Ketamine-Assisted Financial Therapy
When You Know What to Do with Money — and Still Can’t Do It
A lot of people who struggle with money have tried everything.
- They’ve learned more about budgeting.
- About how money works.
- About investing.
And nothing changes. It’s a hamster wheel, and they can’t get off.
That’s usually the sign that the problem isn’t about the money. Very few chronic money problems are. It goes deeper than that.
These behaviors are the outcroppings of things we learned early. Some of it before we had language for it. Some of it traces all the way back to before we were born. So people walk around thinking something is wrong with them, that this is a character flaw, a personal failing. It isn’t. It runs deep. So deep that talk therapy often can’t reach the level where it lives. That’s what this kind of therapy is for.
How it Works
Please note:
- Step 1 and 3 – Financial Therapy with Rick.
- Step 2 – Medical care from a licensed provider you choose.
These behaviors made sense once
Here’s what I’ve learned in decades of sitting with people and their money. The financial behaviors that cause the most financial pain almost always started as a way to survive something.
If money was scarce and frightening when we were young, a part of us learned to brace for it. If money meant fighting, or shame, or a parent who disappeared into work and never came home, we learned that too. Our nervous systems took notes long before we could talk, and built responses to keep us safe.
- Overspending.
- Hoarding.
- Avoiding the bank statement.
- Working ourselves to exhaustion.
These aren’t flaws. They’re old protective behaviors that are still running even though our circumstances have changed.
Our protective behaviors eventually outlive the threat, turning from helpful to hurtful. What kept us safe at six is wrecking our finances at forty-six. But the nervous system doesn’t know that. Those protective parts of us keep running the old program, and no amount of good advice talks an entrenched protective part of us out of the job.
That’s why the budgets and the books and the willpower keep failing you. They’re aimed at the thinking part of the brain. The problem lives somewhere older and deeper. To change it, you have to reach it.
What Ketamine-assisted Financial Therapy is
Ketamine-assisted financial therapy is financial therapy done in connection with a medicine called ketamine.
Ketamine is a legal medicine, given by a doctor, that can put a person into a temporary dream-like state for an hour or so. In that state, the brain’s alarm system quiets down, and things you normally can’t bear to look at become approachable. People have used it to work through depression, trauma, and pain that hadn’t moved with anything else. I’ll say more about what it is and how it feels further down the page.
My part isn’t the ketamine. I don’t prescribe it or give it to you. You get that from a separate licensed provider. My part is everything around it.
Before your ketamine session, we meet. We talk about your history with money, the behaviors you’re stuck in, and what you’re hoping to understand. We decide together what you want to bring into the medicine session — a question, an intention, something you’re ready to look at. That’s the preparation.
After your ketamine session, we meet again. Whatever surfaced during the experience, a memory, a feeling, a realization about where a money pattern came from, we work with it during the integration session. We may make sense of it or we may sit with it for a period of time before it becomes clear what it means for how you handle money going forward. That’s the limbic space of integration. It can feel messy, but that’s where the change actually happens.
Here’s the thing to understand: the ketamine isn’t the cure. It’s a catalyst. It can open a door, but it doesn’t walk you through it. The medicine might surface something you’ve carried since childhood, but surfacing it isn’t the same as healing it. That’s what the preparation and integration are for. Without them, a powerful experience mostly just fades. With them, it can change how you deal with money for good.
Who This is for
Is this you?
- You follow a budget for thirty days and then it falls apart.
- You earn more and still can’t save more.
- You pay off the debt and watch it come right back.
- You lie awake worrying the money will run out, while your advisor tells you there’s more than enough.
- You’re miserable with money. Or miserable without it.
- You’ve worked on this before, made a little progress, and hit a wall you can’t get past.
Or this might be the first time you’ve heard of anything like it, and something in it rings true. Either way is fine.
If your relationship with money is causing real pain in your life, and you’ve started to suspect the cause runs deeper than any budget or advice has been able to reach, KAFT may be for you.
You don’t have to know anything about ketamine or therapy going in. What you do need is a deep willingness to do the preparation and integration on both sides of the experience and to find a ketamine provider in your area.
What Ketamine is
Ketamine has been around since the 1960s. It started as an anesthetic, and it’s still used that way in hospitals and on battlefields every day. It’s legal, and doctors across the country prescribe it.
Somewhere along the way, researchers found that in much smaller doses than surgery uses, ketamine did something else. It lifted depression that nothing else had touched, sometimes within hours. It helped with trauma and chronic pain. It works on a different part of the brain than ordinary antidepressants, and part of what it does is spark the growth of new connections between brain cells. That’s the opening I mentioned — the window where change gets easier.
A quick word on the legal side, because people ask. Using ketamine for depression and similar conditions is mostly what’s called “off-label” — legal, common, and done by licensed providers, but not the use it was originally approved for. There’s one form, a nasal spray called Spravato, that does carry specific FDA approval for treatment-resistant depression. Your provider will walk you through the form and dose that fits you. That’s their call to make with you, not mine.
Ketamine isn’t for everyone. A personal or family history of psychosis is one of the things a provider screens for, and there are others. That screening is part of their job, and a good and necessary part.
What a Ketamine Session is Like
Most people are nervous the first time. That’s normal. They describe the experience as gentle — a floating feeling, a sense of watching your own thoughts from a little distance, the body going heavy and calm. The word for it is “dissociation,” which sounds clinical and a little scary, but what people actually report is usually soft and quiet.
What you feel during the session doesn’t decide whether it works. Some people have vivid emotions, or see images and memories. Others mostly feel relaxed and a little far away. Both can do the same good. What matters most is what we do with it afterward.
What the Process Looks Like
Most people do this over a series of rounds. Each round is one ketamine session with your medical provider, with one preparation session with me before it and one integration session with me after. A typical course is three rounds, six total therapy sessions. Then we step back, look at how it’s going, and reassess next steps.
We usually have a preparation session a day or two before your ketamine session, and an integration session a day or two after. You’ll want some quiet space around the medicine session itself. You may want to take the day off from work. At minimum, block off the half day around the session.
For a stretch of time after a ketamine session, the brain is more open to forming new behaviors than it usually is. Old wiring loosens. That opening doesn’t last forever, so we do the integration session while it’s there, when what shifted is still fresh and still movable.
As for how far apart to space the ketamine sessions, I generally suggest about two weeks. Some people go as often as once a week, others as far apart as once a month. That’s between you and your provider.
The method I use in your preparation and integration to support you is one I developed called Internal Financial Systems®, my adaptation of a well-established therapy called Internal Family Systems™. It’s built on a simple idea: different parts of us drive our behavior with money. There’s the part that spends to feel better. The part that’s afraid to open the bank statement. The part that never feels safe no matter how much is in the account. Instead of fighting those parts, we get to know them. It turns out they always have a good intention and are usually trying to protect us. When they finally feel heard, they can loosen their grip.
One more thing we agree on before we start. For sixty days after each ketamine session, you don’t make any big financial moves. No quitting the job, no liquidating an account, no giving away a pile of money. A ketamine session can leave you feeling certain about things, and some of that certainty is real insight worth acting on. Some of it is just the medicine talking. Sixty days gives us time to tell the difference. If it still matters in two months, it’ll still be there to act on.
What I’ll Ask of You
This is emotional work. It can bring up tender things, and sometimes hard ones. But you are never pushed anywhere you don’t want to go. You set the pace, every step.
It’s important that we get the okay from the parts that have been standing guard over any vulnerable part of you before going to it. Nothing gets forced or bulldozed. That includes the ketamine experience itself. If some part of you isn’t ready, or is feeling deeply anxious, we listen to it instead of overriding it. No is a complete sentence. I won’t push any part of you into something you’re not ready for. Readiness is a unanimous decision, all parts of you included. If we don’t get that permission, we wait, and we work with the fear, anxiety, or resistance.
Finding a Ketamine Provider
Because I work over telehealth, you’ll line up your ketamine sessions with a licensed provider near you. That’s a separate piece from the therapy I do, and a separate cost.
A couple of places to start looking:
- The American Society of Ketamine Physicians, Psychotherapists & Practitioners keeps a directory of member clinics that have agreed to a set of ethical standards. You’ll find it at askp.org.
- Psychology Today lists ketamine providers you can search by state and city, at psychologytoday.com.
You can also just look for a psychiatrist or clinic in your area that offers ketamine. What you’re looking for is a provider willing to handle the ketamine side while you do the preparation and integration with me. Plenty are used to working this way.
What This Isn’t
I don’t prescribe, give, recommend, or run the ketamine experience. I don’t pick your provider or manage your medical care. Those belong to you and your provider.
Here’s something to expect: a lot of what comes up won’t look like it’s about money at all. That’s normal. Money problems are hardly ever really about money. They’re about what happened to us, what we learned early, and the ways we learned to protect ourselves. So when something surfaces that seems to have nothing to do with your finances, it usually has everything to do with them.
If something comes up that needs more care than financial therapy is meant to give, I’ll help you find a licensed mental health professional. That’s not a sign something went wrong. It’s part of how this is built, and it’s how I keep you safe.
Fees
My fee for three rounds of ketamine-assisted financial therapy is $2,950. That covers six 90-minute sessions with me, the preparation and integration across a typical course.
Your ketamine sessions are separate, and you pay your provider directly for those. That cost varies from provider to provider, and it isn’t part of my fee above.
Why I Think This Can Help
For decades we couldn’t really study these medicines. That has changed, and what’s coming out is hard to ignore. For depression, for trauma, for addiction, psychedelic-assisted therapy is producing some of the most promising results modern psychiatry has seen.
Now the honest part.
Now the honest part. Nobody has run the studies on ketamine paired specifically with financial therapy. It’s too new. So I can’t promise you an evidence-based outcome.
What I can tell you is why I believe it could be life changing for your relationship with money. The medicine has a real track record for reaching and healing trauma when combined with therapy. If these medicines can help with the trauma roots then there’s good reason to think they can help with the way those roots show up around money. That’s the bet I’m making, and that’s why I’ve added this service to my financial therapy practice.
About Me
I’m Rick Kahler. I’ve spent more than four decades in financial services, and a good part of that helping people with the emotional side of money — the part the numbers never quite explain.
I’m a Certified Financial Therapist and a Certified IFS Practitioner. I practice over telehealth, using Internal Financial Systems®, my adaptation of Internal Family Systems™ for the world of money. In 2026 I became the fourth person ever inducted into the Financial Therapy Association Hall of Fame.
As far as I know, I’m the first Certified Financial Therapist anywhere offering ketamine-assisted financial therapy. This is new ground. I’ve spent years getting ready to do it well, and I don’t take that lightly.
Getting Started
How I Came to This Work
I grew up in a mainstream Christian home. At 16, I joined a fundamentalist church. Drugs of any kind were not just off the table — they were a reflection of bad character. I carried that belief well into my adult life. As far as I was concerned, psychedelics belonged in the same category as cocaine and heroin.
In 2018, I attended a workshop at the Esalen Institute in California with Dr. Ben Sessa, a British psychiatrist and one of the leading researchers in MDMA-assisted therapy. I went as a skeptic. I was there to understand the science, not to be converted.
What I learned turned my thinking upside down. The difference between hard drugs and psychedelic medicines was not what I had assumed. The science was serious and rigorous. And it became clear that my resistance was not coming from the evidence. It was coming from my biases and cultural conditioning.
That realization changed the trajectory of my work. I began studying the research on psychedelic-assisted therapy and its implications for the clients I was already seeing — people whose financial behaviors pointed to something deeper than money. The question I kept arriving at was simple: if psychedelic-assisted therapy can reach the trauma that drives these behaviors, and if financial therapists already understand the financial layer better than anyone else in the room, then why aren’t we part of this work?
That question led to a co-authored position paper on Psychedelic-Assisted Financial Therapy, to my presentations at the Financial Therapy Association conference, and ultimately to this service.
Disclaimer
I’m a Certified Financial Planner® and Certified Financial Therapist™. I’m not a licensed mental health provider, and I don’t provide mental health treatment. I don’t prescribe, administer, recommend, or facilitate ketamine or any other psychedelic medicine.
Ketamine-assisted financial therapy, as I offer it, means the preparation and integration I provide alongside a ketamine experience you arrange independently with a licensed medical provider of your choosing. The financial therapy and the ketamine treatment are two separate services.
If you’re considering ketamine, talk with a medical provider about whether it’s right for you, including any conditions or medications that might make it unsafe.