Steven Garbman, RP
Registered Counsellor
Toronto ON
I work mainly online with my clients and use our sessions to engage their thinking. Very often, my "psychedelic" clients have deep thoughts and experiences they want to share and often require feedback from me as the therapist to dissect and interpret their thoughts.
When I`m working in-person sessions with my clients , I have the ability to utilize my Gestalt , Play and Therapy techniques to gain a better visualization and understanding of my client but the foundations of my approach lie in my Person Centered approlach and training
which allows me create a facilitative ,empathic environment wherein the client can discover the answers for themselves.
Thanks to technology, I am still able to utilize art therapy over the internet but online sessions are usually far more focused on the speech and thoughts of my client versus their visual expressions, presented via play and artistic examples.
Growing up as the child of a pharmacist, I quickly learned the dichotomy of drugs (medication.) I noticed that drugs had multiple usages and affected people differently. This would reitterate, that legal and illegal drugs both could produce similar results however, one was legal and the other illegal, thus, one was regulated and the other one was unregulated. My exposure to the back-end of the pharmaceutical world created a fascination on the psychopharmacology, otherwise known, as, the way that drugs affects the mind and behavoiour.
Through encounters , I learned firsthand, that psychedelics although low on the list of class allocation according to the danger-rating, had the potential to be the most underrated class of drugs available. The danger lies in the fact that psychedlics tend to work mainly on cognition versus most of the other drugs that have a much more obvious effect on the physical body. Sometimes, the mind was unable to spring back to the place it began whereas the body is able to recover a lot quicker.
My journey has allowed me the privilige to be on both sides of the table with regards to the field of psychedelics, and have experienced firsthand, the power and potential that psychedelics present on the mind and soul.
At this time, I`m not offering any specialized programs.