LEARN WITH CHRISTOPHER
Learn to hold what your clients are bringing into the room.
Psychedelic experiences. Spiritual emergence. Nonordinary states. Profound breakthroughs. Difficult integrations. Experiences that don't always fit neatly inside the clinical models we were trained to use.
Your clients are already bringing this material into therapy. The question is whether you feel prepared to meet them there.
Professional education for therapists, clinicians, coaches, and healing professionals.
The Field Changed. Most Clinical Training did not.
Therapists are increasingly encountering clients who use psychedelics, participate in ceremonies and retreats, explore nonordinary states of consciousness, or understand their healing through spiritual and transpersonal frameworks.
Yet many clinicians received little or no formal education for working with these experiences.
That gap can leave good therapists uncertain about what to ask, what to assess, when to support, when to challenge, and how to distinguish meaningful transformation from destabilization.
You don't need to become a psychedelic therapist to become more psychedelic-informed. You do need to know what to do when psychedelics enter the therapy room.
Attend my next training or check out downloadable resources. The Psychedelic Clinician™ Complete Clinical Field Guide Collection addresses the arc of psychedelic-informed clinical work, from conversations before an experience through post-experience integration, extraordinary and spiritual material, clinical concern, stuck integration, clinician self-awareness, scope of practice, and documentation.
FEATURED TRAINING
Our Clients Are Using Psychedelics. Now What?
What Every Therapist Needs to Know
A practical introduction to psychedelic-informed clinical work for therapists who want to respond competently when clients disclose psychedelic use or bring psychedelic experiences into treatment.
This training helps clinicians move beyond two common reactions: becoming the gatekeeper, who reflexively pathologizes or discourages psychedelic exploration, and becoming the cheerleader, who enthusiastically validates experiences without sufficient clinical discernment.
There is a third stance—one grounded in curiosity, competence, humility, and clinical judgment. View the learning objectives for this training.
2.0 Texas Social Work CE Hours Available for this course.
IN THIS TRAINING YOU WILL LEARN TO:
MORE WAYS TO LEARN
Professional Education for a Changing Clinical Landscape
LIVE TRAININGS & WORKSHOPS
Learn in real time through focused professional trainings, workshops, webinars, and cohort experiences.
Live programs create space not only for teaching, but for questions, case discussion, dialogue, and the complexity that emerges when these ideas meet actual clinical practice.
ON-DEMAND LEARNING
Professional education on your schedule.
On-demand trainings provide practical frameworks clinicians can begin applying to their work with psychedelic experiences, integration, spirituality, nonordinary states, and transformation.
COMING SOON.
ADVANCED LEARNING
Some clinical capacities cannot be developed through information alone.
Advanced programs explore the deeper dimensions of this work: the clinician as instrument, countertransference, discernment, presence, worldview, integration, and the capacity to remain grounded when clients enter territory that challenges our existing clinical maps.
COMING SOON.
DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCES
The Psychedelic Clinician™ Complete Clinical Field Guide Collection brings together all eight guides in this first clinical series: a practical library designed to help clinicians meet these moments with greater curiosity, discernment, clarity, and clinical responsibility.
WHAT YOU'LL LEARN HERE
More than Psychedelics
Psychedelics may be one doorway into this work, but the larger question is how clinicians accompany human beings through profound experiences of change.
My trainings explore several interconnected areas of clinical practice:
PSYCHEDELIC-INFORMED
PRACTICE
Clinical foundations for working responsibly with clients who use psychedelics or participate in psychedelic experiences.
INTEGRATION
Helping clients translate extraordinary experiences into meaningful, sustainable changes in ordinary life.
CLINICAL DISCERNMENT
Developing the judgment to know when to support, question, slow down, assess further, refer, or intervene.
HOLDING TRANSFORMATION
Building the capacity to accompany experiences that may exceed familiar clinical frameworks without prematurely reducing or romanticizing them.
THE CLINICIAN AS INSTRUMENT
Examining how our own histories, beliefs, nervous systems, countertransference, and unprocessed material enter the therapeutic relationship.
SPIRITUALITY & NONORDINARY EXPERIENCE
Working ethically with experiences clients may understand as mystical, transpersonal, energetic, existential, or sacred.
CLINICAL FORMATION
Information Isn't Enough.
You can learn the pharmacology. You can memorize contraindications. You can study preparation and integration protocols. You can become familiar with the growing research literature.
All of that matters.
But the clinician is part of the clinical environment.
Our ability to remain present with uncertainty, recognize our own projections, tolerate experiences we may not understand, and discern without immediately endorsing or dismissing what a client has experienced shapes what becomes possible in the room.
That is why my teaching works on two levels:
What the clinician needs to know.
and
Who the clinician needs to become.
WHO THIS IS FOR
Built for People
Who Sit with People.
These trainings are designed for psychotherapists, counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, addiction professionals, coaches, supervisors, integration practitioners, and other healing professionals navigating increasingly complex experiences in therapeutic and healing relationships.
You don't have to use psychedelics.
You don't have to believe what your clients believe.
You do have to know how to work with what walks through your door.
EXPERIENCE BEHIND THE TEACHING
Clinical Practice.
Supervision.
Psychedelic Medicine.
Contemplative Practice.
For nearly two decades, I have worked with people navigating trauma, addiction, relationships, sexuality, identity, spirituality, recovery, and profound periods of personal transformation.
For more than 10 years, I have also taught, supervised, and consulted with other clinicians.
My approach to professional education brings together clinical practice, psychedelic medicine, supervision, contemplative and embodied traditions, and direct experience accompanying people through forms of transformation that don't always fit comfortably inside conventional clinical categories.
Christopher Shaw, LCSW-S CSAT-S RYT
Licensed Clinical Social Worker & Supervisor · Certified Sex Addiction Therapist & Supervisor · Psychedelic Medicine Practitioner · IFS Trained · Registered Yoga Teacher (Kundalini Yoga) Former Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor & Certified Personal Trainer
PREFER TO START BY READING?
Explore the ideas behind the work.
My essays examine the questions underneath the trainings: psychedelic-informed practice, integration, clinical discernment, spirituality, countertransference, transformation, and what this changing landscape asks of the clinician.
This is a good place to begin if you're curious about my approach before taking a training.
Our Clients Are Using Psychedelics. Now What? (1 of 5)
Your client tells you they took mushrooms, attended an ayahuasca ceremony, or started microdosing. You didn’t bring psychedelics into the therapy room. They did. Now you have about four seconds to decide what to say next—and whether you become a gatekeeper, a cheerleader, or something far more clinically useful.
Read the essay.
The Space Between Gatekeeper and Cheerleader (2 of 5)
When a client brings psychedelics into the therapy room, you don’t have to become either the clinician who shuts the conversation down or the one who opens it too far. There is a third stance—and it isn’t neutrality. It is a distinct clinical competency built on presence, risk literacy, discernment, and knowing the limits of your scope.
Read the essay.
What the Medicine Reveals About the Clinician (3 of 5)
Your client tells you they encountered God, spoke with their dead mother, watched themselves die, or were shown what they believe is their life’s purpose. Before deciding what any of it means, there is another clinical question worth asking: what is happening inside you? In psychedelic-informed therapy, the clinician’s unexamined fear, fascination...
NEED HELP WITH AN ACTUAL CASE?
Need help with an Actual Case?
Training builds capacity. Sometimes you need another clinician in the room with you—even if that room is virtual.
