Brian Henderson

Trauma takes many forms — it can be an accident, a loss, a violent act, a long pattern of mistreatment, or a life lived within white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism, or all of the above. It can be what happened to us and it can be something we don't know we didn't get, but deserved. No matter the origin, trauma has the effect of disconnecting us from parts of ourselves and from each other. Very often, what we lose contact with first is our bodies and the immediacy of our emotions. A vital part of the process of integrating trauma is finding a way home to the body — only then can we start reconnecting with others and building a more vibrant life. Ketamine can be a useful medicine for understanding where our life force has gotten stuck. Through a Western psychological lens, ketamine’s dissociative effect can be understood as interrupting the habitual brain pathways along which we travel in relation to traumatic experiences. In disorganizing the way we are accustomed to experiencing the present, it offers the opportunity for new emotions, sensations, and thoughts to occur in relation to those experiences and make new perspectives on them possible.