Episode 102
Emotional Transformation Therapy with Coastwise Counseling

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Description

In this episode, Jason Friesema brings Chris Burns on to welcome our special guest, Steve Taus, with Coastwise Counseling Center. Steve brings the concept of Emotional Transformative Therapy to the show, explaining the modality’s uses, benefits, and successes and opening a deeper discussion into plant-based medicine in treatment. This episode is packed with information and energy as our team shares thoughts and open discussions with Steve Taus. To find more information on Steve and Coastwise Counseling, check out coastwisecounselingcenter.com

Talking Points

1. Introduction to Coastwise Counseling
   
2. What is Emotional Transformation Therapy
   
3. The use of light in treatment
   
4. The four approaches to light and color treatment
   
5. Ketamine assisted therapy
   
6. Plant-based medicine
   
7. Final thoughts
   

Quotes

“Nature wants to do that. It wants to be harmonious, it wants to prepare, and it wants to make things better. Our brain is the same way. Once the brain understands a better way to do something, it will always want to do it that way. That’s just the nature of things.” 

– Steve Taus, Coastwise Counseling

Episode Transcripts

Episode -102- Transcripts

finding Peaks uh I’m Jason friezma Chief clinical officer of Peaks recovery joined today with by my co-host Chris Burns president and founder of Peaks recovery we are really excited uh to have um Steve and I suddenly forgot your last name Steve I apologize uh Steve Taos Steve Taos of Coast wise Counseling in San uh Pedro Los Angeles area of California uh welcome uh Steve you and I had a chance to talk I don’t know a month or two ago and we I thought we had a great conversation and um I what I think I’d like for you to do first to maybe kind of introduce Coast wise counseling and kind of talk about some of the uh newer approaches that you’re using to kind of help people out I think starting with on the emotional transformative therapy I think uh honestly I’ve been in this field a long time and uh you got to explain the therapy modality that that I wasn’t super familiar with so I’d love to have kind of a similar conversation so yeah take it away thank you um Jason Chris thanks for having me it’s a real treat and Delight to team up with um people of your caliber and and with your with your business and Company and the offerings that you guys are doing for folks in Colorado um and as both of you just said I’m from San Pedro California I’m a licensed marriage family therapist by trade uh since 2008 and I have a I have a business called coastwise therapy and coastwise recovery so one half of the business provides General mental health anxiety depression marriage issues the the usual kind of gamma mental health and then we also have an outpatient drug and alcohol program focusing on on developing sobriety so we have two things that we’re doing I’m passionate about both and I’m passionate to be kind of sharing with both of you who who do the same thing in Colorado um and that’s that’s a little bit about me and then just to kind of return back to if you’d like I can start talking about emotional transformation therapy as one of the treatments that I offer clients but before we even get into that what what brought you into the counseling field I usually like to ask mental health professionals that question actually so yeah what brought you into this field that’s a great question you know um My First Love was basketball and I thought I was going to play for the Los Angeles Lakers and then I I learned that I was not good enough to play for the Lakers and I was gonna have to have to choose something else and so I I I was always good at talking to people and there was a time in my life where I was the uh the class clown I wasn’t doing very good in school and I was getting most of my attention negatively through um disrupting teachers lessons plans and and joking uh and then somewhere along the way there was an elective yeah which essentially was a group therapy elective which I didn’t know that’s what it was conducted by a therapist and then that that therapist thought that I was intuitive and insightful and called my dad and told him that and my dad thought I was he was getting a phone call for another detention or you know more disruptive behavior and it was a compliment that I really needed I was I I was kind of down on myself and this adult person saw something intelligent in me and it uh it seared into my into my body and my spirit is something that I could do and then I went on to college eventually and didn’t know what to major in and chose psychology thinking well there’s a psychology to everything so I’ll just start here and I want to being a right fit um and then later on doing my own therapy and having my therapist affirm to me that this is something that I would be good at and then choosing to go to graduate school and pursue pursue this career also yeah but I I do like to say counselors good counselors are usually born not made I mean we do have to learn skills and that sort of thing but it does seem to be the good ones that’s kind of an innate capacity I agree I’m don’t ask me to do your taxes or change your oil to me either one thing I know how to do I can do this I actually wanted to be a uh the point guard for the University of Arizona I grew up in Tucson Arizona going with my older brother and my grandmother to basketball games you know all I wanted to be was Damon stottmeyer I mean everything and it fit me perfect because I’m about five foot nine on a good day and uh I too had to Grapple with a little bit of that identity and purpose when that wasn’t wasn’t the case well I was going to be a shooting guard for the Nuggets if I’m glad uh we’ve got this all worked out yeah we can we can we we can leave our our level of basketball and our childhood dreams into our podcast exactly yeah I like it all right so anyway Steve tell us about uh emotional transformative therapy and how did you come across it and yeah we’ll give it a description of it so I came across this years ago again I mentioned I was in my own therapy my therapist at the time had discovered this and said Steve this is the uh this is the thing you’re really gonna have to learn this this is do I want you to trust me I want you to say yes and I want you to you know consider getting some continue education in this so I said okay I’ll I will um I will learn so that I learned by dumb luck by just you know having the therapist that I had at the time so so I went on there’s five levels uh of training for emotional transformation therapy and essentially what it does is it is the following right so it’s a it’s an attachment based therapy right so it attends to remembering that who’s sitting across from you has an attachment style maybe it’s secure maybe it’s avoidant maybe it’s resistant ambivalent or disorganized or any of these right and learning how to kind of remember to connect with them and to to attune to that give them a good attachment experience with you as a therapist and I found that to be just stylistically uh very much in my own Styles I really want to have a real relationship with the person sitting across with from me and this this therapy reminds me and forces me to like attune to that and then and then coupling the the attachment style of the person with these visual tools right so emotional transformation therapy is about using color and light visual stimulus for precise brain stimulation so there the the person is going to get the healing quality of both white and color to attach and create its own their own relationship to that with what they’re working through so what what I would kind of liken this too is um like getting to like having a piano tuner tuning the piano to just the right sound right everybody has their own kind of frequency and they vibrate in a different way depending on kind of what they’re going through you know whether they’re grieving the loss of their grandmother or their you know at the beach looking out looking out the ocean that they’re gonna they’re gonna feel a certain way and the color and light can help um induce or stimulate healing uh outcomes so so um I’ll speak a little about each right so so light is very well documented you know there’s lots of who who’ve talked about you know having seen the light or uh the white light of a near-death experience or a light bulb popped off on their in their head and they had an aha moment or um or people in Alaska who don’t see the Sun for several you know days throughout the year sitting under under lamps or that there is a very real light um healing property that happens okay that one would serve discover and so the lead Pioneer is a man named Stephen Vasquez out of Dallas Texas really brilliant mind discovered that that color has the same thing so all the color in the visual Spectrum from you know red to violet indigo Etc uh has its own energetic vibration right it’s not just kind of uh we will kind of vent a speech step but real science and that you’re taking this kind of energetic vibration of this color and all the color also is shown to be specifically good for certain cognitive emotional spiritual and physical states of being so I can I can listen to someone talk about a particular problem and select a color that will help augment or accelerate how fast somebody can begin to work through a particular problem and why that why that is is is is we’re tapping into the parasympathetic nervous system where something that excites me in like the this next chapter of mental health Psychiatry healing is how do you how do we as professionals as healers induce that how do we get somebody into their parasympic nervousness and if you’re a listener or layperson doesn’t know about that this is where healing occurs so it’s the million dollar question that not every therapist and doctors answers how do you how do you get somebody in the repair Superbike nervousness well it’s very very hard to deal with regular talk therapy you know it’s very hard to do yeah but the color and light in conjunction with you know attuning to attachment will help a person settle and drop into the repair sympathetic nervous system and they’ll be able to cut through problems in an accelerated rate they’ll they’ll have emotional breakthroughs they’ll have cognitive Clarity they’ll even have physical relief in their body something that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get as a mental health therapist see somebody get physical benefit from the emotional work that we’re doing um there’s four primary tools I don’t know if I’m talking too much I can stop here or if I what would you like yeah let’s go through the tools and then I just want Chris to kind of React to what what we’re hearing here is this he’s hearing it for the first time I’m sure okay run on um and and forgive me if it’s a little bit out of order I’m just excited to share about a therapy that didn’t work so there’s four primary tools and I’ll share the the about two of them most specifically uh one tool is called the color spectral Char and it’s basically just a poster you can imagine looking at um with as every that has every color on it sort of looks like a psychedelic poster a college kid’s dorm room has every color in it the second tool is a machine it’s called the chroma pulse two and it emits color and light so this is a very Dynamic tool because you can use both whereas the first tool I just mentioned is only color and then the third Tool uh they’re called the color dowels so they’re like these little small sticks and each one has its own color red blue green Etc and and those are used for specific kind of peripheral eye stimulation I might liken that to what maybe an EMDR therapist does and you’re targeting uh the brain with with the brain very specifically with these different eye movements and so is the the color uh chart and so uh the light machine I didn’t afford there’s something called the uh blackout goggles and these are literally blackout goggles that have just two little small pupils in them and you can turn them into specific positions so that you can very precisely aim where a light enters the eye that corresponds to certain parts of the brain that stimulates certain responses in a person okay so um why that’s interesting the the visual stimulation and aiming that directly into the brain is they used to say like a person might say look my identity is a depressed person I’m just that’s just how I am um that’s not necessarily true what what’s true is that there’s a part of the brain that’s managing the depressed problem and it’s not very good at that and this therapy will serve to locate and find that area of the brain and the other part of the brain that badges it better and moving that information or that area that governs that to a part that knows how to do it better and how it’s done is with the color and Light I wouldn’t be able to do that otherwise so so I’ll speak about the color chart a bit and then I will shoot and then I’ll talk a little bit about the light machine because those are the two most exciting so this color chart did you want to say something yeah I it yeah what you describe those two and then yeah we’ll just have a quick conversation about it sure so the color chart is a great diagnostic tool when I begin with a client an early treatment I like to have them um talk about their primary issue and look at each of these colors one by one discovering which which one of these colors is easy for them to look at which color is difficult to look at so what happens is there will be some colors that they can look at straight on and there’ll be no visual Distortion that’s very important is you want to find that where where they distort the color so what I mean by that is they might be looking at Green and then on the chart their eyes expanded it looks like the whole chart’s green or it looks like the yellow is kind of darting into it or it’s shrinking or they see something in that what would that visual Distortion is letting me know is that they’re not oriented right so where this is really a gift in my work is people dissociate and they used to think that only really highly traumatized people like a combat that are in dissociate it’s not true you know regular old people just like you and I get emotionally overloaded and we dissociate but in therapy that Association can be very slight and very subtle and not detectable to the person and not to talk to Bull to the therapists and and what would that color Distortion is identifying is a form of dissociation with a specific color that corresponds to a certain type of cognitive or emotional or spiritual State and so what it’s doing is it’s it’s it’s simplifying for me precisely where the area of treatment needs to become targeted uh I can say people time and I can Orient them quicker and move them through problems faster just by just by employing the use of color so that that that that particular tool is a favor because it’s it it will precisely aim therapy yeah and Orient and and let me know precisely when they’re when they’re dissociated and not fully present for the issue the second tool is the color and light machines you can imagine sitting in a dark in an actual machine that emits color and I can I can blend those colors so I can take red and green and blue and and blend them so that they match the emotional experience that the client is having in the moment how they’re attaching how they’re relating in the moment with the color with the issue that they’re working on and what’s what’s cool about that is this this becomes very physical what I’ve found is people’s stuff is in their body and it’s hard to get it all that stuff that’s in their body and as they’re looking at the color and the line they’ll tell you like you know my shoulders are really crunching up and it doesn’t feel very good and now I’ll start to adjust the color and this would be a blue issue by the way I would start blending blue or removing the blue until they say it’s better or it’s worse and then I’ll ask let me know when it’s better or it’s worse well it’s better they’ll go it’s better but now it’s in my ear now now it’s kind of like the feeling is in my ear and I and I change the color again and what what that it sort of becomes like a cat and mouse or I’m chasing this little physical symptom out of their body and while they’re having these emotional experience while they’re having different memory that makes the therapy very Dynamic yeah Chris I’d love to hear what you hear and all about yeah I mean this has just got my wheels turned and that’s the first time I’ve heard of it and a great explanation so thank you very much you know I’ve spent the last three years personally on a personal journey in uh SE therapy and when you’re talking you know being able to move people much quicker I found myself even as someone in long-term recovery really struggling to find the somatic areas in my body and to attune to those because my brain for so many years it kept me so safe and so with this light therapy it appears to be such a dynamic way to your point to get people to settle and to get into that parasympathetic nervous system it took me 11 years into recovery and I had to go to The Meadows Behavioral Health thing in the my parasympathetic nervous system for the first time and I’ve been working at it ever since but I think uh maybe to your point a little bit there’s a lot of things in our world and in life that pull away from the opportunity to get into that system there’s a lot of barriers to that mainly I gotta go back to work and this seems like a really really cool modality that can help people get grounded and settled and safe much quicker than even something like an sc therapy that’s in the body but most certainly as you said the talk therapy what are you finding for people when they come in as far as getting into the body does that happen pretty quickly after that first session or does that um does that take a little bit of time a little bit more Rapport building because my experience with other modalities absent of talk therapy it takes a bit of work to really get into that and a lot of time and after
yeah that’s a great question Chris you know I think I meet people who are more open I meet people who are more naturally sensitive and and the color and light will have immediate um impact on them and they’ll they’ll they’ll they’ll be able to report things in their body and then they’re sure like you’re describing I mean maybe it’s part of your journey that are that are less that way they’re they’re less connected or they’re just you know my opinion they’re just kind of more uh bulkier type you know that takes them a little longer to connect to what’s actually happening in their body and it’s not like me though I’ll I’ll I might have somebody who is describing something that’s clearly pretty hard-hitting and they’re they’re pretty non-reactive and so so so from that perspective I I know like they’re really disconnected they’re they’re pretty well disconnected from it because they’re talking about something so hard hitting without without much
um change in their in their body and so it’s both right you can take it can take a while it can take a while but a lot of times I find that results come more quickly it’s pretty it’s pretty um it’s very safe obviously unless you have a seat or issue and it’ll help Inspire connection to the body and spirit you know I love how you um stay out of it sounds like it correct me if I’m wrong but with the modality you tend to stay out of the bulky parts of the story if you will a kind of a lot like SC is is we get into the body and we explore the body things come up but as a practitioner I’m sure on the client level it’s quite nice to be able to move through something where I’m not retelling all of my shame and pain in every single session we can really get into what matters in that body and that that mind-body connection well what does happen to your point is because it’s so easily or quickly gets people into that healing part of their physiology
it’s kind of like we’re in we’ll talk about this later with psychedelics but like basically what’s achieving is it’s slowing down the amygdala it’s causing that kind of fear Center that gets caught up in those you know bulky details um and softens that so they can begin to use their other parts of their you know emotional range or their spiritual range or their intelligence to start kind of unhooking solving healing these kind of difficult things without it being like too much time in the bulk of all the content yeah I think I I I love that about ett and I think somatic experiencing has similar qualities and um I I like that our field is learning that like we don’t have to rehash every detail of a trauma to have for people to find Healing um because that almost creates an exposure type environment and I think EMDR actually can be pretty uh intense and kind of exposed people to a lot of things that that uh where they struggle to stay in that parasympathetic nervous system so um I really appreciate uh your your pretty thorough description of it um and so let’s transition uh first to ketamine assisted therapy uh which is again kind of a a newer approach um we’re finding uh I think we’re finally starting to find our group here at Peaks where we’re getting some efficacy with the ketamine assisted therapy uh particularly with uh treatment refractory uh depression uh people who in even um High degree of uh uh suicidal ideation that doesn’t seem to move much with uh other medic medications and uh Psychotherapy um and the use of kind of a six series uh set of ketamine uh infusions is what we’re using here uh does seem to kind of help people be able to dissociate and maybe detach from some of those uh negative cognitions that they tend to be stuck in I’m curious kind of how you Steve are using ketamine assistive therapy and and what what tree to this modality yeah oh man you guys are so cool I I am I am I’m impressed I’m so stoked that you that you guys are thinking this way and and implementing this into your uh services for people like like I’ll just I’ll move into it just a moment but like this next this next chapter of mental health and Psychiatry and well-being I think it really I think it really is you know color and light it’s it’s neural feedback it’s um you know I think a lot of like we’re watching bezel Vander Colt’s work around getting people back into movement and their body you know um and and it’s psychedelics yeah right the these these these modalities and therapies are effective and they’re intelligent and ketamine assisted Psychotherapy is one of them so what what I uh what I can say about it is
probably my personal experience and burning in my professional experience my personal experiences maybe 10 years ago I I had my first intentional ceremonial psychedelic Journey um I didn’t fully understand what I was signing up but people who took me there I had a transformational experience um and it caused for me to become very interested in these plant medicine synthetics and and the Firepower they were rolling out and how fast they were rolling out that kind of Firepower and how fast fuel could heal and really change so I when ketamine became known to me as a therapist as like a you know above board treatment I went and got trained I trained with Phil Wolfson and San Francisco at the ketamine training center and then I’ve since implemented into my work and I I I I work mostly with intramuscular injection and sublingual lozenges there’s different routes of administration as you know you know these are the two that that I use and um what would I what I what I really like about ketamine specifically we can talk about many psychedelics but we’re talking about Academy now is ketamine is is a safe medicine it is long used it’s it’s very well known in the hospital it doesn’t disturb uh respiration there are very few things that would that would disqualify a person medically from from use I mean you would want to use this what people love you know um psychiatric problems like thought disorders sure that’s a very very very safe medicine and what I really like about it is it’s a medicine that I believe is going to be a bridge and Gateway to other healing psychedelics right so ketamine is is a classified and it’s an nmda antagonist and they think it moves in the glutamate receptor area neurotransmitter side of the brain not significant because then that means it doesn’t doesn’t get into SSRI World Series yeah like this means like a person who’s really depressed or really anxious or really traumatized these people are are probably on psychotropic medication that’s going to immediately disqualify them from other psychedelics like mushrooms like MDMA like many of them Ayahuasca they’re not going to be able to do them but they can do Kennedy right oh that’s cool yes it’s it’s a different neural transmitter exactly different system yeah right and it’s in it it only lasts an hour and and and it gives people the break of normal mind like the the thing that’s so cool about is you know like I think how I think I feel how I feel I understand the world how I understand the world my brain is programmed the way my brightness program my default network is what it is and it’s very hard to to have a break from that or adjust that and ketamine will allow that to happen it’s also a dissociative anesthetic right so it causes that break of normal mind and introduces a psychedelic experience with new access to new thinking new emotional experiences new new spiritual experiences and and people come back feeling better as you know has a very robust very robust antidepressant quality so someone’s really depressed or suicidal it’ll it’ll probably really relieve a lot of that most the time and then it’s indicates a lot of things I’ve seen people you know work through a lot of substance use issues I’ve seen people work through uh long-standing anxiety issues or traumas um it’s good for spiritual growth it’s really it’s really a wonderful medicine and I’m glad that it’s becoming more readily available I do think it needs to be done with professional hands curated and intelligently I think there’s a lot of things that can go wrong but these are some of my immediate thoughts about really admiration for the medicine yeah I think it’s I think it’s shown to be super powerful in in kind of preparing to talk to you I came across uh this concept um at least that I was reading about about um how we identify we build a lot of our identity basically on giving ourselves feedback where we are kind of looking in the past and kind of building out our identity and um some of the the ketamine assisted therapy documentation that I was looking at talked about uh ketamine allowing people to give themselves feed forward where they’re able to kind of project forward and build an identity uh looking forward rather than just only building it based upon things we have done in the past and I found that to be fairly intriguing I haven’t had any opportunity to do anything with that uh feedback and I don’t know how that strikes you Steve but that that concept was brand new to me um as of yesterday
yeah yeah I mean I think what I could say that’s kind of relates to that is my own personal experience of the medicine I think if you’re going to be sharing it and offering it or teaching it or you know giving it to to clients that you you have the experience of the medicine yourself and my experience with the medicine it has a it’s good for my existence I find that like it helps remind me about all of existence and my place in it and and and how to be in the world right like I kind of kind of remember things or are shown things about yeah how to live right so to me that feels like kind of feed forward where I kind of come out of these and I’m I’m in touch with some form of love or some form of like wisdom about how to conduct myself internally and externally in relationship myself and my world that that just feels healthier um and smarter than you know an hour before when I before I went in into the journey and that’s what I’ve seen with clients I find a lot of clients come out and they have those types of feed forward experiences I mean sometimes that they come out and there’s lots of turmoil um which is why you want a good therapist or a doctor who’s helping them make sense of all that but generally speaking I think feed forward is a great uh way of talking about you know what what it what it can do for people yeah yeah I I really appreciate you checking in with that and I had no idea that um folks that were on ssris were a candidate for ketamine I mean that just warms my heart um I come from a very uh in Prescott Arizona I’m sure you see a lot of it in Southern California Lord knows they have quite a few treatment providers out there that are 12-step based what are you doing for individuals who are coming to you that maybe have had um trauma resilient we’ll call it some people call it a treatment resistant Tendencies and they just haven’t you know they’ve been to five to ten treatments and they’ve been fed you know the book from 1935 which has a lot of great Tools in it but it really butts up against some of these opportunities that we have uh to satiate the nervous system to seep forward to be objective with our experience potentially the emotions that are associated with it how do you chop through the shame that’s going to come up because I can remember signing up for I’m going to Costa Rica for my first Ayahuasca retreat in February of next year and I remember going into my therapist and this was months ago I said Paulie I got a little bit of Shame here and I said I’m doing this Ayahuasca thing and I you know I’m not a 12-stepper anymore I’m a mountaineer I take people outside but she goes Chris stop it I’m doing my ketamine assisted therapy next week I said all right and that was what it took for me to walk through that but talking about somebody new to recovery how do you walk through that with them yeah yeah now that that now I’m now I’m so glad that you brought that up and it’s for listeners I hope that this becomes like one of the more interesting parts of our conversation is um you know not all the shoes fit right you gotta it’s a case-by-case basis you got to decide if this is a the the right right shoe and this could be a right way of healing but you know first and foremost I I I love the 12 Steps it’s been a long time in a 12-step program myself I could probably still recite like many of the popular passages of that book sponsored and sponsored people like I I know this philosophy very well and I have a great admiration for it um and it and it and it’s
you know it’s something that to really think about I think you know I I have some some colleagues who have treatment centers here in California and their position is most people are going to relapse like like relapse is a very a very common part of the healing process for addiction and most people don’t get it right the first try and so his thought is let’s give him ketamine like maybe it will help induce the psychic change that Bill Wilson and Dr silk worth talk about and Alcoholics Anonymous uh maybe it won’t but it does have a very strong effect on reducing alcohol we’ve seen that in the science right so it’s it’s something to like really think about um and there’s like you know there’s different people in in AAA or like let’s say like uh the Pacific group have very strong opinions about um what medicines you can take and not take and um I don’t care what what I care about is if it works and I’ve seen reduction with with with you know substance use through ketamine and I’ve heard these wonderful stories I I met a man who who who was one of those very deeply entrenched mathematics who tried to do like a cop suicide you know to provoke the cops to shoot him he had one single ayahuasca ceremony never used meth ever again now I have a colleague of mine who spent many a year I’m addicted to heroin almost died of heroin um had ibogaine treatments in Mexico uh totally obliterated her opiate addiction and hasn’t used ever since um and so for for someone who’s new in recovery I’m not sure that I would immediately move to a psychedelic as a treatment option but I would certainly consider it and I would certainly use it if I thought I was appropriate um and then definitely with more established recovery I just work just work reselling with two different men who are long time a a old timers who had nagging depression and nagging anxiety and nagging issues that were obstructing more relational fulfillment and safely underwent ketamine treatment got a lot of good benefit and and did not um did not you know pick up
yeah I love that and it just it’s it’s really exciting to hear I mean Old-Timers and the like I think I remember um we had a mature adult in our program that was 74 years old and was one of our first candidates for ketamine and just the ability to move through issues and areas in which we’re they’re stuck and I just I wanted to ask that question because I believe when we can get the depth and weight of the honest truth behind some of these medications into those rooms in a formidable way in a connected way I think we begin to start to save a lot of lives that would have otherwise been lost and one of my status experiences as being a part of the 12-step program is I would come in as a young adult and you know Joe would be there with 15 years and then I’d come back the next day and he’d be gone and maybe if I’m lucky I get to see him again in three weeks and he’s lost everything and so I’m hopeful that now that these these new Progressive modalities and these opportunities to really just meet people where they’re at can speak to some of the old-timers and maybe create an opportunity for them to work on their mental health because let’s face it when when we started you know in 1935 we just wasn’t a lot of psychotherapy going on and there wasn’t a lot of talk of mental health and if there was uh you certainly weren’t hanging out in that AAA meeting so I just appreciate the breadth of fresh air on this modality and the way that you explain it and its intention um I think most people can probably see themselves in their recovery long term benefiting from something like that yeah I think also it’s just like you know my my my like deepest kind of you know regards for 12-step philosophy because you know people who really really do it it will save their life but I think one of the things that it has not done to your point is it doesn’t always relieve the the other types of pains the you know sadnesses or depressions or traumas and what I think as exciting as as an inter cross intersection between therapy and let’s say 12-step where psychedelics to be able to introduce something like MDMA or mushrooms to help overcome those those those issues so that people really have a good life and really have like a a more fulfilled experience and I think a lot of the other psychedelics remind and teach people over and over again that there’s such a bigger experience to be had um or that that far you know supersedes and outweighs you know getting drunk for example and their lives really get better you know that’s that’s really what I’m interested in and kind of why I’m healthfully jealous of you guys from Colorado right you guys can do more right now because like that’s what it’s about right I think you know you know you you’re offering in mind it’s truly about giving people a good life man like I I what I really want to say is I I want to live a good life I want everyone else to have a good life you have a certain amount of time on the ride before you die right so while you’re here it ought to be good and if it works then it works right and it’s like I always tell people if you’re going to work with me I’m gonna give you what I got I’m gonna give you everything I got to help you win it this thing I want you to have the life that you envision in your mind and and I will use as many of the tools as I can to to help you get there you know and and and implementing psychedelics is going to be is going to be so um it’s going to be so helpful with people you know especially when you’re combining that with like the care of a good doctor or a good therapist so you know nice all the rest you know environment and peers Etc so yeah I think it is the beautiful thing about being here in Colorado with this prop 122 that we passed and that you know hopefully within the next couple years we’ll be able to really uh expand what we are doing and move Beyond just the ketamine assisted therapy and really move into more of the plant-based medicine as well um and it just kind of in the in the brief time we have remaining I did kind of just want to talk about uh even the use of psilocybin and uh the more kind of research in in my own experience with psilocybin uh I I’ve been reminded I I was listening to a different podcast uh called Radio Lab and it’s actually a science podcast and um it was about uh how the so I’m about to go in a little tangent but I’m going to bring it around hopefully you can chat with me but it was about how uh forests are connected all the degrees in the forest communicate with one another and this is new stuff right like they started figuring out that trees were transferring nutrients to sick trees during the mycelium right through fungi through mushrooms um and it’s a tree would signal to other trees in the forest that like something unsafe is happening or a disease is coming or an infestation is coming or we’re running out of water over here and they can transfer nutrients or if a tree is beginning to actually perish it will dump its nutrients into the mycelium and mycelium will spread the nutrients out um through the other trees and then I start to think about the Psychedelic Journey on mushrooms and how parallel that is right there’s a there’s a contact with Humanity that I think can come through a psychedelic Journey with with psilocybin that does the exact same connections of you realize your place in the world and you realize your place in the forest of people if you will and and there’s an exchange going on and and uh that can be done through this uh psilocybin and I and that may be a little bit far out I don’t know if there’s a question in there Steve but no other saying I got all kinds of ideas and responses that I don’t throw one or two out there I’d love to hear what you have to say and I’d love to hear yes and Chris yeah yes emphatic yes to is the answer to that that that that that that that is that is that is the real that is that is nature and we we are nature right right it’s true right like I I I heard this saying that there was uh the example you used was a collection of trees that were near a water source uh and and they were aware that there was a tree that was uh some distance away like over one of our 50 yards or whatever that couldn’t access the water as well and the trees shuttled the water under the ground to the other tree right and that this is this is nature and I’ll you know relate it to humanity is in nature wants to do that right it wants to be harmonious it wants to repair it wants to make things better right and our brain is the same way that once the brain understands a better way to do something it will always want to do it that way it’s it’s just it’s just the nature of things and so mushrooms you know for me mushrooms you know the the nickname the teacher and that’s because they are they’re just very wise and and they’re they’re it’s our if you’re thinking from evolutionary perspective if there was nothing on the earth the first thing that would grow would be the mushrooms the fungus and so they’re they’re the oldest right and the wisest and and they will they they kind of help shuttle the the resource or help shuttle the the information right when they’re they’re helping the trees take that nutrient or water across to another tree it wants to do that and and we’re no different right so we’re just a change the word tree to human right like the the engagement the relationship between a human being and the mushroom is the same the mushroom will begin to
um relate and provide resource uh in the form of wisdom or you know emotional relief or creativity um because that’s its nature the mushrooms want to do that and uh in my experiences our brains want to upgrade they want to yield so yeah I think with intention is what I suggest is what I do when I ask what they’ll do is like be in relationship with the mushroom understand that it wants to wants to wants to connect with you wants to work with you and then it does right and then something something very miraculous and cool happens it’s hard to replicate you know in another in other ways it can obviously be done but it’s a wonderful it’s a wonderful thing that that the human human person and the mushroom can do together yeah wasn’t that uh the Netflix change your mind yeah I think that’s when I initially saw it and from an evolutionary perspective those guys really believe in the depth and weight of these on this mycelium and it’s it’s it’s really cool the way that you guys identify how the mushroom kind of works with you um and can create an experience and more objectively create an experience which you don’t have to necessarily tether to or be over emotional with you can kind of see it in front of you and if it doesn’t you know you can let it pass or bring it in or intentionalize it or integrate it I love that opportunity because for whatever reason when you get into talk therapy so often you get these dead ends and I don’t remember or these blank spots and that was the story of really that my first 10 years of recovery and I was one of those people that sat in Alcoholics Anonymous for the first six years and I was the Secretary of the meeting that had a little bit of depression thought about drinking each day but because I love the community so much and the people were like family to me I stuck around was able to do it but I look back at that experience and offering up something like psilocybin or potentially been ketamine probably could have created a quality of life in my first six or seven years of recovery that was better than a six out of ten um and this is so exciting for people coming in now because they’re really at least in the Peaks experience we’re getting to introduce them to the best of what we have a lot like you do with your clients um and walk with them in that journey and we’re seeing people at Peaks coming into inpatient treatment settling in the first three to five days because they know well first they can see the recovery inside our program because it’s broad it’s open-minded um and it has these offerings that you talk about that I think really have the ability to move people on um and get to a safe place much quicker than they would otherwise now think about it this way like imagine this like just kind of being in the metaphor Chris like you’re in these uh AAA meetings you’re you know you’re you’re the secretary you have your regular folks that are coming you love the community right that those are the trees right the tree those are like we we want to give you the shade we want to shuttle the nutrients to you let’s go to coffee I want to give you know give you a cake on your birthday or you know read the book with me you know and they they that it’s the same thing right and if you could imagine if that was just more acceptable right like you can have the wonderful benefit of that community and be like no and and and I can also have uh mushrooms I can also have the relationship that mushrooms offer me kind of internally right and being able to have have both right I have both to to to have a more fulfilling life experience a healthier more well experienced yeah I love that because I think I think for a long time especially young adults and when I got into this I was 22 years old and I literally thought it was a life sentence to mediocrity and so recovery was because we have this allergy we got to walk through we got to do these things that other people can’t do and this this new way of thinking is is quite the opposite of that you can have everything that you could have ever imagined we just have to walk through these certain steps and develop this um authentic and vulnerable connection with others we have this opportunity to recover in a way that I don’t think was possible before just really cool stuff just sit here watching I’m just like oh my goodness cool I think I think what will be interesting to see is you know mushrooms are you know Mind Medicine they they are good for depression but it’ll it’ll be interesting when and if they allow something like MDMA or another kind of plant versions of MDMA yeah that will allow like uh heart medicine with Mind Medicine together to really really deeply um transform a person’s experience right now I think we you guys can’t use MDMA yet right no or you can use uh plant versions of it yeah yeah that’s it and even then it can’t be used in kind of formal I mean it’s we’re in a nebulous area right now yeah you know it’s a little unclear and certainly yeah a lot of things are still on the line and insurance and that sort of thing uh still trying to sort it all out but of course yeah um well Steve as we kind of wrap up here I I feel like we should talk again like in six months or a year and have you back on here and like let’s just see where all this is going and I I really appreciate your passion it gets me really fired up if I’m going to be honest with you about um where this whole movement is going um it I’d love for you to kind of do a little promo of uh Coast wise if you don’t mind throw your website or and uh talk about how people can reach you real quick and then uh we’ll we’ll sign off for the show yeah I appreciate the opportunity to do that yeah now I would love to be come back in a half year a year I like the friendship that we’re that we’re building you got a great I think I think any client that comes to you is going to be very well served and very lucky um and I and I hope that people have that experience with with Coast wise um if you want to find me you can go to um coastwisecounselingcenter.com that’s the therapy side or you can go to Coast wise Recovery Center that’s the outpatient drug and alcohol side um and follow all the links so my phone was on there um and what I would say to any kind of like would-be listeners or people who who are looking to heal um in any other way you need to it’s like really I said it earlier um the coastwise brand all my therapists my whole team myself what what what we believe in is that you deserve to have a good life you get one time on the ride you should be a good one if you choose to work with us we’re going to be honest with you we’re gonna be caring towards you and we’re going to give you a really solid experience and we’re going to do our best to help you have more of the life experience that that you know is really possible for you I mean it would be a delight to to at least answer questions or if one day it felt right for you to work work with me or any of my team that would be it would be a real um delight and I’d be grateful to have you so um thank you for for having me on guys any listeners out there thanks for thanks for listening and I hope to I hope to you know keep up the the relationship and the friendship with you guys at Peaks yeah I’m really looking forward to that as well and uh next time I’m in the LA area I plan on looking you up Steve I’d love to get coffee or something with you and um really appreciate you and I think anyone who goes to Coastal coastalwise is uh fortunate to have somebody so Innovative and kind of putting forward um where we’re going as a field rather than uh where we’ve been as a field so I I appreciate that and uh with that uh we’ll go and sign off please uh follow us on finding Peaks uh for fall finding Peaks uh you can follow us on Tick Tock there we go uh you can find us on Facebook of course uh Instagram um feel free to email email us at questions at findingpeaks.com um and uh and with that we’ll sign off thank you everyone and have a great day peace