DR PAULA PSYCHOLOGY
Integration Support
“Indications are, however, that what one does with a psychedelic experience may be more important than merely having it. Without integration […] the experience may be only an irrelevant memory, no matter how beautiful”
- Walter Pahnke, 1967
Psychedelic Therapy: Integration Support
While psychedelics can open us to what is important in life, and steer our course, such experiences alone cannot keep us on track. In short: psychedelics are not enough. Integration is essential to maximise treatment effects, maintain gains and minimise harm.
To deepen the insights gained during a psychedelic journey into a new way of life, we must address what is blocking us from experiencing our full freedom, wholeness and potential. We do so by attending to the various dimensions of our human experience: the relationship with ourselves, with others, with the natural world and the mystery of life. This process is known as “integration”.
Psychedelic integration is aimed at helping people ground their exciting, intra-psychic, interpersonal, or transcendental insights into the less glamorous mundane dimensions of ordinary life. Skillful integration supports the transition from the psychedelic experience to deep, long-term and sustainable change.
Following the psychedelic experience integration sessions are conducted to help individuals make sense of and integrate the insights gained during the experience into their daily lives. During the post-psychedelic period of neuroplasticity, integration focuses on processing the experience, discussing insights, addressing any emotional responses, and developing strategies for continued personal growth and healing.
As a certified psychedelic therapist, I offer skilled, compassionate and confidential psychedelic integration therapy to those people who have made the choice to engage in the personal use of psychedelics for recreational or therapeutic purposes.
“Of course the ‘cure’ isn’t permanent. But at least one can see where the sun rises and sets and the horizons and the galaxies and know the infinite peace of liberation. And since the air is purified by truth, it gains something for use in everyday living. And one can never be content to live always in the valley at sea level when one has experienced the rarefied ozone of the higher altitude. So it serves as a map left in the intellect, as a warmth or remembered radiance in the emotions, and as a still small voice or an agonizing goad in the conscience and a longing in the heart”.
- Letter from Betty Eisner to Humphry Osmond, August 3, 1957 – Eisner, 2002.
