Embodied Therapy and Healing Arts

03/19/2026

03/19/2026

How Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Supports Trauma Healing

Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) is gaining attention not just because it can reduce symptoms, but because of how it may support core mechanisms of trauma healing.
When combined with skilled therapy and integration, KAP can help create conditions where the nervous system is able to:
• stay present with difficult experience
• access and process implicit material
• update long-held emotional learnings
• experience new possibilities of self and connection
To understand why this matters, we have to understand how trauma actually lives in the system.
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Trauma Is Stored as Prediction, Not Just Memory
Trauma is not just something that happened in the past.
It becomes encoded as predictions about the future:
• “This emotion will overwhelm me.”
• “If I need someone, I will be alone.”
• “My body is not safe.”
• “There is something wrong with me.”
These are not just thoughts—they are implicit, embodied expectations that shape how we experience the present moment.
This is why insight alone often doesn’t create change.
The nervous system is still organized around old learning.
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What Creates Change: Prediction Error
One of the primary ways trauma can heal is through something called prediction error.
This happens when the nervous system experiences something that contradicts what it expects.
For example:
• Feeling grief and discovering it is tolerable
• Being vulnerable and experiencing support instead of rejection
• Noticing a body sensation and realizing it is not dangerous
When this occurs, the brain has the opportunity to update the original learning.
This process is closely tied to memory reconsolidation—a mechanism through which emotional memories can actually change, not just be managed.
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How KAP Creates the Conditions for Change
Ketamine appears to support several key processes that make this kind of change more possible.
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1. Emotional Containment
Many people in KAP report being able to experience difficult emotions with:
• more space
• more observer awareness
• less overwhelm
Instead of being flooded or shutting down, there is often a sense of:
“I can feel this… and stay with it.”
This supports dual awareness—the ability to be in the experience while also observing it.
This is a critical foundation for trauma processing.
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2. Access to Implicit Material
Trauma is often stored outside of conscious awareness in:
• body sensations
• emotional states
• imagery
• implicit memory
KAP can increase access to this material, allowing experiences that were previously out of reach to come into awareness.
This may include:
• preverbal experiences
• somatic activation
• symbolic or narrative imagery
This creates the opportunity for the system to process what was previously unprocessed.
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3. Softening of Defensive Patterns
Ketamine often reduces rigid defensive responses such as:
• hypervigilance
• emotional numbing
• excessive control
• cognitive over-organization
With these defenses softened, the nervous system may be more able to:
• feel
• respond
• allow experience to unfold
This does not remove protection—it creates flexibility.
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4. Increased Neuroplasticity
Ketamine rapidly increases neuroplasticity, meaning the brain becomes more capable of forming new connections.
During this window:
• new associations can form
• new emotional experiences can be encoded
• old patterns may become more modifiable
This creates a time-sensitive opportunity for therapeutic work.
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5. Loosening of the Default Mode Network (DMN)
The Default Mode Network is involved in:
• self-identity
• autobiographical narrative
• repetitive self-referential thinking
In trauma, this network can become rigid, reinforcing identity-level beliefs such as:
• “I am not safe”
• “I am too much”
• “I am not enough”
Ketamine appears to temporarily reduce activity in this network, allowing:
• less attachment to rigid identity narratives
• more flexibility in how one experiences the self
• the possibility of seeing oneself differently
Many people describe this as:
“I wasn’t stuck in my story.”
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6. Emotional and Somatic Completion
Trauma often leaves the nervous system with unfinished responses.
These might include:
• unexpressed grief
• inhibited protective impulses
• incomplete fight/flight responses
When these emerge in a supported KAP session, there is an opportunity for them to move through and resolve, rather than remain stuck.
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7. Creating Prediction Error
Perhaps most importantly, KAP can create conditions where new experiences contradict old expectations.
For example:
• feeling an emotion that was expected to be overwhelming—and discovering it is tolerable
• expressing vulnerability—and being met with attunement
• noticing a sensation—and realizing it is not dangerous
These moments allow the nervous system to begin updating its core predictions.
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8. Supporting Memory Reconsolidation
When an old emotional learning is activated and paired with a new experience, the brain may enter a process known as memory reconsolidation.
This is one of the few mechanisms through which:
• emotional memories can be updated
• implicit learnings can change
• lasting transformation can occur
KAP may support this process by:
• activating emotional memory
• increasing plasticity
• reducing defensive interference
• allowing new experiences to occur
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Why Integration Is Essential
Ketamine creates a window of possibility—but it is temporary.
Without integration, experiences may remain:
• powerful but fleeting
• meaningful but not embodied
• insightful but not fully integrated
Integration helps translate the experience into:
• new patterns
• new meanings
• new ways of being
This is where change becomes sustainable.
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The Bottom Line
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is not just about symptom relief.
It may support the deeper processes required for trauma healing by helping the nervous system:
• stay with experience
• access what was previously out of reach
• soften rigid patterns
• experience something different
• update old emotional learnings
Healing does not happen because we understand what happened.
It happens when the nervous system begins to experience:
something new, something safe, something different
—and over time, begins to believe it.

03/17/2026

When psychic experience cannot be symbolized, the body often becomes the stage upon which the psyche expresses itself. What cannot yet be spoken, imagined, or consciously held may be carried somatically. In this sense, the body manifests what the psyche cannot yet symbolise.

A true symbol emerges when conscious understanding meets something unknown or unconscious. It allows psychic energy to move and transform. When symbolic life is blocked, however, this transformative process is interrupted. Psychic energy that cannot move through symbol, image, dream, or imagination may instead appear in the body - as tension, illness, fatigue, or unexplained symptoms.

Marion Woodman wrote how the body often carries the weight of psychic realities that have not yet found symbolic expression. Symptoms are not merely pathologies but meaningful communications from the psyche. The body ‘speaks’ when the symbolic function is compromised. In many cases, compulsions, addictions, or physical suffering arise where the psyche longs for symbolic life but has been deprived of it.

Tina Stromsted suggests that the body itself is imaginal - that sensations, gestures, and movements are forms of symbolic language. When individuals reconnect with the body through movement, breath, and awareness, symbolic images often emerge spontaneously. In this way, the body can become the gateway back to symbolic life.

From this perspective, the task is not simply to eliminate symptoms but to listen to them. Symptoms may represent psychic energy seeking transformation. When we engage dreams, images, active imagination, or embodied awareness, the energy held in the body can gradually take symbolic form and become available for psychological development.

The symbolic life is therefore essential to psychic health: through symbols the psyche metabolises experience, allowing the tension between conscious and unconscious to be held creatively rather than somatically. In this way, the symbol transforms psychic energy and releases the body from carrying alone what belongs to the whole psyche.

~ Written by Denise Grobbelaar, , Jungian Analyst

Image credit: Frida Kahlo, The Wounded Deer (1946)

References:
- Stromsted, T. (2025). Soul's body: Active imagination, authentic movement, & embodiment in psychotherapy. Routledge.
- Woodman, M. (1982). Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride. Toronto: Inner City Books

03/15/2026

Why calming the nervous system can be counterproductive to healing.

Many people assume that the goal of trauma healing is to calm the nervous system.
If anxiety goes away…
if the body relaxes…
if the symptoms decrease…
then healing must be happening.
And those things are important.
But calming symptoms and changing the underlying pattern are not always the same thing.
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Trauma is often a prediction problem
When we experience trauma, the nervous system learns powerful predictions about the world.
These predictions aren’t just thoughts.
They become embedded in the body, emotions, and relational expectations.
For example, a nervous system might learn:
• Activation means danger
• If I express myself I will be rejected
• I have to stay vigilant to stay safe
• I am powerless
These predictions can persist long after the original experiences are over.
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How the brain updates emotional learning
The brain is constantly predicting what will happen next.
When something occurs that contradicts the brain’s prediction, the brain experiences what neuroscientists call prediction error.
Prediction error is one of the main mechanisms through which emotional learning updates.
In other words:
The brain changes when reality contradicts what it expected.
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Why regulating away activation can limit change
Many therapeutic approaches focus primarily on reducing symptoms.
And symptom relief can be very important.
But if activation is always removed immediately, the nervous system may never learn something new.
For example, if someone believes:
“Activation means danger”
and therapy always tries to eliminate activation as quickly as possible, the nervous system never experiences the possibility that:
“I can feel activation and still be safe.”
Without that experience, the original prediction may remain unchanged.
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Completion and integration
In somatic trauma therapies, we often talk about completion.
Completion refers to allowing the body to finish responses that were interrupted during threat.
This can include things like:
• fight or flight responses completing
• orienting responses finishing
• boundaries becoming possible in the body
When the nervous system is able to complete these processes safely, it often reorganizes.
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Emotional completion
In relational trauma work, change can also happen through emotional completion.
This might involve:
• expressing anger that was previously suppressed
• grieving losses that were never fully processed
• reclaiming agency
• experiencing authentic connection
These experiences update relational expectations and self-perception.
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Containment makes change possible
For these processes to occur safely, the nervous system also needs containment.
Containment is the capacity to stay present with difficult emotions or sensations without becoming overwhelmed.
Without containment, activation can feel too threatening for the nervous system to integrate.
Developing this capacity is an important part of trauma healing.
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Different therapies support different parts of the process
Many trauma therapies contribute to these processes in different ways.
Somatic Experiencing (SE) works directly with the nervous system, helping the body track activation and complete defensive responses.
NARM (NeuroAffective Relational Model) focuses on developmental trauma, exploring identity patterns, shame, relational expectations, and agency. In NARM, regulation often occurs through what Laurence Heller calls psychobiological shifts.
Implicit Psychotherapy works with implicit emotional learning and procedural memory, helping the brain update emotional expectations about self and others.
iRest Yoga Nidra cultivates witnessing awareness — the ability to observe thoughts, emotions, and sensations without becoming overwhelmed by them. Builds window of tolerance or capacity for experiencing challenging internal experiences.
Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga restores embodied choice and agency through movement.
The Safe and Sound Protocol helps regulate the nervous system by supporting the ventral vagal social engagement system.
When the nervous system shifts toward safety:
• the body becomes better able to contain emotion without overwhelm
• defensive states like hypervigilance and shutdown can soften
• clients may become more open to connection, curiosity, and new experiences
This can create conditions where the nervous system begins to update old threat predictions and experience greater regulation and relational safety.
The Rest and Restore Protocol focuses on supporting the nervous system’s restorative and regulatory capacities.
By helping reduce chronic sympathetic activation, it may support:
• deeper physiological settling and recovery
• improved capacity to process emotion and experience
• greater access to parasympathetic regulation
When the body has more access to restorative states, it becomes easier for new experiences of safety, regulation, and connection to take hold.

And Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy can temporarily loosen rigid emotional patterns, allowing new insights and experiences to integrate.
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Healing means updating the nervous system’s predictions
Although these approaches differ, they share an important principle.
Healing happens when the nervous system experiences something different than what trauma predicted.
Activation occurs — but safety is present.
Emotion arises — but connection remains.
Authentic expression happens — and rejection does not follow, as was predicted.
They may help:
• increase nervous system safety and regulation
• soften rigid defensive patterns
• allow difficult emotions to be experienced without overwhelm
• create new experiences of connection, safety, and support

Over time, these experiences allow the brain and body to update the predictions that trauma once created and move toward greater flexibility and resilience.
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Trauma creates rigid expectations about the world.
Healing gently teaches the nervous system that those predictions may no longer be true.
None of this can happen if activation or dysregulation is continuously resourced/managed/calmed away before it can be worked with successfully.
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✨ Reflection:
What predictions do you think your nervous system learned earlier in life?
What or who supports you to stay present when faced with emotional or physiological dysregulation?

02/26/2026

💥💥💥STARTS MONDAY💥💥💥

Still some spaces available!

iRest Yoga Nidra 6 week series
Mondays 7:00 Beginning March 2nd
Location: 320 Delaware, Ste 1, Bartlesville
To register: Email Fay@Therapy-Embodied.com
Make payment of $175 to -ONeill on Venmo. QR code in flyer.
Space is limited!

Based on the ancient teachings of meditation, iRest is an evidence-based transformative practice that leads to psychological, physical, and spiritual healing and well-being. Its practice is integrative as it heals the various unresolved issues and traumas that are present in your body and mind, and restorative as it enables you to recognize your innate peace of mind that is always present amidst all changing circumstances of life. iRest provides you with tools to help you relax deeply, release stress, increase resiliency, improve your interpersonal relationships and provide you with greater mastery and control in your life. iRest nourishes noble qualities such as joy, peacefulness, empathy, forgiveness, patience, and lovingkindness toward yourself and others.

People who practice iRest report:
Reduced depression, fear, and anxiety
Improved interpersonal relations
Reduced chronic and acute pain
Greater ability to relax and enjoy life
Reduced insomnia and levels of stress
Increased inner peace and well-being
Greater capacity to dis-identify from and mindfully observe internal experiences including emotions, sensations, and thoughts.

01/30/2026

Welcome new Embodied followers!

Did you know I also have a website that lists the array of services and practices I offer, events, a shop with fun mental health inspired products, a blog, and resources? Check it out below!

Are you ready to experience true aliveness and come home to your Self? Rumi says that “what you seek is seeking you.” I would be honored to guide you on your journey inward and onward. Through trauma, including environmental and attachment failures, we have lost touch with our connection to the ...

01/26/2026

✨✨✨✨TCTSY 6 week series✨✨✨✨

Thursdays 6:00 Beginning March 5th
Location: 320 Delaware, Ste 1, Bartlesville
To register: Email Fay@Therapy-Embodied.com
Make payment of $175 to -ONeill on Venmo. QR code in flyer.
Space is limited!

01/26/2026

💥💥💥Spots are filling up! 💥💥💥

iRest Yoga Nidra 6 week series
Mondays 7:00 Beginning March 2nd
Location: 320 Delaware, Ste 1, Bartlesville
To register: Email Fay@Therapy-Embodied.com
Make payment of $175 to -ONeill on Venmo. QR code in flyer.
Space is limited!

Based on the ancient teachings of meditation, iRest is an evidence-based transformative practice that leads to psychological, physical, and spiritual healing and well-being. Its practice is integrative as it heals the various unresolved issues and traumas that are present in your body and mind, and restorative as it enables you to recognize your innate peace of mind that is always present amidst all changing circumstances of life. iRest provides you with tools to help you relax deeply, release stress, increase resiliency, improve your interpersonal relationships and provide you with greater mastery and control in your life. iRest nourishes noble qualities such as joy, peacefulness, empathy, forgiveness, patience, and lovingkindness toward yourself and others.

People who practice iRest report:
Reduced depression, fear, and anxiety
Improved interpersonal relations
Reduced chronic and acute pain
Greater ability to relax and enjoy life
Reduced insomnia and levels of stress
Increased inner peace and well-being
Greater capacity to dis-identify from and mindfully observe internal experiences including emotions, sensations, and thoughtsg ip

01/13/2026

Here it is!
TCTSY 6 week series
Thursdays 6:00 Beginning March 5th
Location: 320 Delaware, Ste 1, Bartlesville
To register: Email Fay@Therapy-Embodied.com
Make payment of $175 to -ONeill on Venmo. QR code in flyer.
Space is limited!

01/13/2026

Here it is!
iRest Yoga Nidra 6 week series
Mondays 7:00 Beginning March 2nd
Location: 320 Delaware, Ste 1, Bartlesville
To register: Email Fay@Therapy-Embodied.com
Make payment of $175 to -ONeill on Venmo. QR code in flyer.
Space is limited!

Based on the ancient teachings of meditation, iRest is an evidence-based transformative practice that leads to psychological, physical, and spiritual healing and well-being. Its practice is integrative as it heals the various unresolved issues and traumas that are present in your body and mind, and restorative as it enables you to recognize your innate peace of mind that is always present amidst all changing circumstances of life. iRest provides you with tools to help you relax deeply, release stress, increase resiliency, improve your interpersonal relationships and provide you with greater mastery and control in your life. iRest nourishes noble qualities such as joy, peacefulness, empathy, forgiveness, patience, and lovingkindness toward yourself and others.

People who practice iRest report:
Reduced depression, fear, and anxiety
Improved interpersonal relations
Reduced chronic and acute pain
Greater ability to relax and enjoy life
Reduced insomnia and levels of stress
Increased inner peace and well-being
Greater capacity to dis-identify from and mindfully observe internal experiences including emotions, sensations, and thoughts

12/30/2025

Did you know that Embodied offers the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP)—a listening therapy developed by Dr. Stephen Porges and grounded in Polyvagal Theory? This process helps build the foundation for awareness, embodiment, and resilience.

The SSP is designed to support nervous system regulation, emotional resilience, sensory and auditory processing, and a felt sense of safety, using specially filtered music that stimulates the vagus nerve through the auditory system. It can be a helpful support for those experiencing anxiety, trauma, sensory sensitivities, emotional dysregulation, difficulty engaging socially, and chronic stress and can improve the effectiveness of other therapies.

The SSP may be helpful in reducing symptoms and supporting overall health and resiliency for people seeking support for:
-Trauma history
-Depression and anxiety
-Autism, hyperactivity, and attention
-Chronic pain
-Chronic health conditions
-Sensory and auditory processing
-And more

Nervous system regulation is essential for our overall well-being. The Autonomic Nervous System regulates essential bodily functions and when we are dysregulated it can impact our breathing, sleep, mental clarity, digestion, concentration, social connection, and emotional regulation, and virtually every aspect of our lives and relationships. Benefits of a regulation nervous system include:

-Improved response to stress
-Ability to access higher learning and cognition
-More social connection and deeper relationships

It is backed by decades of research and proven in a wide range of clinical studies, including clinical trials involving children and adults with autism.

Embodied will be offering the SSP in conjunction with therapy or as a separate stand-alone program. It includes 5 hours of supervised listening time as well as independent listening time of the unfiltered pathway and lightly filtered music as maintenance after the Core pathway has been completed. Reach out with any further questions, for a brochure, or a consultation. You can also visit

Think, feel, and connect better through nervous system regulation.