Psychedelic Integration Coaches Are Just As Important As the Therapy Itself
Don’t sit on your insights — turn them into actions for your everyday life.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy is making its way into mainstream culture. News and research studies have been explosive the past few years in what has been dubbed the Psychedelic Renaissance.
The narrative around psychedelics is changing from tripping so hard your face feels like it’s melting off, to actually using them to do deep inner work. The phrase ‘deep inner work’ may still sound taboo in many areas of the world –something your Mom or Grandma may roll their eyes at.
However, just as regular psychotherapy has become popularized in the past decade, so will using plant medicine as tools to assist in the betterment of yourself. Slowly the stigma of psychedelics being only a part of the 60’s hippie/counterculture movement will fade away, and more commonly they’ll be viewed as tools to assist your therapy sessions.
The Trip
Some argue that the trip is the most important part of the psychedelic journey, but why and what does that even mean? The trip is the altered state of consciousness you experience after consuming a psychedelic substance. A psychedelic substance can be a number of things, such as psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA, Ayahuasca, DMT, Ketamine, and others.
People can feel a number of different ways when taking a psychedelic. There are a lot of factors involved from the dosage, the emotional state you are in when you take them, the type of psychedelic, and the intention behind taking them. This makes it a little more difficult to study, but not impossible.
For example, typically when taking psilocybin (the hallucinogenic compound found in certain mushrooms), people have reported feeling¹:
- Giggly
- Euphoric
- Closer to nature
- More “open” and receptive to objects, people, and colors around them
- Energized
- Excited
And a few not-so-great feelings like:
- Anxious/ panicked
- Nauseated
- Overwhelmed
- Paranoid
Higher dosages of psilocybin will cause more visual hallucinations. The lines between what’s real and what’s not can get a little blurry, but it’s not often that reality’s completely disintegrated. Most often you can still tell what reality is, it’s just that things may be more colorful and your senses heightened.
Sometimes it can be too much to handle or frightening. This is why it’s important to have a trip sitter — someone you trust to be there with you if you’re taking a large dose of any psychedelic substance.
Because of these feelings and (sometimes) hallucinations, a person can open up their mind to thoughts and feelings they’ve never felt before, digging and asking new questions to expand their perception. During the trip is where you tend to discover new meanings to issues or questions that may have been perplexing you for some time.
So what do you do when it’s all over? Your trip is done and you’re left with bits and pieces of new knowledge of yourself that you’ve never had before. You have a few questions.
- How do you incorporate this into your life?
- How do you make it so you can actually utilize this new perception shift and make your life better?
- Isn’t that the point of a psychedelic experience?
Incorporating New Insights Into Everyday Life
If you go to therapy, your therapist listens and typically gives you exercises and/or advice on how to take steps to incorporate what you talked about in your session into your everyday life. This is integration.
The same thing goes for psychedelic-assisted therapy. You’ve gained new insight using psychedelics as a tool. Now, get some help breaking those insights down into actionable steps to improve your everyday life².
Could you just journal and figure out your own issues? Sure, but are you going to ask the hard questions? Are you going to hold yourself accountable for making the changes you need to?
The majority of us are not going to stick with it. We’ll journal for a while and try to figure out the meaning of life, just to end up back where we started… questioning everything.
An Integration coach will hold a mirror up to your life and help you decipher what it is your truly after. Let’s face it, we all have good intentions. But, intentions don’t equal reality until actions are put forth.
And action is often the hardest part.
Just think about any dream you’ve had and let die. It didn’t die because of lack of intention but of lack of doing.
A Few Traits to Look For in a Psychedelic Integration Coach
Like finding a good psychotherapist, there are a few things to keep an eye out for when looking for a psychedelic integration coach.
1. Experience in Psychedelics
A person coaching someone else needs to know how it actually feels to be on psychedelics. To integrate such an intimate feeling into our everyday life, a coach should be able to truly empathize with how their client felt when tripping.
While everybody experiences something unique while on psychedelics, the coach should have their own experience to fall back on when relating to their client. You can tell when someone is just talking about an experience that they’ve read about versus when someone has gone through it.
A great example of this is addiction therapists/counselors who are former addicts. The counselor can empathize because they’ve been in their client’s shoes and can relate in a non-judgemental way that nobody else can.
2. Provides a Safe and Welcoming Environment
Coaches aren’t regulated by a governing body like Psychotherapists are. So, it’s important that the space be free of judgment and comfortable. If you are uneasy in the physical space that the coach has provided, it may not be a good fit for you and maybe even a red flag.
When discussing your psychedelic experience with a coach, you’ll likely be delving into your past –including any trauma you’ve experienced and navigating a complex range of emotions. Being vulnerable is scary enough, the space you’re in should be inviting and give you a sense of ease and safety.
3. Committed to Life-Long Learning
While psychedelics have been used for centuries, the psychedelic industry is still new and emerging. Because the research was shoved underground for half a century due to Nixon’s “War on Drugs” campaign in the 1970s, the research is only now becoming more prevalent.
Your coach should be learning and growing with the industry –not only in psychedelics but in mental health and psychology as well. Reading up on new studies and joining any of the numerous continuing education and psychedelic training courses should be something they are incorporating to better help them as a coach.
Turn Your Intentions Into Actions
Maybe you’re getting ready for your first psychedelic experience, or perhaps you’ve already incorporated them into your mental wellness routine. Aren’t you ready to take your intentions and what you’ve experienced and turn them into actionable steps for positive change in your life?
You’re doing the hard work already, it’s time to see the impact of your efforts.
There are tons of websites that have directories of Psychedelic Integration Coaches and a few are listed below. As always, please do your due diligence when researching a coach that’s right for you.
- Third Wave
- MAPS
- Being True To You Transformational Recovery
- Psychable
- Psychedelics Integration
- Trippingly
- Google! If you Google “Psychedelic Integration Coach near me” in Google, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how many search results will pop up. The growth in this industry is wild.
What do you think about Integration Coaches? Whether it’s psychedelic-assisted therapy or just good old-fashioned therapy, integration is crucial.
How else are you supposed to improve your life if you don’t take the steps to incorporate what you’ve learned into it?
It’s hard, but that’s how you grow.
Resources: