Your KAP Practice Is the Session

Whether you’re newly trained and building your KAP practice for the first time or you’ve been offering this work for years and feel yourself entering a new season, the same principle applies:

The way we shape our practice mirrors the way we hold our sessions.

Preparation Comes First

(Whether We Acknowledge It or Not)

Preparation isn’t an optional add-on in KAP. It is the container. Before medicine ever enters the space, we orient clients to what’s coming. We explore intention, assess readiness, and clarify logistics. All of this is nervous-system work. Regulated systems rely on predictability, clarity, and agency to engage safely with altered states (Benight, C. C., Harwell, A., & Shoji, K. (2018)., Kearney, B. E., et al. (2022)).

I would go so far as to say that KAP cannot be trauma-informed without preparation. And yet many of us try to hold our KAP practices without offering ourselves that same preparation. We can slip into hype and hustle before we’ve clarified our clinical stance with non-ordinary states; even bypassing reflection on our capacity for trauma-informed integration, or what kind of container we genuinely want to build.

In session, we might offer clients a Preparation Checklist. In practice-building, we need one too.

Just like in session, what’s unprepared doesn’t disappear. It shows up as anxiety, self-doubt, or feeling “behind.” Preparation creates space between interest and action to notice what feels aligned, what feels premature, and what’s genuinely resourced right now. Without orientation, we can move forward cognitively while our nervous system is still bracing.

And part of this is recognizing that the structures that support us in one season of our practice may not be the same structures that support us in the next.

The Dosing Session:

Uncertainty and Letting Go of Assumptions

In a KAP session, the medicine opens a window but it doesn’t do the work. We also need presence, attunement, and capacity. This is where many of us feel most unsure, both in session and in our practice. We can sense something important is happening, but we’re not always sure how to trust the process.

In practice-building, this same uncertainty can show up as trying to hold it all alone, over-consuming trainings, second-guessing every decision, oscillating between excitement and fear, avoiding structure because we don’t want to be too rigid, or grasping for more structure because we don’t want to feel lost.

This is the in-between. And just like in the therapy room, clarity doesn’t come from more control. It comes from relationship, consultation, self-reflection, and containers where the work can be metabolized instead of carried in isolation.

Many of us don’t need more information. We need places to process how we’re actually applying it.

Integration Is Where Meaning Is Made

Without integration, sessions can feel intense but unfinished; like something opened without a place to land. The same is true for us. Without integration, our practice can start to feel heavy, fragmented, or misaligned.

Especially because we’re often navigating ethical gray areas, limbic countertransference, shifts in our identity as providers, and questions about sustainability and income.

Integration doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means having spaces where there’s no shame in asking questions about the complexity of this work. Spaces where business structure and clinical depth are allowed to coexist. Places where we can ask:

• How do I scale ethically?

• What actually feels sustainable for my nervous system?

• What kind of container do I want to be known for?

  
  

A Practice Is Not a Protocol

Just like KAP is not simply medicine plus therapy, a KAP practice is not credentials plus logistics. It’s a living system that needs pacing, consent (including our own), containment, repetition, and room to evolve. If we believe KAP should be trauma-informed, client-led, relational, and attuned, it makes sense that our practices need to be built in the same way.

Preparation, presence, attunement, integration (over and over again).

If building and sustaining your KAP practice feels harder than you expected, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong. It may simply mean you’re being asked to practice what you already believe: That how we do the work matters just as much as what we do. That applies in our work with our clients, and it applies to us too!

References:

Benight, C. C., Harwell, A., & Shoji, K. (2018). Self-Regulation Shift Theory: A dynamic personal agency approach to recovery capital. Frontiers in Psychology.

Kearney, B. E., et al. (2022). The brain-body disconnect: A somatic sensory basis for trauma-related conditions. Frontiers in Neuroscience.