycholytic sessions. It's a much lower dose, and often during those times, folks are still talking and engaging and interacting throughout those 40 minutes to an hour. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes it is very internal, but it's not, it's not going to force you to share something that you don't want to share. What, what ketamine can often do is bring the unconscious stuff into the conscious like you are still, especially with those lower psycholytic doses, you're still very much in control of what words come out of your mouth, like. It's not going to be this like spill all your secrets and all the things like you are still very much online and in control of the things that you share, that you choose to come up, even with the psychedelic dosing, the much higher dosing, most often, the higher dosing that we get, the less likely you are to sort of engage with your exterior world, right? And so you might have the eye shades and the headphones with music on the entire time. I have clients that will not say a word for the 40 minutes to an hour, not a single word comes out of their mouth, and I even still do with the psychedelic dosing. Folks will talk a lot, but they're not talking to me. They're talking right? But I don't think it really and in my experience, and I've worked with ketamine quite a bit, both personally and professionally, it's not a thing that you know you're going to share things that you don't want to share. You do still have some semblance of control over your subconscious.
Is it a very emotional experience, or is it a very peaceful, calm experience for most people?
I would say most people lean towards the peaceful calm, because most people are living in the state of like go, go and do and produce and do all the things. And so it can be this deeply meditative, calming. And, I mean, we do a million things to support that, right? We've got very dim lighting. I've got incense going. We've got candles going like it's we've got spa music going. There's all kinds of things that we do to support that environment, because that is what we want happening going into this. Because most people, I would say a lot of the time, maybe 50% of the time, when people come back from the medicine and they take their eye shades off, and they take the headphones off, and they look at me and they say, oh my gosh, I've never felt this calm before. And if you can remind your body, because back to like the somatic, and why somatic and body work. And these things are so helpful and powerful, ketamine can very quickly get you into the place where your body can feel really calm. And then we can go, Yeah, remember, you're totally capable of getting into this place. And over the next couple of sessions, we're going to continue to work together to remind your body that it's capable, so that you don't even need the ketamine anymore, because we're not working with ketamine for very long. Six times is about the max. And then my nurse practitioner wants to see you and be like, Hey, are we really what's the reason for continuing? Because we don't want to do ketamine for very long. We want it to be very short, very quick, to help you remember you are capable of being able to grow that strength, yeah, and really cement that new neural pathway of you can be someone who can regulate their nervous system. You can be someone who can get cut off in traffic and be like, Oh my gosh, they must be in a hurry. I hope everything's okay, yeah, I hope they get to where they're going, and then you can just go throughout your day and not have it completely destroy and wreck. You know, we've all had experiences like that where one tiny thing and we're like, oh, my whole day, and you're participating on
it, yeah, yeah. Oh, well, this is so fascinating. Thank you so much for coming and talking about this, it's we really are so fortunate to have so many tools and resources. And I it's frustrating right to not know which is your next resource. You know, I wish we had this, the test that is like, here's what's going to work best for you, but it's certainly nice to at least have options to try. So thank you so much for being here and talking about this with us. It's been really, really fascinating. I loved it, of course. Thank you so much for letting me be here.
Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their insights and time with us. We are grateful for the incredible support from our sponsors and to all of you listening. We couldn't do this without you. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your favorite platform. You can find us on our website, uplift for her.com, YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And if you found value here today, please share this episode with someone who would benefit from it. Leave us a comment or give us a review. It really helps us reach more listeners like you. Thank you for being part of our community. Stay tuned for our next episode. This information is for educational purposes only and not intended to be medical advice you.
