Psychedelic Preparation & Integration
Psychedelic preparation and integration is a specialized form of psychological support for people who are exploring or reflecting on experiences in expanded or non-ordinary states of consciousness. This work is distinct from general therapy in that it focuses specifically on preparation, meaning-making, and integration before and after psychedelic or ketamine-assisted experiences, with careful attention to safety, grounding, and psychological coherence.
For many people, these experiences can be meaningful, disorienting, or emotionally complex. Integration work offers space to process what emerged, make sense of insights, and thoughtfully weave them into everyday life, relationships, and values in a way that feels sustainable and embodied.
What Integration Work Can Look Like
In our work together, integration often looks like slowing things down and staying close to what actually showed up for you. That might include images, emotions, body sensations, questions, or moments that feel unfinished or hard to place. We pay attention to how the experience is landing in your nervous system and how it may connect to patterns in your life, your relationships, or your sense of self. If you’re curious whether this kind of work might be supportive for you, feel free to reach out and we can talk together about what you’re navigating.
New!Why Integration Matters
Psychedelic and ketamine-assisted experiences can be powerful, but the experience itself is only part of what supports lasting change. What seems to matter most is having space afterward to slow down, reflect, and make sense of what came up, rather than trying to move on too quickly.
Integration work helps turn insight into something you can actually live with and live from. By supporting reflection, emotional processing, and nervous system regulation over time, integration makes it more likely that what emerged leads to steady, meaningful change instead of fading or feeling disorganizing.
Research increasingly supports this idea. A concept analysis published in Frontiers in Psychology describes preparation and integration as central to therapeutic psychedelic work, emphasizing that integration helps translate experiences into sustained psychological benefit rather than short-lived insight (Bathje et al., 2022). Long-term follow-up studies of psychedelic-assisted therapies also suggest that when experiences are held within structured psychological support, people are more likely to experience lasting improvements months or years later (Rucker et al., 2018).