Katy: Jennifer, thank you so much for being here. I can’t wait to get into this discussion and pick your brain, selfishly, about a lot of these things. Why don’t you tell us a little more about yourself and the work you do as a therapist?

Jennifer: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here. My name is Jennifer. I’m a licensed clinical social worker and supervisor, and I’m also a psychedelic-assisted therapy provider. I own a group practice in Houston, Texas, and we specialize in treating trauma and eating disorders, and the intersection of the two, through out-of-the-box therapies. Not your traditional talk therapy, but a lot of EMDR, ketamine-assisted therapy, psychedelic integration, and yoga. We’re trying to take a different approach than what a lot of people are used to, and what a lot of people have found not to be so helpful.

Katy: Absolutely. I’ve seen that so much. For some people, talk therapy and skills only get them so far, and they need something more or something different to fully experience the healing they’re looking for.

Jennifer: Yes.

Katy: I want to ask you so many questions about all of that and how it works. But I want to start with the trauma piece, because you said something specific in your intake form before we scheduled this recording. You said the skills are there, but the trauma underneath was never addressed. Tell me more about what you meant. I think it relates to why you offer these other forms of therapy.

Jennifer: My earlier work was in inpatient psychiatric care and residential care, with a lot of trauma and eating disorders. What I saw was that people would get better, but they would come back.

I believe higher levels of care are necessary for a lot of people, and they help a lot of people, but they only go so far. They help people gain insight, recognize triggers, and develop good coping skills: when you think this, how can we challenge that thought? Or what could you do to soothe yourself?

That gives some immediate relief. But when people are going about life and life is life-ing, all of that deeper stuff that didn’t get addressed starts to surface. You can cope with it, but eventually that gets really tiring, and people get frustrated. They say, “I’m trying really hard, but it’s this uphill battle.”

I compare it to an EMDR analogy about cleaning and healing a wound. If you get a cut on your skin, the coping skills are like changing the bandage, cleaning it, watching it, and hoping it’s healing and heading in the right direction. But a lot of times there’s some dirt really deep in there, and it doesn’t fully heal. It keeps irritating you, or it gets infected. That’s when we need to open up the wound, even though that can be painful, and do a real deep clean so that we heal it beneath the surface. Hopefully it fully heals. It may leave a scar, but it’s not constantly resurfacing and irritating you.

Katy: I’m cracking up because I use that analogy all the time. You can slap a Band-Aid on it, but if you never get it all the way cleaned out, it can’t heal over.

Jennifer: Right. And that dirt beneath the surface, for a lot of people, is lifelong wounds that they’ve carried. Not everybody identifies them as trauma, which we can talk about. But that’s what we aim to get at in our work with clients.

Katy: I think this is so parallel for eating disorder recovery, and even for people who don’t have that in their story but are trying to heal their relationship with food. We talk a lot here about intuitive eating and making peace with food. You can learn all of those skills. You can learn the 10 principles of intuitive eating. But if you never address the underlying reasons why your relationship with food got messed up in the first place, it tends to continue to be an issue.

You used the word trauma, and for a lot of us it conjures images of terrible things happening, but there’s so much more to it. How do you explain trauma to people?

Jennifer: A lot of people think trauma only means what we call big-T traumas: a car accident, combat, an assault. But trauma is anything that overwhelms the nervous system and a person’s ability to cope in that moment.

Think about children, who can’t care for themselves and need attachment figures to give them safety, security, and love. Even just the absence of predictability and security, being in a chaotic environment or one where people weren’t recognizing your emotions and needs, really affects a person over time.

Trauma also isn’t just the event. It’s what happens after the event. We all go through hard things in life. We can’t make it through without facing hard times. The difference is whether there are people there afterward to support us, love us, and care for us, so that we know we matter and can ask for help. Two people could experience the same thing. One has a lot of support and care afterward, and walks away learning, “I can go through hard things, I can ask for help, I’m going to be loved and cared for.” Another goes through the same thing with no support system and walks away learning, “I’m alone. The world isn’t safe. I can’t trust people.” That’s what really makes the difference.

Katy: That makes tons of sense. In your work, how does trauma show up in a person’s relationship with food or with their body, even if they wouldn’t say, “Yes, I’ve experienced trauma,” or don’t conceptualize it that way?

Jennifer: In so many different ways. First, I rarely think we’re just dealing with a food issue. I’ve seen it, but it’s rare. The behaviors around food, dieting, or exercise serve a purpose, and we have to figure out what that purpose is. You could ask someone, “What if tomorrow you no longer had access to dieting? It just wasn’t an option. Then what?”

Then see what their answer is. If they say, “I don’t think my partner would be attracted to me anymore,” or “Nobody would want to be around me,” or “I wouldn’t be good enough,” that’s a belief. We can usually trace that belief back to big life experiences, often in the context of a relationship. When in your life did you learn that you’re not worthy of love, or that you have to be perfect in order for someone to care for you?

It can also show up because people, understandably, are trying to escape painful emotions connected to trauma or just to life: shame, emptiness, regret, loss. Food and dieting can become a nice distraction. If you’re so busy dieting, tracking, counting, and obsessing, it doesn’t leave a lot of space for those things to surface.

We can also look at someone who grew up in a house where they were constantly criticized, or needed to be perfect, or were bullied for their appearance. If I’m dieting and keeping myself small, I’m not a target, or maybe I finally earn praise and acceptance. And unfortunately, a lot of times that’s reinforced.

Katy: For sure. By the world all around us. Are there signs or indicators that someone is dealing with a trauma response in their relationship with food? If somebody is wondering, “Is trauma part of why I have these struggles?” and they’ve never done trauma-specific therapy, how would they know?

Jennifer: I would think about those messages. What are the beliefs that might be connected to this behavior? Sometimes if you can find that fear or belief, and you work with someone, because a lot of times we need someone else’s help, you can trace it back.

I think it helps to open our minds to the idea that we don’t need a trauma to meet certain criteria. We can remove the word trauma, which a lot of people get hung up on, and just try to understand what happened that helped you form these beliefs that then require you to change yourself.

Katy: That makes so much sense. Let’s do a quick example. Say I identify the belief that I must be thinner in order to be accepted or loved by somebody else. How would you work with that?

Jennifer: I would want to explore that person’s history with love and acceptance. If we look back throughout your life, and it might not be in childhood, it could be in romantic relationships as an adult, or in the workplace, where are the times you felt like you weren’t enough?

Katy: This is so powerful, because when we step away from fixating on how to control the food or change your body, and start connecting these dots, it’s powerful to realize this has been about so much more all along.

Jennifer: Yes.

Katy: One thing I see a lot is that when people step away from restricting, dieting, bingeing, or using food to stuff down their emotions, it’s almost like a volcano erupts, and everything they’ve been avoiding comes rushing in. What’s happening there? What do we do with that?

Jennifer: Those behaviors have likely been a way to protect themselves, to check out and avoid really difficult emotions. You can think about it the same way someone might use substances to numb out or find relief they’re desperate for. Once you no longer have that strategy, all of those emotions come to the surface. That’s where skills work is very important, because you have to replace that strategy with something to get you through while you do the deeper work.

Katy: When you say skills work, can you explain what you mean?

Jennifer: How can you regulate yourself when you feel overwhelmed or have a rush of emotion, whether it’s anxiety, shame, or sadness? How can you soothe yourself? But I’d even challenge that a bit. What’s more important is learning to sit with the emotion and know that it will come and it will go, and you don’t have to attach to it. You can let it be and hear the message it’s trying to send you. Eventually, you can do something soothing. But it’s not necessarily about getting rid of the emotions or escaping them. It’s about being able to sit, breathe, ground yourself, and know that you can be with this emotion and that it will pass.

Katy: To be able to tolerate it. It reminds me of when I asked my therapist about feeling my feelings. I said, “But how? What am I supposed to do?” And she said, “Katy, this is part of the problem. You don’t have to do anything.” I love that.

Jennifer: Yes. We’re human beings, not human doings. I say that a lot. Can we just learn to be? I think that’s really hard in the world these days, for many reasons. We don’t have a lot of time and space to just be.

Katy: Absolutely. When someone feels that their body or food is their enemy, like they’re at war with it, and has felt that way forever, do you have thoughts on how they might start building trust and feeling comfortable within themselves?

Jennifer: It truly is a relationship. Trust needs to be rebuilt both ways. We have to rebuild our relationship with our body and our trust in it, and our body also has to learn to trust us again after chronic dieting or whatever’s been going on.

There are different approaches. I’m happy to go into my experience with psychedelic therapy and how it can be helpful in that way. But for people who don’t want to take that road, I really love yoga. It teaches people to sit, be, and connect with their body in small, supported doses. How can you start to tune into your body, listen to what it’s telling you, and respond without punishment, forcing, or controlling, but with patience and compassion? It takes a lot of time to disrupt the relationship we have with our body, and a lot of time to rebuild it. That’s one way, and I’m happy to talk more about the psychedelic component as well.

Katy: Definitely, let’s get into that. Some people may not know what you mean when you say psychedelic. They may be thinking, “Wait, is she going to tell us to go use drugs?” So explain psychedelic therapy. You also touched on EMDR earlier, so let’s talk about that too.

Jennifer: Psychedelic therapy wouldn’t have been called that, but these are practices that many communities have used for thousands of years as a way to heal, often together. Think of psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, or ayahuasca, these plant-based medicines. In the 50s and 60s there was also research being done with LSD and psilocybin, and a lot of really promising work with people recovering from alcoholism, addiction, and depression.

Eventually all of that got shut down for a number of political reasons we could spend a whole podcast on. Now, when people hear psychedelics, they sometimes think it’s scary and illegal. But there are actually lots of legal routes in the US now. Here in Texas, the only legal route right now is ketamine-assisted psychotherapy.

Essentially, psychedelic-assisted therapy uses medicines that can, first, create lots of neuroplasticity in the brain, meaning new connections and new pathways, and second, quiet our default mode network. You can think of the default mode network as where our ego lives, and where we can get stuck in ruminations or rigid beliefs about ourselves or the world. In some people who struggle with things like eating disorders, depression, or OCD, the default mode network takes over. They get really stuck, and it’s hard to break out of these patterns, because the other networks in their brain don’t have as much room to communicate.

What psychedelics do well is temporarily quiet that default mode network and allow other parts of the brain to start communicating. They lower people’s defenses so they can access material that may have been pushed down.

All of that, together with a safe, supportive space and a therapist, can allow people to have aha moments or shifts in perspective. Maybe they’ve heard something before and know it should be true. I know I should be nicer to myself. I know I should have compassion for myself. But it never really clicked. Then they have these experiences and they can see it, experience it, embody it, and believe it in a different way.

Katy: Do you have any examples of clients you’ve done this with, confidentially of course? Or an example from your own experience, of a shift that happened, so a person can envision what this might look like for them?

Jennifer: Going back to rebuilding trust and relationship with the body, that’s one place I’ve seen it, and I can speak to it from personal experience as well. We’re told so often, especially when trying to get help for chronic dieting, to practice self-compassion, or to think about all the great things our body does for us and name them. People say, “Yes, I can go through the exercise,” but it doesn’t really land.

Katy: They get it intellectually, but they don’t feel it.

Jennifer: Right. Those are some of the biggest shifts I’ve seen: people come out of an experience and say, “Whoa, I could see my body and the things it’s been through, and actually feel compassion for it,” in a way they couldn’t through hearing it or through traditional talk therapy. That’s one example that stands out.

Katy: Now the very practical part of me. Say someone thinks, “I feel like I need this, or I’d want to try this.” How does it actually work? What does a session look like, and how many sessions do you need?

Jennifer: It depends on the medicine. First, you need a medical evaluation. That’s how it all starts.

Katy: And let’s be clear, we’re not telling people to go get some mushrooms or some ketamine and do it in your bedroom. There are protocols you need to work with.

Jennifer: Right. The experience you can have with recreational use is not the same as in a safe, supported space where you’ve had medical clearance and have someone trained sitting with you. That allows you to surrender to the medicine and the process and really turn inward. Recreationally, people can have some really difficult experiences. You can have difficult experiences in therapy with the medicine too, but it starts with a medical intake and evaluation. You want to make sure you don’t have a history of psychosis. You also want to make sure you’re not pregnant. With ketamine specifically, we have to look at things like uncontrolled high blood pressure. A doctor would make sure that whatever medicine it is, is safe for you. Some medications you’re taking might need to be adjusted.

Then you’d have an intake with a trained psychedelic-assisted therapy provider to make sure that psychologically you’re in the right space for it. If you’re not, you can start doing some of the prep work to get there eventually.

Every medicine is different. I can start with ketamine, which is a lovely place to start if people are curious. Instead of psilocybin, where you’re looking at five, six, or seven hours, you’re looking at a single hour. You’d have a series of maybe six to eight treatments, and we always have someone present in the room with the client.

A therapist checks in with you when you arrive. You might do some grounding exercises or meditation, or look at your intentions for the session. Then you have the medicine experience itself. Some people talk and share during it, and some go inward and have the journey. Often you wear an eye mask, and there’s music you’re not familiar with, so we’re allowing subconscious and unconscious material to surface. As you come out of the medicine, you start to process, share, and explore what came up with the therapist.

In between medicine sessions, regardless of the medicine, you want to be integrating with a professional. Whatever insights or aha moments you had during the experience, let’s make use of them, along with that neuroplasticity in the brain, and figure out how to translate them into your life for the long term.

Katy: Can you give some examples of how a person might integrate that?

Jennifer: Going back to rebuilding trust with the body: say someone’s aha moment related to having compassion for their body, and for some of the hard things that happened to it throughout their life. They realize, “That’s why I’ve been so mad at my body, or at war with it.” Then we look at practices to help you rebuild that relationship. Let’s have some yoga sessions where we work on tuning in with your body and not forcing or pushing it. What was that experience like? What challenges came up?

It could also look like EMDR. I use a lot of EMDR during integration. If you had aha moments about experiences your body went through, we can target those with EMDR and reprocess those memories.

Katy: Explain EMDR to us. What exactly are you doing?

Jennifer: EMDR is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which I always think is a really interesting name for a therapy. It uses bilateral stimulation. Traditionally that was eye movements, your eyes moving back and forth, which is thought to activate the right and left hemispheres of your brain in a way similar to rapid eye movement during sleep.

That’s the time in our sleep when our brain is busy processing and filing things away. It’s why, when you’re really upset about something, you hear the advice to “sleep on it.” When you wake up in the morning, you usually feel a little differently, or it’s less charged. EMDR uses that same idea.

Part of it is resourcing: we work with people on building the nervous system regulation skills they’ll need to address difficult memories. Then we open up a memory. We help people access all of the emotions, body sensations, and beliefs attached to it, and use bilateral stimulation, whether that’s eye movements, tapping, or headphones with alternating tones, while the therapist guides you through the memory.

The goal is that at the end of the process, the memory is still there, but a lot of people describe it as feeling further away. It doesn’t have the same charge. It feels like it’s in the past. It’s still a bad memory, but it’s not overwhelming.

Katy: So the goal is not to forget it or make it go away.

Jennifer: Right.

Katy: What makes someone a good candidate for ketamine, psychedelic therapy, or EMDR? How would a person know if they should consider it?

Jennifer: EMDR is a wonderful trauma treatment, one of the gold standard treatments for trauma. If someone knows they have trauma, it’s a great place to start. You do need to find a therapist who understands how to provide EMDR for complex trauma, the longstanding childhood relational and attachment trauma we talked about. That looks very different from EMDR for a single event, like a car accident. So I’d say find someone who can help you understand your trauma and what that looks like, and you can approach it through EMDR.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy and ketamine therapy are wonderful for anyone who wants to know themselves better, dig deeper, and do some self-exploration. They’re great for trauma, and also for treatment-resistant conditions. Going back to the default mode network and those patterns, people who have struggled with depression that hasn’t responded to traditional medications may find that ketamine and psychedelics work through different pathways. If someone hasn’t found relief from traditional treatments, I’d recommend looking into psychedelic therapy.

Katy: You also mentioned yoga as a way to start connecting with the body if someone doesn’t want to go the psychedelic route. Exercise and movement are complicated for a lot of my clients and listeners. For some it’s on again, off again: when they’re dieting they exercise, and when they’re off the bandwagon they don’t, so in their mind the two are paired. Some have a hard time backing off exercise, and it feels like an obligation. Others hear “yoga” and think, “What’s the point? It doesn’t even count. It’s not hard enough.” So how do you view yoga, and what’s the difference between trauma-informed yoga and the fitness version that’s more popular in our culture?

Jennifer: You can certainly find yoga classes that get your heart pumping. The idea of yoga is really nice because it helps you connect your breath with your body and move with your breath. But in some of those classes, I can’t even take a full breath between movements. I’m practically hyperventilating, and the last thing I want someone with trauma and anxiety to do is hyperventilate. In the therapy room we’re slowing it down. It’s not a fitness class.

Katy: It’s not meant to be a workout.

Jennifer: Right. You are working your muscles, flexibility, balance, and strength, so I don’t want to say that’s not the case. But when I’m using it with people, it’s more about slowing down, tuning into your body, and giving yourself permission to practice not giving it 110% all the time, to the point that you ignore your body’s cues and limits and punish or injure yourself.

Yoga also isn’t just about the asanas, or postures. It involves meditation, breath, and a lot of self-reflection, and trying to let go of our attachments. All of these things work really nicely with therapy and healing, and I think with psychedelics and consciousness too.

Katy: Are you doing yoga one-on-one in session with clients, or trauma-informed yoga classes? How does that work in your practice?

Jennifer: Both. I have groups specifically for people who have struggled with dieting or overexercise, and I also use it one-on-one with clients. I’ll use it before a ketamine therapy session, for example, or as a way to help people integrate.

Katy: That’s very cool. If someone wanted to experiment with yoga, where would you have them start, if they’ve never done it, or have only taken a class at a studio or the Y?

Jennifer: Many therapists incorporate yoga into their practice, so I’d look for some of those people, or get recommendations for a class that views yoga as a whole practice, not just fitness. You can also find a lot of great free videos on YouTube. If you’re intimidated to go to a class, or don’t want anyone to see you doing it, you can do it in the comfort of your own home. Pick a short 20- or 30-minute class. Look for something like trauma-informed yoga, yoga for relaxation, or yoga for stress.

Katy: I love that idea of it being a tool to connect with your body and listen to it. As I think about dieting and the world we live in, where we’re so distracted and so many of us walk around completely disconnected from our bodies, dieting itself forces you to override and dismiss what your body’s telling you. This is the opposite of that. I can see how it would be restorative and a good way to repair some of that.

Jennifer: Absolutely. Dieting forces us to override our body’s needs, messages, and cues, and it takes intentional work to get back in touch with them. Yoga is a great way to do that.

Katy: What’s one tiny micro practice we could do throughout an average day, without going to a session with a practitioner, to start feeling more present in our bodies?

Jennifer: Even just setting aside a couple of minutes to pause and be, and scan your body from head to toe. Notice: is there a part of my body that is calling to me right now? Is there something my body needs from me?

There are also great free resources on YouTube, and some apps, where you don’t have to commit to meditation. Meditation sounds scary to a lot of people, who say, “Oh my gosh, I can’t meditate.” But you can find three- or five-minute body scans and start there. It can be a very short practice, and I think it’s more important to be consistent than to sit down for an hour-long meditation. Just try five minutes a day.

Katy: I love that, because it feels so much more doable than sitting for half an hour with your thoughts. I’m always amazed when I do a body scan. I notice I’ve been holding tension or clenching somewhere, or sometimes that I have to pee or I’m thirsty.

Jennifer: Right. And just responding to those needs starts to rebuild that trust.

Katy: I love that. Is there anything else you want to leave people with? What’s an important takeaway from this conversation?

Jennifer: Let me think for a moment. I keep going back to what qualifies as trauma. A lot of people don’t feel worthy of seeking help because they think, “Nothing that bad happened to me,” or “Other people have it worse.” I want to say that we are all human, living this human experience that is inevitably filled with hurt and pain along the way. We don’t need to compare those experiences, and they don’t have to meet any criteria for us to be worthy of seeking help and support, whatever that looks like. If it looks like therapy, well, I’m a therapist, so I think everybody can benefit from it. But whatever that support looks like for you, try to let go of the labels and see yourself as a human who’s gone through human things and is worthy of support.

Katy: Absolutely. That’s so beautiful. Jennifer, where can people find you and connect with you if they’d like to learn more?

Jennifer: Our website is houstonhealingcollective.co, that’s .co, not .com. We serve all of Texas, and we also offer retreats throughout the year, so if you’re not local, you can check whether we have an upcoming one.

Katy: What happens at a retreat?

Jennifer: They’re all ketamine therapy retreats right now. We take that work into a group setting, similar to the way a lot of psilocybin or ayahuasca practices happen. Everyone is there together during the medicine journey. We do all of our preparation work together, a lot of psychoeducation, and we teach nervous system regulation skills. People integrate as a group. It’s really beautiful. People from all walks of life come together and find that they can relate, because there are others who struggle with the same things and understand. It’s some of my favorite work to do.

Katy: Very cool. I’ll put the links to all of that in our show notes so it’s easy to find. And if you live in Texas, specifically the Houston area, you should definitely get in touch and check it out. Jennifer, thank you so much for being here.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me.

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