A Research Update

I’ve spent the last year pecking away at my research, and feel incredibly relieved to have completed a draft of the project, entitled: “Approaches to Ketamine-Assisted Couple Therapy”. (Yes, “couple therapy” is the grammatically correct usage, but everybody says “couples therapy” colloquially.)

This was a labor of love, emphasis on labor. As it turns out, gathering information, metabolizing it and synthesizing it takes a lot of effort. I began to feel somewhat bovine as I sat there and chewed, chewed, chewed on data. But, my experience as a writer has taught me that if you just keep showing up to the project, it will reveal to you how to complete it. And that’s what happened. Special thanks to my advisor, sociologist Dena Smith, who trusted me to manage this project and gave me some hand-holding as well.

Ultimately I interviewed nine leading therapists who represent four different modalities of couple therapy, each of whom is incorporating ketamine into the process of facilitating dyadic attachment. In addition to getting what was essentially a ton of training in the practice of KAP for couples, I also got to spend one-on-one time with people I look up to professionally.

Another interesting element of this experience for me was writing an article that describes different modalities of psychotherapy. I had done this once previously, when I coauthored an article about Motivational Interviewing. Therapists can sometimes tend toward cultishness; they often adhere to a particular way of working based on their training and can even be caught throwing shade on rival modalities. Personally, even though I identify as a practitioner of EFT and IFS, I try to maintain an ecumenical view of therapy. In other words, I don’t believe there’s one true mode of therapy that’s more effective than all others. Like all the different religions, I believe each style of therapy offers access to particular truths.

This opinion reflects my ongoing study of sociology, which holds that psychotherapy came to replace religion over the course of the 20th century as Western culture shifted from rural to urban, agrarian to industrial to postindustrial, and communitarian to individualistic. But that’s a different topic. Long story short, I am pleased with how this paper came out, and look forward to sharing it once it finds a home at a good peer-reviewed journal.