In this post:
- The Science of Love, Stress, and Ketamine’s Role
- Why Traditional Talk Therapy Falls Short for Couples
- How Ketamine Works in Couples Therapy
- Real Ketamine Couple’s Therapy Stories from Avesta
- Conclusion: The Gift of Love and Healing
Love is the most profound source of emotional safety and security. However, chronic stress, past wounds, and unprocessed pain can lead to defensiveness and disconnection.
Traditional couples therapy is a useful tool to help partners find their way back to each other. However, for some people, defenses remain too rigid to dissolve through talking alone—this is where ketamine-assisted couples therapy (KAP) creates a breakthrough. Dr. Kathryn Rheem, a KAP and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) practitioner, has seen firsthand how ketamine therapy at Avesta transforms relationships.
This article discusses the healing power of love and how ketamine works in couples therapy to provide relief and strengthen bonds.
The Science of Love, Stress, and Ketamine’s Role
Communication and emotional connection are the pillars of long-term happiness and love in relationships. However, Dr. Rheem sees how struggles and pain collect over time and chip away at that bond. Partners retreat from each other emotionally, communication suffers, and reactivity increases.
“Love is meant to be a great protector from the stresses of life,” says Dr. Rheem. “However, people get hurt regularly in life and in their love relationships. Having unprocessed pain can make partners defensive. Too often, they express anger, frustration, get shut down, or go quiet.”
“When we’re defensive emotionally, the signals of our love get all scrambled. The ultimate death of all love relationships is the absence of a clear emotional signal.”
Ketamine helps revive heartfelt impulses by shifting the brain’s neurotransmitters, easing unprocessed pain and depression, and allowing couples to move from head to heart.
Opening New Therapeutic Windows
Ketamine helps couples soften rigid emotions and create space for a deeper connection by targeting glutamate, a brain chemical that influences mood, perception, and internal processing. Additionally, ketamine acts quickly to promote neuroplasticity and break rigid patterns formed by stress, trauma, or conflict.
- Disrupts negative thought loops – Temporarily quiets the brain’s default mode network (DMN), reducing repetitive, self-referential thinking.
- Enhances emotional regulation – Strengthens synaptic connections in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, helping partners process emotions with less reactivity.
- Reduces fear responses – Lowers amygdala hyperactivity, creating a sense of safety for deeper emotional conversations.
- Increases emotional fluidity – Softens ingrained coping mechanisms like avoidance or defensiveness, making honest communication easier.
- Facilitates emotional release – Allows suppressed emotions like grief or shame to surface and be processed safely.
“Ketamine acts as a ‘benevolent disruptor,’ lowering defenses and allowing for the expression of authentic feelings, including pain, love, and joy,“ Dr. Rheem says. “And that’s what we want people to think of on Valentine’s Day and every day: How to restore love to its original purpose, which is to protect from life’s stressors.”
Overcoming Pain to Send and Receive Love
Another key to ketamine’s heart-bound success is its ability to ease the personal suffering that can hinder partners’ connections. Ketamine helps relieve suffering of all kinds, addressing PTSD, anxiety, depression, and self-confidence issues.
- A double-blind study demonstrated that infusion of ketamine rapidly and significantly reduces symptom severity in patients with PTSD.
- A 2022 review found that single-dose ketamine infusions reduced panic, irritability, and other anxiety symptoms in people with GAD and social anxiety disorder.
Dr. Rheem has seen ketamine’s anti-depressant benefits transform relationships in real time.
“I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) with a doctorate in counseling education and supervision, and I’ve worked as a couple’s therapist for over 20 years in Virginia, Maryland, and California,” she says. “I’ve exclusively seen couples for all of that time. There is nothing close to ketamine-assisted therapy and its unique ability to address unresolved trauma and expedite healing.”
Why Traditional Talk Therapy Falls Short for Couples
Before offering KAP to couples, Dr. Rheem relied on the “microsurgery” of EFT talk therapy alone. This traditional intervention took a long time to create change, and the time and energy required left her burnt out at times.
According to Dr. Rheem, the challenge with traditional talk therapy vs ketamine couple’s therapy is that people get stuck rationalizing their struggles rather than feeling their feelings.
“I’ve seen many couples who have done a ton of individual therapy but still find it hard to get through their relationship’s worst moments because they find themselves arguing,” Rheem says. “They can’t find their feelings. And yet, that’s exactly what they need to find and share to improve their connection and have their love feel more loving.”
How Ketamine Works in Couples Therapy
KAP for couples is a therapeutic process where one or both partners take a ketamine infusion in a safe clinical setting, like Avesta Ketamine and Wellness. Typically, a psychotherapist like Dr. Rheem joins them and conducts a therapy session as the IV’s dissociative effects wear off–usually within 40 minutes.
Dr. Rheem says there is no set standard for whether one or both partners take the ketamine IV. “One at a time is more common,” she says. “But both partners doing it together also happens and can be pretty amazing. That’s one of the clinical judgments I make with couples based on their situation.”
The Role of the Therapist
Dr. Rheem’s role as a KAP couple’s therapist is facilitating conversations after ketamine’s peak effects subside but while partners are still in a state of emotional receptivity.
“KAP is especially helpful for people with relationship distress who want to process their ketamine journey, explore what they can do with what they learned about themselves, and examine what they can do with the emotions that came alive during treatment. I’m there to help them integrate their experience,” she says.
However, Dr Rheem emphasizes that couples can undergo ketamine therapy without her presence. “Once people feel more comfortable, they often get treatment without me there and call me after when they want to process and integrate their experiences,” she says.
Real Ketamine Couple’s Therapy Stories from Avesta
Dr. Rheem has seen many cases where ketamine has helped couples break through trauma and miscommunication to find their way back to love.
Melting a Frozen Heart
One particularly moving case involved a husband who had been emotionally shut down for decades due to deep-seated childhood shame.
“He described feeling shut down and numbed by a wall of shame in his body, making it impossible to find his feelings,” says Dr. Rheem. “When one partner becomes frozen like this, they become highly reactive, and it’s hard to have a feeling of love grow in the space between them.”
As the sessions progressed, the patient’s wife saw a profound change. And after six KAP sessions, she turned to Dr. Rheem and said, “KAP has brought him back to me. I’m so grateful..”
Giving Unspoken Feelings a Voice
Another breakthrough occurred when Dr. Rheem witnessed a couple processing the unspoken grief of a miscarriage.
At the hospital, the husband believed he was “in the way” during his wife’s emergency because a clinician asked him to step aside. Feeling helpless, he left the building, but never told his wife why. She interpreted his action to mean that her pain was not very important to him. As a result of this unspoken but potent disconnect, their emotions became more defensive toward each other.
“His wife was in really good hands medically, but no one told him, ‘Even though your wife is in really good hands, she still needs you there,’” Rheem explains.
Through KAP, the couple revisited this moment and came away with a new understanding.
“This event was all unspoken until ketamine helped facilitate the beautiful emergence of the vulnerabilities that all humans have from the cradle to the grave,” Dr. Rheem says. “They were finally able to verbalize and comprehend emotions they didn’t even know were there.”
Conclusion: The Gift of Love and Healing
Love is more than words. It is more than roses on Valentine’s Day. It is a felt experience. For couples struggling with emotional disconnection, ketamine-assisted therapy offers a way to reclaim what feels lost. The medicine can rewire old ways of thinking, provide moments of relief, and open the heart for expressing genuine emotions.
This Valentine’s Day, consider not just celebrating love but actively healing and strengthening it. Contact Avesta’s ketamine clinics in DC, Maryland, and Virginia to begin healing with the power of love.
Dr. Kathryn Rheem
*Voted top couples therapist by Washingtonian magazine, author and director at Rheem, Clark & Associates providing couples, individual, and family therapy*
Certified EFT trainer, supervisor & therapist and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapist (KAP). Kathryn has received 126 hours of Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy training from the Ketamine Training Center, Polaris Insight Center, Fluence, the Psychotherapy Networker and PESI. Her private practice treats couples, individuals and families across the spectrum of relationship and mental health struggles.
