314 - The Future of Therapy: Psychedelics, Spirituality & the Courage to Feel with Christian Snuffer
“The two energies that are gonna free everybody is just curiosity and compassion. And if you can't learn to hold those two, like, you're kind of cooked.” ~ Christian Snuffer
If therapists can’t feel, they can’t help. Christian Snuffer dives into psychedelics, spirituality, and the future of therapy—and why curiosity and compassion matter more than any modality.
No pithy preamble today. We’re getting right to my conversation with Christian Snuffer, a psychedelic somatic therapist in private practice. We met on Instagram and immediately bonded over, well, everything! While every tangent in this episode is just so compelling, three topics really reinforced my belief in the future of psychology and the clinicians who are dedicating themselves to its evolution:
self-compassion - for the twisty journeys that bring many of us into this field and home to our own healing
coachability - old dogs (and therapists) can learn new tricks, modalities, and ways of being with their clients and themselves
psychedelics - we need to protect this vital treatment option from the scourge of capitalism
Bonus focus: spirituality, namely, how do we make space for it in practice? The search for connection to the universe/nature/higher power is a dynamic driver of human existence. Yet spirituality remains largely off-limits in therapy. Christian, who was born and raised in Utah, embraces a pragmatic yet spiritually curious approach. He comes from a high-control religious tradition (can you guess which one?) and spent years disconnected from his body and emotions.
Eventually, Christian found his way back––through a graduate program that required students to engage in their own therapy (ahem!). “I've spent my whole life trying to get away from my body and inner world,” he recalls. “Through the training and therapy experiences, [I realized] there's enough safety to now be in my body.”
Christian brings his expansive curiosity to private practice. “I'm trying to really speak to that spiritual component,” he says, noting that clients are either all in or absolutely not. “There's very few people in the middle.” That said, Christian thinks the feedback suggests how therapy and spirituality might link up in the future. “People are going where our country is going,” he observes. “We're spiritually devoid, and so, it makes sense that it's coming back.”
This great recoupling might also explain the revival of therapeutic psychedelics. “If there's a critique,” cautions Christian, “it's more of a hammer than a scalpel. It's not right for everybody.”
True! But, sometimes, your heart just needs to be blown wide open!
GUEST CONTACT & BIO
Christian Snuffer (he/him) is a psychedelic somatic therapist practicing in Salt Lake City, UT. He owns a private practice called Attunement Psychotherapy & Psychedelic Healing and works with clients both in person and virtually.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Internal Family Systems Institute
Federico Faggin: Science & Spirituality Merge in this New Theory of Consciousness
Psychedelic Somatic Interactional Psychotherapy (PSIP)
NeuroAffective Relational Model™(NARM)
The Role of Autonomics in the Origin and Healing of Chronic Illness
The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny
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