You’ve been around the block a few times. You know how to do therapy. You enjoy it. You like the self-exploration and the connection with your therapist. You’ve benefited from therapy and you want to continue to delve deeper and reshape some of the patterns you’ve found but haven’t been able to access. You’re wondering what the best approach is for you.
Traditional Therapy
When you hear traditional therapy, several things may come to mind. Perhaps you think about lying on a couch and free-associating like Freud proposed in psychoanalysis. Maybe you are more intrigued by the mysticism, symbolism, and spiritual connectedness that Carl Jung taught in depth psychology. The vastness of the exploration pulls you and you’d like weekly sessions to go deep for a long period of time.
Perhaps you are looking for something more practical like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. You’re looking to understand your behaviors, learn tools and affirmations to change your mind. You’re not interested in going too deep into your past. You want some practical skills to bring into your life to help you regulate and know how to engage with others. Or perhaps you’ve learned these skills and tools and you’re wanting something more direct with the ability to deeply heal the wounds you carry around.
At Spilove Psychotherapy we meet you where you’re at and help you see yourself and your patterns from a compassionate lens. We often utilize trauma reprocessing and reshaping approaches such as Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Attachment Wounding Repair, Inner Child Work, and Somatic Approaches. Many of our weekly sessions facilitate you through these methods to connect into yourself, find the places you’d like to shift, and help you to reshape your patterns into ones that hold the most integrity for you. Our traditional therapy methods are broken out into weekly, consistent sessions and we build with you, over time across your daily life.
To learn more about our traditional weekly therapy sessions in Bryn Mawr, Philadelphia, and Online throughout the state of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, contact us here.
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP)
Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy brings the medical world, the psychotherapy world, and the mystical realms together for deep exploration and swift results. It can be done in the context of traditional weekly sessions over an extended period of time, it can be more intensive with 2 sessions per week and it can also be done in the context of a trauma intensive where a finite amount of time is blocked off for an outpatient experience with a rigorous inpatient model of momentum. Suppose you have been working on resolving trauma and you’ve been feeling challenged to get at the root of the issues. In that case, Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy might be something you’re interested in learning more about. Many of our clients have very long-standing very complex PTSD, often with complicated comorbid conditions. Our clients are motivated and show up to regular weekly therapy, ready to face their trauma.
Is KAP for you?
If you’re wondering if KAP might be right for you, here’s something to consider. We can help you to create safety and foster your therapeutic relationship so that you can feel comfortable allowing us into your inner worlds to help you unravel the patterns that wrap around your trauma. You’ve given it your all and even then, many patterns are created to keep you and the people around you away from your tender wounds. Here’s an example of how KAP can bring you to deeper healing:
Jessica has a history of childhood trauma and her system learned how to cope through binging, purging and eventually restricting her food. It’s been 20 years since that pattern was necessary for her to feel agency or mastery in her life, but she continues to restrict because when she eats, she has body memories of her childhood trauma. She’s talked about the trauma in weekly sessions, she’s talked about the food, she’s talked about it all and she wants to eat, but it feels like she can’t. With the use of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy, she was able to see herself go back in time to the age when she experienced the trauma that created her food patterns. Using the Ketamine, she was able to connect back to that part of herself without being pushed out by the fear, the terror, the body memories, the freeze and shut down responses. In KAP Jessica spent time with her inner child at various ages and gave her younger self the internal care she needed at that age. She used KAP to tell herself that the memories are in the past and that no one can hurt her in the present. Through KAP she discussed ways she would like to start caring for herself differently and ways that she could tend to those younger parts in her everyday life. The process was similar to traditional therapy, but it was easier to access the younger parts on Ketamine. After several sessions, Jessica started being able to eat and reshaped her body memories. She practiced feeling the body sensations during her KAP sessions and paired that experience with relaxation, safety and self love. Eventually her system created new patterning so that the triggers subsided and she could enjoy food without the inner critic voices inside. This case example is possible to do without Ketamine, but it takes longer and there’s more resistance from the internal systems so the KAP experiences made it easier and swifter. If this experience sounds like something you’d like to learn more about or try for your own specific patterning, contact us and we can walk you through the process.
We provide KAP sessions for people in Bryn Mawr and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Click here to book your intake.
Trauma Intensives
If you want a kick start or a head start or if you don’t have the time to commit to weekly therapy sessions and you’d like to jump into your trauma work for a finite amount of time, trauma intensives might be for you. In our trauma intensives we use several trauma resolution modalities and sometimes KAP to help our clients dive into their trauma resolution work and come out recalibrated and more integrated then when they began. If you already have a therapist, but you want to go deeper faster, you might consider a trauma intensive. If you’ve been doing pretty well but want to address those patterns you haven’t been able to access before, you might like the intensive format. If you have a busy schedule and you can take a week off but not weekly for an hour, trauma intensives can help with that. People just starting off their journey might like this boost and people well into their journey like it for different reasons.
Weather you want weekly or inteisves, only you know the best fit for your needs and we trust your choices. Agency and your own choice, education and your relationship between you and your therapist are of paramount importance. If you’re uncertain where you land, contact us and we will be happy to walk you through your specific and unique needs and your various options. We wish you luck and look forward to meeting you on your road.
Sincerely,
The Spilove Psychotherapy Team