How ketamine helped break my endless cycle of meaningless sex and find joy… by unlocking years-old traumas I didn’t even know I had

A decade ago, I vowed never to open myself up to love again.

As a successful showbiz reporter in my 40s, my life seemed perfect to the outside world. I’d built a career interviewing the biggest A-listers in Hollywood. I had walked the red carpet dressed to the nines more times that I could remember. I had dated and slept with several well-known stars. 

But the truth was I had long since abandoned the idea of love, convinced I was beyond it, broken in a way that made connection impossible.

I hid behind my dogs, using them as a shield, an excuse to avoid anything that remotely resembled vulnerability.

‘I cannot hang out because my dogs need me home,’ was always a popular go-to response when someone asked me to go on a date.

Dating consisted of one-night stands, which led to further detachment.

‘You cannot sleep over because that is my dog’s side of the bed,’ I would tell the person of interest for that evening.

I found my suitors on hookup apps. Most of the time I didn’t know their name. Even worse, I didn’t care to.

Intercourse, to me, was a tool that I used for validation. The only goal was to feel better about myself afterwards, but I never did.

Often, I didn’t even need to meet up to get what I needed out of the experience. After endless back-and-forth banter, they would ask for my address and number so they could come over. Which is when I’d block them.

It became a game. I didn’t actually want to have sex with some of these prospects. I simply wanted to know that I could. It made me feel wanted.

This went on for years. But when I hit my forties, I became less interested in the game and my heart became colder.

As for love, well forget about it. I wasn’t interested in romance, love or relationships. For a year, I lost interest in sex all together, even though it was the only way I’d have physical contact with another human being.

I’ve always been open to different forms of therapy – I’ve seen a shrink on and off since high school – but traditional talking therapies didn’t seem to be helping with this particular issue. So when a friend mentioned he’d gone to a walk-in ketamine clinic and that taking the drug under supervision had stopped his alcohol dependency and transformed his life, I thought I’d give it a go. 

It may be best known as a party drug that, taken illegally, can blight lives, but ketamine has been an FDA-approved anesthetic used by doctors and vets for decades. 

Over the past few years, it has also emerged as a groundbreaking therapy treatment for a variety of mental health challenges including PTSD, anxiety, depression and sexual trauma. At the cellular level, ketamine repairs neurotransmitters and creates new neuropathways. This allows patients to rewire their brains and break free from old, destructive patterns.

Data for the number of mental health patients prescribed ketamine is scant, largely because as few insurers cover it, most pay for it out-of-pocket. But in 2021, it was nearly 30,000 tried it and there are now estimated to be some 750 ketamine clinics across America.

I didn’t like the idea of going to a clinic, so, after a cursory Google, I discovered Choose Your Horizon, where treatments, which start from $87, can be completed at home over Zoom.

Before each session, you must avoid caffeine, alcohol, nicotine – and not consume any food. Ketamine can cause some people to have an upset stomach, although it didn’t for me.

A word of warning: this form of therapy is not for the faint-hearted. My first at-home ketamine therapy experience absolutely broke me.

The session started with a Zoom call at 7.30pm. I was at home in my apartment in Manhattan. On the other side of the computer was Danielle McFarlin-Barto, an experienced sexual trauma specialist I’d chosen to take me through my therapy journey.

Danielle asked whether someone else was present for my own safety (my friend was) and checked my blood pressure which I had taken with a device the company had provided.

Then she instructed me to put a pill the size of a Mento sweet into my mouth, but not swallow it. The white pill disintegrated and, as directed, I swished the powdery contents around my mouth for 15 minutes, before spitting the residue out.

From that moment on, the ketamine took control. I couldn’t do much of anything besides lie there. And that was okay with me because, at that moment, that was all I wanted to do.

I soon found myself floating through a dark tunnel that felt warm and inviting. I was everywhere and, at the same time, nowhere at all.

After, what felt like a minute but was actually an hour, I opened my eyes to find my Shih Tzu, Buddy, curled up quietly under my arm. This was strange as Buddy is never calm. I looked down at him and started crying.

Danielle voiced concern: ‘Why the tears?’

I felt one thing in that moment: that the love I was getting from Buddy was stronger than anything I have felt in a long time.

I realized that Buddy did not care how much love I gave him. He did not care what I did for work. He did not care if I missed a walk or forgot to feed him. He loved me unconditionally.

I’ve had Buddy for five years. I got him when he was six weeks old and for the past five years, I’ve never once seen this love in him. I was blind to it because I couldn’t see it in myself.

Sobbing, I told Danielle that I never knew how much Buddy loved me. I promised to never take Buddy’s love for granted again. I never have.

A week later I had my second session following the same process. The second my head hit the pillow I was out – completely and utterly incapacitated. This time I felt slightly overwhelmed, but I wasn’t scared. I had no fear, even though I was not in control.

I found myself hovering over an endless field of tiny white boxes. As I floated over each box, I opened the lid and found it contained a person I had had a romantic encounter with. Some were dates; some just brief sexual encounters.

One box contained the first girl I kissed before I was sure of my sexuality as a gay man. Another contained someone I had slept with a few weeks prior. I didn’t know his name.

Then I opened another, and there he was, the man who ripped out my heart and led to my lost decade of loveless pain: Joe.

Joe and I were in a one-bedroom apartment in West Hollywood that we had rented when we were a couple 25 years ago.

He looked exactly as he had then – 6ft3, blonde and blue-eyed, with the sort of head-turning looks that landed him lucrative modelling jobs. 

Ketamine had taken me to the moment Joe was telling me that he was leaving me, that he had fallen for someone else.

I opened my eyes before Joe said anything, but for the next 20 minutes, I cried harder than I have ever cried in my life. It was the kind of sobbing that happens when you lose a parent or a partner.

Before he left me, Joe and I had spent several years building a life together. We had fallen in love, moved across the globe. Both of us had had huge plans.

We’d met when I was a sophomore at the University of Hawaii. I’d seen him as soon as I’d walked into a karaoke bar in Honolulu. A gaggle of beautiful girls surrounded him, and they were singing Summer Nights. He was John Travolta’s character.

The second my eyes locked with his I fell completely, utterly and madly in love for the first time in my life – and he felt the same.

I proposed to Joe a few years later on a secluded beach at midnight in Hawaii and we went together to get $20 gold-plated rings.

After graduating, we decided to move to Los Angeles, where we found work as bellhops while we pursued our dreams.

Los Angeles was perhaps not the best place for two young, attractive, star-crossed lovers to start their life together. But five years after we first locked eyes, I still had butterflies every time I looked at Joe. The lovemaking was passionate and fulfilling.

I trusted him entirely because I had no reason not to. He had never betrayed my trust.

Yet two weeks after arriving in Los Angeles, I found myself face-to-face with him in our one-bedroom apartment. I remember it being sunny and beautiful outside when he was telling me he was leaving. There was nothing I could do about it but watch him shut the door and walk out of my life forever. 

Joe’s words blindsided me and left me in complete shock. I felt a deep sense of betrayal. 

The next morning, I got a call from him, but it was simply to ask me to cover his shift at the hotel. He told me there was a family emergency, but I knew this wasn’t true.

Heartbroken, I picked up his shift… and it changed my life.

That’s the night I carried a wealthy-looking woman’s suitcase up to her suite. She looked over at me and smiled. She glanced down at my nametag, which read: ‘James. Hawaii.’

‘Hawaii, huh? What are you doing here?’ she asked.

I was crushed inside, and it was an effort to appear okay, but I found myself saying: ‘I came to LA to be a celebrity reporter. I know it sounds insane but…’

She cut me off midsentence. ‘I work for Entertainment Tonight. If you want a job as a production assistant, come to this address.’ She then gave me her card.

I was hired on the spot and the very next day I started my job. In a short number of years, during which I worked every second, I went from a production assistant to producer.

I rubbed elbows with the biggest stars in the world. I attended the Oscars, the Golden Globes and Emmy Awards.

I forgot about Joe – and even convinced myself that everything had happened exactly as it was meant to: If it hadn’t been for me picking up his shift, I’d never have got my big showbiz break.

Over time, I created this fake narrative surrounding our split. And I hadn’t realised how fake it was until ketamine therapy unlocked the memory of that particular moment.

With my shirt soaked with tears, I remembered the real reason for the split: Joe had met someone else. 

When you experience immense pain, your brain can block it out as if it never happened. That’s what mine had done. From that moment on, I lost the ability to feel love.

The day after that second ketamine session, I wrote a letter to Joe. I said I forgave him and mentioned how deeply he had hurt me when he left. I told him about the scar I still had from the breakup.

I never sent that letter. I didn’t need to. It was about me, not him and writing it was healing enough. 

That particular ketamine session changed me to the core.

A week later, I went on a date. We kissed and I thanked him at the end. I walked through the streets of Manhattan that night with a smile on my face. I could feel again.

During the next few ketamine sessions, I slowly dismantled the walls that surrounded my heart.

Going into my sixth therapy session, I was expecting another coast along the highway of love and self-acceptance. But this time my dose was increased by 50mg.

As the ketamine took effect, I found myself at a place called Stone Hill in the town I grew up in. This was where kids went to fight when I was at high school.

I had been on this hill once before: when a boy had told me he’d wanted to fight me because I was gay. He beat me up. I did not fight back. Instead, I cried and ran.

During this ketamine session, when I ran from Stone Hill, I kept bumping into another bully, who wouldn’t let me leave the hill. He kept kicking me down to the ground and I kept getting up because I had to. I had to get out of that place.

The kids in high school were brutal, especially if they thought you were gay. That’s why I dated girls, while secretly having sexual encounters with one particular boy from a neighboring town. 

When this person discarded me, I blamed myself, such was my self-loathing.

Ketamine took me to a place with just two people: me and the boy I’d had this secret relationship with. His only goal seemed to be to kick me down.

Eventually, I did get over the hill, but there was my former lover-turned-tormentor again seated on a bench. This time he had his face in his hands. 

I had forgotten all about him – I haven’t spoken to him since my twenties. I had blocked out his memory after he’d deserted me because I wasn’t cool enough – or because he was not willing to face his feelings.

I had buried the experience deep within my subconscious.

When I woke up, tears were streaming down my face, but I was also laughing. I laughed so hard my stomach hurt. I knew now I could forgive him – and myself.

The remaining two sessions were smooth sailing. I had unearthed the pain that kept my heart in a cage. Danielle, my understanding guide, had helped me love again.

Ketamine therapy is not a party in a pill. It clearly is not for everyone. And there are very real risks. While it is legal for doctors to prescribe ketamine, the FDA hasn’t approved it for mental health treatment, so the therapy remains unregulated.

But what it taught me was priceless. It showed me where I lost the ability to love so that I could love again one day.

With an open heart, an abundance of walks and treats for Buddy, I look forward to when this day comes.  

To schedule the same at Ketamine Therapy home treatment used by James, go to chooseyourhorizon.com