Article / Inside the process
What Happens in a KAP Session?
Knowing the sequence can make an unfamiliar experience feel more navigable. Here is how preparation, onsite support, monitoring, and aftercare come together on a session day.
At a glance
What to carry forward
- Preparation and medical readiness are reviewed before medicine is administered.
- A trained clinical team remains onsite and monitors you throughout the experience.
- You must arrange transportation and should not drive on the day of a dosing session.
- Integration follows the experience while insights and emotional material are still close.
Before
Arrival and readiness.
You arrive having already completed preparation. Your clinician reviews your intention, the plan, and how support will work. The prescriber confirms medical readiness. Set and setting are deliberate: a comfortable space, eyeshades, and music selected to support an inward focus.
During
A monitored, supported experience.
Depending on the route decided with you, ketamine is self-administered sublingually in your clinician’s presence or administered intramuscularly by the prescriber. You are monitored onsite by trained staff throughout.
Many people describe shifts in emotion, perception, and body sensation, or a sense of distance from familiar patterns. Your clinician holds a steady presence. You are not alone at any point.
After
Return, transportation, and integration.
Effects ease over the session. You will not drive that day, so transportation must be arranged in advance. The first hours and following days can be an active integration window.
We follow experiential sessions with integration, where we make meaning of what surfaced and connect it to how you want to live.
First session
The handshake session.
The first medicine session has a specific job. We call it the handshake session: a gentler, lower-dose introduction where you meet the medicine, notice how your body and mind respond, and build trust in the room. Later sessions can go deeper once that relationship exists. Moving gradually is deliberate. In this work, going slower usually gets you further.
The experience
The range of what can happen.
No two sessions look alike. Some are biographical, moving through memory and life story. Some are somatic, felt mostly in the body. Some reach toward something larger than the self. And some feel like almost nothing happened. We welcome those sessions too. A quiet session is often a nervous system recalibrating, and the days that follow it can carry the real movement.
As the medicine eases, we hold a quiet reflection period before anyone speaks. Insights are still arriving in that stillness. Journaling or resting lets them land before conversation begins.
Clinical context
Orientation, not an assessment
Session routes, doses, monitoring, and discharge readiness are individualized by the clinical team. Arrange a responsible adult to drive you home and follow the transportation guidance provided during consent.
In crisis, call 911 or call or text 988. LuminaThera is not a crisis service.