Amrou Al-Kadhi: How ketamine infusion therapy changed my negative perspective

Part of the conundrum of therapy is that it can make one painfully conscious of their traumas, behavioral patterns, and mental blockades, but also very aware that they seem permanent and immovable.

I’ve been in many forms of therapy for around a decade, and I think I’ve reached the point where no corner of my psychology or emotional behavioral patterns is a mystery to me; I know why I do all the fucked up and emotionally self-harmful things I do. But I can’t stop doing them. They don’t just seem to be a part of me, they seem to be ME.

Unshakeable feelings

No amount of work I’ve done in therapy can help shake those core feelings of being unlovable, worthless, a failure. I know exactly why those beliefs are there and how specific instances of abuse have anchored them in my psyche. But they’re so deeply entrenched, and have been since such a young age, that they seem to have infected every neuron in my brain.

Fortunately, I am currently living in Los Angeles, where trauma therapy is far further along than in the UK. Ketamine infusions are a legal and well-trusted form of psychological healing — this is not recreational ketamine, which I’m not advocating the use of as it does not work in the same way as medically monitored and administered ketamine. The infusions are particularly for people with treatment-resistant depression — that is, patients like me who have been on every antidepressant and tried every form of therapy there is and yet are still unable to move past the core beliefs that seem to dictate their life.

Dissociating “in ways beyond language”

I was desperate, and fortunately in a financial position to be able to try ketamine infusions. And I have two words: HOLY FUCK. Ketamine is a highly dissociative drug, and when administered by a board-certified anesthesiologist through an IV at controlled doses, it can allow you to dissociate in ways beyond language. It’s thus hard for me to explain what I truly experienced during my first infusion, but I’ll try.

With my eyes covered and my ears blasted with psychedelic trances, I slowly dissociated from my present, past, and future, and hurtled to the edge of the universe, literally dissolving into the sun, falling into cosmic black holes, and escaping into the deepest recesses of our multiverse, into sensations, images, and feelings beyond the matrix of reality. At one point, I felt that I was quite literally inside a black hole, my skin merging with the dead star inside, as I broke into a trillion pieces. In doing so, my “self” quite literally obliterated.

“My subconscious was liberated”

I finally understood what it was to be a speck of dust hurtling through the chaos of ever-expanding space without meaning. In experiencing this, all my psychological defenses to protect me from feelings of worthlessness or failure suddenly seemed moot, and my subconscious was liberated into experiencing the meaningful meaninglessness of life for its pure, unadulterated bliss.

Since my first treatment — and I have around five left before the course is completed — the usual triggers of my PTSD have been much softer in their effect. I can recognize that it’s a trigger that causes anxiety, but I can somehow deconceptualize it as something real. The thoughts that circulate our brains are so often not real, shaped as they are by traumas and malign societal conditioning. If someone doesn’t text back, it doesn’t mean that the notion that I am worthless is real — it’s a meaningless thought that was implanted improperly and is now blocking my experience of reality. Ketamine-infused therapy seems to have been able to unblock it.

The infusion has allowed me to put more faith in feeling over thinking, in experiencing life rather than narrating it, and in so doing, I hope I’ll be able to move past the shameful narratives that have shackled my experiences and live my life with my feet on the ground rather than monitoring it from a judgmental bird’s-eye view.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

This article originally appeared in the Attitude July/August issue, which is available to download and order in print now.