Ep 76 with Christian Snuffer

Ailey Jolie: 00:06

Welcome to In This Body, a podcast, where we dive deep into the power of embodiment. I'm your host, Ailey Shalee, a psychotherapist deeply passionate about living life living from the wisdom within your very own body. The podcast Inless Body is a love lover to embodiment. A podcast dedicated to asking important questions like how does connecting to your body change your life? How does connecting to your body and ask the capacity to love more deeply and live more authentically? And how can collective embodiment all over the course of our share of all? Join me for consciously curated conversations with leading experts. Each episode is intended to support you in reconnecting to your very own body. This podcast will be available for free wherever you get your podcast, making it easy for you to stay connected to In This Body, the podcast with me, Ali Julie. Our guest began his career in wilderness therapy, guiding young people through rites of passage in the backcountry of Alaska and Hawaii before moving into residential treatment and eventually building a practice of his own. A practice that blends traditional clinical work with somatics and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy modalities. His own path with this work began with disconnection, and he so generously in this episode explores exactly what that means for him. Growing up inside a high-control religious environment left him cut off from his body and carrying a quiet, persistent shame. It was his own personal journey of reclaiming his body from shame and reclaiming connection in his body that now shapes how he works with others today. In this conversation, we talk about what it actually feels like to lose touch with your own body and what it takes to find your way back. We talk about the nervous system as something that tells the truth long before the mind catches up, about what somatic and psychedelic work can reach that talk therapy alone sometimes can't, and what it means to build a spiritual life again once that old certainty is gone. We talk about shame, integration, and what he's learned from his own body that no training program ever could. I wanted Christian to be on the podcast because he is such a wealth of wisdom, but you can also tell from his embodied presence and the tone of his voice that this is someone who has really been there themselves and offers what they offer today through a truly lived lens. I hope you enjoy this episode of How to Be in This Body with me, Ailey Sholy. One note before we begin this episode includes open discussion of shame, religious and spiritual harm, invasive medical experiences, and sexual assault, alongside references to substance use. Look after yourself as you listen and step away and come back whenever you need. Lastly, a word about the medicines we discussed today. This conversation explores psychedelic and somatic therapies, including work with kinamine, cannabis, MDMA, and plat medicines such as ayahuasca. Christian and I both speak from personal and professional experience, but nothing here is medical or therapeutic advice, and none of it is a recommendation to seek out or use any substances yourself. Many of these medicines remain illegal in many places and they carry real risks, particularly for people with certain physical or mental health histories. Psychedelic experiences can be destabilizing, and they're not a shortcut past the slower work of building capacity in the body. If you feel drawn to this territory, please approach it with qualified ethical support and proper medical and therapeutic guidance. Take what's useful here and leave the rest.

Christian Snuffer: 04:00

It's the capacity to know what I think. And I and I want to say that specifically because I think a lot of people in the somatic world have kind of like taken the brain and the mind and acted like it no longer exists in the body, which obviously it does. So what do I think? What do I need? What do I want? And what do I feel? And I think being embodied is essentially how you arrive at those answers.

Ailey Jolie: 04:26

I love that you included what you want. Right now I'm writing a book and I have a whole section on that want, and it's such a piece that often gets left behind when we're speaking about somatics. I I loved your inclusion. Um we'll maybe circle back to want and the body a little bit later, but I would love to start just hearing a little bit of your experience. I know that you were in wilderness therapy and then you moved into your own private practice. And I know of wilderness therapy because I had a dear friend who practiced a practitioner, but I know not everyone does. So I'd love to hear maybe what is wilderness therapy? How is it different than traditional therapy and what you maybe learned there that you brought into your room today?

Christian Snuffer: 05:04

For sure. Um, I would say at the highest level, wilderness therapy falls under what we would call experiential, you know, experiential education or experiential therapy. The way that a lot of people talk about it is the the wilderness, nature, the earth, the mother, becomes the facilitator of the experience herself. Now, of course, there are therapists involved, there are therapeutic goals, there are all these kind of different ways of doing that, but fundamentally you're kind of relying on the trials and tribulations and success of immersion in nature to do the work for you. So I can give you a couple of examples that are kind of broad spectrum. You know, I worked at a program where we would do a lot of backpacking and we would backpack in pretty challenging situations and terrains. And for at this time, these groups were um they were split. And so I was working with just adolescent uh boys. And, you know, for a lot of these boys, like going through the arduous process of carrying a mountain up a backpack was the most, you know, fulfilling, empowering thing that could possibly have happened to them. And as you're well aware and your listeners are well aware, you can't really facilitate or simulate that experience in an office. It's like you need to spend a week getting your ass kicked to like feel the win, you know. And then there's like other layers, you know, there are a lot of programs who rely on primitive skills, like making fires with a with a bow drill, you know, with like a stick. And as you might imagine, if you are if your dinner depends on your ability to create a fire with a bow drill, you're going to develop a very different type of relationship with, I mean, really with everything, but you know, with food, with cooking, with gratitude, with appreciation. And so just being immersed in those experiences becomes to elicit experiential lessons that you're not really going to get otherwise.

Ailey Jolie: 07:13

Do you have any experiential lessons that you maybe would like to share with the listener that have really stayed with you from your personal experience?

Christian Snuffer: 07:22

That's a great question. Um, the first thing that comes to mind is actually, I don't know, maybe a little different, maybe a little bit more meta. So, like one of the programs I worked at, I would my shift was 30 to 50 days. And that was that was literally just me, two other guides, and a group of nine boys. We would be immersed in the wilderness for 30 to 50 days. Uh it's been about, let's see, been about three years since I did that. And when I look back on my time in that setting, I am so immensely grateful to have the experience of complete and total disconnection from modernity, basically. And I'd say like the most experiential lesson that I've taken from that is like that is necessary and needed. And there are people who will never go three days, let alone 30 days, disconnected from technology and phone and noise and just all the stuff that we're dealing with. So it's given me a deep, deep reverence for that and uh kind of a knowing that that must be included in my life if I want to stay sane. And I would probably apply that broadly, but I don't want to be too prescriptive, you know.

Ailey Jolie: 08:44

Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper. And the reason being is I before COVID, I spent about two months in silence. So I had this period of my life with like no phone, no technology. And it's been several years now. My brain still doesn't move as quickly as it once did. Like it's still like word finding is like, ooh, we're grabbing the word. Like I can still feel that it's obviously sped up. But I would love to hear from you maybe some of the things, if there were kind of embodied experiences that you had by being disconnected. Yes, you were in a guide role, so it's a bit different than sitting and meditating. But maybe some ways that you noticed your relationship with your body changing by disconnecting.

Christian Snuffer: 09:26

For sure. This is really interesting because most of my work in wilderness therapy happened before my most transformative, like somatic experiences that connected me back to my body and gave me an awareness of my nervous system. So when I look back at that time, there's still I'm I'm blanketed a little bit in what you know, essentially just dissociation and disconnection. And yet, that said, I can recognize that probably the most visceral experience is one of being able to hear and trust my intuition. Like understanding that there is a a part of me communicating with me that that knows beyond language and words what uh is needed. I mean, so so like we can maybe maybe move a little bit into the woo-woo, but like I had a couple of experiences with um deceased ancestors in the wilderness. Nothing like crazy, but just like enough space and quiet to feel like I received a direct message from one of these ancestors. And that's an experience that's only happened to me in prolonged periods of like you're talking about meditation or nature immersion.

Ailey Jolie: 10:49

Do you have a name for what you would call that? I know some clinicians call it like an additional sense or intuition. Um, but I'm just curious to hear from you if you have language around what that experience was for you. Because I I do definitely agree, like when we go into our the body in such an intimate way, there is connection in other senses or other intelligences we can tap into.

Christian Snuffer: 11:11

For sure. I am very um psycho-spiritually open. I think that therapy done effectively must become a psycho-spiritual process. I also grew up in a very religious environment where experiences like that were acceptable and normal, you know. So I give all of that preamble to say that like I don't have a specific word because I almost don't even want to like subset it from what being a human being is. I think it's actually just what is available to us if we get out of our own way and we stop becoming inundated with stimulus every second of every waking moment.

Ailey Jolie: 12:00

I really love that answer, which is gonna lead me to ask you about how spirituality informs how you show up as a clinician.

Christian Snuffer: 12:07

For sure. Well, you know, there there's the Jung quote, yeah, I can't, I'm not gonna say it specifically, but essentially, like as you become more conscious, you'll notice more synchronicities. Um, and noticing synchronicities is a mark of like increasing uh consciousness. I think at this point, I have experienced enough moments that can only be described as magic that to deny them would be it, I mean, it would cost me my soul. I would have to be a liar, you know? And it's like that's just not possible to inhabit the role that I have, that I inhabit without making space and allowance for that to be here. And I mean, I I have a I have a lot of frustrations with modern therapy. I have a lot of appreciations for modern therapy as well. But one of them is just this deeply materialist lens where we need to turn everything into a into a protocol and a manual, and we need it to be evidence-based, and we need to label and segment and and like really map it out so that we can understand it and explain it. And and I understand the impulse, but again, I think the deeper I get into this work, the more I realize that there are things happening that we'll never be able to explain, and to try almost diminishes the sacred, and so it's just like I don't know what's happening, but let's remain open to it and let's see what happens, you know, and like that's kind of the most we can do.

Ailey Jolie: 13:42

You've probably already named some of them, if I'm projecting. Okay, but I would love to hear a little bit more around maybe your personal experiences that have informed spirituality being part of a clinical lens, because I I know that it isn't everywhere, it's not every therapist, it's not how we're trained. And yet for myself, the two are so interwoven, I couldn't actually imagine them being pulled apart at this moment in my career in any way. So you're asking about specific like synchronicities or moments, or yeah, personal experiences that have really led that to be a part of how you show up.

Christian Snuffer: 14:16

For sure. Everything like this one happened this week. This one's fairly mundane, and a materialist person might just be like, yeah, whatever, it was just coincidence. A woman reached out to me who wants to do some intensive work, and I'm open to do that. Um, but she would have to travel to where I live, and traveling was making it cost prohibitive. I just so happen in two weeks to be going to a part of the country I've never been in ever and have no reason to go to, but circumstances are bringing me there, and I will be about three hours away from where she lives. And so there was kind of this merging of like, very interesting. You reached out to me at this moment where I'm about to be in your neck of the woods. So let's do it. You know, so again, coincidence, I don't know. It feels I just got goosebumps telling you, so it's like, what am I gonna do with that? You know, am I gonna deny that? Um, and then maybe to perhaps the more um abstract or more, I don't know, difficult to believe. Like I engage fairly regularly with uh plant medicines, um, not necessarily in a clinical setting, more in a ceremonial and ritualistic setting. Um and there have been multiple like very direct downloads into my heart that not only were exactly what I needed in that moment as an individual, and then I go into a session in the next one or two weeks, and exactly the thing I just learned about myself, a client is telling me. And because I just understood how it was showing up in me, I can actually hear and feel what they're saying. This happens very often. And I don't, again, I don't know what to do with that other than trust that it's meaningful.

Ailey Jolie: 16:09

Did you always have that trust that it was meaningful, or were there experiences that laid some of that foundation for you?

Christian Snuffer: 16:16

I love that question because that question forces me to acknowledge the beautiful aspects of being raised in a high demand religion. Um, I I was raised, I was raised Mormon. You know, I'm here in Salt Lake City, so Mormonism's like that's the thing. And to be honest, Mormons are pretty magical, like literally, like it's a fantastical, magical religion. Maybe less so today. It's kind of becoming more and more materialist and modern and and they don't like to acknowledge the magical elements of it. Um, so I I grew up living a religious kind of ethos

Christian Snuffer: 16:52

that was fantastical, and I love fantasy. I read I still to this day read a lot of fantasy novels. So I'm just like down for magic. So I actually don't think I had very much resistance. It was like, well, this is happening in, you know, the scriptures I grew up reading. This is happening in the fantasy books that I read. Why wouldn't this be happening now? You know?

Ailey Jolie: 17:12

Was that a tricky transition for you? It's sounding like it was relatively smooth, but I would love to hear maybe for those who are listening that have come from a faith that has been more strict or more rigid in beliefs or is less understood. Um, how they how you how one makes the transition out or if they want to, or makes the transition into integrating that into where they're going.

Christian Snuffer: 17:35

For sure. No, it has not been easy. There are elements of it that have been easy. I would say the primary thing that a high-demand religion uh did to me was install what I call a shame-based operating system. I think that that's happening to a lot of people for a lot of reasons, not necessarily religious, but the the way that the religion was transmitted into my body and my being, I internalize it as shame. And so I've spent a significant portion of my life um being so intoxicated in the worst way by shame and in shame. And it's taken me a long time to kind of reconcile that. Uh I'm 34 years old now. I know that without a doubt, from about 12 to 27, I was completely disconnected because of the shame was like too much. Probably even earlier than that, I was experiencing that. When I, you know, left religion, I didn't think much of it. I thought that was an experience I had. Kind of weird, kind of awesome. I just not into it anymore, and I'm gonna move on. It took me about 10 years to begin to access. Number one, I became aware of the shame, but second, I've become aware of the anger, kind of the frustration. So I have a lot of clients today who are dealing with the same thing. You know, I I live in this place where this is a very common story. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard the thing. I don't feel very much about it. It's totally fine, you know, it's just like just happened. Only to within the next six to twelve months begin to tap into pretty extreme unbridled anger and rage toward the institution that that took so much from us, you know.

Ailey Jolie: 19:21

Could you say a little bit more regarding how you work with shame as a clinician? You can share part of your personal experience there. You can stay with the professional lens, it's up to you.

Christian Snuffer: 19:30

Yeah, I mean, I'm I'm down. So it's a couple couple foundational pieces to understand really in any experience. There's kind of three primary dimensions. There's kind of like the the biological nervous system state, like like what's happening in your nerve. When you say you're sad or angry or whatever, like how would we where how would we map that in a nervous system state? Then there's like the sensation and the feeling. So what is that experience like in your body? And then there's the set of beliefs surrounding that. You know, there's a little bit of a generalization, but I think that's kind of a helpful three-pronged approach. So when I talk about shame, for me, shame was synonymous with kind of dissociation and shutdown, collapse. That'd be the nervous system. The experience of that in my body was just a heavy, heavy weight in my stomach. And then the belief system around that was I am bad, but more so I am broken. Like I'm uniquely broken, and nothing, no one will ever be able to fix that. And so my experience of shame personally, it actually started. Okay, this is one of those like back to the spiritual synchronicity kind of thing. So this is relatively recent. This was in the last year. I was doing this kind of like parts work adjacent process with myself, uh, journaling, and I start to feel something in my stomach. And as I start to tap into my stomach, I uh I meet this part who uh introduced himself as deacon. He was called Deacon. I start talking to Deacon, and Deacon tells me, I have been carrying this weight in your belly for your whole life, and I'm keeping it from you because it's heavy, and I don't want to hold it anymore. And so I'm ready to like give it back to you, but we're gonna do this, you know? And then I ask him, like, what would you prefer to be doing than like carrying this weight? And he says, Well, I want you to tell my story. And I say, Well, okay. A week later, I'm in this group. I'm on an open mic with the part of the group we had an open mic experience. It's coming up time to share the to for my share. I don't know what I'm gonna do. About five minutes before it's my turn, a whole um flood of memories come back that I didn't remember. I had lost them. They were. Were number one, a pill bottle on a counter. They were the pill bottle was um probiotics that my mother was buying me when I was 12, 13, 14 because my stomach, I was having stomach issues. Then after the pill bottle, I start to get all these memories of being in these doctors' offices where they were um giving me physicals. The prevailing thesis became that I had a sports hernia, which is why my stomach issues were there. These um physicals were incredibly invasive. The word that came to my mind was medical molestation. Again, these are all flashing in my mind five minutes before going on screen on the mic. I get on the mic and I just tell them that story and I'm sobbing, like sobbing. That was a moment where I reclaimed the felt sense experience of shame in my belly, and I like really connected to it. Kind of as an aside, I smoked weed pretty much every day from like 18 to 27. I realized now is because I couldn't be with that feeling in my belly. I hated it. So this was that like synchronistic moment where my shame came to my awareness through the belly. Then I, and then the part says tell my story. And then I I've I've literally never done an open mic in my whole life. The next week I'm on an open mic with an opportunity to tell Deacon's story. And it's just like that was one of the most liberating, healing moments of my entire life. And um since then, again, that was in the last year, I have developed a clarity around shame that is just like, holy shit, like I I understand what's going on with you because I've spent 20 years doing this, you know, without knowing it.

Ailey Jolie: 23:45

Thank you so much for being so generous to share and to really bring the listener into what an experience of working with shame can look like and feel like in the body. I would love to hear a little bit, because I think it might resonate, around how psychedelics have trickled their way into the work that you do now, but also your personal experience and why I'm kind of merging these two together is I definitely know that it was my shame body that led me to keep drinking more and more ayahuasca. And it was like I needed a lot of MDMA assisted psychotherapy to finally like feel my shame. So that's why I'm kind of weaving these two things together if you feel comfortable speaking about your experiences.

Christian Snuffer: 24:30

100%. So I told you that my wilderness era was like kind of before I uh cracked open and began to understand what was happening. So I'll kind of set this up so it makes sense. Um I never thought I was gonna work with psychedelics. I never intended to work with psychedelics. Um, as I became a therapist and got licensed, uh, that was all the rage. So, you know, I have a folder on my computer with like a hundred psychedelic trainings. I was just always kind of paying attention to like what's happening, but I never found one that like really spoke to me, mostly because it was very didactic. They were essentially just re-teaching books that I had already read the source material from. So I was like, I don't, I don't know. I came across this modality called um, it's a bit of a mouthful, it's called psychedelic somatic interactional psychotherapy, PSIP. When I found PSIP, they the creator of it had published a white paper that was about 30, 32 pages. No other training had any sort of theoretical background. So that was already an anomaly. I read the white paper, I find it to be incredibly compelling. Then I look at the training, and the training is broken into three parts, and part A is purely experiential. They don't teach you anything about the modality other than reading the white paper, and then you come in with a small cohort of three people and you spend a week actually doing the sessions. So again, that was most of the part the trainings were missing an experiential component. So boom, boom, theoretical background, experiential component, I'm in. I had no idea what I was getting into. So I go to this training, and in that week of experiential stuff, I had the most psychedelic experiences I've ever had up to that point with like a puff of cannabis and a somatic purely in the body. I actually just listened to your podcast uh mapping kind of a lineage of somatic healing. PCP would fall in roughly, okay, roughly in a more toward catharsis, but not totally. But so I go into these sessions and I'm having what you would classify as catharsis, but just full releases, um, finding levels of rage I've never experienced, feeling um layers of terror and panic that I've never felt. And what that did is that turned on my body after at least 20, if not more years of being completely disconnected. So that was kind of the foundation. That was like, oh my gosh. I had sat with ayahuasca one time before that, and the message I had received was like, this was fine. You did some good work, you know some things, don't come back, you've got more to do. Come to find out, I needed to turn my body on. I think what was happening and what happens to most people is we get into these um these psychedelic experiences, and our nervous systems are not ready. They just experience the psychedelic state as threatening and of itself. So at worst, you're you're creating just compounded dysregulation, maybe more mundane, you're just extremely dissociated and not that much is happening, you know? So my body gets turned on through PSIP, and that's where like everything started to change. Um that was when I became aware that I was actually not available to give and receive love and never had been. That was when I went on a walk and saw a flower and like paused and looked at the flower and got emotional and cried because I had never actually felt beauty. It was all just so intellectual. Um, and then that has just led to like, I mean, that was um about five years ago. Like, this is still pretty recent, but like, so I've just been on this continued path where I do these PCP sessions. I sit with ayahuasca a couple times a year, again, in a very ceremonial container that's not therapeutic, quote unquote. But what I can say is my engagement with psychedelic medicine post-PCP is like night and day. It's it's actually in my body, it's actually connected. I'll say, I'll say one more thing and then I would I would love to hear your reflections, but like my first three years of ayahuasca, um very interesting because I think you're right, shame was drawing me there. But I also think the medicine was very intentionally and methodically working with my shame. Because I would go in there and have these grueling deep belly experiences after that experience with Deacon and the open mic, I went back and sat with ayahuasca fully ready, like, okay, let's keep doing the shame work. No shame, no body, all heart and all fear and all courage. And I was like, whoa, something has changed, and I could just feel that it had changed, and it was a surprise to me. It was beautiful.

Ailey Jolie: 29:42

Yeah, yeah. Um I love what you shared there for many reasons. I can definitely relate also to for the first oof, I was drinking a lot of ayahuasca at one time in my life. So for uh quite a several number of years, every time I took ayahuasca, I was just body-based experiencing moving nervous system energy, just moving my body in positions I had been sexually assaulted in, and that was it. And then I would hit this peak somewhere, and the shame body would come and I would totally collapse, and the ceremony was over. I like we we were that was it. And then the last time I did ayahuasca, a very different tradition was held. Um, they believe the medicine can bring such darkness that they surround you in flowers and put candles everywhere. And I just had an experience of love and light, like no shame. Heart was like open, and the medicine was like, you listened, please don't come back. Like you've got what you want. So I would love to just spend also a little bit of time. I want to go back to PSIP and really exploring how the model is different. But you said something there that I am so passionate about because yes, it would be very hypocritical for me to say, you know, psychedelics caused me harm because they did bring me a lot of healing, but I can also hold. Yeah, I was like, nervous system was really dysregulated. There's probably some compounding trauma there. And maybe just speaking to how someone can discern if it's even possible. Like, am I ready for an experience like this? And if from some of your wisdom, of maybe what are some of the indicators that, okay, I can go into an experience like this as best prepared as one could ever be. And and you know, maybe and I can prepare myself that my nervous system won't be so dysregulated or not gonna have compounding trauma from being um with hallucinogenic.

Christian Snuffer: 31:29

For sure. I think one of the simplest indicators is if if I ask you what do you feel and you have no idea, then I don't think you're ready for psychedelics. Like there's a a layer of both interoception and inner awareness that like if you if you don't have any of that, the psychedelics are not gonna just give that to you. Or if they do, it will be a fleeting, like dreamlike experience that you'll then go back to your day-to-day life and nothing will stick. The way that I think about that is like if you aren't in a body and you go and take these medicines, um, on the other side, you won't magically be in a body. So even if you got every answer to every question, you're not in a body to actually facilitate the changes. So I have a lot of compassion for people who are like, nothing's changing, nothing's changing, nothing's changing. And it's like, well, yeah, because nobody's home. Like the lights are on, but nobody's home. How could you, you know? And so we do I do more work to kind of prepare their body to hold that, to like be embodied, you know. Um go ahead. Yeah.

Ailey Jolie: 32:50

Yeah. I think that probably ties into PSIP. And I would love to just spend some time breaking down the framework. I became aware of PSIP when I was working at Numness. This was many years ago. No way. And so I read the white pa read the white paper at that time, but have not experienced the model, have heard wonderful things about it. So I would love if we could spend some time going through the model, how it's different, um, and these pieces, because it's one of the only ones that I know that is very deeply somatically oriented.

Christian Snuffer: 33:19

Yes. Very cool. You worked at Numinous, that's like all around here in Salt Lake. Um, yeah, so it's 100%. So PCP, a couple foundational pieces. A lot of the uh psychedelic assisted therapy world, um, we could classify as like a sitter, and we just classify it as a sitter model, which is basically you're gonna take medicine, I'm gonna sit here, I'm gonna quote unquote hold space and just make sure nothing bad happens to you. Um, and that's it. We'll just kind of see what happens. There's a time and place for that for sure. Um if you're an experienced kind of traveler and you are embodied, it's probably okay to just get someone you trust and to like do your thing. If you're not, and if you're seeking out these medicines for clinical, you know, healing, clinical expertise, that's probably not the move. So PCP in juxtaposition to a sitter model is deeply relational. The the relationship is like the primary channel that things are changing on. I like to say that like it's called psychedelic somatic therapy, which is great. Good job. They got like the two hottest buzzwords in in mental health. Probably great for SEO. Um, but the the psychedelic component is like pretty minimal. Like it the star of the show is not the medicine. The star of the show is the somatic component. The medicine just creates different, it just creates an altered state to connect with sensations in the body differently. And so there's kind of like two primary camps. We've got uh we can do this work with ketamine, we can do this work with cannabis, and we can do this work with MDMA. MDMA is not legal, so ketamine and cannabis are easy ways to start. And there are different nervous system presentations where one of those medicines makes more sense than another. This is kind of like back to your um your episode on the somatic lineage, is like there's a time where ketamine is going to be the right thing because it's gonna be very resourcing. It's gonna we can do a lot of resourcing, solution building in that state, where cannabis might come online when we are resourced and we do have enough solution, and we're gonna move more toward what we might call catharsis. So I've really grown to appreciate over time that an attuned PCP practitioner can kind of determine which route we're gonna travel depending on where the client and their nervous system is at. So another important piece is PCP would regard things like psilocybin, ayahuasca, LSD, ibogaine, they would call those tier two medicines and they would classify those as transpersonal. If a person cannot be in their body, using tier two transpersonal medicines is harmful at worst, benign at best. The work with PCP is to do the foundational nervous system work to be ready to engage with tier two medicines. And I guess I guess I could say that. That's not explicitly the purpose, but like when people come to me and they're like, why would I do this versus psilocybin? That's kind of how I explain it to them. And I say, if you are a if you are a modern human who has not grown up in a tradition where being in your body is a priority, you're probably experiencing some level of dissociation, and we'll probably get a lot of really helpful work done if we do this foundational work before you consider tier two medicines.

Ailey Jolie: 37:08

I would love to spend a little bit of time exploring ketamine assisted psychotherapy. When I was at Numinous, that was my role was supporting the medical director in writing the ketamine assisted psychotherapy protocols and developing training in these pieces. Um but it's been quite a few years since I left the field. And I would just love to know a little bit more about how you offer ketamine assisted psychotherapy, who it's great for, who are maybe some people that it's not so great for, and when is it best? Um yeah, when is kind of the best time? Can you tell that I have a cold with my question making skills right now?

Christian Snuffer: 37:45

I got you.

Ailey Jolie: 37:46

Thank you. Like it's 7 p.m. Oh my like. Um when would be the best time to when would be the best time to seek out ketamine's assisted psychotherapy?

Christian Snuffer: 37:58

For sure. Uh so when I first started working with ketamine, I was doing high dose intramuscular uh administration. So that's a shot in the arm. Kind of like you would just get in a f if you got a flu shot. After a while, I started to realize, and that was very sitter-based. This is before I was introduced to PCP. So I would just kind of sit there with a client while they went deep into this experience. After a while, it was just like, dude, I don't know what's happening. Like it's kind of a roulette. Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's not. Most of the time they come out of that, and it was like a dream that it's like hard to remember anything, and there's nothing to grasp onto of like, how does this change anything? That said, there is a biological component of ketamine that for some people's biology, it really does serve as a reset. But that was kind of the roulette. It's like I have no way of determining that. That might happen, it might not. Um, also, just to be totally frank, I was bored. It was boring. It was like, what are we doing here? And so I went and sought out PCP, I sought out additional training, and I totally changed how I work with ketamine. At this point, I don't think that's helpful. Again, just just kind of in in aggregate, I don't think that's very helpful. The way that I work with it now is very low dose, oral. So it's just the dissolvable troches, and we're only using it to again to get slightly altered to find different places in your body and to resource. So something that's not, I mean, I think it is intuitive when I explain it, but people don't realize this. Like ketamine is a dissociative medicine, it's a dissociative anesthetic. There are people with types of trauma, very often it's childhood sexual abuse, where it's impossible to get near it in their system and in their body. Ketamine has this paradoxical effect where with a little bit of dissociation, we find that we can actually start to touch in to what's there. And so I've been shocked to find it how effective that is in just slowly building the capacity to start to stay with what's going on inside their body. Extremely effective. And I start there almost every time if we learn in our process that there was um significant trauma that they just can't even get near. Um when is it wrong? I would say the high dose experiences I just described are usually not great. So again, I I want to hammer that point home. Sorry, everyone. Um I think if a person is living like in in deep, see, I'm almost gonna contradict myself a little bit, but maybe not. Because if a person is living in like a deep chronic state of dissociation, adding more dissociation is probably not the move. I think maybe the differentiator there is like the person with the really intense trauma that they can't touch. They're not living in a chronic state of dissociation, but if we start to circle it, they're gonna just fall into that. And so that would be the distinction there.

Ailey Jolie: 41:12

I really appreciate you naming that ketamine is a disassociative anesthetic. And that was one of the reasons why I moved out of the ketamine space when I was there, was because it was more of that model of really high-dose ketamine. I mean, there were reasons that related to Health Canada and all those types of pieces, but also just it is a different relationship to also really honor that. It is a relational experience. I would love to just hear a little bit more around kind of what you name there around disassociation and how a medicine like ketamine, we can stay with that focus, or you can answer in regards to cannabis, can give us a little bit more space to explore and be present for. I know that's been my experience with the medicines that you've named. It just gives a little bit more capacity. Um, for someone who's really new or is curious, how would you describe that?

Christian Snuffer: 42:04

Yeah, really good question. I mentioned earlier I, you know, compulsively and habitually smoked cannabis for 15 years, you know, and like um used that way was entirely to numb and escape my life. I didn't know it at the time. I would have just told you that smoking weed is fun and makes hiking and food better, you know. So it's very interesting because there's there's very much a set and setting, a container involved that that changes the felt experience of these medicines. Same thing with ketamine. I mean, people, you know, snorting ketamine at parties are having a very different experience as someone doing ketamine here in my office with me. Um I mean, we could also add in breath, Ailey. Like we're we're just we're just talking about like an altered state that shifts consciousness just enough to begin to relate to the mundane and the normal with a little bit different of a perspective. So when I started using cannabis in a setting that was designed to uh use interoception and to notice what's happening in my body, surprised to find out, oh my gosh, there's a whole world of sensation in here. And because I'm just altered slightly, I can find it. And it was funny because I realized I used to really like smoking weed and then stretch. And I never thought, like, oh, because I'm increasing my capacity for somatic awareness, only when I started working with it, I was like, oh, that makes total sense. Like, of course I would do that. So um for me, it's just been like, can we put on a slightly different set of goggles? Can we go into the body and can we notice um the subtle and the overt with intention?

Ailey Jolie: 43:56

I would love to spend a little bit of time also diving into the concept of intention. Integration and what that looks like. What does it include? What is a realistic expectation? I can look back at my experiences of MTMA assistant psychotherapy and go, oh, sweetie, you should not have been doing that every two weeks or like once a month, you know, like that. You were not integrating anything. And so I would love to just really get into what that looks like in your office. What are some best practices?

Christian Snuffer: 44:24

For sure. Another great uh nonspecific word that just gets thrown around forever. Yeah, it doesn't. You know, what are we even talking about? Um, I mean, I think at the basis, like let's just start by acknowledging that like integration is not a thing. Uh no nobody can tell you exactly how to integrate. There are there are processes, there are there are things and practices to do that will, you know, facilitate quote unquote integration. Um, but it's not a thing. So it's deeply subjective and it's deeply connected to whatever's happening in that person's nervous system at that moment. Uh for a lot of people, it's super simple. Like the best thing that you could do to integrate is to notice what you're afraid of and then go do that. You know, but that's like people who have capacity to stay with that fear. I find for most of the clients that I'm working with in my office, like that's what we're building into. And then it's essentially saying, like, okay, you've constructed your life around avoiding all of that because it's kept you safe, but it's also kept you very small. Now you have the internal resources to stay with it. Notice every time that fear impulse shows up that tells you to get small and go away and do the opposite. And if you do that for six months, you will be unrecognizable, you know. Also, that's a tall order. I get it. Like that's hard. Um, but I think that's sound advice for a lot of people. Then there are the the the you know, kind of the opposite end of the spectrum who are maybe like hyper productive, constant, just you know, we know we all know these types of people. And it's for them, it's like you need to slow down, you need to go to yoga, you need to do yin yoga, you need to do slow, calming breath, you need to dance, you need to walk very slowly, intentionally, very slowly. It's you know, it's it's all kind of the opposite. It's like kind of down regulating and learning to trust that you can be safe even when it's slow and quiet. And so you're, you know, I'm just trying to gauge like what's the what direction do we need to go here? There's also deeply relational things too. It's like if we're coming up against relational trauma and we're seeing how it's being expressed in your nervous system over and over and over again, there might be something to change in a relationship. And, you know, uh again, like I could come up with a bunch of examples, but like maybe you're the adult now who has uh an inner child who's extremely wounded, and the inner child is asking for you to hold a boundary today in your adult body. Hold the boundary, say the thing that needs to be said. Relational stuff is super hard, the the hardest, probably the hardest. So anytime we're our integration process is circling around that, we're treating that as very, very sacred and kind of honoring the words that need to be said that never were.

Ailey Jolie: 47:21

From your perspective, why is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy so important for healing relational wounds?

Christian Snuffer: 47:28

In the context of the PCP container, what we begin to find, well, let me let me say it this way: one of the primary reasons why we don't allow ourselves to feel certain things is because some part of us believes that if we feel that, everyone will leave us, we'll be rejected, we'll be too much, you know, whatever the story is. So we take those experiences and we stuff them away inside. In the PCP container, we are watching the nervous system as it circles around these, you know, I'll just call them bundles of energy, these kind of clusters that have gravity. And we're really feeling what it's like to be in relationship while that's here. And so we're allowing that and we're kind of giving this reparative experience where it's like you can go there, and I, the therapist, I'm not gonna leave you. Like it's all good, it can all be here. And people underestimate how healing that is because it's like, well, yeah, you're my therapist. I don't, I don't care about you. Of course, you're here for me. But it's like that's like a that's a cognitive thought. That's not this is way deeper than that, you know. And so with PCP particularly, the relationship is everything, and that's what it's like, that's what people need to understand is missing in the other stuff. And you know, that's in uh an individual container in my office, but that translates elsewhere. It's like now go and do this with other people. Like, don't keep this here. Go integrate in the community. Maybe that's another piece of it of integration, is like you got to return to the community, you know. That's the whole, that's the arc. Go take your gifts out there and share them with people, you know.

Ailey Jolie: 49:12

What are some signs for the listener that you can maybe give that signal a therapist who's willing to do more of the relational piece? Because there are psychedelic assists and psychotherapists that are very much like, okay, we had our sessions, like get out. See you later. Um, and then there are those like the ones that I worked with that really honored. This is like a lifelong relationship. Like we kind of brought you back into the world and reclaimed like little parts with you, and you know, they're attached to us in strange ways. And like, that's kind of my role in your psyche and your system now. And so I'd love to hear from you maybe some green flags for the listener to look for if they are wanting more of that relational experience or if they know that that's something that's important to their healing.

Christian Snuffer: 49:55

Yeah. I'm so glad you said that because I've been kind of processing that in my own world right now, kind of like feeling like exactly like you just said, like there are there are parts of me and parts of you that have now intermingled, and it's like we're bonded. Like it doesn't mean you know we need to talk all the time or even see each other, but like it's here, you know. Um I mean, I think the first place to start is just very simple. Like, do you facilitate this medicine in a sitter model or a relational model? And if that question is foreign or unanswerable to them, then you know they're in a sitter model. And like they haven't even considered that there could be a relational model. Another thing is like, uh, this is kind of funny. This is what came up. Like very strict time limits on how the session starts and how it ends, and like when you need to be out the door and gone. Like, you know, it's hard to contain the bigness of these experiences in like these moments. Um, so that would probably be another green flag or uh maybe a red flag, depending. You get what I'm saying? You get what I'm saying. Um, another this is funny. I've I've really not even thought about this, but these are like very kind of like logistical, but I think they make sense. It's like, how many of these sessions do you do a week? How many do you do a month? And it's like if they're doing like I mean, I don't know, I don't want to say a number, but you could you could probably feel if it seems excessive, and it would also give you an uh an idea of how much uh time is getting spent on each each one. Um so those would be a couple. I think another one that I would ask is like, what is your what is your experience with these medicines? And um how have you experienced relationship in these things? I wish people were more willing to like ask providers hard questions. And I think if it's a good provider, they won't be threatened, they'll be stoked, and it'll it'll be strengthening. And if they if they react with kind of constriction and like, what are you doing? Uh red flag for sure.

Ailey Jolie: 51:59

I really loved what you provided, and there are definitely parts of me that wish that I'd had that list earlier in my psychedelic journey, like 10 years ago. Um, could have saved me some time and some strange attachments with some practitioners, but you live and you learn.

Christian Snuffer: 52:14

For sure.

Ailey Jolie: 52:14

I would love to bring us back to where we started today and ask you if there's anything about being in the body that you would like to share with the listener that we didn't get to touch on before we close.

Christian Snuffer: 52:26

Yeah, I mean, you don't get to selectively numb. You know, so if you if you're constructing a life around not feeling pain, you're also constructing a life around being limited in your capacity to love. And so just be aware. We love to talk about kind of like the nitty-gritty, the traumas that we're working through, you know, my trauma resume. And it's like, well, dude, you're also becoming more available to love, beauty, presence, joy. You get one with the other. And and the way that I would sum it all up is like the only reason, in my opinion, why we're doing any kind of spiritual work, personal development, therapy, all of it is just in service of being more available to give and receive love. And if that's not happening, then like something's off. And that's uh that's kind of the metric that I'm always tracking. Am I more available to give and receive love?

Ailey Jolie: 53:21

I really love that. Thank you so much. And also just say I really love it because one thing that I'm very passionate about is naming the presence of love in the practice of psychotherapy. For sure. Even though that there can be a lot of red tape around that. And so I'm really grateful that that was how you ended our time together today was really naming that explicitly. I would love to know if you have anything upcoming that you would like the listener to know about.

Christian Snuffer: 53:47

I do. That's awesome. Um, when we scheduled this, I didn't, but now I do. Um, so I run a group called uh decoding the SBOS, the shame-based operating system. This is my third cohort, and we're gonna start August 18th. So actually about a month, and I'm running a free webinar on August 8th to kind of lay out, you know, offer a lot of value and how I understand shame and to also promote that upcoming group. So you can find all that information on my Instagram, which is underscore attunement. I'm sure you can link it and whatever. Yeah, so thank you. That's awesome. I didn't even think about that.

Ailey Jolie: 54:37

He describes shame as an operating system, not a feeling that arrives and passes, but a program running quietly underneath everything, shaping what he could let himself want, feel, and reach for. Only thing that I would change or say a little bit differently is that shame is not at its root a thought. The thought comes later. Shame is first a physiological event, the nervous system dropping into collapse, the shoulders curling in, the gaze falling, the belly going heavy and still. And if you saw Christian in this moment, you could see that he was demonstrating this with his body. Christian could locate that heaviness as he describes in his stomach long before he had a story to explain it. And that's the order these things tend to arrive in, which is why I wanted to bring in the physiology here. The state comes first, the sensation second, and the belief I'm bad, I'm broken, arrives last. That's because it's the mind's attempt to make sense of a body that's gone small, quiet, and still. This is also why his memories return the way they did, in a flood, minutes before he spoke them out loud. The body keeps what the mind cannot yet hold. When an experience overwhelms the nervous system at the time it happens, it's not filed away as a tidy narrative. It's stored as sensation, as posture, as a weight in the belly with no words attached. So much of somatic work is a slow translation, letting the body finish a sentence it began years ago. I want to add one distinction because Christian spoke to it really beautifully about learning to trust the intelligence of his body, that sense of knowing that arrived beneath language, that capacity is so real and so important to spend time cultivating. But I would gently name that not everything which feels like intuition is intuition. A nervous system shaped by early threat becomes very skilled at prediction, it scans, it anticipates, it braces, and then bracing can arrive with all the certainty of a gap feeling while it's actually hypervigilance. And I feel quite positive I'm not the only person who's gotten confused by their hypervigilance or their intuition or their intuition and their hypervigilance. From the inside, the two can feel identical. The difference is really in the texture. Intuition tends to be quiet and spacious, and it leaves the body a little bit more open. Hypervigilance is urgent and narrow and it tightens. Learning to feel the difference between these two is so important so that you can learn which part of you is speaking. This is some of the most delicate work that you can ever do in therapy. It's also not work that you can think your way through. That discernment is built in relationship in the presence of another nervous system that stays. And this is what Christian meant when he spoke about the relational container. And this is worth me repeating here. We do not regulate alone the capacity to feel shame without collapsing into it, to feel fear without fleeing it, is something most of us borrow from a steadier body before it becomes one we know in our own body. And there's no shame or judgment needed if you need another body to learn these body-based experiences inside of you. If any of this is found somewhere to land in you, this is precisely what we explore in Embody, my embodiment program, where we work slowly and relationally with these questions of shame, sensation, and coming home to our one and only bodies. You can find out more about the program at inbodymethod.com. And if you would like to keep thinking alongside me between episodes, I write each week on Substack where I take threads from conversations like this and deepen them. This is available to you at aileyjolie.substack.com. You can also spend a week with me this fall in Costa Rica. All of the information is available at alieyjolie.com. Again, thank you for listening and for being in the tender, ongoing process of coming home to your body and allowing this podcast, our guest, and me, Ali Jolie, to be a part of that process for you. If you found value in this episode, it would mean so much to me for you to share the podcast with friends, a loved one, or on your social platform. If you have the time, please rate and review the podcast so that this podcast reaches a larger audience, and humans are more and more humans to connect to their bodies too. Thank you for being here and returning the relationship with you.