Me, Ketamine & an Ocean of Tears

Or how releasing embodied grief with a loving witness helped free me from chronic pain.

About a minute after the doctor injects 65 milligrams of ketamine into my left bicep, the room starts to dissolve.

My body follows soon after.

It’s both unsettling and strangely relieving not to have a body after all my meat suit has been through over the years.

Before I have much time to appreciate it, I’m suddenly catapulted through a vast futuristic machinescape on an otherworldly roller coaster, barrelling forward to the soundtrack of a low, pulsing drone with no beginning or end I can locate. It’s not so much a song as a frequency the machine itself seems to be breathing.

A Different Kind of Medicine

In the years leading up to the ketamine experience, I’d been immersed in a relational somatic therapy journey that included several encounters with psychedelics.

Relational somatic work is based on two ideas: that the body holds and processes trauma and that healing happens in relationship, through the attuned, compassionate presence of another person.

Instead of talking about what happened, you feel what’s happening in the present: in your chest, your gut, or your breath. And the relationship with the therapist is more than just a space where the work happens. It is the work.

Many traumatic experiences happen in unhealthy or harmful relationships. Healing from these experiences can only happen in the context of a healthy relationship.

Nearly all my psychedelic experiences were held within this framework, so over time I developed a unique relationship with the medicines. Instead of visuals or insights, they took me on journeys deep inside my tissues.

A Visit with Nan

Suddenly, after an undetermined amount of time, the biopunk circus ride spits me out into the living room of my grandparents’ house—one of my childhood homes.

There was my Nan, who had died suddenly nearly two decades ago, sitting on the couch where she’d be every night—peeling an apple in one long strip with her arthritic fingers, smoking a king-sized du Maurier cigarette, likely watching Dallas or something.

The calmness is stark compared to the wild ride that brought me here. I’m vaguely able to navigate the space. I look out the large picture window at the long driveway, walk up the stairs and visit my old room with its single captain’s bed, Dukes of Hazzard sheets and Monchhichi’s comforter.

As these scenes play out, I feel my body begin to convulse. Deep sobs start to emanate from within, followed by wails of sadness and an ocean of tears.

My back arches, and all the muscles in my hips and pelvis tense as if there’s high voltage running through them. This goes on for what feels like an eternity.

Grief, Denied

When a threat arises, our sympathetic nervous systems activate to help us fight, flee, or freeze.

From a somatic perspective, this activation is meant to be discharged through actions such as running, screaming, shaking, or other physical movements. Once it’s complete, the body knows the danger has passed, and it’s safe to rest.

But we live in a world that doesn’t make much space for that.

We’re culturally conditioned to suppress these responses: to sit still, stay quiet, keep it together.

Or we exist in environments like offices, hospitals, and funeral homes that aren’t designed to accommodate the needs of activated nervous systems.

Many cultures have rituals for this kind of thing: collective wailing, ecstatic dance, trance and drumming. In Western society, we’ve largely lost them.

Take grief, for example. We’re often expected to maybe take a few days off, wear a sombre outfit to a stuffy funeral, then put our grief in a box and return to everyday life.

I didn’t even get that.

I was alone on the other side of the country at university when it happened. The news came over the phone one evening after I returned to my dorm room from French class.

My wails echoed off the cinder block walls of the tiny cell-like space. I remember wandering city streets that felt Dali-esque, trying to make sense of a fundamentally altered world.

Then I dragged myself back to try to push through and finish the semester as best I could.

The Compassionate Witness

The ketamine session lasts just under an hour, though it might have been a whole lifetime.

Much of the integration session after the journey is a blur. But as we reflect on the experience to make meaning of it, the doctor notes that it seemed like I encountered some unprocessed grief.

This opens the door to sharing the story of what was one of the most painful chapters in my life, and having it received with compassion by someone—while in a highly neuroplastic state induced by the ketamine.

I continue to integrate the journey in the weeks to follow through online sessions with my relational somatic therapist. Along with working on applying the lessons to my life, I get more opportunities to share my grief and have it received by someone who cares.

Experiencing trauma is one thing, but going through it alone (or with a feeling of isolation) is another thing altogether. Not having a compassionate witness to our suffering can cause the wound never quite to heal right.

The thing is, even if we never had someone to accompany us during our suffering, we can still find it later in life.

I didn’t have that witness when Nan died. But 17 years later, I found it on the floor of a doctor’s office.

Psychedelic therapy and relational work gave me the chance to revisit my grief and have it held with love.

The Open Space that Followed

In the years following Nan’s sudden death, I developed chronic pain in my lower back and neck.

Many frustrating doctor visits yielded no cause. All manner of alternative health approaches did little.

Underneath every intention I set for a psychedelic journey was the secret wish that the pain would go away. Disappointment followed.

Then came ketamine.

I went in with low expectations. Maybe that’s why it was so profound: my guard was down. Or because all the work I’d done on my journey up to that point had primed me for this kind of release.

In the days and weeks following the session, the pain I’d lived with for more than a decade was eerily not present.

At first I thought it might have to do with ketamine’s anesthetic properties.

But it lasted. The pain was gone.

As I see it, the bodily discomfort I experienced for so long was the result of my body chronically bracing against the pain because it had no way to be released and no one to witness the grief that caused it.

The best way I can describe what happened after those conditions got met is “spaciousness.”

The space inside that braced around the grief, now filled with love. The pain that constricted me, released.

I exited the roller coaster into a new landscape that felt wide open, versus the tight crevice I’d been living in for so many years.