Educational Resources
Not only is a well informed participant our ideal candidate, we require that our clients be well educated on the psychedelic process, our programs, and what to expect during and after treatment. Here are our mostly commonly asked questions:
As a general rule, we have a number of different criteria that we consider as important in a prospective student:
1) Training (traditional graduate level degree in psychology or an alternative certification in a mental health-oriented therapeutic modality such as Gestalt, Hakomi, IFS, psychodynamic therapy, Somatic Experiencing (SE), and addiction counseling to name a few examples)
2) Licensure or certification in any of the aforementioned modalities
3) Two years of experience working with clients specifically in a mental health context (private practice is acceptable)
4) Population served (clients/patients)
5) Professional / personal motivation to provide this work
Our primary concern is that the prospective student has a basic foundation in psychotherapeutic theory, skills, and clinical experience working with clients in a mental health context (private practice is acceptable). We assume they have these basic capacities in place as the Apprentice Training is an advanced training in a highly relational, somatic trauma therapy modality. Our focus is on complex developmental wounding, attachment, relational transference dynamics, and autonomic nervous system processing all within a psychedelic framework.
We highly recommend that our students are either actively working with a therapist or at least have a therapist with whom they have a pre-existing relationship and can restart with if needed. The Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) Apprentice Training is highly experiential and is reliant on you engaging with your own work as a means to learn the modality. Your unworked, complex, developmental trauma is guaranteed to emerge as part of your learning process. The majority of our students are professional therapists who have been in practice for years and are often well-processed at a secondary consciousness level. What this frequently means is that they have processed what their mind allows them to see, or they have developed better management and compartmentalization strategies. What is often left untouched is the realm of what was being hidden by dissociation. What we frequently see are structures that have been functional through successful management. What can be a surprise to students is what emerges as part of the psychedelic excavation process. Psychedelic therapy in general and certainly Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) in particular will target the fundamental compromise in a person’s system as well as the coping strategies that allow that compromise to remain intact. This can be destabilizing because of the depth of restructuring that is taking place even in a training container.
Bottom up shifts and consequent destabilization are something we saw in the MAPS MDMA trial, we saw this at our former clinical site using ketamine and cannabis, and we see it to varying degrees during the Apprentice Training. It should be expected. For many students, they have the ego strength and the internal resources to work through their charged material with the support of their PSI instructor. This is particularly true for students who complete nervous system activation "waves" and make it to a calm, neutral nervous system state. This is ultimately a profoundly resourcing and empowering experience. For other students, they will need additional support when they get home to help them continue to work through what has emerged. It is better to have therapeutic support in place and not need it versus needing it and not having it when acutely needed. We do not require it but we recommend that you have access to therapeutic support.
Short answer: ‘no,’ you do not need to be conducting Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) with clients, but ‘yes,’ you need to be exchanging trades with other cohort members.
There is no need to provide this work with clients during the Part A: 5-Day In-Person Experiential training or the Part B: Theory Lectures component of the Apprentice Training. We recommend that students provide non-medicine assisted trades with other students within their cohort during Part B. Only when we begin the Part C: Group Supervision component do we suggest that students open the door to working with medicines in their trades with other students, or their sessions with volunteers or clients.
Practice trades are an important training element both for the student-therapist providing the work and the student-client receiving the work. Eventually, it will become important for your growth to begin working with clients. You will learn a great deal more as you gradually implement the modality into your own practice and see the arc of a client’s process over a period of time. These are the experiences you will bring to the group supervisions: the questions, the places you find challenging, the transference and counter-transference dynamics will make group supervisions much more of a valuable experience for you and the cohort.
We recommend that students start providing and receiving sessions from other members of their cohort half way through the Part B: Theory Lectures component of the Apprentice Training. We ask students to split themselves into 3-person practice groups to facilitate this exchange. The sessions at this point will be non-medicine sessions that focus on technique before adding the speed, depth, and power that psychedelics tend to bring with them. Once the Part C: Group Supervisions component has begun, the expectation is that the student continues to provide sessions to their practice group, and volunteers or clients if the student feels comfortable with that choice. Furthermore, each student has an individual video case study presentation of their work that they present during Part C.
Let us be clear on what we provide during this therapy. At our former clinical facility or in private practice, we do not sell, administer, advise, recommend or require clients to use substances as part of their therapy. We do, however, provide psychoeducation on the effects of legal options that the client can choose to use in therapy. In fact, for added safety, we recommend that the therapist require their client to get a medical recommendation from a doctor to use cannabis for their PTSD treatment even in recreationally legal states. Of course, a doctor's prescription is already required for ketamine use in therapy. The therapist does not have the authority to intervene in the patient's medical recommendation and the responsibility to use or not use these medications does not rest with the therapist—it is a medical decision. It is no different than the client choosing to take their prescription Prozac or Zoloft prior to their session. It is simply not the therapist's position to give advice one way or another.
Liability for ketamine or for cannabis in a medicinally legal state rests with the prescriber and the individual as it does with any other medication. The service we provide as mental health professionals is therapy that can be considered a form of exposure therapy. We have not had problems getting professional practice insurance, and while we are not on insurance panels, our clients have gotten reimbursed by their insurance companies for the treatment they’ve received. We provide them with a superbill with treatment codes and diagnostic codes as we do with any client irrespective of whether they engage cannabis, ketamine, an SSRI, or no substance during therapy.
Lastly, as our legal team informed us before we launched our former clinic specializing in the Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) modality, there are no laws governing the use of these substances in therapy. The law follows, it does not lead. The law is shaped by precedence which is why we purposefully invited an investigator from the Colorado state licensing board to review our program and they noted the treatment modality did not violate any state mental health statutes. This is true even though we incorporate touch into the treatment.
To further decrease liability, we had a recovery room where clients can stay for as long as they need before leaving the office. A prescribing physician will typically require the patient to not drive for the rest of the day after using ketamine. The therapist can choose to add that condition to their disclosure paperwork.
The short answer is that Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) is a non-medicine specific modality, meaning this is not a cannabis-assisted therapy training, or a ketamine-assisted therapy training or a psilocybin-assisted therapy training. It is very useful to have the body available to support any psychedelic medicine process. Having said that, there are two primary reasons we emphasize cannabis: 1) because it is the most easily accessible, legal, and inexpensive psychedelic that most of your clients will have access to, and 2) cannabis is extremely useful as a starting point for psychedelic therapy because of its ability to interrupt executive management strategies, amplify sensate direct experience, and resolve dissociation. When we initially provided PSIP sessions in Amsterdam, our protocol was that every client started with 3 cannabis-assisted PSIP sessions before moving onto psilocybin.
The Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) Apprentice Training program is a training in the innate biological, relational, and psychological healing processes that become much more active in the psychedelic state. Our focus is on the therapy that pairs with and amplifies the healing capacity of these medicines, and not on any medicine in particular. While it is true that each offers their own unique gifts, they all share the common feature of disrupting ordinary consciousness and causing us to enter into non-ordinary primary consciousness. This is where the magic happens, in the foundational mammalian biology that has been with us for millions of years of our evolution.
Absolutely not. We know from researchers such as Bessel van der Kolk that explicit, declarative memory systems (the conscious form of memory that can be verbally expressed) either shuts down or becomes greatly disrupted during highly stressful or traumatic episodes. In contrast, non-declarative forms of memory which are not conscious and cannot be converted into language remain active and record traumatic events in great detail. Psychedelic therapy brings dissociated memory and non-declarative programing into focus. An example of this would be attachment which is a very early type of experiential learning that is not available to conscious memory. Insecure attachment is a form of complex, relational developmental trauma that we frequently work with even though no one has direct memory of the events that created their attachment patterning.
The Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) Apprentice Training is divided into 3 basic components: Part A is the 5-Day In-Person Experiential training. Part B is the Theory Lectures component which is spread over 2 months. Part C is the Group Supervisions component which is spread over 4 months. As the cohort size for Part A is only 3 students, the absence of one student greatly impacts the learning of other students and may cause the cancellation of a training. Because of the serious impact of cancellations, we require a 50% non-refundable deposit for the Part A tuition to secure your spot in the training. We ask that you carefully consider your Part A training date as the 50% non-refundable deposit is also non-transferable to another Part A training date except in the extremely rare case of a documented medical emergency and at the sole discretion of PSI. The remaining 50% tuition for Part A will be due 1 month prior to the start date of your Part A. You do not have to pay for all parts of the training at one time. The tuition for Part B will be due 1 month before it begins and the tuition for Part C will be due 1 month before it begins. Students may choose to postpone or exit the Apprentice Training prior to the start date of Part B or Part C with no financial penalty as long as the postponement or exit is made 2 weeks prior to the start date of each of these components. No refunds or cohort transfers will be provided once the student has begun any component.
For trainings held in a location where we do not have a local PSI instructor and for which we have to travel to your location, there is an additional travel expense fee of $400-$1,000 (depending on the city/country) added to the cost of the Part A in-person training
We provide two types of certifications:
1. Certificate of Completion - This certificate signifies that you have met the basic attendance requirements, participated in the training activities / assignments, and have demonstrated a basic fluency with elements of the model based on an assessment of your case study presentation. It is not a testament to your skill level or the quality of your work as a practitioner.
Requirements for Certificate of Completion:
a. Completion of Part A: 5-Day In-Person Experiential Training Component
b. Completion of Part B: Theory Lectures Component
c. Completion of Part C: Group Supervisions Component
d. Successful participation in training exercises (trade sessions with cohort members for Part C and present a case study that demonstrates a Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) session)
2. Certificate of Mastery - This is a much more significant assessment and validation of your skill sets as a PSIP practitioner. Achieving this certificate means the Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) organization is vouching for your demonstrated skill sets. Simply engaging in the requirements listed below do not automatically qualify a candidate for mastery, but rather it is the subjective evaluation of the supervisor.
Requirements for Certificate of Mastery:
a. Prerequisite: Certificate of Completion
b. Completion of Part D: Observation Component
c. Minimum of eight (8) Individual Supervisions with PSI’s Director of Education
d. Minimum of eight (8) Individual PSIP sessions with a mastery-certified PSIP practitioner, PSI instructor candidate, or a PSI Instructor
We have discontinued providing NBCC CEU’s due to lack of requests from students.
You are welcome to work with cannabis (Delta-9 THC, CBD), Delta-8 (cannabis alternative in non-cannabis legal areas), ketamine, oxytocin, or no medicine at all. Students are responsible for bringing their own medicines to the training. Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) cannot provide or administer these substances. While Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) is a non-medicine specific modality, meaning it is useful to have as much of your being (including your body and nervous system) online for any psychedelic process to move through, each of these medicines have their unique therapeutic benefits. Through observation of your primary consciousness process, we may focus on one of these medicines over another.
Cannabis (Delta-9 THC) is very effective at disrupting executive functioning, top down management strategies, resolving dissociation, and amplifying sensate experience so people can quickly discover their autonomic felt sense pathway. THC is the active ingredient that is useful for the PSIP process. However, because it is so effective at what it does, it can also open the door to destabilization and negative transference. Combining THC with CBD will yield a softer entry into the cannabis experience. If you are new to cannabis or not a regular user, a wise approach would be to start your sessions with a THC / CBD hybrid (most people tend to use a 1:1 ratio). In contrast, most people experienced with cannabis or its use with PSIP actually prefer to not mix THC with CBD because of its more direct, unsoftened effects.
While strains do make a difference, it really is the THC that creates the autonomic nervous system response we are looking for. You are welcome to research the more psychedelically-oriented strains on sites such as leafly.com. If you have a favorite product that you already know and are comfortable with, please feel free to work with that. In terms of whether to go with indica or sativa, it is more useful to have a body high than a mind high so products that stimulate mental activity or generate strong visual imagery are less helpful to the PSIP process. We are looking for students to have a more detailed, sensate experience which typically means working with an indica strain, but having said that, everyone's system is unique and you are the ultimate judge of what works best for you.
Delta-8 THC is a hemp-based, psychoactive alternative to Delta-9 THC. It is available in locations where Delta-9 THC is not available and can even be sent through the mail because it is hemp derived.
The route of administration for cannabis that most students use and which makes most sense in this context is inhalation. Cannabis oil (vape pens) or flower vaporizers are preferred because they are easy to operate for novice users. However, using cannabis flower with a pipe or a pre-rolled joint also works perfectly well. We recommend against tinctures or edibles because their onset is difficult to predict, and the effects last for many more hours than inhalation methods. Students smoking cannabis or using a vape can also easily add more based on their own internal sense of what is needed for their process.
Ketamine is a well-researched dissociative anesthetic used commonly off-label as an anti-depressant medication. This effect seems to have a positive correlation with the depth of dissociation created by ketamine. Its use in PSIP is more for the psychedelic processing effects and not for the dissociative effects. In fact, many people who are using PSIP do not report an anti-depressant effect at all. We suspect this is because we are using ketamine to reassociate a client to their traumatic material. Ketamine can look quite similar to cannabis once the autonomic nervous system (ANS) pathway has been defined in the student’s
system. However, ketamine is less effective at challenging dissociation compared to THC which is why we typically will not begin with this medicine.
It is useful to accomplish tasks in the session that THC cannot do very well. For example, we can use ketamine to establish corrective relational experiences at a very deep, undefended experiential level.
Typically, students are prescribed 100mg sublingual tablets. If available, fast dissolving tablets (FDTs) are far preferable and more convenient to use.
Finally, oxytocin can be added as an adjunct to any of these medicines or it can be taken alone. It adds more relational capacity and “warms up” the THC or ketamine experience. Some students notice the effects of oxytocin in a significant way while other students don't notice it at all. Unlike THC or ketamine, oxytocin is not a psychedelic in itself. It is both a prescription and over-the-counter medicine in the US.
No, we do not offer accommodations for the Part A trainings (the other parts of the Apprentice Training are done remotely online). If students are not local to their training site, they are expected to arrange for their own lodging. If possible, we recommend that students arrange to live together during their training in order to build support and community with each other.
No, we currently do not offer any financial aids for the Apprentice Training. The Part A: 5-Day In-Person Experiential training is designed to focus on only 3 students at a time (as opposed to other trainings that have anywhere from 20 to 100 or more students). Because of this, if we provide a scholarship to a single student, that would mean a full 33% of an entire Part A training would be scholarshipped which we could not financially sustain.
However, we do offer a 3-part installment plan for the Part A component of our Apprentice Training. This is how this works:
1st installment (⅓ of the tuition for Part A) - Due upon enrollment into Part A
2nd installment - Due 1 month before Part A starts
3rd installment - Due 1 month after Part A starts
Most somatic modalities including SE and PSIP involve interoceptive and proprioceptive "felt sense" awareness that was established by Eugene Gendlin's work, and both modalities have a focus on working with dissociation. PSIP differs from SE in some significant ways. 1) We don't use pendulation during the processing, and we don't adhere to the window of tolerance (we have other relational safe guards that prevent retraumatization). 2) We focus much more on complex, developmental trauma versus single event shock trauma. 3) We focus on procedural memory systems in terms of developing relational abilities disrupted in trauma versus just emotional or episodic memory. 4) We incorporate transference theory into our modality to work with the relational aspects of family of origin, complex PTSD. This past relational wounding gets expressed as charged negative transference onto the therapist during the psychedelic session.
We train a fair number of students from the SE world. Perhaps the most telling difference is that these students frequently report that the processing involved in each model, the feeling of each model, is quite different.
Theoretically speaking, because we don't adhere to pendulation or the window of tolerance during the processing phase of treatment, the PSIP practitioner will not prevent a psychedelic process from taking the client to hyper or hypoarousal. This is an exceedingly common and natural state that a client’s system will move into during the psychedelic session, and preventing it would require a high level of directive intervention from the therapist.
We feel that the adherence to the window of tolerance concept and consequent insistence on therapist induced regulation may complicate the entry of somatic modalities into the psychedelic space.
Lastly, here is an excerpt from an interview Peter Levine gave to Psychotherapy Networker where the question was about psychedelics. He does not appear to see a role for the body in the psychedelic state but rather, the body is something people access in ordinary consciousness after the psychedelic state:
"Psychotherapy Networker: As a body therapist, what do you think about the increasing interest in using psychedelics in therapy these days?
Peter Levine: I do think they’re potentially valuable. Whether it’s MDMA or psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca, certain substances can open doors to seeing the world in a different and expanded way, while facilitating self-compassion. But even though they may open the doors of perception, they don’t necessarily take the person through these portals and help them navigate on the other side. In other words, while many people do have valuable experiences while they’re on a substance, it may be less accessible in the normal waking state and is, therefore, not embodied. So how you make that bridge to ordinary, sensate reality is a key
issue. You have to understand how and why you closed those doors in the first place. That takes additional work, which includes asking questions like, “How did I close down my body? How did I dissociate? What am I dissociating from now?”
In contrast to this perspective, PSIP is specifically designed to work with the body inside of the psychedelic state.
We recommend leaving two hours for medicine-assisted sessions with either cannabis or ketamine. How long any individual client takes will depend on their nervous system and how their body interacts with these medicines. The active effects of these medicines typically last between an hour and twenty minutes all the way up to two hours. Most clients will naturally move into an integration phase as the medicine’s effects wear off, and the active processing phase comes to a close.
We recommend having a quiet recovery room that clients can move into in case their allotted session time is over and they are not yet ready to leave. Some people's active process may come to an end but they will stay altered for some time afterwards. As a policy, we have clients agree to not drive for the rest of the day after their session. This is standard protocol with ketamine, and we suggest it be adopted when clients are doing work with any psychedelic medicine.
The short answer is 'yes', we recommend integration and resourcing sessions that support the client's secondary consciousness (cognitive, meaning-making, narrative constructing) mind to catch up with the bottom up shifts that take place in the psychedelic-assisted Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) session. In addition, integration and resourcing will support the client's stability and limit the destabilizing effects of the psychedelic work.
The more thorough answer is that transformation in the PSIP modality is a bottom up, autonomic, shift in primary consciousness. While integration is helpful in orienting the ordinary conscious mind to the shifts that have taken place, this is a useful and secondary benefit in PSIP. Based on this understanding, we do recommend that clients engage in integration.
Nervous system states are part of a biological defense cascade system we share with other animals that are lacking in higher order cognitive capacities. We can certainly attempt to manage nervous system reactivity through top-down means. This path works to some extent, but it is more of a learned compartmentalization than actually shifting a nervous system state by processing it. What we frequently find even with people who have become successful at managing their autonomic nervous system (ANS) through mental techniques is that once the management is paused, the ANS response is still very much active under the surface. It was never resolved, only managed.
We do not use CBT or traditional narrative-based talk therapy interventions as part of the Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) modality for a number of reasons— all stemming from the fact that traditional psychotherapy interventions are primarily designed to operate inside of and support ordinary states of consciousness or “secondary consciousness.” Insight, cognitive restructuring, meaning-making, reality testing and narrative reconstruction are all features of secondary consciousness, whereas psychedelic medicines work by neurologically taking the brain in the opposite direction towards primary consciousness. This is a far more direct experience-based, sensory, emotional, and concrete form of consciousness shared by other animals. In other words, traditional western psychology is seeking to create stability by grounding the client in an objective, secondary consciousness-based reality. Psychedelics take the brain towards a subjective, dreamlike reality that requires very different interventions to navigate.
Originally known as Trauma Dynamics, Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) is the culmination of 20 years of experience providing trainings for mental health professionals. The initial version of the Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) modality was developed to work entirely without psychedelic medicines. It focused on entering into primary states of altered consciousness through embodiment techniques.
In 2014, our Founder and Director of Education, Saj Razvi, joined the MAPS phase 2 research team through which we quickly realized the essential role psychedelics would play in the field of mental health in general and traumatology in particular. We saw how much psychedelics boosted the somatic processing of trauma and how much the autonomic nervous system (ANS) pathway boosted the effectiveness of psychedelic medicine for trauma resolution. At that point, we paused our trainings for a few years as we felt we could not in good conscience continue teaching students to work with trauma and ignore the role psychedelics could play in treatment. We initially believed that there was something unique about MDMA in how effective it was for mental health, and we resigned ourselves to waiting for 2021 for approval (how naive we were).
In the meantime, since Colorado was one of the early cannabis-friendly states, clients began reporting that the type of autonomic processing they were engaged in during sessions with us was continuing at home when they would use cannabis. We received multiple reports on this so we invited these clients to bring their cannabis into session with them and indeed went on to discover that cannabis did a few things very well. First, it disables executive functioning which is a well-known quality of this drug that makes it disliked by most mental health practitioners. It also greatly increases access to sensate experience, helps discern the autonomic processing pathway, and engages dissociation quite effectively.
After years of research and clinical experience understanding more about psychedelic medicines and how they affected the autonomic processing of trauma, we launched PSI as a public benefit corporation with the PSIP modality now fully redesigned around the psychedelic state.
Psychedelic therapy, if done right, is inherently destabilizing. All of the adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies, compartmentalization, avoidance, and management strategies get challenged. These conscious and often unconscious coping strategies are what we engage and ultimately inhibit so that the underlying traumatic experiences may become more visible to the nervous system. Some clients will thrive within the work and find much relief even in the short term, while others will experience destabilization. People who are well-resourced or do not have complex, early childhood, familial trauma will be affected but will typically move through the process more easily. There is less deconstruction that the process has to engage with them. Their relatively well-resourced systems can complete nervous system activation waves which can be a deeply resourcing, confidence-inspiring, empowering experience. Those who have unresolved early childhood, familial, and complex trauma, or those who have worked with their material solely at a secondary consciousness, verbal level should expect more foundational restructuring. We have seen this type of destabilization phenomenon in the MDMA clinical trials and we see it when Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP) is engaged with cannabis or ketamine. This is the opportunity and complication that comes with working with the depth, speed, and the dissociation-resolving capacity that we see in PSIP sessions.
At our former clinical site, we established a variety of groups that served our community of clients undergoing this work such as art therapy integration, restorative yoga, women’s movement, and a talk therapy support group (which we offered at no cost to clients engaged in individual psychotherapy with us). In particular, we found that because of the unique nature of the psychedelic process, clients felt most supported when connecting with other clients going through the same process. While all of these may not be essential to provide in a private practice setting, these groups are some examples of the type of support your clients will seek as their coping mechanisms and dissociation falls away.
We made these resourcing groups a no-cost option to our clients in order to remove any barriers and actually incentivize them to find stabilizing resources between psychedelic sessions.