Psychedelic Integration
The Institute for Substance-Assisted Therapy offers support with integration. Psychedelic integration means that a person can process their experience with psychoactive substances in such a way that they find a place in their reality and self-image that enables them to live with themselves, society, and the environment, that the healing potential is recognized, and that the associated, sometimes profound, insights can be implemented in everyday life.
Psychedelic integration is not only indicated when people can no longer cope with themselves after a substance use experience (see Spiritual Emergency Support). There are also cases in which someone, without their functioning being impaired, has an experience they don’t understand at all. Sometimes such an experience is dismissed: This time it was just nonsense or meaningless. However, upon closer examination with trained support, it may be possible to recognize meaning or a deeper message in it. You can compare it to a dream: Some dreams we don’t understand. And sometimes, when we talk to someone who understands dream interpretation, it becomes clear what the dream is trying to tell us.
Psychedelic integration can also mean that a person simply wants therapeutic support in implementing the experience into everyday life after a substance-assisted experience. Whether a substance-assisted experience is effective depends not on the experience itself, but on what can be carried over into everyday life—that is, how it can be integrated.
The IST offers the following integration events:
