Dan Stein, LCSW
I bring a compassionate, curious, and playful approach to therapy. Using my own daily practices to cultivate spaciousness and clarity within myself, I offer my presence and attention as a guide and gateway to help facilitate and expedite your healing and transformation. Using a Gestalt approach to therapy (explained more below), I work through a relational lens, creating safety in relationship so that we can process and digest relationships in your life that may have caused trauma, wounding, fear, or difficulty thriving. I see therapy as a collaboration, joining you in your experience, to walk alongside you as you uncover and recover parts of yourself that may have been lost or hidden from trauma, mental illness, addiction, or feeling lost, depressed, anxious, or insecure. I specialize in trauma work, attachment work, and managing mild to severe mental illness. I also utilize contemplative practices, parts work, somatic practices, and embodied mindfulness practices to help deepen your exploration of self.
Life is about relationship. Relationship with self. With other. With our past, our future, with objects, with substances, with dreams, goals, and the Great Mystery. Let’s rewire what it means to be in relationship, together.
What is
Gestalt Therapy?
The word “gestalt” doesn’t quite have a perfect translation in English, but we can use the word “whole” as a close attempt to capturing this concept. This approach to psychotherapy aims to help people discover, build awareness, and reclaim their sense of wholeness through the exploration of (and experimentation with) our many parts, in the present moment, and in relationship. This type of work is also referred to as “existential,” which means we work in the HERE and NOW. Memories from the past and thoughts of the future often pull us out of the present. Gestalt therapy allows us to work with our relationship to the past and future, but through the crucible of the present moment. Through the safety and trust created in relationship between therapist and client, we gain access to healing other relationships in your life, both internally and externally. This technique also utilizes somatic practices, as the body always exists in the present moment. To put Gestalt Therapy simply, we can define it as “the healing of relationships while in relationship.”
If you can’t tell by now, Gestalt philosophy is difficult to translate into words, which often leads to me to tell clients that I see this approach as the “jazz of psychotherapy,” which allows our sessions to go with the flow, improvise, experiment, explore, and discover new ways of being through a mindful surrender into the present moment.
Gestalt Therapy radically changed my own life, and I believe it has the ability to help you on your path of healing too.
What is
Ketamine ?
Ketamine is a chemical compound originally designed for anesthetic purposes in 1956. It continues to be used all over the world, is arguably the most important anesthetic available on a global scale, and has been on WHO’s list of Essential Medicines since 1985. Since it’s creation, Ketamine has been a reliable, safer option for anesthesia in hospitals, battlefields, and yes, veterinarian medicine. But after some time, researchers started to notice interesting phenomena when given to patients in lower doses.
At lower doses, Ketamine often creates a dream-like, sometimes euphoric, psychedelic experience which often lasts about an hour. Now federally legal as a therapeutic intervention, Ketamine can be prescribed to treat various conditions, including depression, PTSD, OCD, eating disorders, and anxiety disorders. Most Ketamine Clinics in the US offer high dose intravenous infusions or intramuscular injections, where the patient is often left alone while they embark on a 60ish minute journey in which people often report “leaving their body.” While these treatments do have high success rates, and are sometimes the appropriate type of treatment, I feel that they are lacking the relational safety that can often be an essential component to healing and rewiring our nervous systems, especially when exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness.
I choose to use ketamine differently, in much smaller doses, through a lozenge. With this lower dose, medical supervision is not required (though you will be referred to a psychiatrist or NP to be prescribed the medicine). One of the benefits of this low-dose approach is that you are still able to communicate with me and stay “in your body.” Low dose ketamine paired with psychotherapy gives you the opportunity to explore being in your body, but in a more spacious, supportive, and mindful way. Ketamine often helps my clients feel more resourced and safe to do deep, powerful, healing work.
I don’t believe that ketamine heals people, but rather, I believe ketamine can help create a safe, comfortable environment for you to tap into your own innate healing capacity.