The PSI Apprentice Training

Pricing (payment plans are available):

 

• Part A: 5-Day In-Person Experiential Training: $3,899 USD**

• Part B: Theory Lectures: $1,949.50 USD

• Part C: Supervised Practice Sessions & Supervisions: $2,400 USD

• Part D: Observation (optional): $1,500 USD

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* We do not provide accommodations for Part A in-person courses, but we recommend that students arrange to stay at the same location in order to deepen their experience of community and support

** Part A trainings in Europe have a $1,000 additional non-local training fee

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 Apprentice Training Outline:

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• Initial theory and logistical preparation through videos and reading materials

• Preliminary Zoom meeting introductions to the training team and cohort

• Part A: 5 Day in-person experiential course begins

• Day 1: Each student receives 2 to 3 hours of non-medicine and medicine-assisted PSIP sessions (typically cannabis), and 4 to 5 hours of observation time

• Day 2: 2 hours of medicine-assisted (typically cannabis) PSIP session per student, and 4 hours of observation

• Day 3: 2 hours of medicine-assisted (ketamine or cannabis) PSIP session per student, and 4 hours of observation

• Day 4: 1 hour of non-medicine integration per student, 2 hours of observing integration sessions

• Day 5: 2 hours of medicine-assisted (ketamine or cannabis) PSIP session per student, and 4 hours of observation

• Part B: 20 hours of theory lectures (remote, online, live), 2.5 hours once a week for 8 weeks

• Part C: 29.5 hours of supervision and Q&A (remote, online, live) 

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We train mental and medical health professionals with at least two years of clinical experience (private practice is acceptable) and those with a significant background in the healing arts (also with at least two years of experience working with clients in a mental health context).

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Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP)

 

The skill sets required for psychedelic trauma therapy are quite different from the skills most of us learned in graduate school. This is because traditional talk therapy is designed to work with and stabilize clients by strengthening what neuroscientist Robin Carhartt-Harris refers to as secondary consciousness. This type of consciousness is how your everyday, adult rational mind tends to operate with features such as meta cognition (abstract thinking), self awareness, goal orientation, and temporal awareness. Psychedelic substances, on the other hand, move the brain and cognition in the complete opposite direction towards primary consciousness which is a more primitive, animalistic, visceral, present moment, direct experience based consciousness that we share with other animals. It is derived from the more primitive areas of the brain that we share in common with other animals. Consider the irrational, timeless, magical thinking manner in which a child's mind operates. Interventions that are ideal for secondary consciousness such as meaning making, cognitive restructuring, insight, and reality testing are incongruent with the dream state that is primary consciousness. There is no objective reality to even reality test in primary consciousness. Instead, there is a highly experiential, subjective reality. 

 

The interventions of PSIP are specifically designed to operate inside of primary consciousness. PSIP interventions target and amplify the homeostatic healing mechanisms that become far more accessible and far more effective during primary consciousness. This is an entirely different pathway the psychedelic takes through a person's system. Instead of a mind pathway, this would be a felt sense, embodied, direct experience pathway.  

 

The powerful revelations and memories that emerge during psychedelic states will very quickly overwhelm the cognitive, insight-based functions of the secondary consciousness mind. The body, with its unique homeostatic self-correction and felt sense pathway, is far more equipped to process the fear, panic, depression, traumatic overwhelm and charged relational transference that arises in psychedelic therapy. This innate somatic processing pathway can be quickly found within clients even if they have been engaged in talk therapy for many years. This pathway is preferentially taken by the psychedelic process due to its more robust capacity to process charge.

 

One way in which the PSIP Apprentice training will differ from non-directive sitter trainings is that we posit a more active role for the clinician. Our approach is based on the idea that human relational wounding requires human relational healing, and this cannot simply be left to a mystical, transcendent interaction between the substance and the client's psyche. Attachment and the capacity for relationship, for example, is a human developmental phenomenon and requires a person actively engaged to provide corrective experiences and help process all the failures of attachment that clients hold. We have found in our clinical experience that an over-reliance on medicines promotes a passivity in the clinician and frequently, very significant therapeutic opportunities will be missed. Psychedelics are fundamentally catalyzers of innate healing intelligence and homeostatic biological tendencies that live in primary consciousness. Psychedelic medicines and the consciousness they engender amplify these mechanisms, they are not a replacement for them.