Five Invitations for healing with Medicine Assisted Therapy
Our approach to Medicine Assisted Therapy provides guidance through a series of invitations that honour the individual's agency and healing capacity. Rooted in Trauma and Violence-informed Care and Cultural Safety and Humility, the concept of "Invitation" respects personal boundaries, choices, and histories.
The Five Invitations framework offers both therapists and clients a way to navigate the complex and sacred territory of Medicine Assisted Therapy that fosters safety, empowerment, and self-discovery.
The Five Invitations are:
Inviting Trust in Inner Healing Intelligence: Empowering the Healing Journey
Inviting an Inner-Directed Focus: Looking Within to Learn and Heal
Inviting Self-Observation Across Multiple Dimensions of Experience: Expanding Access to the Known
Inviting Access to Resource
Knowing the Trauma Vortex and Growing the Healing Vortex
Identifying Somatic Resources
Incorporating Supportive Touch or Touch Alternatives
Inviting and Welcoming Parts: Embracing Inner Voices to Co-Create Higher Orders of Integration, Mastery, and Self-Leadership
Each of these invitations serves as a gateway to a deeper trust and understanding of oneself, fostering an environment of exploration, resilience, and self-guided transformation. By embracing these Five Invitations, therapists and clients engage in a collaborative journey of healing and growth, rooted in choice, respect, empowerment, and co-creation.
The First Invitation: Inviting Trust in Inner Healing Intelligence
The concept of "inner healing intelligence" offers a powerful framework that fosters internal locus of control, empowerment, and the fundamental trust in oneself as a wellspring of healing. It was introduced in therapist training for MAPS MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and builds upon a central tenet of Stan and Christna Grof’s method of Holotropic Breathwork, where holos means ‘whole’ and tropein means ‘moving toward’ - referencing an innate tendency to move toward wholeness with nurturing conditions. It's essential to clarify that terms like "inner healer" or "inner healing intelligence" are metaphorical expressions that symbolize our body's and psyche's innate propensity for healing rather than a literal presence or entity within the client. This notion encapsulates a driving force perpetually steering us towards equilibrium, coherence, and a harmonious natural order in both body and mind. Inner healing intelligence broadly relates to concepts from physics and complex systems theory, such as quantum coherence, self-organization, complexity theory, synergetics, and synergy.
This principle resonates with others from contemporary somatic psychology disciplines, such as ‘organicity’ in both Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Hakomi, which denotes “an assumption that when all the parts are communicating within the whole, the system is self-directing and self-correcting, and has an inner wisdom of its own” (Hakomi Institute). Organicity conceptually originates within the profound and influential work of English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician, and cyberneticist Gregory Bateson.
The therapist's role in this invitation revolves around gently and skillfully guiding the client toward accessing this process, moment by moment. CMAT therapists offering Medicine Assisted strive to internalize and embody this stance, as it empowers them to authentically invite clients to trust in their own capacity to heal and evolve. This invitation often leads to a dialogue that dispels a common yet counterproductive and disempowering belief in therapy: a belief that external factors such as the medicine or the therapist's intervention are responsible for the client's healing. Far to the contrary, these elements of the healing container are merely considered tools and contextual factors that support a process of healing arising from inner healing intelligence that is located within the person. This shift to trusting an internal locus of empowered healing within the client is an important shift in decolonizing therapeutic practice.
Our partnership centers around this invitation to embody that you hold the power to heal within you. We invite nurturing this together as the guiding light illuminating your journey forward.
The Second Invitation: Inviting an Inner-Directed Focus
Inner directed therapy is a specific orientation within MAT that encourages clients to follow the natural unfolding of their internal experiences during medicine sessions. This approach was formally introduced by MAPS as "Non-Directive Therapy" in the MDMA-AT approach and later termed "Inner-Directed Therapy." (MAPS Therapist Manual)(reference).
The Essence of Inner-Directed Focus
Inviting an inner-directed focus involves guiding clients to attend to and follow their unfolding inner experience in therapy, and particularly while under the influence of a medicine adjunct. This invitation hinges on the assumption that what emerges during the journey holds significance for the healing process. It aligns with the concept of trusting the inner healing intelligence inherent in everyone.
Keeping an inner-directed focus necessitates embracing uncertainty about the emergent process, and a willingness to remain grounded in an attitude of discovery as it unfolds. CMAT therapists aim to refrain from analysis or opinions, supporting the client’s own discovery process, while skillfully gauging timing and appropriateness for therapeutic invitations or more assertive direction as appropriate.
The Role of Therapeutic Relationship for Inviting an Inner-Directed Focus
Inviting our clients into an inner-directed focus does not undermine the significance of the client-therapist relationship. Quite the contrary, therapists must cultivate heightened attunement with the client, while simultaneously tracking nuances of their own inner experience. Our therapists cultivate the following facilitation approaches to support inner directed exploration:
Genuine Curiosity: An authentic interest in your experience.
Embodied Attunement: Tuning into your experience, emotional state, and nervous system energy with embodied resonance and dual awareness.
Invitational Language: Using language that encourages exploration rather than directing it.
Descriptive Assistance: Aiding you to articulate your inner experience.
Embodied Reflective Listening: Echoing your words, postures, and gestures to demonstrate understanding both verbally and nonverbally.
Reassurance and Patience: Providing comfort and allowing space for exploration.
Pacing: Slowing down the process to enable deeper introspection.
Client-Driven Insights: Supporting you to arrive at your own conclusions, through trusting and allowing for spaces of not-knowing, and refraining from offering or providing interpretations.
By embracing these components and guiding you toward an inner-directed focus, therapists enrich the medicine journey's potential for self-discovery, healing, and growth.
The Third Invitation: Inviting Self-Observation Across Multiple Dimensions of Experience
Expanding the inner-directed focus to encompass multiple dimensions of experience offers a gateway to breaking free from conditioned patterns of the mind to explore a broader spectrum of one's inner landscape. In this context, the presence of a medicine plays a pivotal role, by fostering a non-ordinary state wherein deeply ingrained patterns of attention and thinking may be interrupted. The medicine functions as a key, opening the door to a wider range of experiences and brain states. Holding supportive space for this journey into foreign dimensions of conscious awareness requires skillful guidance, invitational language, and helpful frameworks such as SIBAM to encourage broad attention and deep listening.
Observing Multiple Dimensions: The Power of SIBAM
At any given moment, your inner landscape is composed of various dimensions, like thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and impulses or urges. They could be described as ‘channels’ of experience that can be known when brought into the spotlight of conscious awareness. Various mindfulness meditation practices cultivate the ability to aim or broaden one’s focus of attention to observe one or more of these channels, and to sustain observation with curiosity, noticing flux and change. Individuals develop habituated attentional biases, depending upon where and how they are directing attention moment to moment throughout daily living, consciously or unconsciously. Certain people may develop an attentional bias to the channel of thinking mind, perhaps frequently absorbed in streams of thinking, or when taken to the extreme, finding themselves imprisoned in ruminations or intrusive thought patterns. Others may move more freely between channels, perhaps through conscious practice, while others may become preoccupied with particular body sensations or emotions.
The SIBAM framework from Somatic Experiencing provides a simple mnemonic that supports thorough investigation of the inner landscape. SIBAM stands for Sensations, Images, Behaviors, Affect, and Meaning. When therapist inquiry is guided by this framework, it encourages you to examine different facets of your experience, aiding you in accessing a richer tapestry of your immediate reality. It is important to note that there is no specific order; SIBAM inquiry is non-linear and multi-directional. Your therapist will follow your emergent process, gently offering inquiry across SIBAM dimensions if and when it may serve your inner-directed process, a kind of leading by following. In the context of trauma history, fragments of traumatic imprints are often chaotically disorganized, or rigidly coupled, in the inner realms of experience. By employing SIBAM inquiry, these elements can be accessed and either brought into coherent order, or uncoupled from one another to increase flexibility.
Inviting exploration with SIBAM
By offering open invitations, therapists create a safe space for clients to venture into their inner landscape.
Some examples:
"I’m curious…as you tell me about this, what sensations, images or emotions, if any, do you notice?"
"Is there a place in or around the body that you feel the sadness? Does it have any other qualities, like a shape or colour?"
"As you feel this anger, I’m curious if there may be any impulses or movements that want to happen?
"As you are telling me about this memory, I wonder what you might notice if you take a moment to scan your body - do you notice any tensions or feelings, or other sensations anywhere?”
The Fourth Invitation: Inviting Access to Resource
Knowing the trauma vortex and growing the healing vortex
Trauma often pulls us into what Somatic Experiencing describes as the trauma vortex—a state of profound disconnection, helplessness, and nervous system dysregulation. Like a gravitational force, this vortex can manifest as fear, shame, panic, or numbness, keeping individuals stuck in survival states. In Medicine Assisted Therapy, the presence of the medicine can offer new pathways for healing, but may also intensify traumatic responses if not skillfully navigated. To counterbalance this, therapy must actively engage the healing vortex—a reservoir of resilience and connection. By fostering somatic resources, relational safety, and mindful awareness of positive experiences, your therapist will support you to gradually restore balance and widen your capacity for processing difficult material. Pendulation—gently oscillating between the trauma and healing vortices - promotes nervous system regulation and integration. This rhythmic movement helps reawaken innate resilience, restoring the ability to feel and respond to life with greater ease. Engaging in rhythmic activities like bilateral movements, drumming, or breathwork can further strengthen the healing vortex, creating a foundation for lasting transformation
Identifying Somatic Resources
Central to the somatic approach to trauma resolution lies the essential practice of identifying and nurturing specific somatic resources, consciously growing the healing vortex. These resources, carefully tailored to each individual's needs, serve as invaluable tools for supporting both their nervous system regulation and emotional well-being.
Defining Somatic Resources: Building Bridges to Safety and Control
Somatic resources, at their core, encompass tangible pathways to a sense of connection, security, and self-empowerment. They can take various forms, ranging from purely somatic techniques to embodied cognitive associations. Consider the simple act of grounding oneself by feeling the connection of one's feet to the earth, attending to sensations of the rhythmic flow of breath to bring the present moment into focus, or feeling the very tangible support of a chair beneath the body by noticing sensations of pressure at areas where the body is physically supported against gravity. Rhythmic bilateral oscillatory movements represent another direct somatic resource, such as lifting and placing one's hands alternately on opposite upper arms or shoulders. Exploring direct somatic resources through the body, with therapist and client jointly partaking, not only introduces these resources to discover what works for you, but also incorporates the power of co-regulation. It is important to note that not all people will find certain aspects of direct experience resourcing, therefore remaining curious to explore together what supports you the most (without preconceived ideas such as a belief that “breathing practices are grounding”) is an important element of TVIC and Relationship-Centered Care.
Elaborating Embodied Positive Associations: Nurturing Safe Anchors
Beyond direct somatic techniques, resources can also emerge from the embodiment of positive cognitive associations. SIBAM can be used as a reminder to invite you to connect with different dimensions of your experience associated with an external resource, be it a person, place, object, animal, spiritual figure, event, etc. By enriching the details and positive sensory experiences related to a memory or idea, it can become an anchor to the healing vortex. For instance, imagine that you find solace in a particular tree encountered on your daily walk. To anchor this into a somatic resource, your therapist helps you immerse themselves in aspects of your present-moment experience intertwined with this cherished tree. Questions may be asked relating to detailed sensory recall: "Can you describe the tree—its shape, color, and texture? How about the scents around it, if any?" As details are discovered, your connection to the tree deepens, making it come alive by invitation through imagination into your actual present-moment sensory awareness.
Empowerment Through Practice: Anchoring Resources for the Journey Ahead
Anchoring resources in your experience enhances their potency and accessibility, even amidst stressful circumstances. Anchored somatic resources act as beacons of stability, offering you a sense of agency, empowerment, and connection. With practice accessing resources with key words, sensations, movements, or postures that encapsulate the essence of the resource, you have a roadmap to return to the resource if and when needed. Embodied resources serve as a safety net, primed to be accessed if and when you get pulled into the trauma vortex, pendulating toward healing and restoration and aiding in the effective processing of challenging experiences.
Incorporating Supportive Touch or Touch Alternatives
Touch is a fundamental aspect of human connection and, when used skillfully in Medicine Assisted Therapy (MAT), can serve as a powerful tool for healing and regulation. For those who have experienced trauma—especially where safe, nurturing touch was absent—thoughtfully applied touch can support co-regulation, deepen interoceptive awareness, and provide corrective experiences that foster a sense of safety and connection. In psychedelic therapy, touch must always be intentional, consensual, and aligned with the client's comfort, boundaries, and therapeutic goals. Conversations about touch begin in the preparation phase and continue throughout the process, ensuring mutual agreement and adaptability. While touch can be a valuable resource in moments of distress, grounding, or integration, it is not always necessary—alternatives such as therapist proximity adjustments, imaginal touch, or the use of weighted objects can offer similar support. Ultimately, touch in MAT is a collaborative endeavor, requiring therapist attunement, ethical integrity, and an ongoing dialogue to ensure it remains a safe, supportive, and non-intrusive element of the healing journey.
The Fifth Invitation: Inviting and Welcoming Parts
In Medicine Assisted Therapy, deep inner exploration often reveals distinct aspects or parts of the self, each carrying its own emotions, needs, and perspectives. Rather than resisting these voices, a parts-based approach encourages clients to welcome and engage with them, fostering integration and self-leadership. CMAT therapists are all trained in Internal Family Systems, a system of therapy that assists you to explore your inner landscape using parts language. Normalizing the emergence of parts, acknowledging their presence, and even personifying them can help you navigate your inner world with curiosity. By facilitating internal dialogues, therapists can help you gain insight into the roles that different parts of you play in your life, while self-compassion ensures the process remains gentle and nonjudgmental. Rather than suppressing or rejecting different parts of you, integration involves learning from and embracing them as meaningful contributors to personal growth, affording new “job descriptions” for some parts when it serves your healing. This invitation to engage with the multiplicity of the self can deepen self-awareness, coherence, and mastery, ultimately supporting a more profound and unified sense of you.
Excerpt adapted from “Integrative Somatic Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: A Model for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Grounded in Systems Theory, Contextual Behavioural Science, Somatic Psychotherapy, and Parts Work by Devon Christie, MD, CCFP, RTC, Edited by Kate Browning, PhD Candidate.
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