What Is Ketamine-Assisted EMDR Therapy?
Ketamine-Assisted EMDR Therapy (KA-EMDR®) combines EMDR therapy with low-dose sublingual ketamine to offer another approach to trauma healing.
When You’ve Done the Work but Still Feel Stuck
“I’ve done the work. I understand my trauma. Why do I still feel this way?”
You may have spent years in therapy, gained insight into your experiences, and tried different treatment approaches, yet still feel that something is missing. You understand what happened, but the emotional pain, patterns, or reactions may continue to affect your life.
Sometimes, healing involves more than understanding your experiences intellectually. It involves finding a different way to connect with yourself, your emotions, and what happened to you.
KA-EMDR brings together the trauma-processing approach of EMDR and the effects of low-dose sublingual ketamine. This combination can create a different therapeutic state in which you remain aware and engaged while exploring memories, emotions, and experiences from a new perspective.
For some people, this approach can create opportunities for new learning, deeper processing, and a greater sense of connection with themselves.
If you feel there is more healing available to you, KA-EMDR may offer another way forward.
When You Feel Stuck
Healing is not always about gaining more insight. Sometimes the deeper change is in how you experience yourself and what happened to you.
During KA-EMDR, you can experience new insights, unexpected connections, greater self-compassion, reduced self-judgment, and a deeper connection to your emotions.
Sometimes something that has felt stuck begins to shift. Through memory reconsolidation, previously distressing memories can become open to new information and experiences. This can help change how a memory feels and the meaning it holds.
You may begin to feel less defined by what happened to you and more connected to who you are today—or who you want to be. What once felt overwhelming can begin to feel more manageable.
The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to help you take forward what is helpful and leave behind what no longer serves you.
What Is EMDR Therapy?
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a trauma therapy that helps the brain process experiences that may still feel stuck.
EMDR is based on Adaptive Information Processing (AIP), the idea that the brain has a natural ability to process experiences and connect them with helpful information.
When something overwhelming happens, parts of the experience can remain connected to the emotions, body sensations, beliefs, and reactions that were present at the time.
EMDR helps reprocess the experience and connect it with more helpful information. Sometimes you may already know something intellectually, but it doesn’t fully feel true. EMDR can help this new information become more connected to the experience.
One way to understand how emotional memories may change is through memory reconsolidation. When a memory is activated, it may become temporarily more open to change before it is stored again. During EMDR, new information and emotional experiences may become connected with previously distressing memories, potentially changing how those memories are experienced and the meaning they hold.
How Can Ketamine Support EMDR?
KA-EMDR uses low-dose ketamine in a psycholytic approach to support a therapeutic state in which you remain calm, open, aware, and able to engage in the EMDR process.
Ketamine temporarily changes the way you experience thoughts, emotions, memories, and internal experiences. It also affects glutamate, which plays an important role in learning, memory, and forming new connections in the brain.
This may support the brain’s ability to develop new learning and healthier connections during EMDR processing. By combining ketamine with EMDR, KA-EMDR may help optimize the therapeutic process by creating opportunities to approach experiences from a different perspective and engage with them in new ways.
The goal is not to erase what happened. Instead, the goal is to help you leave behind what no longer serves you while taking forward what is helpful.
What Does a KA-EMDR Session Look Like?
KA-EMDR is usually provided as a series of appointments, rather than as one single session.
Some appointments may include low-dose sublingual ketamine and EMDR processing. Other appointments may involve:
- Standard EMDR without ketamine
- Integration sessions using talk therapy
- Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR)
- LENS Neurofeedback
- IFS Informed or “parts work” therapy
Some clients may have ketamine-assisted sessions weekly, while others may have them every other week or less frequently. Standard EMDR, integration, or other supportive treatments may be used between ketamine sessions.
The treatment schedule is individualized based on your needs, treatment goals, and how you are responding to the work.
Safety and Medical Care
Ketamine is a prescription medication and is prescribed and medically managed by a qualified medical provider.
We do not prescribe or provide ketamine. Our role is to provide the psychotherapy portion of treatment, including preparation, EMDR, therapeutic support, and integration. With your permission, we can coordinate with your medical provider as needed.
Before beginning KA-EMDR, you will need to be evaluated and approved for ketamine treatment by a medical provider. We provide you with referral information to providers that we work with.
What Is an Integration Session?
Integration sessions provide time to talk about and make sense of what you experienced during a ketamine-assisted session.
Thoughts, feelings, memories, or insights may continue to develop after a session. Integration helps you explore these experiences and bring what is helpful into your everyday life.
When Something Finally Shifts
Healing is not always about gaining more insight. Sometimes the deeper change is in how you experience yourself and what happened to you.
During KA-EMDR, you can experience new insights, greater self-compassion, reduced self-judgment, and a deeper connection to your emotions.
Sometimes something that has felt stuck begins to shift. Through memory reconsolidation, previously distressing memories can become open to new information, changing how they feel and the meaning they hold.
You may begin to feel less defined by what happened to you and more connected to who you are today—or who you want to be. What once felt overwhelming can begin to feel more manageable.
The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to help you take forward what is helpful and leave behind what no longer serves you.
Next Steps
Want to learn more about how KA-EMDR® works, what to expect, and who it may be appropriate for? Learn more about Ketamine-Assisted EMDR Therapy.
KA-EMDR® is not right for everyone. If you are interested in learning more, we can talk about your goals, your history, and whether this approach may be a good fit for you.
You can also learn more about the research behind KA-EMDR® in the published research article:
Vancouver EMDR Therapy PLLC
Additional Posts
Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) can be difficult to explain because much of the work happens beneath conscious awareness. Clients may notice changes in sensations, emotions, images, or body responses that can be hard to put into words. One way to understand [...]
Ketamine-Assisted EMDR Therapy (KA-EMDR®) combines EMDR therapy with low-dose sublingual ketamine to offer another approach to trauma healing. When You’ve Done the Work but Still Feel Stuck “I’ve done the work. I understand my trauma. Why do I still feel this [...]
What if trauma therapy could address both the processing of traumatic experiences and the way your nervous system responds to them? Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and LENS Neurofeedback are two different brain-based approaches that can sometimes be used together to support [...]
When we think about trauma, we often think about fear, sadness, anger, or other emotions. But trauma can also leave something deeper behind: shock. Deep Brain Reorienting™ was developed by Dr. Frank Corrigan, a psychiatrist whose research and clinical work in [...]
