Part 1: Introductions and Misconceptions

Chaotically, a millennial’s first encounter with the idea of Therapeutic Ketamine or Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy is met with the D.A.R.E.-educated programmed response: “The horse tranquilizer?” And while it’s a question launched dismissively from the perspective of ignorance, it’s not your fault if that’s your first thought. That’s what we were told.

But the first step in learning anything is to clear your mind of your conceptions. Rather than address and repeat more misconceptions, we’ll start with easy truths and then you can do more research about it if you’re interested. We’re removing our egos from this one.

Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic that has been used to treat depression and chronic pain; it is also being used to treat other disorders, as well as during surgeries of humans and most domesticated animals, but I bring up depression and chronic pain specifically because of its relevance to my story.  It is most often taken intravenously, intramuscularly, orally, nasally, sublingually, and in some other specific methods that are not relevant to this story and not necessarily in that order. Ketamine can be either administered by a doctor or anesthesiologist in a clinical setting or prescribed for use at home. Ketamine is not covered by most insurance companies.

I can’t speak for anyone else’s experience, but know that when I present an experience from my subjective perspective, that it’s unique to me in its presentation and experience. Not everyone will experience Synesthesia in the way that I do. Expecting that we will have the same or even relatable experiences is counter to the purpose of my journey. But I will share some of my experiences so I can solidly document them for myself, and for you, in case there’s anything we may share in common.

Ketamine may or may not be addictive. I don’t believe myself to be addicted to ketamine any more than a diabetic is addicted to insulin. No, we don’t need to debate it. I speak honestly about my use and the work I’ve done with a Ketamine-informed therapist as well as a psychiatrist. I had an inimitable care team, and it was a genuine loss for me to leave this incredible combination of people, but hopefully another will take my place and find what they need to heal.

When Jakki introduced me to the idea of ketamine-assisted therapy with subtlety for the 4th or 5th time, I was ready to try anything. No tests were conclusive. My suffering seemed unending.

Was I making all of this up?

This one ends up being quite a destructive question. Second-guessing yourself is the cornerstone of what we’ve been taught to do. Someone else has to be worse than you in some way so you can’t complain. “He’s not hurt enough to need time off, that lazy jerk,” I’m guilty of having thought of other people before. Our “superiors” (in whatever capacity) taught us that way of thinking so we’d put our needs aside for other people or other “needs.” In their minds, the “lazy” people were too far gone to help and were mostly there to be an example of what you shouldn’t be.

If you’re capable of asking if you’re “making all of this up;” I’m betting you’re a person who was made to learn to suppress themselves in service of others. If you’re not capable of that kind of self-doubt; then I envy you. It’s poisoning to the soul to no longer know if you can trust yourself. I was so far in denial about myself and my feelings that all I could do is keep myself constantly occupied. I was the guy playing a console game with a laptop and a phone out. Before the pain, of course.

Suffering had become more consuming than any job I’d had before. In fact, I was seeing an acupuncturist there for a while. I guess I’d decided that I wasn’t quite suffering enough. You know what the most disgusting part about all of it is? I still had the nerve to ask myself, “Is this pain real? Am I just doing this for attention?”

There’s plenty of reading you can do on the subject of somatic pain or pain re-processing that will lead you to one very simple conclusion. Pain happens in the brain. Everything is stimulus until it’s interpreted by the brain. Regardless of the catalyst, your pain is real. As was mine. But I didn’t trust myself. How could I trust myself? I didn’t even know who I was.

Eventually, I’d meet with a doctor about Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy via telehealth protocol, and the conversation mostly touched on what my mental health history is like. “I think I’m fine,” I remember defending myself meekly. “I can’t be depressed. So many more people have it worse than me. Why would I cry for myself?”

The doctor would weigh my soul with a vague story about another patient whose mother would burn her on a hot stove. The thought of a child being physically burned by the person who was supposed to protect her was devastating. The despair that I imagined for a person with no one to turn to for comfort or safety in that moment would be one thing. To imagine it being caused by the person who should have protected her became overwhelming-- I burst into tears. How horrible. How truly horrible.

I felt her pain.

That was my coping mechanism, now that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel anything. People talk about addiction and I have to tell you, there’s nothing in my life that I’ve done more addicting than feeling the suffering of other people. That might sound ridiculous or dramatic, but I think if you’re relating to that mechanism, you know what I’m talking about. At least I could feel something. Or was I feeling something. Was I still performing for other people? There was that self-doubt again.

This doctor would schedule something with me but he’d miss our first appointment due to snow. I remember how upset I felt in that moment, as though everything was spiraling out of control just because we had to start a week later. I took it internally as a message that this wasn’t going to work out. But I wasn’t depressed! There was nothing wrong with me. Let’s talk about how stupid the world is. There. All better. It was stupid to get my hopes up. This is what always happens.

The doctor that I began with preferred IM (intramuscular) treatments but I’d never really gone to any doctor much before all of these appointments. I didn’t know how to prepare for this experience. But I wanted to be ready. “Bring the most comfortable clothes you own and a notebook and pen.” He’d provide the headphones. This all framed at a time you might describe as “peak Covid” so people still cared about protocols. You’d wear a mask until after your injection. Then you’d lay on his leather couch, head encapsulated with Bose cans, breathing inches from an air filter and his MacBook Pro.

After a brief introduction, and some calming words about intention and authenticity, I was under. I thought I’d understood anything he’d spoken of. I understood his words, but they meant nothing to me. I plunged under the surface of our reality and found myself moving, almost on a rail with the pace of the music. Songs I’d never heard before. I found myself absolutely delighted to hear the piano’s sustain lift from the strings, envisioning the suspension of the rosin in the air or the individual textures of the strings; something I continue to seek in my daily life. The drama of the music has enveloped me almost completely, but I find myself experimenting in this space almost as if lucid dreaming. I build incredible forests, I visit otherworldly temples, I am visited by a goddess. She tries to teach me about something but I can’t even tell that’s why she’s there.

My every breath takes me further under until suddenly I’m coming out of it. At the time, I didn’t know I’d been “kicked out” of the experience: a situation I’ll later call being “put out in the bushes.” I’m up a little earlier than most people here. It’s only been about 40 minutes. I’m beginning to be lucid almost immediately as I awaken. Just a minute or two later, I’m sitting up. We talk for a while but I don’t give much. I don’t understand the importance of what I’d just experienced, nor do I understand the importance of what I now had the chance to do.

When I tell people about Ketamine in person, it’s not difficult to recognize the furrowed brow of concern. Don’t get me wrong, when we transition into that conversation, we start pretty well. It’s easy to relate to how I felt. I was not alone in being trained to ignore my needs in favor of others. Or in feeling that there’s something wrong with the fact that you can dig deep and the only feelings you can come up with are outrage and anger. “This guy seems so well-spoken, and he’s just gonna tell me he’s a junkie?”

Honestly, they probably think I’m going to ask them for money at this point. Check out my GoFundMe! I need more Ketamine, Stranger! We’re programmed to think that anything out of the norm is scary. People are used to the impression of how drug users are portrayed in media. Everyone is on guard that something might be a scam unless it’s something they feel compelled to connect with.

But where’s the truth? Again, it’s just more simple. Some people take drugs. Some people have a prescription. Some people do not. You can’t tell me that anti-depressants and alcohol are a good mix. We all know someone who does better staying away from alcohol. I remember my father whispering secrets about someone whom we knew was into some serious chemicals but because they hadn’t done anything too bad, nobody said anything.

The moment I tell people I’m taking Ketamine to work on my chronic pain problem, I see that same (sometimes brief) look of judgment. And again, I don’t blame them: It’s what we’re told to do. Ketamine doesn’t work in a vacuum. Well, actually statistically it does. Chronic pain patients see massive improvements to their condition within the first few treatments. Mental health patients need a little more help. I didn’t know that I was both, but I was. Perhaps we all are.

I still needed help.

I make it seem much easier to just start ketamine than it actually is. I first had to be diagnosed with something. You can’t just sign up to try ketamine and get a poke. I spoke with a really lovely psychiatrist who asked me some questions that I thought weren’t going to amount to much. Maybe some depression, sure. But who wasn’t a little depressed? Right?

If these things sound familiar and it’s the things you’re still saying right now, you need to know that it’s ok to ask for help. My combination of answers and priorities during our conversation led my doctor to a diagnosis that I wasn’t expecting: cPSTD. I can’t really tell you that I had mixed feelings about it. I can tell you that I thought I did. I wasn’t feeling feelings, remember? I just know that I think I was supposed to feel conflicted.

I’d begun working with a Pain Reprocessing Therapist who saw straight through my issues almost immediately when my symptoms manifested but had no immediate explanation, but I wasn’t allowing us to do any measurable work. Not because I wanted to be obstructive, mind you, it’s just how I’ve been taught to view and defend myself. It must have been infuriating to listen to week in and week out. I did my best not to be upset with myself about the cost. Oh, didn’t you know? Pain reprocessing therapy isn’t covered by insurance. In most cases, neither is ketamine therapy. Try recovering from a megadose of guilt and shame with the price tag looming overhead sometime. See if it doesn’t make you think it’s in your best interest to “recover” as quickly as you can.

See, the biggest misconception brought to my sessions was that I was in charge of my own life. I believed I had agency, but I was being run by all of the expectations that had already been built for me and it was tearing me apart. Mostly, I felt the guilt; something that I thought I had control of, something in reality I was in denial of.

I love the song My Humps by The Black Eyed Peas.

I was ashamed of people knowing that I loved My Humps because I would feel like I had to defend it. If I take my ego out of that, I can simply say that I love My Humps. Why? It doesn’t matter. I’m enjoying it. And yet we feel the need to perpetuate that response from other people. We criticize people for even liking something different to what we expect. The anxiety of this reality is that these conversations do happen. It’s not something that you’re prepared for and it’s just this unlikely eventuality. We do it to each other constantly.

But the answer is: “It doesn’t matter.” The question we should be asking ourselves is: “Why does it matter?” But you have to see past your ego to accept that.

The language we use matters. Taking passive stances on ourselves and our boundaries makes it easy to become so passive that you exist only to worry about others, ruminating in your spare time about when you’ll fit into your own life.

I had to wake up.

It’s become this horrific cliché now to hear, especially in today’s climate, so many people telling you to wake up. If you’re an elder millennial, or a xennial especially, you’re probably cringing and remembering the last time you read “Wake Up, Sheeple!” in your high school years, probably on a forum somewhere. Or maybe you were the one saying it out loud. The metaphor of waking up is too prevalent in all aspects of this journey to ignore for any period of time.

I was stricken with a pretty rough habit to break-- the Intellectualization of feelings is something you learn to do when it becomes clear that you aren’t safe to express your feelings (or your thoughts). You start having experiences where your caregivers are making it clear that you are causing problems by feeling or thinking things, and you start eating it; you internalize all of it, looking for a safe way to process it. Not intentionally, of course. That would be ridiculous. Kind of like expecting your children to regulate their feelings. That kind of ridiculous.

You’ve got that sitting inside with you, ruminating, and you’re going to disassemble it. You’re going to start looking at how you affect other people. You’re going to start recognizing those things in the wild. Pretty soon, you’re anticipating things. And people see you doing this. And the most disturbing part of this is that they reward it. People saw me constant anxiety and need for control as “consideration” or “thoughtfulness.” Of course I saw your needs coming! (I was attempting to avoid your disapproval.)

I grew up with the accolades of a “gifted” child. A child whose maturity and intellect was vaunted by parent and teacher alike, who almost invariably heads into middle or high school an emotional wreck or a disciplinary issue. They always ask the same questions. It all gets to the same point. Some of us hold off for longer than others, but everyone eventually grieves the untapped potential. Now it’s your fault that you’re not “performing.”

Almost everything I learned was about programmed responses, not thinking for myself, or even really acknowledging that I had a self beyond being a point of disappointment later. Oh man, it’s almost like those moments of rebellion are an attempted establishment of self, isn’t it? And the better I got at anticipating other people’s reactions, the better I got at getting what I thought I wanted.

Any of this sounding familiar? Then you or someone you know may be a People Pleaser. That’s not the extent of my injuries, but it’s important to the story, so it’s the element that I’ll choose to focus on.

My second session with the good doctor was much more eventful. Certain that I hadn’t “broken through,” he would increase my dose by 25% and reiterate the lessons about being like the river, pulling back further from our interactions in what I interpret to be a calculated move to stir up some stimuli. Perhaps it worked. But I think he was looking for someone more emotionally evolved.

Misconceptions work both ways.

One thing that I noticed during my journaling at this point is that I didn’t really know what to say. That hasn’t changed… but as I worked with the other member of my care team, she began to focus in on the wounds of childhood. I probably can’t possibly intimate to you how unavailable I was to what she was asking of me. Write a letter to a younger version of me? To tell him what? What could I possibly say to make things better?

I found myself stuck there for weeks. And you know how therapists are; I was supposed to find that answer for myself. And since it’s important to be completely clear with you, I was also stuck in my work with the Ketamine therapist.

20 or so minutes into my second session, I woke myself up from my dissociative state:

“You’re early,” he said.

“I’m here to work.” I declared, entrenching myself in the shame I existed in. Knowing this single session had cost us so much, I was determined to be ready to get all of my money’s worth. We had 6 sessions up front,  with boosters being suggested. I had decided that I wasn’t going to need to boosters. I was going to ace therapy and move on.

“Is there no room for play?” he would ask.

I was afraid that all of this was costing so much money and that if I enjoyed any of it, that it made me a bad person. I needed to try as hard as I could. And actually, despite the fact that feeling like that was one of the reasons I had worn myself to this point with self-attacks, I needed other people to see me existing that way. I needed to see myself existing that way.

Inside, the person I’d been trained to be is that person who is always aware of where he is and how much space he’s taking up. I spent most of my childhood being chided for not thinking far enough ahead to know how I was going to affect everyone. So, I created a mechanism for myself. I took to heart some factoid someone shared (that I was never able to verify) about the origin of Sorry meaning “It will never happen again” in the language of its origin. And I would test and then punish myself relentlessly until I felt I could make the correction my new automatic reaction.

Chris Jericho would say of Chris Benoit:

“I remember I worked with Chris [Benoit] once in Japan — tag team match when I started going to New Japan when I started with WCW […] I went for a spinkick and I missed. But I only missed to the point where no one would see it because Chris bumped so fast that we just continued on. It wasn’t like when you screw up or a blatant mistake. It was like I didn’t hit him as crispy as I should of but he still bumped.”

“After the match was done I went looking for him. I couldn’t find him anywhere. I found him in the boiler room doing squats. And I said, ‘what are you doing?’ — and he said, ‘you know I never should have bumped off that that was so unprofessional of me and it was such a bad rookie mistake, I had to do squats.’

I’m not trying to crassly compare myself to Chris Benoit for dramatic effect, but I understand the intensity that other people observed in him. He was crushed by the weight of his insecurities. I find myself able to empathize with that intensity. Do I wish I had a less upsetting example? Absolutely. Don’t be silly. But I remember hearing that story and despite the disgust that most of us have for the situation that led to Chris Benoit taking two lives, or for Benoit himself, it’s important to remember that life is not dealt in absolutes. I related to that level of self-hate. There was much more to Benoit’s story than how he enacted discipline.

For me, though… compliments? I didn’t deserve them. I never earned them. What if everyone found out who I really am without all of the compensations that make them think I’m useful? I couldn’t let anyone know how much that weighed on me. I was too ashamed to share how exhausting it was to be all of this. But who was I if not a constant series of interrupts and instructions? What was I if not just a series of IF and THEN statements? Was I not doing it right? Should I have done it better? If I was doing it right, I probably wouldn’t have ended up here at all.

For the greater part of therapy, I’d say things like, “I did this to myself.” Because that is what I believed. These statements didn’t feel overwhelmingly negative when I brought them up, but I could detect a palpable concern off of the lightly furrowed brows of my therapists. I was hard on myself at every level of my existence. Punishing myself wasn’t just refusing to acknowledge my physical limitations, it started at the very base of my operations. I never allowed myself a compliment because I was never done.

And when something would go wrong, it was always my duty to take responsibility.

Someone at some point put that onus upon me. And I took it. Almost as the consolation prize, in a way; if I wasn’t going to achieve, I damned sure was going to show up for the sentencing. My failures would be just as important to me going forward as they were reaching back. Some of us are told early on that failure is part of your experience. At one point, it became the only thing I could depend on. From the outside, everything looked normal and I was carefree and cool… Ok, well, maybe not cool. But if you knew me, you knew me to be a rock.

Inside, I was a complete mess.