Brian Henderson, AMFT
Associate Marriage and Family Therapist
San Francisco CA
My clients describe my approach as warm, direct, compassionate, and real. I tend to bring a mix of relational work (making real-time comments about what I'm aware of in the connection between us) and somatic work (helping clients build awareness of the sensations in their bodies, so they can have more choice in how they respond to the world). I find it important to contextualize what my clients are experiencing within the deeply painful political, ecological, and spiritual moment in which we live. So often, we turn inward to ourselves with cruel, judgmental voices that we have learned to swallow from the world around us. Part of allowing ourselves to change and grow involves returning responsibility for the pain we feel to where it really belongs, so we can get back in touch with the web of life around us.
We heal in the presence of other humans. I’m a human too, it turns out, and my humanity will be in the room with us.
I've been a practicing psychedelic integration coach since 2019. I am also a therapist, writer, a swimmer, and a lover of queer dancefloors and music. To inform our work, I will call on my experience as a gay man who has grappled with unlocking his own life force and on my decade-long relationship with chronic pain. I will also reference my UC training as an ecologist and the inspiration I've received from Taoism to point out the ways that our healing journeys so often mirror processes in the natural world. Our souls go through cyclical progressions like seasons and weather patterns, just as the Earth does.
I offer Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy and weekly ongoing psychedelic integration coaching, in addition to traditional psychotherapy.
Ketamine can be a useful medicine for understanding where our life force has gotten stuck. Through a Western psychological lens, ketamine’s dissociative effect can be understood as interrupting the habitual brain pathways along which we travel in relation to traumatic experiences. In disorganizing the way we are accustomed to experiencing the present, it offers the opportunity for new emotions, sensations, and thoughts to occur in relation to those experiences and make new perspectives on them possible.
We can thank indigenous traditions for preserving a more ritual or ceremonial framework, in which ketamine can be imagined as one of many portals available to us through which we can meet a more expansive version of ourselves, connect with the ancestral memories held in our bodies, make contact with divine presence, and rediscover the inherent magic of the world around us. I tend to hold these paradigms as being simultaneously true.
I work with couples and individuals, and specialize in working with the LGBTQ+ community and with folx suffering from chronic pain and illness. Visit my website for information on pricing, location, and contact info.