What makes someone a good psychedelic integration therapist? Red flags and green flags

Green flags: they ask what happened in the session and listen without rushing to interpret. They understand that the work after the session is as important as the session itself. They have their own direct experience with the territory — not necessarily psilocybin, but with the kind of non-ordinary states the work produces. They are comfortable with silence, with not-knowing, with the client's process unfolding at its own pace. They can hold the spiritual/transpersonal dimensions of the experience without pathologizing or spiritually bypassing. They are professionally licensed and supervised.

Red flags: they try to interpret your experience through their favorite framework before you've finished describing it (Jungian archetypes, traumatic material, past lives — whatever). They are uncomfortable with the content being spiritual or transcendent. They tell you what your experience 'means.' They rush integration. They are unlicensed but call what they do 'therapy.' They have no personal experience with non-ordinary states of any kind — meditation, breathwork, somatic work, or psychedelics — and clearly don't know the territory from inside.

The most important thing: they are genuinely curious about your specific experience rather than pattern-matching it to a template. Every psychedelic experience is different. Good integration therapy is phenomenological — it helps you understand your experience from inside before applying interpretive frameworks. If your therapist seems more interested in confirming their theory than exploring your experience, that's a meaningful problem.