One of the most powerful things ketamine brought out of me was the ability to hold both honesty and compassion—to name my truth without needing to erase someone else’s. I know quite a few people reading this are still in the religion I grew up in. And I want to be clear: I still love and have a great relationship with many individuals in that faith. This post is not about shaming people. It's about naming the wound. It's about calling out the system. It’s about reclaiming what was stolen from me.
Let me start with this story:
Back in 2017, I was on a short Sunday hike. And out of nowhere, I had a full-blown panic attack. I lost my breath. I felt like I was carrying a fucking boulder on my chest. Over and over, I had to whisper to myself, “I am not sinning for going hiking on a Sunday.” That panic didn’t come from nowhere—it was the residue of years of indoctrination. And the worst part? This happened four years after I had stopped going to church… and seven years after I stopped believing.
Let’s go back to 2010. That’s when I found out the narrative I was taught in church didn’t match the actual history. I felt completely isolated, terrified to tell anyone. I was afraid. Angry. And that anger started leaking into other parts of my life. I fell into a rabbit hole of doubt, shame, and confusion. It took me eight fucking years to stop feeling guilty for drinking coffee. I had major trust issues—especially with myself.
Even earlier—when I was a missionary in Orlando—we were required to read a quote or scripture every single day reinforcing the idea that your happiness and prosperity were conditional on obedience to the church. I had a zone leader companion tell me I had to choose between my antidepressants or Jesus Christ. My dad had died just 18 months before. I was carrying grief, untreated ADHD, and barely threatened with deportation. When I got home, everything I had buried came flooding back. The guilt. The anxiety. The belief that if I wasn’t suffering, I must be doing something wrong.
I read The Miracle of Forgiveness multiple times—this book that used to be recommended by the church as part of the repentance process. All it did was teach me to hate myself more. If a book written by a so-called prophet—quoted in General Conference—can just be tossed aside and go out of print, then none of their prophets, past or present, hold any value for me anymore. Same with their whiplash rebranding—spending millions on the “I’m a Mormon” campaign, only to later say that “Mormon” is a victory for Satan? Fuck that. But I’m gonna stop there before my blood boils.
When I first started ketamine treatment in June 2024, it wasn’t even for religious trauma. It was for grief. In February of that year, I lost a friend who was like a father figure. Two weeks later, I lost another friend to suicide. My nervous system tapped out. I had already spent almost two years crying over my cousin’s death… and that grief resurfaced the old pain from losing my dad.
My first ketamine sessions felt like a full replay of my life—but through the eyes of an observer. I wasn't trapped in the story anymore. I was witnessing it. And what blew me away wasn’t just the medicine itself—the emotional surgery happening in real time, the rewiring I could feel happening in my brain—it was also how in sync Better U was with the entire process. They knew exactly which songs would touch which parts of the brain and when. It wasn’t random. It was precise. It was fucking sacred.
Part of the ketamine treatment protocol is to go really easy on yourself for the next 4–8 hours. And you don’t just “feel relaxed”—you become this walking embodiment of self-compassion. That kind of softness toward myself? I had never felt it before. No disrespect, but I never once experienced that kind of self-compassion as a Mormon.
Here’s a snapshot:
On my mission, my companion and I passed out from pure physical exhaustion and took a nap. We needed it. We were done. But instead of anyone checking in to see if we were okay, the zone and district leaders saw us, ratted us out, and the mission president chewed us out over the phone. That man was Joseph B. Wirthlin’s son-in-law. So you know what kind of rigidity I’m talking about. No empathy. Just punishment.
Ketamine? It does the opposite.
You start with journal prompts that get under your skin in the best way—pulling up buried memories, thought patterns, emotional knots. Then the medicine hits, and it drops you into this deep meditative state, expanding your sense of self and opening your brain to neuroplasticity. The gold comes in the integration afterward—which is what this blog is really about.
In math, integration is about summing up the tiniest pieces of a region infinitely, to find the area under the curve. That metaphor landed hard for me. Ketamine integration isn’t about "avoiding the appearance of evil"—it’s about sitting with the truth of what’s actually there.
Integration is the act of reflecting back on the treatment experience while your mind is still open and flexible. You take the insights, the images, the feelings that rose up during your session, and you zoom out. You look at them as a whole and ask: What is this showing me? What needs to shift? What patterns can I let go of now that I’ve seen where they came from?
It’s about giving new meaning to old pain.
It’s about learning to listen to your body, your emotions, your memories—instead of just shutting them down or quoting a hymn to push the “unwanted thoughts” away. Ketamine doesn’t tell you to shove your pain in a drawer and fake joy. It teaches you to sit with the pain long enough to learn what it’s here to teach you.
If you've made it this far, thank you. Writing this wasn't easy, but it was necessary. Ketamine didn’t just help me process grief—it helped me reclaim parts of myself that had been buried under shame, fear, and rigid conditioning. It gave me space to finally breathe, to finally feel, and to finally heal—not through suppressing my truth, but by facing it head-on.
This work isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not a magic pill. It’s a guided journey into the depths of who you are—and who you were before the world (or a church) told you who you had to be. But if you're carrying the weight of old trauma—religious or otherwise—then maybe it’s time to let something new in. Something that honors your healing. On your terms.
If you’re curious about starting your own ketamine journey, I can’t recommend Better U enough. Their process is thoughtful, trauma-informed, and backed by science—but more than that, they see you as a whole person, not a project to fix.
You can get $100 off your first treatment by using my promo code NANDO100 at betterucare.com.
Whatever path you're on—whether you're still in the church, out of it, or somewhere in between—just know this: you deserve healing that actually heals. You deserve to feel whole.
And you're not alone anymore.
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