Psychedelic Integration Therapy

You've had a psychedelic experience, or you're preparing for one. Either way, you already sense that this isn't territory to navigate alone — and that who you work with matters.

Maybe you finally broke through to emotions you've long kept at a distance, and now there's so much coming up you don't know how to make sense of it. Or the experience was so disorienting and confusing that you feel more unmoored than before. Or maybe you're still in the thinking-about-it phase, wondering whether you're going to add to the problem or create an experience that's actually healing.

Psychedelic experiences don't end when the substance does. What surfaces during a journey — the emotions, the insights, the difficult material that was waiting for an opening — is an uncovering, not a resolution. Think of it like an MRI: the scan reveals what's there, but the healing happens in what you do next. This is what I'm here to help you with.

Preparation and Harm Reduction

If you've read the books or followed the research, you may have come away with the impression that psychedelics work something like magic — that you take a substance, have a profound experience, and emerge transformed. The reality is more demanding than that. Psychedelic experiences are not passive. What you bring into them — your state of mind, your relational history, your unprocessed grief or trauma, your intentions — shapes what happens, often more than people expect. If you show up expecting the substance to do the work, you will likely be caught off guard by how much is being asked of you.

Harm reduction is the clinical and ethical foundation of this work. It means approaching psychedelics with clear eyes — knowing that these substances can open extraordinary psychological territory, and that opening is not without risk. Good preparation doesn't guarantee a smooth journey, but it meaningfully reduces the chance that a difficult experience becomes a damaging one.

Set and setting matter. Your mental health history matters. The people supporting you during and after the experience matter. So does the inner work you do beforehand — learning to work with your breath, practicing psychological flexibility, building a tolerance for not being in control. These aren't just preparation exercises. They are the skills you will draw on inside the experience itself, when the terrain gets unfamiliar and the instinct to resist or escape becomes strong. The degree to which you can allow what comes up — rather than brace against it — shapes what the experience is able to do and what you are able to do with the experience.

In the preparation phase, I begin with a thorough assessment to evaluate whether psychedelic work is appropriate for you and to identify any factors that might affect safety or outcomes. From there, I help clients clarify their intentions, assess their readiness honestly, understand what substances do at a pharmacological and psychological level, and think carefully about context and support. This includes working on the capacities you'll need inside the experience itself — grounding practices, breath awareness, and the ability to go with the current rather than fight it. The goal is not to eliminate the unexpected but to build enough internal stability that you can meet it.

The Work of Integration

The experience ends. Integration doesn't.

Psychedelics offer a window of disruption — of habitual thought, of stuck emotions, of the defenses that have kept you from actually feeling, of a nervous system running on autopilot. That disruption has the potential to be genuinely healing. It can also be disorienting, frightening, or destabilizing if there's no structure for making sense of what emerged.

It's not about holding onto the experience or chasing its intensity. It's about taking what surfaced — the images, the body sensations, the emotions, the insights, the material that felt unfinished — and working with it in ways that create real change in everyday life. A psychedelic experience might leave you with a sudden clarity that your relationship with yourself needs to change. But clarity is not the same as change. Integration is the work of figuring out what that actually looks like on a Tuesday morning.

This work is rarely neat or on our own timeline. What surfaces in a psychedelic experience can take months to fully metabolize. Some of it connects to earlier material — relational wounds, grief, trauma — that is now ready to be met. Some of it requires sitting with uncertainty before meaning becomes clear. Integration therapy creates the space and the clinical relationship in which to do that work without forcing meaning before it's ready.

Clinical Background and Training

As a research therapist in two FDA-regulated psilocybin clinical trials — including work with patients facing terminal cancer diagnoses — I've guided people through some of the most demanding psychedelic experiences that exist in a clinical setting. Sitting with someone as psilocybin surfaces their confrontation with their own mortality requires a kind of presence and clinical skill that most therapeutic contexts never call for.

I hold a certification in Psychedelic Therapy and Integration through Fluence, one of the most rigorous professional training programs in the field. My broader clinical background is rooted in advanced, trauma-informed practices — including EMDR, IFS, and ISTDP — approaches that share a common orientation: that lasting change happens not through insight alone, but through the healing of early wounds within the context of a genuine therapeutic relationship.

How I Work

I rely heavily on AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) and IFS (Internal Family Systems) in integration work, and the fit is not incidental. AEDP is built around close, moment-to-moment tracking of emotional experience — staying near the body, following what's alive, helping emotions move through to completion rather than getting stuck. Psychedelic experiences often generate exactly the kind of intense affective material that AEDP is designed to work with: grief that finally has room to move, fear that can be met rather than managed, joy or connection that the nervous system has never had permission to fully embrace.

IFS is particularly well suited to integration because psychedelic experiences so often surface parts — distinct voices, images, or aspects of the self carrying specific emotions, beliefs, or memories. What emerges in the experience frequently speaks in the language of parts, and IFS provides a framework for meeting those parts with genuine curiosity rather than trying to explain them away. Together they create a rigorous container for the complexity that psychedelic experiences tend to surface. AEDP tracks what's emotionally alive in the moment; IFS makes sense of the conflicting voices and impulses that emerge.

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is currently the only legally available psychedelic therapy in the United States, with a meaningful evidence base for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and anxiety.

The quality of the experience varies considerably. At many ketamine clinics, the process is largely medical — you receive the medicine, often alone, checked periodically for blood pressure, and that's the extent of it. You enter a strange internal landscape, have an experience you may not have language for, and then go home. Without a framework for making sense of what happened, most people simply move on — or try to work through it alone — and the experience gradually becomes just a memory. The therapeutic potential of ketamine comes not just from the medicine but from the window of heightened neuroplasticity it opens, a period in which the brain is unusually receptive to new patterns. Without intentional preparation and integration work, that window closes and most of what it offered goes unrealized.

I work with you as the integration therapist, before and after the ketamine session with clear intention and focus. I typically schedule a follow-up session within 24 to 48 hours of your ketamine treatment, when the window of neuroplasticity is still open and the experience is still close enough to work with directly. That timing is intentional — some of the most meaningful therapeutic work happens in that period. If you're considering KAP, I can help you assess whether it's clinically appropriate, identify reputable prescribers, and structure the surrounding work to make full use of what the medicine offers.

Working Together

Whether you're preparing for a psychedelic experience, processing something that's already happened, or exploring ketamine-assisted therapy, I work with clients in person in McLean, Virginia and via telehealth throughout Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.

My work is strictly within legal and ethical bounds — preparation and integration support for people approaching these experiences thoughtfully. I don't prescribe or provide substances of any kind.

If you'd like to explore whether this is the right fit, I offer a free initial consultation.

Providing in-person Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Integration Therapy in McLean, VA, and via telehealth across Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland.
In-person sessions are held at 1491 Chain Bridge Rd #302, McLean, VA 22101