We Support Every Journey of Growth and Integration
Our compassionate and grounded integration counsellors hold RCC, CCC, and RTC designations, with advanced training in psychedelic integration, trauma processing, and transpersonal psychology.
- Trauma-Informed Trip Support
- Prepare Intentionally for Transformative Experiences
- Navigate and Integrate Psychedelic Journeys
- Process Emotional or Challenging Material
- Ground Insights Into Daily Life
- Reconnect With Meaning and Purpose
- Explore Expanded States With Skilled Support
- Create Sustainable Change Beyond the Experience
- Cultivate Inner Safety and Trust
- Feel More at Peace Within Yourself
Our team has special training and experience in best practices with psychedelics. Feel free to choose your own therapist below.
Want us to help match you to a therapist? We’d be glad to:
Colter Long, RCC
Do anxiety, racing thoughts, or emotional spirals keep you stuck? I bring a direct, no-nonsense approach with sharp clarity, fierce accountability, and cognitive behavioural therapy to help you build real resilience. My style is strong yet supportive, cutting through the noise so you can break old loops, level up, and truly thrive.
Serena Slatten, RCC
Whatever brought you here, heartache, anxiety, or just life being life, you’re welcome. I specialize in relationships, addictions, and life’s messy in-betweens, working with individuals and couples. My style? Saucy, warm, and real. I use EMDR to help untangle the hard stuff, with Chester, my fluffy sidekick, occasionally stealing the spotlight.
Jess Cumming, CCC
What happens when life drops you right into the middle of everything you’d rather avoid? I work with people navigating big transitions, identity shake-ups, and the awkward in-between. Using EMDR and other approaches to heal trauma, I bring warmth, sharp honesty, and laughter to the darkest corners, because nothing human scares me.
Laura Lu, RCC
Being human can feel like getting tossed between tidal waves and numb silence, one moment overwhelmed, the next disconnected. I offer a space to make sense of that inner chaos through compassion, curiosity, and EMDR. Together, we’ll meet every part of you with care and uncover the self that’s been waiting underneath.
Estairia Hong, RTC
In a world that rewards conformity, it’s easy to lose touch with your most authentic self. I specialize in supporting queer folks and all those exploring alternative relationships, identity shifts, and life transitions. Together, we’ll create a space where complexity is welcomed, honesty leads, and your evolving truth can unfold with clarity and care.
Joel Myers, RTC
Maybe you’ve been numbing, distracting, or duct-taping your soul together with habits that only half-work. 🩹 Change can feel terrifying (and a little weird), but you don’t have to do it solo. I specialize in addiction and trauma recovery, using EMDR and other evidence-based magic to get to the root, where real healing begins.
Fabiola Pérez, RTC
The human experience can be… a lot. Ever catch yourself thinking, “Can I just get a break?!” I specialize in early attachment trauma, helping you untangle the body’s old stories with care and curiosity. Together, we’ll reconnect mind, body, and spirit, so you can feel grounded, whole, and more at home in yourself.
Xiva Taverna, RTC
Psychedelics, when approached with reverence and intention, can illuminate inner truth and release old patterns. Yet real transformation comes through preparation and integration. Combining Internal Family Systems with psychedelic work has taught me to love every part of myself, revealing that healing is not escape, but embracing all we are to become whole.
Andressa Taverna, RTC
You might feel something’s off but can’t quite name it, disconnected from yourself, others, or the life you hoped to be living. I offer a warm, compassionate space to gently explore what’s beneath the surface. I specialize in childhood sexual abuse, using EMDR and somatic therapy to help you reclaim safety, belonging, and joy, one tender step at a time.
Carson Kivari, RCC
I’ve spent the 23 years of experience I have with psychedelics learning how to relate to and respect them. These aren’t drugs we take to cure things. They are sensitizing agents that make us more aware of what we’ve fallen asleep to. I very rarely recommend psychedelics, save for those willing to first ‘wake up’ to how out of alignment they’ve been living. In my experience, psychedelics often make things feel worse, as we are called on a hero’s journey to clean up our spiritually devoid materialistic lives. If you’re willing to do that? A life of greater meaning, love and grace awaits, but you’ll have to open to losing the false safety you’ve leaned on until now.
Choosing Your Psychedelic Integration Counsellor at Thrive
Psychedelic integration is the work of making sense of an expanded or challenging experience and weaving what it showed you into everyday life, and the counsellors above each bring a different way of supporting that process. This guide helps you compare them: what integration support involves, which team members focus on which concerns, how their therapeutic approaches help, what their designations mean, and how to get started. Whatever you have experienced, you make sense, you are not broken, and connection heals.
On this page
What Psychedelic Integration Support Involves
Support usually falls into two phases, and you can begin with either one.
Preparation
- Clarifying your intentions, hopes and fears
- Reviewing your health, medications and mental health history so you can have informed conversations with medical professionals
- Building grounding skills to steady your nervous system during intense emotion
- Planning practical support for the days and weeks afterward
- Setting realistic expectations, including the possibility that nothing dramatic happens
Psychedelic integration
- Talking through what happened without pressure to make it neat or meaningful
- Processing memories, emotions or body sensations that surfaced
- Translating insight into concrete choices, boundaries and practices
- Restoring a sense of safety if the experience was frightening or destabilizing
After a clinical trial or treatment elsewhere
Some people arrive after taking part in an authorized research study, or after receiving treatment in a country where it is permitted. Psychedelic integration can continue here even if the formal program has ended. Bring any notes you kept, and with your consent, your counsellor can coordinate with your previous treatment team.
What Thrive does and does not do
Thrive offers preparation and integration counselling only. We do not supply, sell or administer psychedelic substances, and we do not guide sessions under the influence. In Canada, most psychedelics remain controlled substances, with legal access limited to authorized clinical trials, exemptions and Health Canada’s Special Access Program. Laws continue to evolve, so please follow Canadian law and medical guidance. You can read more on our psychedelic therapy and MDMA therapy pages.
If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency. Support is also available through 988.ca.
Signs Psychedelic Integration Support Could Help
You do not need to be in distress to benefit from psychedelic integration. People often reach out when they notice:
- An experience keeps replaying in their mind weeks later
- Insights felt clear at the time but are fading, or feel hard to act on
- Old memories, grief or anger surfaced and have not settled
- Sleep, mood or anxiety have shifted since the experience
- They feel lonely because people around them do not understand what happened
- Spiritual or existential questions now feel urgent
- They are considering a legal treatment pathway and want to prepare thoughtfully
Any of these is a reasonable reason to talk with an integration therapist. Reaching out early often makes the process gentler.
Finding Your Integration Therapist on the Team
Each integration therapist on our psychedelic integration team brings their own focus and style. Based on what they share in their profiles, here is one way to narrow your choice. You are welcome to read full bios on our team page or ask us to match you.
If trauma processing is your main focus
Several team members use EMDR to help untangle painful memories that surface during or after an experience. Serena Slatten, RCC, works with relationships, addictions and life’s messy in-betweens, with individuals and couples. Laura Lu, RCC, supports people who swing between overwhelm and numbness. Joel Myers, RTC, specializes in addiction and trauma recovery. Jess Cumming, CCC, works with big transitions and identity shake-ups.
If you want to work with parts of yourself
Many people meet younger, protective or wise parts of themselves in expanded states. Xiva Taverna, RTC, combines Internal Family Systems with psychedelic integration work, and Laura Lu also brings a parts-friendly lens.
If your body holds the story
Fabiola Pérez, RTC, specializes in early attachment trauma and reconnecting mind, body and spirit. Andressa Taverna, RTC, specializes in childhood sexual abuse, using EMDR and somatic therapy.
If you prefer a direct, skills-based style
Colter Long, RCC, brings a no-nonsense approach and cognitive behavioural therapy for anxiety, racing thoughts and emotional spirals, which can help when an experience leaves your mind feeling loud.
If identity, queerness or relationships are central
Estairia Hong, RTC, specializes in supporting queer folks and people exploring alternative relationships, identity shifts and life transitions.
If you are unsure whether psychedelics are right for you at all
Carson Kivari, RCC, Thrive’s director and co-founder, takes a cautious and reverent view. As his profile explains, he very rarely recommends psychedelics and sees them as sensitizing agents rather than cures.
Not sure where to start?
If several profiles resonate, notice whose words feel easiest to imagine talking to. Comfort and trust matter at least as much as any single technique. You can also ask us to match you: share what you are hoping for, and we will suggest an integration therapist whose focus and style fit.
What to Look for in an Integration Therapist
Whether you choose someone from Thrive or elsewhere, a trustworthy integration therapist will usually:
- Have solid training in trauma and nervous system regulation, not only enthusiasm for psychedelics
- Be clear that they do not provide, source or guide the use of illegal substances
- Collaborate with physicians or psychiatrists when medications or health concerns are involved
- Hold spiritual experiences with curiosity and humility, without imposing their own beliefs
- Respect your culture, identity and relationship structure
- Never pressure you toward, or away from, psychedelic use
Between psychedelic integration sessions
Small practices help insights take root: writing down what you remember, protecting sleep, spending time outdoors, moving your body gently and sharing only with people who listen well. Your psychedelic integration counsellor can help you choose one or two that fit your life rather than adding pressure.
How Our Approaches Support Psychedelic Integration
Psychedelic integration is not one technique. Our counsellors draw on established therapies and adapt them to what you bring.
EMDR
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing uses bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements or tapping, while you briefly focus on a distressing memory. If an experience brought old material to the surface, EMDR offers a structured way to process it while staying anchored in the present. Learn more about EMDR therapy at Thrive or through EMDR Canada.
Internal Family Systems
IFS understands the mind as a family of parts, each with its own role, led by a calm, compassionate Self. It gives words to experiences of meeting inner children, protectors or critics. The IFS Institute explains the model in more depth.
Somatic therapy
Body-based approaches help you notice sensation, tension and release. They are especially useful when an experience was felt more than understood, or when your nervous system still feels activated days later.
Cognitive behavioural therapy
CBT offers practical tools for anxious thoughts, rumination and unhelpful patterns, which can be grounding if your mind feels busy or unsettled after an intense experience.
Transpersonal psychology
Transpersonal approaches take spiritual, mystical and meaning-making experiences seriously, without insisting on any particular belief system. They can help you explore questions about purpose, connection and identity that psychedelic experiences sometimes raise.
Integration Therapist Designations Explained
You will see three designations on this team. Each reflects training and membership in a professional body with its own standards and ethics:
- RCC, Registered Clinical Counsellor: granted through the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors.
- CCC, Canadian Certified Counsellor: granted through the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association.
- RTC, Registered Therapeutic Counsellor: a professional counselling designation held by several team members.
Extended health plans differ in which designations they reimburse, so check your policy before booking if coverage matters to you.
How Starting With an Integration Therapist Works
- Free 15 minute consult. Reach out through our contact page and share, as much as you are comfortable, what you are preparing for or processing.
- Match or choose. Pick a counsellor from this page, or let us match you based on your needs.
- First session. Your counsellor asks about your history, health and support network, and explains how they work.
- Collaborative plan. Together you decide on focus, pacing and approach.
- In person or online. Meet at 470 Granville St., steps from Granville SkyTrain Station, or by secure video.
If you are reaching out after an experience that felt overwhelming, mention it during your consult so we can consider it when suggesting a counsellor. Your early sessions can focus entirely on helping you feel steady again before exploring anything deeper.
Current rates are shown when you book, and many extended health plans reimburse counselling with registered counsellors.
Psychedelic Integration FAQ
Do I need to have had a psychedelic experience to book?
No. Many people come for preparation, or simply to think through whether this path fits them at all.
Will my counsellor judge how or where my experience happened?
No. Our counsellors offer confidential, non-judgemental support. They will explain the legal limits of confidentiality at the start.
Can Thrive provide psychedelics or guide a session?
No. Thrive does not supply, sell or administer substances and does not guide sessions under the influence.
How many integration sessions will I need?
It varies. Some people want one or two sessions to reflect; others are working with trauma and prefer longer-term support.
Can integration help if my experience was frightening?
Yes. Difficult experiences are a common reason people seek integration, and your counsellor will start by helping you feel safe and grounded again.
Can couples attend psychedelic integration sessions together?
Some counsellors, such as Serena Slatten, work with couples as well as individuals. Ask us which team members would be a good fit for joint sessions.
Where can I learn more about psychedelic research?
MAPS shares updates on psychedelic research, and your physician can speak to your personal health considerations.
Connect With an Integration Therapist
You do not have to make sense of a profound or unsettling experience alone. Book your free 15 minute consult or call 604-227-0297, and we will help you find the counsellor on our psychedelic integration team who fits you best.
