WOW, Beauties! I feel incredibly grateful and honored to have received such an outpouring of love and support in response to yesterday’s LoveLetter.
It’s made me realize that I’m truly not alone on this journey.
And I hope it has helped you realize that you’re not alone either.
Thank you for being such an amazing community of sisterhood and support for me and each other, as we continue down the path of vulnerability and healing.
This is even more proof that there is absolutely nothing that women cannot accomplish when we come together and lift each other up.
Your responses also made me realize that I just can’t wait another week to tell you the rest of this story!!
So I’m back today with a special edition of The LoveLetter and Part 2 of my latest healing journey!
However, I need to first call out a trigger warning: I am about to go into some pretty rough stuff – not graphically, but certainly about situations that could be triggering for some of you. Please take it slow and be easy on yourself.
Now, where were we… Oh, yes! I had finally admitted that I needed additional support to treat my PTSD from having been married to a sex addict, and from having experienced childhood sexual abuse.
I also needed help processing the experience of my oldest son being hospitalized twice in 2020 for suicidal ideation. This is something I have never shared publicly before because it is so deeply personal, and because I want to respect that it is really his story to share – not mine.
I am choosing to talk about it now because it was really pivotal to my decision to do ketamine therapy.
Around the time I was admitting to myself that I needed additional therapeutic support, I connected with Angie Heijl, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago.
I ended up sharing with her what had happened with my son, and she told me that ketamine has been successful at treating suicidal ideation. She also shared with me that she had received ketamine treatments herself, to treat both PTSD and trauma.
After talking with Angie, who is such a warm, compassionate, and earnest person, my intuition told me that maybe ketamine treatment was the support that I needed too.
The use of psychedelics to treat PTSD had been on my radar for a few years, but I seriously never thought I would have the nerve.
I HATE TAKING DRUGS OF ANY KIND.
I am not one of those people who take drugs, start to feel weird, and think, “This is cool!”
I am one of those people who take an allergy pill, start to feel weird, and think, “What the f*ck is happening?! Am I going to feel like this forever??”
Laugh all you want but I know that more than one of you out there knows exactly what I’m talking about. Listen, I was an alcoholic, and not a drug addict, for a reason!
But the timing of talking with Angie, and the way that our lives intersected at that very point… my intuition radar was going off, and it was telling me:
IT’S TIME TO START TAKING DRUGS.
Given my history of being resistant to taking drugs, I was understandably feeling a bit skeptical about going down this path. But then I consulted with my therapist, my psychiatrist, my functional doctor, and my spiritual director.
And they all had the same message: GO FOR IT.
So then I spent several weeks researching local ketamine clinics here in Austin. I met with and interviewed a number of them. I learned about all the different ways that the drug can be administered and monitored. I decided that I wanted a therapist present the entire time during my sessions.
I chose my clinic, my therapist, and scheduled my first session…eek!!
Now all I had to do was wait patiently and get through the holidays.
I put my writing aside for the time being, and the countdown to January 3, 2022, began.
Alrighty – there’s the setup! The what, when, where, and how.
I’ll be back tomorrow to start walking through the experience of my first two sessions, and I promise to share in as much descriptive detail as I can muster.
And I’ll leave you with this… I feel like something very old and dark is in the process of being pried loose from me.
I feel a softness and a surrender inside my skin that is new and foreign to me.
I have tapped into my own atomically innate power to fight off the dark when it wants to close in on me.
I have witnessed my own grandness in a glory of red light bodies… and it is good.
More tomorrow…
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
~ Wayne Dyer