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Seven months before Colin Frangicetto went on his first Ayahuasca retreat, he began seeing a therapist who specializes in psychedelic integration. Psychedelic integration specialists are a new field of professionals who help people prepare for and interpret psychedelic experiences and they’ve been popping up in cities around the United States. From retreats in Peru to intentional mushroom journeys at home, this mix of licensed and formerly licensed therapists, life coaches, and other mental health professionals can help folks maximize the personal growth benefits of psychedelic trips.
These varied experts provide emotional support in the weeks–or in Frangicetto’s case, months–leading up to a trip and help dissect and process feelings about it after the fact. In the pre-journey sessions, Frangicetto says he and his integration therapist talked about his goals (or “intentions” to use the language preferred by the psychedelic community) in using psychedelics as well as personal issues and conflicts that could come up during his multiple Ayahuasca ceremonies.
“Basically it was really traditional at first. Like, ‘let’s talk about your shit’ type stuff,” explains the Circa Survive guitarist, artist, and host of the new podcast, The Cosmic Nod. Looking at things in his life that cause him shame and fear was a big part of the preparatory work because “if something causes you fear when you’re not ‘in the medicine’, then it’s a good indicator that it will cause you a lot more fear in the medicine,” he says. “It’s about facing all this stuff head on.”
Skye Weaver, who specializes in psychedelic integration as a life coach, explains prep sessions are all about “setting up your spiritual safety net before you jump off the cliff.” With this extra support in place, the idea is that folks can learn the most about themselves during psychedelic experiences and navigate those sometimes harrowing journeys more easily. “I was so aware of everything that was in the dark corners [of my mind] that they weren’t scary at all,” Frangicetto says of his psychedelic experiences after doing the preparatory work with his integration therapist. “I was in the zone. Completely comfortable and really didn’t have that same disorienting kind of chaos that I would encounter a lot before.”
There are two reliable databases of licensed professionals who specialize in this area, one run by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and another called Psychedelic Support. There are also some therapeutic centers like the harm-reduction focused Center for Optimal Living (CFOL) in New York City, which opened the Psychedelic Education and Continuing Care Program in 2016. “It has been our mission to really legitimize offering services to people who are interested in or are using psychedelics,” says CFOL founder Andrew Tatarsky. His group is seen as the most “professional” space offering this kind of work in the New York area because all of the integration specialists are licensed therapists or psychologists, and many also work on the current clinical trials with MDMA and psilocybin.
A lot of my work is really helping people get out their own way.
“As far as I’m aware, we are the first legitimate mental health organization to offer these services,” says Tatarsky and explains his therapists are really focused on minimizing potential risks for people who use psychedelics outside of the clinical trial context. “I thought there should be a knowledgeable, kind of science based place where people could come for information and support. To minimize potential risks and even to help people who have really negative, difficult experiences.”
While aboveground psychedelic integration therapy is a relatively new trend, therapists who work with “non-ordinary states of consciousness” are not. In Boulder, Colorado there are two learning institutions where folks can study how to work with clients who experience these altered states, Naropa University–where the modern mindfulness movement was born–and the Hakomi Institute. Students from both of these programs have gone on to offer psychedelic integration to clients, as well as other spiritual practices, like meditation, yoga, and holotropic breathwork. Not to mention, integration sessions have been a big part of psychedelic-assisted therapy, both before psychedelics were criminalized in the late 1960’s and now in clinical trials with psilocybin and MDMA.
There are also therapists who work exclusively underground with psychedelics since the 1970s, who have been offering integration as well as “dosing sessions” with actual substances. What’s new is offering solely psychedelic integration to clients who take substances like mushrooms, LSD, or Ayahuasca on their own or at retreats abroad–and it’s taking off like wildfire.
Another new-ish trend is psychedelic integration groups, and that’s where Frangicetto initially found his integration therapist in his home city of Portland, Oregon. Often called “psychedelic societies” or “integration circles,” peer-and professional-led groups of around 10 to 40 people who meet monthly or more are starting in cities all over the US and their goal is pretty simple: to give people a safe space to openly discuss psychedelic experiences.
“There’s a feeling that everybody in the room kind of knows what you’re talking about,” says Ethan Covey photographer and co-Founder of the Psychedelic Sangha in NYC, which hosts monthly integration circles at the Judson Memorial Church off Washington Square Park. “The only thing I can really compare it to is the feeling of being in an AA or NA meeting. It’s that same sense of safety. That, no matter what you say, it’s one of the rare times in your life where you’re surrounded by people who are going to get what you’re talking about, even if they’ve not had the same exact experience.”
The benefit of simply feeling heard and unjudged while you process a psychedelic experience can be immense, says Christopher “Doc” Kelley, Covey’s Psychedelic Sangha co-founder and part time professor of religious studies at The New School. “Just sitting in a room, talking and looking around, making eye contact with your peers and being accepted and loved in that container. That’s what blew me away,” says Kelley. “That may sound weak in the abstract, but in the lived experience, it is so powerful.” Plus, Covey points out that it’s not all about integrating negative experiences. Oftentimes, folks come to their integration group to discuss positive, even “mystical” experiences, to try and learn from them, too.
Integration circles are typically about two hours long and can be free or have a small ticket price ($15 to $30) to cover expenses. The other main distinguishing difference among them is some can be led by a professional – in the case of Psychedelic Sangha, psychedelic researcher Katherine MacLean has been their most recent “facilitator in residence” – while others are led by peers. Of course, there are pros and cons to both types of integration circles, but because these groups are public and advertised on sites like MeetUp or EventBrite, anyone can show up, even those struggling with more serious mental health conditions post-psychedelic experience, like psychosis or mania. While not common, mental health professionals are more likely to pick up on those signs and guide those people to more intensive professional help, if needed.
When it comes to the differences between licensed psychedelic integration therapists and unlicensed integration coaches, the ability to recognize and diagnose actual mental health conditions is obviously a big one. Coaches often don’t have Master’s degrees or other types of professional psychedelic training like MAPS and the CFOL offer for clinicians. In fact, coaches often have a mix of different certifications, like “reiki master” and “hypnotherapist.” What’s more, coaches also aren’t held to the same ethical standards as licensed therapists, and so things like confidentiality aren’t protected.
I was so aware of everything that was in the dark corners [of my mind] that they weren’t scary at all.
At the same time, some coaches doing this work find the standards of licensing to be too restrictive, and many psychedelic integration specialists I came across reporting this piece were formerly licensed social workers who hadn’t felt the need to renew their licenses to effectively see integration clients. One major restriction to being a licensed professional in this space is the inability to do any “medicine work”, which is psychedelic community lingo for giving clients psychedelics and facilitating their experiences. While many unlicensed integration therapists and life coaches deny doing this, it can be a big part of “the work.”
Even though Frangicetto’s integration therapist is formerly licensed (her official background is in treating those with eating disorders), her knowledge of a specific therapy modality, Internal Family Systems (IFS) or “Parts Work”, has been invaluable to his whole healing process. Basically, IFS is a type of guided meditation that has participants dig deep into childhood trauma by labeling different parts of themselves, like the “analyzer self” or the “stubborn self” in Frangicetto’s case. Then clients “re-parent” themselves by listening to these parts, asking them questions and showing them curiosity and compassion rather than whatever other type of emotion is usually tied to them, like fear or shame.
For Frangicetto, labeling and working with his own parts the seven months before his Ayahuasca retreat and then in the two months after coming home helped him to both navigate his actual psychedelic experiences as well as understand them later. “It’s about seeing what part of you is being made to feel vulnerable from this experience. And trying to figure out how to calm it down and go into a dialogue with it rather than just freaking out or melting down,” says Frangicetto. “I think quite often a lot of people have these kind of off the grid psychedelic experiences, not in a medicinal setting, with no therapy in place and have some kind of crazy thing happen in the experience. And they don’t know what to do with it or they’re terrified by it and they just suppress it. But you can actually further traumatize yourself [by suppressing these experiences].”
Skye Weaver also brings up Parts Work in our conversation, but says she isn’t formerly trained in the modality. Her expertise is “somatic therapy” in which she became certified by the Hakomi Institute satellite campus in the Bay Area of California. She explains somatic therapy is also a type of guided meditation that helps folks get in touch with their bodies to process non-ordinary states as well as trauma, and in the case of integration work, how folks were feeling during their psychedelic trip. “It’s a lot of self-discovery work…Some people are answering their own questions,” Weaver says of her sessions with integration clients. “A lot of my work is really helping people get out their own way.”
This emerging “integration industry” is helping a lot of people maximize the benefits of tripping on psychedelics for personal growth, however the private one-on-one sessions are not cheap. Starting at around $100 to $150 per hour, psychedelic integration therapy, like “regular” therapy, isn’t accessible to everyone. What’s more, life coaches and formerly licensed therapists are not covered by insurance, so folks have to pay for the entire hour out of pocket. On the other hand, insurance providers will likely reimburse a portion of the fee licensed professionals doing this work charge, making it a little more accessible.
Of course there are other ways to interpret or “integrate” psychedelic experiences. Some common practices in the community include journaling, meditation, and yoga. “You don’t necessarily need to spend a bunch of money or get a therapist, but you need to invest time and energy in what this journey is [to you],” says Frangicetto. “You have to be part of your own healing. You have to be an active participant.” Although, he admits, if he had to choose between the Ayahuasca retreat and the integration therapy for personal growth, “I would probably just pick the therapy.”