When Grief Gets Stuck: A Different Approach to Loss

There's a particular kind of suffering that comes with profound loss—the complex grief that follows a death, the anticipatory grief of a terminal diagnosis, or the existential distress that can accompany end-of-life awareness. These experiences often resist our conventional approaches.

Sometimes grief becomes complicated, not in the sense that it's doing anything wrong, but clinically—it gets entangled with rumination, avoidance, or emotional paralysis. The loss gets replayed in the mind without resolution. We know intellectually that healing is possible, but we can't quite access the emotional shift needed to move through it.

This is where ketamine-assisted psychotherapy offers something different. The medicine creates what I think of as an "emotional reset"—a window where we can encounter our grief from a different vantage point. Research shows it can significantly reduce rumination while allowing us to approach difficult experiences we've been avoiding. In palliative care settings, ketamine has demonstrated reductions in depression and anxiety while easing physical pain. But perhaps more importantly, it facilitates what dying patients often need most: the chance to process what's happening, to tend to unfinished business, to access acceptance that felt impossible before.

Your grief wants to be known and to evolve. Sometimes it needs a little help getting unstuck.