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Addressing The Underlying Causes of Mental Illness with Keith Kurlander, MA, LPC · The Trauma Therapist

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Trauma Thepist Podcast Plus listeners can listen to episodes early and ad free right now.
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Become a Plus listener by going to Apple Podcasts searching for the Trauma Thepist
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podcast and signing up today. Welcome to the Trauma Neveris podcast. A show
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about the incredible people dedicated to helping those who experienced trauma. My name is
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got macpherson, and my mission is to raise awareness of trauma and to inspire
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each of us to help those around us. All right, Keith, So
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here we go so five four, three, two and one, our folks,
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welcome back to the podcast. Very excited to hap as my guest today.
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Keith Curlander. Keith Welcome, Thanks, good to be here. Awesome
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So. Keith is the co founder of the Intricative Psychiatry Institute, the industry
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leader and psychedelic assisted therapy training. He's also psychotherapist, a coach, co
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founder of the Intricative Psychiatry Centers, as well as co host of the Higher
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Practice podcast, and he previously founded and ran in the Higher Practice business that
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helped therapists grow their practices. Keith, Welcome, once again, before we
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get going here, share with the listeners where you're from originally and where you
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are currently. Well, I grew up in central New Jersey, so east
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coast, and then you know, I left there when I was eighteen seventeen,
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and I'm in my late forties, so I've been around, but I've
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been in Colorado for the last twenty plus years. Oh wow, Okay,
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okay, I'm originally from the east coast of the world too and out Yeah,
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all right, so fascinating here. How did all this start for you?
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It's a personal and professional journey that led me here. Personally, I
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had a lot of complex PTSD as a kid that I didn't know about what
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it was, and in my early late teens early twenties, I started developing
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a lot of serious mental health symptoms and got pretty sick. And you know,
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twenty five years ago, even longer, there wasn't a ton of conversation
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in the mental health field about trauma as a process. You know, there
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was sort of PTSD, but it was reserved for like, very serious events
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that have happened to people, and so nobody ever thought of bringing up even
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the firm trauma to me. And so you know, I went on a
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roundabout way. But I also was very spiritually minded and also interested in helping
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other people because I was not doing well. So I ended up becoming a
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psychotherapist, and that started my professional journey into psychotherapy. Uh. And then
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there was a long road of different things. And I had dabbled with psychedelics
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from a healing perspective early on. Nothing crazy, not like doing it every
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day or anything, but you know, I was looking for answers and long
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story shirt. Eventually, six years ago I moved out of the individual private
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practice world and realized I wanted to you know, I co founded a couple
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of companies to try and get education out to the masses and to to educate
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mental health providers in the more a broader way of looking at mental health disorders
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and root causes and uh. And then we opened, you know, a
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continuing medical education company essentially to do that. So and then I'm here.
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So there's a lot of there's a lot of winding parts in there, but
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that's the overview. But really interesting. So when you you said, I
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think you said just you moved out when you were eighteen, When you were
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in the midst of this as a young kid, were you cognizant of what
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was going on in terms of the symptoms you were experiencing and what they were
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caused by. No I mean as a kid, as a young kid,
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my symptoms looked like severe social anxiety and and anxiety. I would say,
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just anxiety. But then they started exacerbating in my late teens early twenties,
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and I did a psilocybin journey for the first time, and that really spun
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me out, and I didn't know why, and nobody had good answers for
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me. Spun you meaning what I mean, my symptoms got a lot worse.
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I started getting. I started having, you know, more of a
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mixed symptoms of depression and anxiety and a lot of overwhelm and intrusive thoughts.
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And you know, now, when I would start listening to these symptoms,
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we would start thinking about trauma. Then it was like bipolar was really the
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best thing they could think about without thinking like could this be trauma not bi
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polar? And then you know, things kind of fluctuated in my twenties looking
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for answers, and then it was in my thirties when I discovered that this
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was really due to trauma from childhood and complex trauma. It wasn't like specific
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event trauma. I wasn't physically abused or anything. That was very complex trauma
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and intergenerational trauma. I'm Jewish, and you know, I did a lot
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of work there, and there's a lot of that going on around complex trauma.
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There's a lot of complex trauma going around in the world. Yeah.
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Yeah, So at some point you decide to pursue becoming a therapist, you
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founded companies at what So at a particular time did you work with a therapist?
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Yeah, I mean I've done hundreds of hours as a client, you
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know, I've I did that. I was also very deeply involved in my
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twenties and more of like the spiritual stuff like yoga and meditation and things,
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trying to use that path to work with myself. So I've done I've done
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all kinds of things and things have helped, you know, things have helped.
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And I also found that psychedelic psychedelics helped me. But they also what
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they did was they really amplified my trauma. They didn't get in of it,
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you know, they they kind of shone a light on it. And
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we can talk more about that and eventually, like it was a lot of
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different work, it was trauma therapies somatic based trauma therapy is like somatic experiencing
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and a lot of physical things I had to do for my body. Often,
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a lot of systems in the body get disregulated when you're very traumatized.
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You're got brain access, your hormonosystems. There's a lot of repair you have
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to do, typically if you've had long term, enduring trauma in your body.
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Right, So I had to do that stuff too, So damn a
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lot of work you did. Yeah, a lot of work. Now what
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talk to talk to us about the journey of founding Intricative Psychiatry Institute. So
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I'd say ten or twelve years ago, maybe I don't remember the exact time
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I started this. I started wanting to branch out from individual work with people,
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and at first I started the higher practice business, which was like helping
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therapists get more empowered to build practices and get the types of clients they want.
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And you know, that was sort of my first taste at something of
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a larger scale business than a solo practice. But then about six years ago,
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I was getting more and more dissatisfied with what I was seeing in mental
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health care at large, you know, seeing the numbers over the last two
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decades of mental illness, you know, just rising and rising, and now
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you see what's happening in teens. When you look at those numbers, it's
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pretty scary. And my dear friend and I he's a psychiatrist, we sort
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of at the same moment we're like, we need to start something bigger here.
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We need to reach other providers so that they're working with people differently so
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they have a much broad knowledge base of all the different things that are causing
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mental health issues. Typically, providers are taught in a very siloed fashion about
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what's causing a mental health issue, and that's what they know. Whether it's
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a therapist or a doctor, doesn't matter. They're siloed into what they know
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of what they were taught. So we came in with an integrative educational model.
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It's called the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. We started with doctors. We started
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in the field of psychiatry to educate mostly psychiatrists and nurse practitioners around integrative frameworks
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and trauma. But we had always had our eye on We knew we were
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going to get into psychedelic therapy when the time was right, and we did
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a few years ago and that's really what we're focused on now. We're we're
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really focused on psychedelic therapy because we believe it's just the next wave of a
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tool that's really going to help a ton of people in the world. It's
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not a panacea, but it's one of the great tools. We're going to
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have you in our lifetime. There will be others in the future. Now
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you intrigative listeners about what exactly that means. It means different things, but
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depending on who you're talking to, what it means in our world. So
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the concept of integrative medicine is really where that term comes from. Integrative medicine
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is a little different than like alternative medicine, but a lot of people have
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heard that term. Integrative medicine is really about bringing different fields together and really
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working with different aspects of the human condition and not staying only in like a
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reductionistic view of medical science. It's still a medical based field, but we
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try and look at other things, and that's going to include lifestyle medicine.
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It's going to include understanding that remedies like they do an alternative medicine, like
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supplements and things. It's going to include having a much broader understanding of the
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root causes in your nervous system, which is trauma to mental health conditions,
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which is still greatly underappreciated in the education of mental health care providers. So
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integrative is really spanning out the root causes of what mental health conditions are from.
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So it's a much wider span of root causes so that a provider can
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you know, work with, or a client can come to an integrative practitioner,
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it's going to have a much wider view where does this come from?
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You know? And then trauma tends to be one of the most common themes
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across all mental health conditions. Trauma is a process. Okay, so I
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don't I don't know how much you've talked about this in this podcast, but
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you know there's trauma as a disorder, which is PTSD post traumatic stress disorder,
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and that's the Trauma Therapist podcast. Yeah, so we've talked about Yeah,
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so you've talked about it. So trauma as a process is what's the
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disorder, is not what's across all all mental health disorder, So that's allot
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the symptoms. What's across all mental health disorders is the process. So that's
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what we're focused on. Okay, So in terms of psychedelics, in what
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you provide in terms of training, when you say you're getting the psychedelics,
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what does that mean specifically, because it can mean many different things, correct,
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Sure, yeah, it can. Well, right now, there's three
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main medicines to think about in psychedelic therapy. That's ketamine, MDM A,
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and psilocybin, and there's different legal things to discuss about each one. And
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but in terms of what will hopefully be used in the near future, is
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MDM A we hope, but we don't know. There's an approval process happening
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right now that could get denied or approved by this end of the summer.
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In terms of psilocybin, you see state led initiatives now where that's already happening
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in Oregon, and it's about to happen in Colorado coming to coming to the
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field by next year. In Colorado, you'll see psilocybin therapy and then katamine
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therapy is happening. That's legal for providers to do because keatymine is a Schedule
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three substance used in medical cases already. It's been used for decades. So
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psychedelic therapy, when we say that we're talking typically about these three medicines,
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and it's the pairing of using a medicine during a therapy session that allows for
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a very different process. It's an altered state of consciousness. So it can
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typically amplifies things inside of us. It turns the volume up, typically not
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always on something inside of us, and that can be a trauma process that
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it amplifies that then we work with in the session. It can be other
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things. But people can gain really deep insights about themselves that they weren't aware
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of. They can revisit childhood memories. There's a whole gamut of things that
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happen in psychedelic therapy. So I think one of the questions would be when,
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for example, with well, let's you said, you've experienced a lot
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of a lot of these enough enough enough enough so they're not actually a big
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part of my life anymore, just to be clear, But I had to
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give our listeners a specific idea of who might this be useful for someone coming
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in with interpersonal trauma, or someone coming in or any any type of trauma.
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When would this be utilized? So it depends on the medicine, because
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the medicines are going to have different indications. The the the primary medicine being
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researched for trauma is MDM. A uh, now that's PTSD. We're not
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talking about traumas a process. We're talking about coming with that with that syndrome
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PTSD, treatment resistance, you've tried other things. MDMA is heavily researched now
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on that. Now, whether the FDA grews with the findings there, we're
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going to find out soon. The ketamine is pretty heavily researched on depression treatment
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and resistant depression, and then psilocybin, which is a mushroom, is searched
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on treatment and resistant depression. And then some other more nuanced things like end
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of life distress and some other things. And then there's some other smaller studies
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too, you know, looking at anxiety with ketamine and this and that.
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So that's kind of the broad brushstroke. But just returning to what I said,
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all psychedelics can amplify trauma processes in US and most people, in my
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opinion, a very high percentage of people with any mental health condition has a
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trauma process in their body. When you say amplify a trauma process, what
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does that mean? What does that mean? Exacerbated so that we can look
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at it more clearly, or what what do you mean when you say amplify
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a trauma process it it might mean turning the volume up on the somatic representation,
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the physical representation of the trum in the body, sensations that are associated
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with with the trauma traumatic process. And that could be pain, that can
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be you know, discomfort, agitation, different things that people have trauma feel.
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So it could be sematic, it could be memories, it could be
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direct memories of traumatic events. That if a good thing because it then could
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be worked with in that moment. This is usually a good thing. Okay,
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this is usually a good thing. You know, some people, it
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might it might be too fast for them to go that fast with the trauma
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process if they haven't done any other work. But it's usually a good thing
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because as as great as trauma therapy can be, sometimes it's it takes years
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and it's slow and it's not it's not moving the needle fast enough for people.
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So it's usually a good thing. Is it always a good thing?
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No, nothing's always a good thing. Sometimes it's too fast or they haven't
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done enough groundwork. But typically these medicines do work really well overall, I
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would say. So let me just remind everyone I'm speaking with Keith Kurlander from
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the Integrated Psychiatry Institute. So let's talk about the programs you provide for professionals
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mental health professionals. They can come to your website and find what specifically.
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So we have a bunch of programs. The main program, since we're talking
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about psychedelic therapy, is our year long psychedelic Therapy training. It's one of
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the only programs that leads to a certification. It's a very it's probably the
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most robust program in terms of training hours available. It's in two hundred and
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sixty hours roughly over the course of a year. It includes if you do
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the full train, you're coming into two live practicums in person where you're training
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with psilocybin and you're training with ketamine. It's weekly online for that whole year.
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So that's our main program that you know, we're really investing most of
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our time into. Right now. We've trained about fifteen hundred people at this
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point wow, that are certified, and so there's a lot of interest in
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getting trained right now because it's it's really like, you know, the next
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modality wave. You know, there's these modality waves that come and this is
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a big one because we need something, we need we need more obviously,
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we always need more here for helping people people are suffering, as you know.
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Well that that's an interesting point. And I think, you know,
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thinking about people who are listening to this podcast thinking to themselves, well,
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I've done this, you know, I've done this training, and I've done
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that training, and I've done this workshop, and I've done this modality,
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and I've studied MDR and Semitic experiencing or whatever. What is it about psychedelics
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that is so intriguing? What what angle is it coming out? What is
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it? What is it providing in terms of treatment that these other modalities aren't.
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That's a good question. Is this in reference to the client or the
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therapist? This question, Well, it's in reference to I guess the therapist,
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because I'm imagining there are a lot of people thinking who aren't familiar with
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psychedelics. Why should I study this? What is this going to give me
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and in turn give the client? What is it going to give you?
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Well, first of all, it's not for everyone. I would start saying
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that you have to want to be with the you know, intensity in people
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like you know, very high level. Sometimes sometimes it's mellow and sweet and
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super like warm and fuzzy, you know, but you're going to get the
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opposite of that coin too, and and you're really wanting to be in like
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this. It's a person a therapist that's like wanting to help people in their
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most you know, deepest stuff inside of them and really get in there and
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and and wants to do the training to be able to sit with that because
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it's not you have to know how to deal with that stuff. I mean,
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people might act out a little here and there in ordinary therapy. That
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happens, but people will act out more than here and there in non ordinary
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therapy because they're they're under the influence of a medicine. They're going to say
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things that you're like, whoa in ordinary therapy like that's not okay. In
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here, you can't never say that, you know, and that's not that's
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different. So it's about it's an extremely dynamic form of therapy. There's so
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much going on there and sometimes you're sitting in silence for hours. You know,
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someone's very internal and you have to be able to do that and not
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get in the way of the process. So it's it's super dynamic, it's
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creative, it's interesting beyond belief. Uh, and it's delicate, and you
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need a lot of training. You know, you really have to understand the
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ethics really well. You have to you have to know yourself really well because
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you're working with people are under the influence of powerful substances and so you really
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have to know yourself well. And the whole world of counter transference and all
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that. It's like the next level because you know, you got people doing
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things a little stronger than usual. So it's it's it's incredibly it's great.
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I mean, it's in terms of like preventing burnout, it's it's so interesting,
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right, it's it's and I think in the end though, it's it's
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about it's very possible you may be able to help some people you would been
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able to help and that and that's what it comes down to for me,
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Like there are certain people just did they just need something different. I've interviewed
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a few representatives from different psychedelic therapy organizations on this podcast, and you've explained
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it in a way that I don't think anyone else has. And you are
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you articulated the nuances of it, uh and in a way that I can
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really appreciate what it's about and how dynamic and creative and complex it is.
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Because what you what you said, people are going to be experiencing things in
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a way that they don't in a normal therapeutic setting. But at the same
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time, that's almost going to demand more from you as a therapist. You've
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got to know your own s. H I t let me ask you,
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what have you learned in terms of about yourself in terms of doing this type
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of work? How has this challenged you? Well, I mean I have
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to be uh more voiced, less respond less reactive, more tuned, higher
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levels of attunement, more empathy. It's just like turning the dial up on
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everything for myself. It shows me all the places where I'm not attuned,
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where I'm not empathic, where I'm not compassionate, where I'm scared, which
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is fine, all the places in me that I'm scared of human suffering,
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a human acting out, which shows me all those places And you know it's
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you know, I'm I'm I'm running a company now, I'm not sitting with
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people right now, but I've been around a lot at this point, and
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it just this work shows me just again, you know, all the places
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inside myself that constantly need help and healing and in order to be able to
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sit with a person's places in themselves that need that. Yeah. Well yeah,
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so you said that these trainings aren't for everyone, but who are they
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for? Well, there, it seemed to be increasingly for a lot of
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people, is what we're seeing. But I'm saying enough for everyone because not
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everybody. You know, there are certain types of workers out there that are
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you know, they're they're healing modality is just different. It's not depth oriented
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there there. Let's say they're just like super I'm a cognitive behavioral person.
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I love it. I love working with like thoughts and moods in this sort
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of engineering way. You know, it might not be for them, right
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if that's just like they're very fixed on that. But I think generally speaking
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in the therapy space, it's for a lot of people that want to go
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down this road. But it's it's you know, you're taking on an investment
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of time and energy and money and also self growth because you're going to be
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inviting more into your office than you have before. That's an exciting thing for
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most therapists. Honestly, that's what most therapists live for, is more growth.
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But not everyone's on that road, and that's okay. And also it's
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just not for everybody, Like not everybody wants that extra level of predictability in
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their in their workspace, in their career, and that's okay. You know,
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it's not for everybody in that way, all right, Keith. How
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do people learn more about these training programs? What's the best way for them
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to get in touch with you? The best way to check out this program
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is to go to Psychiatry Institute dot com, forward slash apply, So that'll
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take you directly to this program Psychiatry Institute dot com, forward slash apply and
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and from there they can see a lot of other programs too, all right,
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and I'll have that linked up here at the show notes page at the
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Trauma theaperspodcast dot com. Awesome man, thank you so much for joining me
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today and sharing not just your experience but the nuanced, textured excitement that's happening
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with all these different types of therapies. Appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for
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having me. Armen, take care. Thanks