About This Episode
Welcome to Episode 3 of the PHW Podcast! In this episode, Dr. Davis introduces Ashley and Bryan Brockus, who share their backgrounds and personal journeys into the world of MindBody Therapy. In this episode, we discuss the increasing need for MindBody support for family practice patients and how emotional well-being impacts clinical outcomes. We also tackle societal stigmas around seeking therapy and using Ketamine therapeutically. We wrap up by highlighting the importance of collaboration between Prairie Health & Wellness and Guide MindBody Therapy in healing the whole person.
Listen On
Episode Transcript
Auto-generated from the episode audio — may contain minor transcription errors.
The first thing that I tell someone when they — their first session with me, is that we're not in a hierarchy here, we're — I'm not the boss, and we're — I'm the expert and I know more than you. Yeah, we are partners, and I'm coming here as a guide, and I have some tools, and I have some skills, and I've been doing my own healing work, so you know, I — I've been through this mountain range before, and I've come back through it, and I've got, like, this backpack with all these things in it that we might need, and I'm going to walk with you, yeah, as we go through it together. And what you're bringing is expertise on you, you bring all the healing inside of you, this inner healing intelligence.
Well, uh, welcome to — you guys are, uh, the esteemed guests of our third podcast, so this is the PHW podcast, and today we have, uh, Ashley and Brian Brochas, a husband and wife, um, both, uh, licensed clinical marriage and family therapists — I was trying to get that whole title down there. So, Brian and Ashley, um, I — I love your guys' story, and I want to hear a little bit more about it, um, I struggled remembering where you and I met, because I feel like I've known you guys for so long that — that — that memory is fuzzy. To tell you this — this is my story, we do — you really don't remember? It's a bad story. I'm so glad you mentioned it.
So I had set up to do a meeting with Prairie Health and Wellness, introduce myself, um, I knew Dr. Marvin, your naturopathic doctor, yes, from childhood, we used to be on swim team together. Okay, and so we had reconnected, and she was like, I really want you to come meet Dr. Davis and the team. So it was in September of 2018, and everybody was in there, but you — you were with a patient, then you just come in, and you had these baby doll hands poking out of your arm sleeve, and you were swinging them around, pretending to be baby hands. Oh my gosh, Laura brought those — those hands into her office, we've had a lot of fun with those hands. Okay, that's funny, so that's my first impression of you. Oh great, yeah, which I love, I love that that you're such a fun, playful, like, real doctor.
Well, especially, you know, we — I kind of consider our office to have sort of onstage and offstage areas, and so, uh-huh, when — you know, the way we have our provider room, you guys have been in there, but um, my — in my old office, the practice I came from, every doctor was in a pod that physically couldn't be further away from other doctors, like, you literally were on two ends of a large hallway. Um, I started off practicing with my dad, so my dad and I were actually the first physicians that practiced together in a pod, and so I — when we started Prairie Health and Wellness, I was like, I really want all of us to be together, and so in — in our office, the provider room is just a huge open room, everybody has their desks, so it's — so we can kind of collaborate.
So it is true that when I walk through that door, I do sort of feel like, okay, I'm off stage, I can let my guard down, and yeah, this time I did so too quickly, because I didn't realize we had a guest in there. Well, I loved it, because I felt your first memory to you, and I was like, oh wow, I've never met a doctor who was just so human and personable, and I was very excited. So then that was actually our first conversation about, um, trauma therapy, like psychedelics, all that stuff. I do remember that, but for some reason I don't remember that as the first time that I met you, so I think that's part of your — I think part of your nature is that you — you are someone that, after 5 minutes with you, you feel like I've known this person for a long time, so I think that's characteristic.
I don't think that I met you in person until, I think it was at, um, Whole Foods, and we were meeting about the MAPS training, and about you potentially being the doctor, we were all kind of deciding, like, all right, we're going to try to do — yeah — this whole MAPS, MDMA therapy thing together, cause at that time you could not apply to do that training without a medical doctor, right? So it's this really unique opportunity for medical doctor and therapist to come together, which really doesn't exist in, you know, our field. Yeah, yeah, I want to — I want us to go back to that in a minute and talk about that, because I think that's important, to figure out how our lines intersected, beyond just that first introduction to your office, because I feel like really that was the time when we felt like we're on congruent paths, and so I want to talk more about that, I think that's a pretty, pretty fun thing to talk about.
Um, so tell me, um, Ashley, tell me your story first, of how you came into therapy, because you were — you were, um, you went to the University of Missouri, um, I — well, I went to Southwest Missouri State, but they changed the name to Missouri State, so that's in Springfield, Missouri, and I thought I wanted to be a missionary, I was a religious studies major, and then by the time I got to my senior year, decided I want to be a counselor, but at that point I'd only had one psychology class, so ultimately I just love people's stories, I've always loved people, and it took me really just hearing it from other people, over and over and over, you should be a psychologist, you should be a counselor.
I — they knew it before I knew it, and so um, I ended up choosing a seminary that gave me the upper level courses that I needed to actually, like, get the degree, and um, at that point that school wasn't a good fit for me, so I ended up transferring to Friends University, because I was dating this guy. So um, I moved to Wichita, and I went to Friends University, and I was very young, so I'm 41, and I graduated from Friends in '08, and I think I got my master's degree in the — in the Marriage and Family Therapy program, um, I think I was 24, 25, no kids, barely married, uh, really didn't have a lot of life experience, but knew that this is what I was called to do, so that's how that started.
And then Brian, when did you — you were also, you said you were a psychology major, but you weren't going to the same school, correct? We — how we met is a much different story, uh, we had a long-distance relationship, but I was at Friends University for my undergraduate, and I was studying, in my mind what I wanted to do was become a youth pastor, and then come back at some point and get my degree in marriage and family therapy, so that I could work part-time as a youth pastor, and then, um, uh, and then be able to work with the whole family system, and so not just working with the kids, but then also doing therapy, um, with their families, was what I had in my mind. And we got married in March of her first year at Friends University, and I watched her kind of go through this rigorous program, and I was not a great student at the time, and I was like, I am not ready for that, don't think I'm going to do that.
And what did you do after that? So I was, uh, we worked at Chapel United Methodist Church as youth ministry directors for about three and a half years. Okay, and um, that job was not what I — what I thought it would be, um, for me, um, I — I had trouble, um, never feeling like I was done, like, that I could ever just go home and rest, like, there was always another thing to plan, another event, more people to call, volunteers to find, and that's when I really started to find, like, oh, school isn't the only source of my anxiety, like, there — you know, there's something else going on here, and uh, it was causing me a lot of gastrointestinal problems, um, it was affecting our relationship, and I started to kind of try to find an out.
And um, someone told me, kind of like with Ashley's, like, people started being like, you seem like you would — like — like to be a firefighter, and um, it was really strange, because my dad had tried to get on the fire department when I was a little kid, and it didn't work out for him. And um, I just had never really let myself ever dream, because I knew I was supposed to be a youth pastor, that was my call, that's what I wanted to do, right? And um, I started to — to kind of look into it a bit, and it kind of, like, rebirthed something inside of me. And so, and then I was so miserable being a youth pastor, um, that it kind of pushed me into getting my EMT, because that was the first step, I want to see, well, how do — how do I handle blood, how do I handle these bad situations, I don't know how my — my body would handle, because that's mostly what a firefighter does.
Yeah, and did it, and I actually really enjoyed it, um, didn't affect me the way that I thought it would. And so, so um, yeah, so in 2009 I became a firefighter for the city of Wichita, and uh, did that for 12 years. 12 years, yeah, wow. Mm, and then when — when was the step that you decided to really return to that path of getting back to being relational with people, helping them — the lot that a good youth pastor does is not just entertain kids, but — oh, for sure — troubled kids, yeah, and that — I mean, that was my story, as I felt like I went through a lot of unnecessary — um, put myself through a lot of painful places and hardships, like trying to fit in and trying to be a part, trying to find love and connection with kids, and I didn't have, like, a youth pastor, um, in my early — in my earlier years in middle school, that I felt like — if I would have had somebody who I felt really cared about me and who wanted to mentor me and bring me along, that I — I would have never looked to all these other people, so I wanted to be that.
And then when I became youth pastor, I was at a church predominantly very wealthy, I grew up very poor, and so that I didn't feel like I could connect with these kids very well. And so um, so yeah, so I never lost that desire, I don't think, I just turned that, uh, to the fire department, and um, and I remember, like, how my — my first calls, like, going on these medical calls, and people in a lot of pain, or, uh, losing a child and all these things, and like, I would cry, like, I mean I would try to hide it, but like, tears, like, welling up, and I felt so much compassion for these people. And um, it was so strange to me that people could just joke and then leave, and it's like, it didn't seem to affect people, and I'm feeling all of this.
And you know what I learned is that the body's pretty amazing at going, it's impossible to feel this much compassion for everybody, and so it starts to shut itself down, and very quickly you — you kind of numb yourself off, and you, to protect yourself, you can't feel all this pain. And then you — you start to become callous, and then you resent these people for needing you and for calling you out for things that aren't true emergencies, right? And then that's, uh, that leads to a lot of the problems, that's a tough place to be at a job. I mean, I — I worked in — in rural ER, true, a long time, and I would — I would get that same sense of people coming in, and you know, 4:00 in the morning, of course, you know, this is a moonlighting job for me, and so they're waking me up from sleep usually, and yeah, you do lose some of that compassion, I think.
Yeah, yeah, so when was the time where you — did you — was that something that you felt like, okay, this is a dividing line, I need to look for something else? Well, I mean, kind of like with the — in the youth ministry and the anxiety causing it to be so uncomfortable, like, something's got to change here, um, I think there were a lot of coalescing forces, but the fire department, there was the piece of me, um, of the job being difficult, being woken up all throughout the night, losing sleep, having to come home, and then I'm grumpy, and I'm not a good dad, I can't — I, you know, I can't be the person that I want to be, um, seeing how that's affecting my wife and my kids.
And then also there's this other piece of the fire department, I only speak for myself, I — it was an everyday experience — but I was at stations where I didn't feel like I could really be myself, because there was a lot — it was like anything you would say could be turned against you, like, there was a lot of jockeying for power, and um, you know, you live with these people a third of your life, but I never felt like I really knew them, it was a lot of jokes, it was a lot — lot of fun times, um, but who I am in my core has always been a pretty open and emotional person, and, like, wanting connection, wanting to find that, and assuming other people wanted that as well.
So you live with a therapist, yeah, so how long did it take, was — was — well, within the first year, within the first year of our marriage, I — I sought therapy, um, for, you know, there was one symptom, you know, that I was — that I was going in for, and really it was, there was so much under there, like, I knew, but it's really hard to remember exactly what happened, but I just remember, like, I felt connected to — it was a male, an older male therapist, and I felt like, oh, like, this person cares about — mentor me, and then at some point it just felt like I couldn't connect to him, or it was like it wasn't helpful, and there was some part of me that was like, this is stupid, this isn't helping, and it just kind of shut me down, like, I didn't go back.
Yeah, you know, and that happened two more times, um, maybe a year or two apart, yeah, and — and I was just really like, yeah, this — I don't know, this isn't — this isn't helpful. Yeah, but I knew, like, I — I didn't quit trying, uh, I would read books, I was trying to learn, I was trying to — to access what was going on, um, and I knew that I didn't have the best childhood, but the story that I told myself to survive was, it made you who you are, it made — it made you stronger, which is true. Yeah, that's only one side of the coin, I — I couldn't access, like, that was really painful, and this wasn't fair, and um, you deserved — you know, I want to say deserved, but like, it's okay to want something more, or to need something more.
And so essentially the culmination of what happened was, I started to — to listen to podcasts, and started hearing about psychedelics and mental health, and my only idea of psychedelics was, that's what hippies did, or that's what, like, crazy people, parties did, like, I had no, like, no friends that I knew of that ever did, you know, mushrooms, or LSD, or, you know, barely even anybody that did cannabis that I knew of. And um, but when I started hearing these stories, I was like, there was something, like, it was like that voice, since I was, like, this is — this is your next step, and that was, like, um, I remember weeping, and like, I had lost a lot of access to my softer side, and just, like, feeling like it was so surprising to me that I'm, like, listening to these podcasts about people's stories and what happened for them, and just, like, weeping.
And then, like, my wife seeing me weeping, and like, I'm like, I feel like I'm called to this, um, but I didn't know how to find it or access it. And at that point it had been years since I had experienced Brian having any tears of any kind, and so then I just started crying, and I was like, yeah, more, we feel in more of that emotional side of the next level, you're open, you're feeling something, you're not numb right now. And, like, I don't know how we're going to do this, or what, you know, but yeah, I'm all for this, and with the caveat that, like, around friends I could be more open and vulnerable, um, probably, I mean, they can see my hardness as well, but it was really my family that got the brunt of my coldness, my heart, and the — the inability to connect, because they were the safest people.
Yeah, yeah, you decided this was — that you wanted to — you'd had a failure, essentially, in — in the therapeutic world, you know, seeing um, a couple therapists, right, which I — I hear that a lot from my patients, you know, I — I recognize, if patients — like, man, I think they'd really benefit from therapy, and I talked to them about that, and they'll say, been there, done that, got what I needed out of it, I don't see how going back for one more hour is going to help me. Yeah, I think that's just this common barrier, that — that I have the same feeling, it's like, I think there's still something deeper, yeah, that you didn't address.
But you know, so what made you decide, maybe therapy would work, because you — you know, you're — you're passionate, obviously, about what you're doing, yeah, and had failed at several points getting a benefit from therapy, what made you feel like, okay, I think therapy is the thing. Well, I mean, specifically I would say, just to — to address that, is, like, one is, like, I completely get it, yeah, and those are my favorite clients, are the ones who come and they're like, I've done this before, um, because I feel like I connect to that story, and it's like, I — I have a unique ability, because I went through that, to, like, kind of touch into those niches, yeah, and it doesn't scare me, it actually makes me kind of come alive.
But — but really, so I had, um, just in — in full disclosure, I was invited to do, um, Iaska, which is a South American tea that is psychedelic, yeah, and this is what I was hearing about in these podcasts, and so I had this experience where I — I got to go do this three-day retreat, where three nights in a row we drank this tea, and it was in a group of 12 people, and there was, you know, a husband and wife who led the ceremony, and we were in a group, but it wasn't — we were interacting with, and um, essentially I had the experience of — of my heart blowing open, and hard to talk about, I love talking about it, it just — when I think about it, I feel so sad for myself, and like, I've gotten so stuck, and that the answer, you know, was in something that I was told was bad and wrong for so long.
You know, and yeah, I mean, I welcome the emotion, and I think part of the reason why I try to shut it down, cause emotion can make other people feel uncomfortable, you know, mhm, and so, but what happened was, I had this — you know, my heart blowing open, and — I mean this sounds crazy, um, but my experience was feeling like I felt joy, love, peace, connection, for the first time in my life, and I know cognitively — in your body, yes, in my body, like this felt sense — yeah, and I know cognitively that I felt those things, but it almost felt like what I was realizing was, like, I was only feeling, like, the shadow of it, but like, I was really feeling the fullness of it.
And I just, you know, could weep, and I could feel it all, like, I wasn't numb anymore, cause I had just been so numb for so long, mhm, that I didn't even know what feeling good was anymore. And um, and so once — then I had that experience, and there's much more to it, obviously, than that, was — then my heart was opened back up to — Ashley had been seeing a therapist for about 2 years, who was helping her a lot, and she has — she had a background of helping people, uh, integrate psychedelic experiences and doing psychedelics herself, and so I was like, oh, I mean, I couldn't just go talk to any therapist about this, right, they might think I was crazier.
But, and so I started to see her, because I was now open, mhm, that I feel like, um, I could give myself to the process, and she wasn't just a talk therapist, like, let's just talk about your problems, it was more of, um, you know, we're called guide mind body therapy, but it was really accessing what was stored in my body, what — you know, we talk about anxiety and depression as thoughts or these things in our head, but really, um, they all have a very body component to it, and I was never taught, uh, to feel my emotions, or that there was a sensation, there was something even there.
And so I started to connect all of that with this experience that opened me up to, oh, this isn't all weird stuff anymore, like, I had the felt experience of it, and um, that's what opened me back up to therapy. And so I had that experience, and then I spent — now I've been in therapy, not weekly, but pretty consistently for the last, six — it was in '07, was it? And I would say that, um, after you had that experience, I don't know if it was immediately after or within a month or so, but you — I remember you feeling called to that, maybe — maybe not, it wasn't the first time you felt called to it, but, like, it was the sense of, I want to help people have this experience.
Yeah, and then, as a part of those podcasts, I learned they were training therapists to do this work, because my anxiety would not let me do something secretive and underground, I was like, that would not feel good to me, right, you know, so it's like, I don't want to try to take people and do illegal drugs with it, right, and still at that time there's a lot of taboo around, oh yeah, and still remains around, uh, these plant-based therapies. Yeah, and so, tell — so, so you're seeing that this is a powerful therapeutic tool, yes, obviously opened up a pathway in you, mhm, where you were able to tap into that emotion, yeah, on — on a physical level, yeah, helped you sort of restore some of the — the problems that you were having in your marriage.
Yes, really the — the main part that it helped me with was, I could see what was — her problem in the marriage, I could not — I could — I felt like in my system it was, I had to be perfect to be loved, and so I could not, like, there was some block inside of me that could not, like, admit, like, when I did something wrong, or when I didn't do something right, when I didn't do something perfectly with her, because it felt like if I was admitting that, I was saying, I'm bad, that's who I am. Yeah, but when you're feeling numb all of the time, you know, I think it's really easy to have that kind of protection, or those defenses, to not want to admit that, because it already feels bad enough, or you're already missing, you know, feeling so much in the body.
So once you could feel your body, and feel a whole spectrum of emotions, and not just, like, numb, or anger, or depressed — that's what it was, yeah, angry — or no, yeah, and so once you could have this whole spectrum of all these different emotions again, you know, by having access to your body, I feel like that enabled you to be able to move into the skills that you already had, yeah, to make repair, yeah. And to be very clear, like, I — I wasn't thinking doing this psychedelic was, like, I'm going to do this, I'm going to be fine for the rest of my life, like, I always viewed it as, I just need some help to get there, because, like, I wanted it, like, I was trying to do it, but there was this block, and so, like, psychedelic, like, helped open the roadblock, and then now I was like, okay, now I have to put in the work to progress this forward, and to um, continue this, because I can't just do a psychedelic, that's right.
Yeah, so, so from that you went back to school, yes. So um, I found out that MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, was training therapists, um, to do MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, which um, we can get to that if we want to get to that, but it's another so-called psychedelic drug that, uh, helps people with — with trauma, to access, and so — and most of the trials have been done on veterans, yeah, from the military, so they started that, I think they published the first results in 2011, so it's been a long time coming. So for me it was like, that was — that was kind of the thing that pushed me over the edge, it was like, okay, if I can do this work with people legally, um, I'm in.
Yeah, and so I reached out to them, and because I was a firefighter, a first responder, there's not many therapists that — that are first responders, yeah, um, they said, if you get into grad school, we will accept you, and at this time they had a huge waiting list, like, and they only were accepting therapists who had extensive, uh, experience — therapy experience, yes, yeah — and so um, so I immediately applied, and got into grad school, and I started — I did two weeks of grad school and then missed a whole week to go get this training in North Carolina.
Wow, so, so I think MAPS is a fantastic story, and that's really where some of my um, interest in — in these tools, you know, just speaking from my experience with people who, you know, have the anxiety, depression, um, PTSD, you know, we have — we still to this day have no FDA-approved, uh, medication to treat PTSD, and it's probably the thing that most people are dealing with, and the depression, anxiety, probably comes from a place of trauma. The more I've learned about trauma, I always thought trauma was something that soldiers, you know, it's shell shock, that's trauma, but — but I recognize now that, you know, trauma for a four-year-old looks different than trauma for an 8-year-old, looks different from trauma for an 18-year-old.
And so when I — it was also with a podcast, I think it was — I think it was Rick Doblin, um, and Rick Doblin, I don't know the best way to describe that guy, is just a force of nature, he's been on this almost singleminded pursuit of getting these drugs that are — I think their schedule one, MDMA is, which means the FDA has said there's no therapeutic use for this, like, crazy, cocaine is scheduled — to just give me an idea, it's — it's like, somewhere back in the 60s we sort of took this whole subset of drugs that showed a lot of promise and had a lot of research that they were effective, and they — this got kind of bundled together into a group that just got pushed aside.
Yes, and so I think Rick's whole work was to say, we need to bring these through an FDA approval path, which is an insurmountable task, when you consider that, if the FDA has said something's schedule one, you have to now say, well, no, there is a therapeutic use for it, but you can't even do a clinical trial on something that is schedule one, because it's already a foregone conclusion that it's not going to help you. Yeah, and so he's amazingly been able to — the first uh, psychedelic was MDMA, or is MDMA, and they are now at the point where, through MAPS, that it'll be approved for therapeutic use, therapeutic use, which is amazing, to see that happen in a person's life.
Yeah, well, they go back to the trauma piece, that's one of the things that gets thrown around so much now, as, like, you know, and — as mental health has gotten so big in social media, is you have — just in broad strokes — you have an older generation who's kind of, um, we don't have time for emotions, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, like, just kind of, like, in all this talk of trauma is like, oh, you're making excuses, and then you have a younger generation who, everything is trauma, yeah, you know, and almost, like, can seem like an excuse to the older generation, right?
And so trauma, really the root of the word just means wound, mm, and so it's — I'm sure as a doctor you see it's like — please use a better analogy — but it's like, 10 people can be exposed to a virus and not all of them have a cold. Yeah, and so it's like, we can never say, like, what causes a wound, so uh, I would even take it further to say that 10 people could have the same wound, by the same mechanism, and you could have 10 different healing responses. You know, a person who has excellent nutrition, um, has a clean environment, uh, is able to take care of the wound and protect it, they'll get very quick healing.
And then you take somebody who has very poor nutrition, doesn't have a clean environment, doesn't have the ability to protect that wound, that wound will fester, get infected, it may scar in a way that leaves permanent disfiguration. So even in the healing process from a traumatic event, I think there's a lot of variability. Yeah, and I'm glad he brought that up, because that's actually one of our favorite analogies to — to use, and so, you know, from the medical standpoint that makes sense, and so taking that to — if we have foreign objects, um, if — if we have represented relational trauma as having an invisible foreign object in our body, some people might be like, um, a splinter, and other people might be like a rusty nail.
But it, you know, those things are going to produce very different symptomology, and a lot of, you know, therapists don't know how to find that invisible foreign object, they just know how to, like, notice the symptoms and not really sure how to trace it back down to the roots, to, like, kind of unveil this foreign object. And part of what we do with the mind body therapy is, like, figuring out how to get down to the roots, to figure out what is this invisible wound inside of you, or trauma, and also carefully, really, like, with a lot of curiosity, because we can't assume, uh, what is a trauma for somebody. You know, it's really being very curious, and I find myself often surprised that, oh wow, I didn't know it would be traumatic for them like this, I thought it would be like this, you know, and consistently I'm surprised and grateful for just being curious, because trauma is what happens — it's not what happens to you, it's what happens inside of you as a result of something, and that's, I think, how it can look so different.
Right, so the event, something that happens to you, as a stressor, and the trauma is if the stressor, uh, it's too much, too fast, too soon, or not enough, too little, too late. Yeah, interesting, and so you're — your analogy of, like, nutrition, yeah, and that being a resiliency factor, yeah, um, if you grew up with parents or a caretaker who unconditionally loved you and supported you, uh, in a good enough way, in a good enough way, and you have friends and family who come around you, you don't feel alone, it's like, you have a stressful event happen, car wreck, maybe you're held at gunpoint, you know, maybe you see some really bad stuff, right, um, you're not going to be alone with it, and you're going to be able to, like, that burden isn't going to get stuck or trapped in you, because you don't know what to do with it, you have all this resource of healing.
Yeah, so then it doesn't take on the negative symptomology. Yeah, it's such a good — and I think that's probably one of the reasons I feel like we have this crisis of mental health, is that we have that lack of community in many ways, even though social media has allowed us to connect with a larger crowd, I don't think it's a connection in the way humans are meant to connect. Yeah, you know, for instance, I was thinking about this the other day, have you ever dreamt that you're using your iPhone? I've never had a dream that involves an iPhone, and yet this is something that I carry around all day long, I use it to research medications, dosages, I'm looking up, you know, all sorts of things on my phone, but my mind, when I'm unconscious, never connects with that phone.
Yeah, I'm connecting with people, I don't know if you guys have had that experience, maybe I never thought about that, but that — that's true for me as well, yeah, as much as I can remember. So getting back to community, so Ashley, you touched on something I want to — I want to talk about more, is, you — you said mind body therapy, and obviously the — the practice is called guide mind body, you know, and Brian, you — you talk about having a lot of clients who, similar to the clients I describe, have done what I would call talk therapies. So can you, for people who've maybe never done therapy before, how — how would you delineate what the therapy at guide mind body is, or what mind body therapy does, or tries to do, and how that differs from talk therapy?
I think the first thing that, you know, we want to say, to be really clear, is that talk therapy has a really important place for many people, and is a really beautiful gateway for some people to begin to experience support, um, vulnerability, encouragement, um, being one-on-one with somebody that's really listening to them. I think some people, um, have had so many stigmas, or emotions have been so unsafe, that that's been a really positive experience for people to enter into. So — so I just wanted to start off and — and say that, but where we have found personally that talk therapy has failed for us is that it's not getting us into the root issue.
Yeah, for us it's — I think the way we accomplish that is really that we set aside time, you know, I mean, so many people come in and go, you know, they'll start by saying, I know you're really busy and don't have much time, but here's what I need to talk to you about, and I kind of sit back and go, we got an hour, what do you want to talk about, and it — that for them is just knowing that, wow, I have access to you for an hour uninterrupted, um, because in a typical clinic setting, where you're, you know, billing insurance and needing to push high volume, the goal right now is to see a patient every seven and a half minutes.
And I — I mean, I look at that and go, yeah, no way, can't do that, wow, like, I can't even find out who this person is in seven and a half minutes, much less figure out how I can help them with their physical ailment, or whatever they're — they're dealing with. So I — I do, I love that — that's even, even you saying, you know, before we started this, saying that the training is often to tell you to put up these barriers and keep — keep a clinical distance, you know, the — the white coat, the — the separation, I'm the expert, you're here to listen to me and do what I say, and you've — you've really taken that and thrown that whole paradigm off.
The first thing that I tell someone, when they — their first session with me, is that we're not in a hierarchy here, where I'm the boss, and we're — I'm the expert, and I know more than you. Yeah, we are partners, and I'm coming here as a guide, and I have some tools, and I have some skills, and I've been doing my own healing work, so you know, I — I've been through this mountain range before, and I've come back through it, and I've got, like, this backpack with all these things in it that we might need, and I'm going to walk with you, yeah, as we go through it together, I'm going to take you through this, I've been through these mountains before.
And what you're bringing is expertise on you, you bring all the healing inside of you, this inner healing intelligence, that it's just like if you get a cut on your skin, you can provide, uh, savlon, and you can put bandages on it, but really the miracle is happening in the body, the body knows how to heal all — all the things that need to be healed. And so it's the same way with invisible emotional, relational trauma wounds in the body, it knows how to come together again, as long as there's not a foreign body — exactly, you got to get that foreign body out — but it's got to be in the right set and setting, yeah, to do that.
And so that's part of what we do as partners, right, you know, and — and become with different things, yeah. That's a good point, I — I sometimes will say it, that um, I buy time for your body to do this healing, you know, I — I, you know, I don't see myself as a healer, you know, um, but what I do is try to provide that environment for the body to do what the body does, the design that we have for that healing to take place, and I think that design happens on an emotional and psychological level as well. You know, it's so — it's so interesting to me that we — we have the stigma against using these — these molecules and compounds, and you know, you said drugs, and I think, you know, drugs has a negative connotation, yet I send people to a drug store to pick up drugs, and that has a positive connotation.
It's like, well, why is this molecule, you know, schedule one, and seen as evil, and we've got to burn every bit of it, but this — this drug over here, you know, we're like, oh, this is great, it's been FDA approved. And yet when I use this tool, it's like I don't see people getting better in many cases, that you're dealing with a ton of side effects from these medications. I think that's part of my frustration, is that I felt like I just don't have a big tool bag to be able to help people. You know, with anxiety, I think what's interesting is that, you know, the typical response, if somebody has a panic attack, well, here's some Xanax, yeah, and you know, I think Xanax really only has one use, to try to figure out if it's something physical that they're feeling, or if it's something emotional, and if the Xanax 100% removes all the — the physical symptoms they're having, then that helps me know this person needs therapy, right?
I don't need a CT scan to figure out what's going on, yeah, this is — this is happening from another locus of control inside their body, yeah, but so many people look at Xanax as, I'm just going to treat this with a Xanax, right, or Valium, and I'm going to suppress all that, and wow, everything feels so much better, the anxiety and the panic has gone, but they haven't really dealt with that roots. Pause, and I — the way I kind of explain to patients is that it's like, you know, it's good to have a fire extinguisher in your kitchen, right, when — when a — when a grease fire breaks out, you want to be able to hit it with a fire extinguisher, but if you're using the fire extinguisher every single time you're making macaroni and cheese for your kids, something's wrong, right, we need a different method.
Yeah, and I feel like in — in the world of pharmacology, we've sort of just said, no, we're just going to push these medications, and rather than really going back and using those medications for what they should be, I think, is used as a crutch — hey, you sprained your ankle, or you broke your ankle, you're going to need to be non-weight-bearing for a while, but this is really what I want to get you into is physical therapy, so you can start moving the tendons, get the blood flow through there, you know, do some things to treat the inflammation. So, so for me, I kind of feel like that's where you guys excel, is helping people with that natural process of healing.
Yeah, and so to go back to my story of, um, like, wanting to heal, like, trying so hard but feeling blocked, you know, with the stigma around substances, like, because one of the things that I tell my clients is that every substance, we could go sugar, we could go protein, we go — it's going to turn up some aspects of your personality, or of your psyche, and it's going to turn others down. Mm, so if we look at alcohol, you know, oftentimes it turns down the social anxiety and turns up the openness, you know, maybe — maybe it turns up the fun side of you, you know, or then at some point it turns up the angry side, but every substance is turning up and turning down something that's already inside, of modulating, yeah, it's modulating.
And so if we're using those things intentionally, I feel like almost any substance can be used for healing, potentially in some way, some much more effective, and so how, quote unquote, psychedelics seem to be most helpful is in this sphere, in this — this protection, um, not letting me go, or even think about, or put myself in a situation where I might be, uh, exposed or feel this fear, or, all — you know, and it's like, we can know this isn't rational, like, this is safe, and people can tell us that all day long, but then we can't do it. And so talk therapy oftentimes is a lot of, um, well, if you just understood, and so, like, let's understand more, let's figure this out, let's — where is this coming from, let's figure this out, and there is help in that, yeah, but if knowledge could heal us, we would all be healed.
We have all the books, we have all the podcasts, we have all the understanding, we know what we should eat, we know how much we should sleep, we know all these things, but why don't we do them? Because our body doesn't let us — cannot live in our head, separate from our body, they have connected — doesn't let us do it, and that's where I feel it's like, there's this — there's another story inside of us that doesn't have access to all the knowledge, it doesn't believe all of this, and psychedelics for a lot of people help us to move, um, to work with those protectors, to allow us to get to what the story is underneath all that, and where it came from, and not just to understand where it came from, but then to go, okay, let's — let's start healing this.
Yeah, and that's a whole other story on what that actually looks like and how that happens, it's not a smooth, easy process typically, it takes time. I — I would say a regular response of — of our clients at guide is this, you know, I see it in sessions all the time, of like, we start off with a trigger, somebody comes in, you know, had this conflict with my spouse, and was, say, okay, great, so as you're talking about that, what do you notice happening in your body? We go to the body, the body can't lie, thoughts can lie, feelings can lie, but the body doesn't lie.
So if we just bring it to the body, and then we keep working, and keeping, and every time — oh my gosh, it makes so much sense, I didn't realize how this was so connected to this — because there's been separation between mind and body, but when we go to the body and begin to just feel what — the stories that it's telling us, and then get curious about it, not with any judgment or — I don't come in with, like, oh, I know what this is about, I actually really don't, most of the time, yeah, you know, I — but I know the body knows, and I believe in that, and that makes a big difference, as the therapist, when you're coming in feeling like, I don't know everything, but your body knows, and I believe that, in this power, belief in the body's wisdom to heal.
The client needs that, yeah, environment to be able to do this, it's like they're borrowing from your belief, because they've had so much avoidance of these invisible wounds inside, cause it's been too painful, they haven't had enough — we, you know, we haven't had enough support or skills in our culture. Yeah, yeah, and speaking of our culture, I mean, if you look at past cultures, they've had access to these compounds, I mean, I think I remember reading that every single, you know, culture historically that we looked at would use these things therapeutically, except maybe the Inuit, I think they're the only ones, because they lived in an area where nothing grew, so often use them.
Yeah, yeah, right, and — and it was almost in a sacred way, you know, we see the icons of old that these, you know, psychedelic compounds were presented in a sacred way. That's right, so yeah, it's, you know, I think every time I see that, we try, as humans, to say, we can do this better than our biology, or, in your reference, better than our body knows how to do it, I — I always say I think there's a little hubris there, is, I'm not sure that we can improve upon what nature has given us, right, I'm really — you know, like, I know people are trying to grow lab-grown meat, I don't think they're going to get there, I don't think it's going to be like a ribeye, you know, I'm — I'm happy that they're trying some cool stuff out, but — but it's going to be a tough one to improve upon.
And so I think what I love most about what you guys are doing is really tapping into what — what nature has provided us over, you know, our entire development of our species, um, and using that as a tool for healing. So, so going back to this idea that, you know, there's obviously these compounds that are illegal to use, right, you can get thrown in jail, um, the reason Rick Doblin set up MAPS was because MDMA was a synthetic chemical that was known to have these psychedelic, um — which the word psychedelic, I mean, even that, I think people don't understand, you know, psych, we think psychotic, you know, someone who's out of their mind, yeah, and then, you know, the term, there's — they're psycholytic, which you — you guys use it in a different way, where it's just mind loosening, uh, you know, loosening of the bonds.
Yes, and then there's psychedelic, which you said — what did you say the word psychedelic meant — mind manifesting, mind manifesting, so mind expanding, mind expanding, okay. So ketamine works, but the way — yeah, incredibly safe, I mean, that the anesthesiologist talked about, like, this is an amazing tool. Well, yeah, because it's so safe, and it's so — I think it was in the 50s or 60s when they discovered it, or when they created it, but when they started to realize the psychological benefits of it, was the Vietnam War, and so all the soldiers or medics could just carry ketamine and syringes with them.
And so um, what they started to find was that, if a soldier who got blown up or shot or something received ketamine within, like, a short amount of time after — 30 minutes to an hour, an hour I think, yeah — if they got — yeah, if they got an injection of ketamine, there was, like, a 60 to 70% reduction in PTSD symptoms, nightmares, depression, yeah, just — and that was the only difference, and 60, 70%, I mean, that sounds like a C-minus grade, but that — that is, for any substance in — in medicine, that is a profoundly useful tool, if it gets to that 60 to 70%. I mean, give — give an idea, something's 25% effective in the — in the clinical trials of drugs, it's considered a, you know, a knock-it-out-of-the-park result.
So 67% profoundly, yeah, and at that time it was really not thought to be psychedelic, it was more thought to be a dissociative. Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, so technically it's — and that dissociation is probably dose dependent, I would imagine. Yeah, and so, yeah, there — I mean, there's so many different directions that we could go with it, but um, I don't know, what — what would you — what would you feel like, with ketamine, I guess I want to say, like, if somebody wants a more extensive history of ketamine, we like to recommend the Tim Ferriss podcast, where he interviews the head of Yale Psychiatry, Dr. John Krystal, yeah, and it's a 4-hour podcast where you can learn everything you want to know about ketamine, um, its whole history, all the ways that it's used to treat chronic illness or — right, yeah, we put that, I think we put that in the show notes.
So, so maybe instead of going into all the various uses of ketamine, because it's still used, you know, so we're using ketamine off-label in the ER today, because I think it's FDA-approved as a rapid sequence induction drug, part of a cocktail, like you were describing, but used for pain management, acute pain management, if you have to set a bone, or you have to, you know, pop a dislocated shoulder back in — yeah — in the mental health field, its only FDA approval is for treatment-resistant depression, yeah, and so um, and that product is called Spravato, or esketamine, yeah, and oh, we get into how jacked up that is, pharmaceutical industry, but anyway, um, we do not provide — no, but it's — it's mostly used off label, yeah, and maybe you'd be better.
Well, I think a lot of people think off-label means that, uh, that it's not its intended use, it's that the FDA approval process is really meant first and foremost to be about safety, and that, uh, as a product is deemed to be safe, that's supposed to be the most critical point of FDA approval, is saying, this is safe for human use, then, is it effective, effective at whatever the thing that they're studying — once it gets FDA approval, it really opens it up for physicians to be able to use it for a lot of different things, and this is where I think that's the one exciting part of using different drugs, is that when we begin using them more, because again, clinical trials are done on a very small population of people, they're in very well-controlled environments, with people where they're trying to look at one single variable, you know, we're trying to look to see, does this lower someone's, you know, depression score, you know, by a certain percentage.
Okay, there is an effect of this drug, it is safe, so safe and effective, gets FDA approval, and then, as we use it, physicians, uh, begin to understand, oh, this actually has compounds that work in other areas, like my favorite example is azithromycin — azithromycin is an antibiotic, and so we use it for bacterial infections, and I used to be very critical of some of the older physicians who would give people a Z-Pack for a cold, because I'm like, it's not bacterial, that's viral, and those guys would all say, well, they get better within one to two days, so, you know, I'll keep using it, and I thought, this is crazy, we're just driving antibiotic resistance.
And then the research comes out and shows that azithromycin has both antibiotic, antiviral, and you know, uh, it's an anti-inflammatory, and then I think, oh gosh, they were using their clinical skills of observation to say, hey, I'm going to try this and see if it makes them better, and it did, and as more people try that, we begin to look back and go, oh, these — these compounds are polyphenolic, meaning they have multiple uses, and some of those uses are dose dependent, like naloxone is a good example, we use naloxone as, uh, EMTs, to reverse someone's, you know, opioid overdose, and in high doses, it — it competes with the opioid receptors, miraculous, it's amazing, yeah, it's life saving.
So we begin to learn that, at low doses, naloxone had a very different effect, and so that's — that's a concept of hormesis, that compounds can have different mechanisms of action at different, um, doses. So on the medical dose that you used, you know, as a physician, you know, in surgeries, or that's used in the ER, is very different than what we use at guide mind body, you know, we're using extremely low doses compared to what physicians use. Yeah, so we're primarily using intramuscular injections, we're not providing IV at this time, um, and sometimes we'll use troches as well, um, but a troche is a wax-like tablet that has the ketamine in it, that absorbs into the mucosa, or, for those people who haven't taken a troche before, right, like, lozenge, almost, yes, and it's really nice for low-dose work, um, or if, you know, you can't be on site with medical staff, yeah, it's very safe to use it that way, because you're only absorbing about 20% of it.
Um, with the intramuscular, we found that it's predictable with our dosing, and so, even in our — much lower dosing than, you know, the way a hospital would use it — we have the same thing that you talk about, where we use a sub-psychotic dosing that's very low, to do some types of things with people, or we'll use a medium dose for other things, and a high dose for other things. So, so in terms — not high dose to be lower, it's high dose from a psych — from a — from a, um, psychotherapy, yes, standpoint, it's still like we're not even in the same zip code as what you — not even in the same zip code.
Yeah, I had a client who came to see me that you had recommended to me, Jeff, and a longtime patient of yours, and we did a ketamine session last February of 2023, um, she had had suicidal ideation every day of her adult life, this is someone that's close to retirement in her job. Okay, so it's a long time to have suicidal ideation. One ketamine journey of a medium-low dose, we weren't even doing anything significant here, we were just, like, let's just see what happens, still to this day, she's not had a single suicidal thought, which is crazy, when you think about that, because the tool that we would normally give someone, we would start them on an SSRI, or, or Prozac, or Zoloft, whatever, yeah, the number one blackbox side effect of me using that drug, and that type of patient, is they might commit suicide.
Yeah, so you know, it's — it's wild, it's like giving somebody a pill and saying, you're going to have to take this every day, here's this list of side effects that it might cause, and by the way, one of the side effects might be that it might lead you to commit suicide, which is the reason I'm giving you this drug is, I don't want you to off yourself. Yeah, and so, so again, I think it's hearing that — that you're talking about, one single dose was transformative, so it's not the — it's not the chemical, I would argue that it's not the chemical that helped her with her healing, let me give you just a little bit more about that story.
So this person had a profound amount of trauma in their system, we talked all about it in the prep sessions that we require beforehand, and we thought that that's what would come up in the journey, but actually what came up in her journey was love, she had never felt love for herself before. Wow, and she felt so connected to God and love in her body, and this is someone who had religious trauma too, yeah, so when that was restored, then she just stopped feeling like dying was the answer. That is — that's an — that's an amazing — her whole adult life had thought about suicide, to — to think that a year later she still was not having those recurring thoughts.
I mean, you could definitely say that the medication, the half-life is such that it's out of her body within hours, so that — that therapeutic effect of the medication was in a defined period of time, the truth. It's what — what it really allowed, I think, is an opening of the true therapy, which allowed the body then to go heal, right, she was able to feel love for herself, yeah. And so I mean, for me, I think again, it was — it was hearing the stories of, you know, reading, uh, Michael Pollan's book, where he talks about a woman who had — she had ovarian cancer, she had had treatment, but she lived in constant, crippling fear that the cancer was going to come back, and so she had sought out, um, a psychedelic intervention, I believe it was psilocybin, that they used, high dose psilocybin, and it was, I think it was in a clinical trial.
Which is magic mushrooms, which is magic mushrooms, yeah, um, she had — she had an experience where she went into her body, and under her rib cage, if I remember correctly, she saw a dark mass, and this wasn't where the cancer was, the cancer had been in her ovaries, her ovaries were gone, and she screamed, uh, during her session, for — for that dark mass to go away, I mean, she was — a guttural, primal response — and then after that, Michael Pollan writes that she had no fear of her cancer returning, and so when he goes to write his book, you know, or it might have been an article for the New York Times, quoted in his article, he said she had a profound reduction in fear.
And so cause he thought, I can't really say that it was completely gone, so I'll — I'll, you know, pinch it this way. So New York Times, they go back to fact-check the story with this lady, and they say, is this accurate, did you feel a profound reduction, and she goes, that is completely inaccurate, I felt a complete lack of fear, it wasn't a profound reduction, it was gone. And again, that was — this was a year and a half later, she'd had no other therapeutic sessions, and she was a cancer survivor who no longer had fear of her cancer returning. And so as I hear stories about that, and I read articles, and then I see that, you know, there's a lot of our universities, Yale, Harvard, that have been doing research on psychedelics, I look at it as, it's a tool that we're not utilizing, why aren't we utilizing it?
And so understanding what MAPS was trying to do, I said, I looked at it very procedurally, and said, okay, I need to find some therapists who are in MAPS, right, we need somebody who's been trained in this modality, then we need to find a way that we can use the FDA-approved medications that we have now, whether they're using them off label, use them in a safe way, to give that therapy to our patients, which is where I think Prairie Health and Wellness and guide mind body have really intersected, and — and it's so fun to hear the stories of people coming back, who've had failure in the past, or didn't have good results, and not everybody has that amazing of a story, but I would say it's the spectrum, it's a lot more than I would expect.
And it's a lot more than I see using, you know, the traditional SSRIs, and I would say, without the side effects — I mean, that's to me, is I think a lot of people discount the fact that when you start, you know, a medication like sertraline, or Prozac, or whatever, um, if you get to a point where you feel like, I'm — my life is at a great place, I've done therapy, I feel a lot better, I think I'm ready to come off this drug, there are many people who, when they try to decrease doses, they have profound side effects in doing that, almost a withdrawal, although the — the medical community calls it medication discontinuation syndrome, right, because I don't want to call it withdrawal, that sounds like something that happens with an illegal — but your body has become — your body is completely dependent on it.
And — and there was — there was a patient, I — I remember this patient, because her husband, we were trying to go down on dosages, and the medication she was on was the type that had a lot of beads in it, and I said, you know, she couldn't make the next jump down to the next lower dose that was available, and so, you know, we're kind of beating our head against the wall about what to do, and I thought, maybe we can do alternate day dosing and try to get there, it just wasn't working. So the husband came back, he had an appointment with me, and he said, here's what I've been doing, I don't know if it's okay, but I've been taking the capsules apart, I count one bead out, put it back together, and the next day I count two beads.
And I remember thinking, that seems — there's no way, physiologically, that the pharmacology is that precise, that that's going to work, but he said, it's working, so I said, well, there's certainly no harm in doing that, yeah, great, you're — you're separating the — the components of the medication out, you're counting out these beads each day. I mean, it was an arduous, you know, counting one's not hard, but when you get to day 180, and you're sitting there disassembling a capsule for your wife, that this guy loved his wife and wanted to help her get off this medication, and they finally weaned — and it's one of those things that in the back of my mind, I sort of just filed it away as something that makes you go, hm, you know, like, huh.
Maybe — and then again, in the New York Times, in the medical section, I was reading a story about a medical doctor who experienced the same kind of difficulty coming off of his medication, so he couldn't tolerate the next lower dose, and so he took his capsules apart, and bean by bean, he lowered his dose, and after reading that, I go, okay, this is a real thing. Wow, and so now, you know, flash forward many years, this medication discontinuation syndrome is well recognized, and — and so we really should be, before we start patients on these medications, say, hey, you — you might really struggle to come off of this, this may be something you have to take for the rest of your life, whereas with using a tool in a psychedelic-assisted setting, I don't ever have to tell them, you're going to become addicted to this, or you're going to be dependent on this.
Well, in the setting that we're doing it in, this — especially you — they're not alone with it. Well, and what I like to tell clients about ketamine, because a lot of, especially Prairie Health Wellness, patients, like, they don't want another medication, right, you know, yeah, and I get it, I — I don't want to be stuck on something either, and what I like to tell patients, this is from the John Krystal podcast, but it's how — the benefit that we're getting from taking ketamine isn't the ketamine, it's the response that your brain has to the ketamine entering, and it's like, the brain already has it all, it's locked up, and the ketamine allows it to open up.
Yeah, you used an analogy once that, as we go through life, a lot of our brain becomes these — these neural pathways become cemented in, like, in a — in a really permanent way almost, and it's like a rut in a country road that's had rain, and then, you know, a tire goes through it, you're driving that road, and your car is constantly going into the rut, and it's very difficult to pull it out of the rut, and for — and you kind of use this analogy, that the ketamine allows that, uh, the hard concrete, to — to mold, be moldable clay temporarily, as we learn to use these molecules, uh, therapeutically, we may begin to get some nuance and understanding that ketamine seems to help really well with this type of, you know, dysfunction, but maybe we see MDMA is going to be better at, you know, helping people restore connections with their loved ones.
Well, and we even see that now, and I'll tell people, like, hey, ketamine isn't the best medicine for everyone, so you know, as we embark on this journey, it's a bit of an experiment for us, we don't know how you and your body are going to respond to this dosing, we might need to change the dosing, or maybe — I've even had one or two people, I don't have a huge case load, but one or two people, just, ketamine, it's not for me. Yeah, and so I say, maybe MDMA would be when it's released, you know, what are some other tools if someone's just resistant to using drugs altogether, like you said, our clientele usually seek us out because they're looking for a more natural approach, yeah, you've talked about holotropic breathwork, um, EMDR, can you touch on some of those, because I think those are — I would also call mind body therapies, and can be profound tools that don't involve using chemical molecules.
For sure, well, they're just all just this process, I think our culture as a whole has tended to be more up in the head, and um, for all of us, learning how to come back into the body and be curious and see what's going on emotionally, into our body, we've also, for generations, not had the skills or the ability to be with our emotions, or even really name what they are, share our emotions with people. You know, if we look three or four generations back, you know, our grandparents, our great grandparents, in the Depression, in World War II, and, like, those were hard times, and you had to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and so, you know, there's no — at least at guide mind body, we don't blame the past generations, we understand that they were surviving, but we are, like, standing on their shoulders, and doing the next thing that they couldn't do, which is learning how to come into our emotions, they didn't have time or energy for that, they had to survive and get food on the table.
So with great respect, we say that they didn't, you know, our parents or grandparents, they didn't teach us about emotions, they didn't know, people didn't know generally, that it was incredibly important for our physical health to grieve, and feel sad, and angry, and that we needed to hold space for this, or even how to do that. So um, EMDR is a great tool to come into the body, well, what I was going to say is that, like, so experiential therapy would be this broad category, of talk therapy you think of, like, cognitive, up in your head, talking about things, and experiential therapy is moving back towards the body, so it's your experience of yourself, and so how psychedelics are being used is because it's very difficult for people to get out of their head, oftentimes, like, they want to stay in their head, and if that's where they feel safe, and it's like cognitive, and like your story, like, you wanted to get out of your head, but you couldn't.
Yeah, and so psychedelics make it much easier to do that, but what we're doing is, psychedelics are giving you an experience of something else, and so — an experiential therapy, which is EMDR, IFS, AEDP, they're — they're quite somatic experience, there are quite a few different ones. So, so talk — what are those words? So IFS, EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, and then IFS is internal family systems, AEDP is — we're not trained in it, but we really respect that, and we do have a — a couple clinicians that practice, at guide, but — but roughly, how it's helpful is that those therapies help you to get into a non-ordinary state of consciousness, so not a psychedelic state, yeah, but psychedelic is a non-ordinary state, so essentially what I'm saying is out of your head, right, and when we get out of our head and into our body — so 20% roughly of our memories and our experiences, cognitively we can recall, and 80% of it, yeah, so we might say explicit memory, we have this much, and implicit memory is so much bigger, but we use the explicit, the cognitive memories, as a doorway, it's like the doorway to go into the body, so, you know, some people will bring up the same memory over and over again, and that's okay, it doesn't mean they didn't heal, that it just means, oh, well, that's one of the few memories you have for us to get in the body, and that's fine.
Interesting, it's true, so it can be very hard for left-brain people, or people who are very cognitive, to let go of that, and so experiential therapies, um, can be challenging for them to want to engage in, or for them to believe or see, like, how is this even beneficial, and you have one hour, you've been at work, you've been with your family, I'm going to come in for an hour, then I got to go back to my real life, so it's really hard to feel safe and to drop into these places, knowing I have to go back out in the world, right, so when you add a psychedelic, uh, it's almost like there's this instant safety, it's like you don't have to try so hard, it's — it's easy.
Yeah, you can get there without psychedelics, a lot of people can, right, um, it just takes much longer, and it's much more difficult, for people to want to stay with that and to feel the pain of it. So these other therapies that we use are really good for prepping for the psychedelics, and they're very essential for what we call integration, yeah, which is anywhere from, like, one to, you know, however many, 100 sessions, in between journeys, because journeys don't, uh, psych journeys don't have to be right next to each other, they can be — they can also be spaced far apart, based on what you need. You know, so, so in your — in your setting, you have a client, uh, one of our patients, let's say, comes in, and then you work with them on an individual basis to determine what tools are going to help them, so there's — there's preparatory sessions, yes, um, and we always tell our clients, like, you don't have to do psychedelics, that's not the goal, the goal isn't to get you to psychedelics, right, the goal is for healing, yes, and that path is going to look different for a lot of different people.
Yeah, and really we're depending on their inner healing intelligence to guide that process, because, um, they need to — we each need to have choice, we need to be — like, when somebody's in our room, they have their — they're in control, they're in charge, we're guiding them to consider things, but ultimately it's their choice, yeah, we're not telling them what — you going inside the body, if they're pushing back on that, we're not going to force that, it's, well, let's just stay where you're at then. So if they do reach this area of being able to move into their body using EMDR, do those EMDR sessions also need reintegration sessions afterwards?
They — they can, if they go to a really deep place, and it feels really surprising to the client, that can cause them to be in a bit of shock, if they'd been really avoiding something, and they might need an extra session to process that, that's cool, but it moves a lot slower, so there's less likely a chance for, you know, than with psychedelics, but there's just process in, um, you know, this trauma therapy, or this, you know, mind body therapy, of pendulation, so we'll kind of go in deep, you know, one session, and then we might need to swing over to go a little lighter the next one, which would be more integrative, and give a little bit of an exhale before we move back in.
Wow, I mean, we have this outline of things I wanted to talk about, and I'm like — I think we've touched on any of them, but — oh, we've touched on a few of, but what we've touched on here is just — what it does is make you want to dive in even deeper, you know, and I think this is one of those topics, like, there's some things that I — I research, and I research, and I research, and I get to the point where, like, I'm — I'm so tired of looking at this, there's just nothing else to look at, whereas this — this body of literature, this body of research, every time you get a little deeper, you — you peek around the corner and you see, oh my gosh, there's so much more here, that it makes me want to come back and talk about even more of what you guys are doing, but we don't have all the time in the world.
Well, is there anything — how, in wrapping it up, um, I think the key takeaways that I would — I would want patients to hear, or people who are listening to this, which I think mostly are going to be our patients, is that just because they haven't done therapy, or that therapy wasn't effective for them in the past, doesn't necessarily mean that they can't find an effective path for healing going forward, with your techniques and some of the tools. And by the way, it's not just you two, there are — how many therapists at guide mind body now? We're at, uh, seven, including our student therapist. Yeah, and "The Body Keeps the Score" is a very testable book, you know, for people to start with.
Michael Pollan's book, "How to Change Your Mind," yes, that's a very good one, and he's got "How to Change Your Mind" on Netflix, for people who don't like books, four episodes that you can watch about different medicines. Listen, and he's kind of doing a little docu-series. Okay, great, so well, that's awesome. Well, again, thank you guys for taking time, and this one is — like our other podcast — I'm like, I just want to bring you guys back, and we'll do it again in the future. All right, thanks for listening.