Making Play Safe Again: Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy with Traumatized Autistic Adults

Abstract

Autistic individuals are more susceptible to trauma due to higher baseline anxiety and overwhelm; poorer episodic memory; and the frequent lack of a sense of community, safety, and belonging that are both protective and needed to heal from trauma. Furthermore, many autistic adults have adopted a false self to get by in a neurotypical world and are often cut off from their affective, embodied experience and/or struggle to put it into words. Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) creates a dream-like, transitional space, in which autistic adults can more safely regress and facilitates access to somatic, visual, sensory, and affective aspects of the trauma, which are then available for meaning making with the facilitation of a mentalizing therapist. This process is not about uncovering forgotten or suppressed memories but, rather, about creating the conditions in which autistic people can reconnect with their minds in a way that allows new representations of experience to take shape, facilitating the transformation of past traumas into narratives that can be explored and integrated. This process with the therapist, in turn, makes new forms of relating imaginable and knowable, when such possibilities have been foreclosed by trauma and social ostracization.