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Psychedelic Somatic Institute
Highly Experiential • Deeply Relational • Psychedelic Therapy Training
- Ragnhildstveit A, Kaiyo M, et al. Cannabis-assisted
psychotherapy for complex dissociative post-
traumatic stress disorder: A case report.
Frontiers in Psychiatry (2023) vol 14
Apprenticeship Training at PSI
The PSI training is not an integration focused model where traditional talk therapy happens after the medicine experience (which can often lack a holding container or attunement). Nor is PSIP a non-relational sitter model that often relies on a transcendent bypass of the painful aspects of life and relationship. Human relational wounding requires human relational healing, and because of this, there is an incredible therapeutic potential when we deepen the human relational element in the medicine session. PSIP is a comprehensive, medicine-assisted, somatic, trauma therapy model where the therapist is an active participant in the client’s medicinal consciousness. This keeps the process in the human relational realm. This yields visceral access to childhood developmental trauma, attachment wounding, transferential projection, and the homeostatic self correcting intelligence of the body.
Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) is a highly relational, highly experiential, embodied therapy model specifically designed to pair with and amplify the remarkably powerful organic healing tendencies that live in the unconscious mind and body. There are homeostatic, self corrective mechanisms that are part of our biology that become far more active and far more accessible when we enter altered states of consciousness. These processes take a felt sense, autonomic nervous system pathway and know exactly how to work with unresolved traumatic material.
The emphasis of PSIP is on the interventions, the process, the therapeutic relationship, and the psychobiological pathways that transform ketamine and cannabis into such potent facilitators of healing. Our goal is to enable you to provide this depth of healing to your clients in your private practice setting. You did not get into this field to put band-aids on profound wounds, and now you don’t have to.
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Apprentice Training Model
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We have developed a training model that is so highly experiential, so individually focused and so reliant on the therapist engaging in their own process as part of their training that it is more appropriately an apprenticeship. Psychotherapy, and particularly medicine-assisted therapy, is an art form. It can't be learned on an 80 person zoom call and it can't be learned through a lecture format anymore than an artist can be produced that way. Based on our experience running psychotherapy trainings since 2008, we have found that the single most important factor for learning PSIP is to understand the work from the inside out by receiving it. The somatic (autonomic) and relational processing that becomes active in the medicinal state, and which is at the heart of PSIP, needs to be experienced to be truly understood. Having a cognitive grasp of the material through lecture and watching video sessions is important, but knowing the process viscerally through your own personal experience develops depth, nuance, confidence and mastery with the work.
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Apprentice is designed around students receiving their own sessions and observing the live sessions of other students. PSI faculty will work with an extremely small student cohort of just 3 people where each student will receive multiple medicine-assisted therapy sessions, observe live sessions, and engage in integration work.
Click below to learn more about these training options. We also have a sample training excerpt that we recommend all students applying to our programs watch.
Articles & Podcasts:
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