“As therapists and guides, we’re holding that space for the location of healing to be intrinsic to that person.”
In this episode of the Numinus podcast, Dr. Joe speaks with Dr. Devon Christie. Dr. Christie is a family physician with a focused practice in Multidisciplinary Pain Management and the Senior Lead of Psychedelic Programs at Numinus. She is also a clinical instructor with the UBC Department of Medicine, Kundalini Yoga instructor, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher, Relational Somatic Therapist and MDMA-assisted and ketamine-assisted psychotherapist.
She also has first hand experience recovering from chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, PTSD, bulimia, anorexia, and depression. These experiences have served as the foundation for her work.
Dr. Christie and Dr. Joe spoke about:
- How Devon got into psychedelic medicine and why she believes there is so much promise in this field
- The psychedelic paradigm shift in medicine
- Healing mechanisms in psychedelic therapies
- The role of neuroplasticity, mindfulness, the default mode network, and mystical experiences in healing
- Why she believes somatic relational therapy is an ideal approach for psychedelics.
- Profound insights from her near death experience
- Her own healing journey, recovering from chronic pain, traumatic brain injury, and PTSD
- How psychedelics can change the world and some of the risks along the way
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Connect with Dr. Devon Christie on Facebook and Instagram.
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Here are some highlights from their conversation:
I think you and I both believe that psychedelics have the potential to bring about very, very meaningful change in our health care systems, maybe even more broadly than that.
Why do you think there’s so much promise here in mental health or maybe even health more broadly?
There are a lot of ways I could go in answering that question. I mean, the first thing that comes up is just this notion of a paradigm shift where, in my view, what psychedelic assisted psychotherapy proposes, is that we can have the intention of helping individuals to heal, to deeply heal from mental health conditions, from chronic illness in that the location of that healing is inside them.
We talk about this concept of an inner healing, inner healer, or innate healing intelligence as part of preparation for people going into these experiences to trust that that’s there and to allow that to guide the process. And that is as therapists and guides, we’re holding space for that, the location of healing to be intrinsic to that person. Like you cut yourself and then you keep the conditions clean and dry and your cells know how to knit themselves back together. There is an intelligence there.
But I think what our broader system has sort of conditioned us into perceiving is that we need to be fixed somehow by external people or modalities or surgeries or drugs, people that know more than us. And there’s this almost like a victim–there’s just less empowerment. It’s much more passive. And I think the way our system is set up almost kind of encourages that.
So it’s this active–you’re the source of healing. We’re going to create the optimal conditions. Do our best to do that. And so that to me is really powerful, empowering, and I think will lead to a lot of support for motivation and health behavior change. And so that’s just one aspect of the paradigm shift.
Another is, as I mentioned, with respect to how much I respect Gabor and his work is just this breaking–quitting this view that comes from biological reductionism that the mind and the body are separate. And that it’s all like–Western medicine is very materialistic and there’s a lot of benefit from that. We’ve learned so much. It’s amazing how much we understand our cellular biology and yet it sort of parses things apart and creates silos of specialties.
For example, where this doctor treats this system and this doctor treats this system and it’s all very focused on the physical. So there’s all these kinds of discrete categorizations, and people get many different diagnoses and go to see many different specialists for each of those separate things.
Yet when you really zoom out and take this more systems approach–which I actually didn’t mention as well, I’m a certified functional medicine practitioner, which is a systems biology view. It’s like, actually, no, it’s all interconnected. We’re alive ecosystems, and mind and body are absolutely intricately simultaneously co-arising. They can’t be separated. I have a thought that is producing chemicals that are influencing my state.
So I really see that psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is going to really support this awareness–approaches that are targeting our emotional well-being and our nervous system regulation and our what we term mental wellbeing will translate into physical, like positive physical outcomes.
Because we know and this is again in Gabor’s work. The stress response is just this common underlying factor between a multiplicity of different expressions of illness, whether we call them mental or physical.
So I’m really excited for that and for the ways that as we continue to research different applications of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy that we’re going to see and learn how much more broadly, this type of intervention may be applicable.
And the final tag on that is to actually support more systemic funding for psychotherapy in general. You know, psychedelics aside, right? We already have evidence for that. We already know that if people have access to psychotherapy, they visit their family physician less.
Psychotherapy as opposed to pharmacotherapy for mental illnesses. The research shows that it likely has much longer term benefits, more impact on quality of life for people rather than just symptom management, and that people prefer it and there are less side effects. So even if psychedelic assisted psychotherapy can also just usher this change in our system to bring parity to approaches that support individuals mental well-being, that would be a win, in my perspective.
