About Bruce Sanguin

How I Got Here

Growing up I was a high-performance jock up until I graduated from university with a psychology degree and a couple of national championships in volleyball. But I ended up debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin at seminary. While there I also received accreditation as a marriage and family therapist.

After a few decades wearing a gown and preaching Jesus I am now a psychotherapist and an advocate for the legalization of psychedelics. (I’m pretty sure that the bread and wine Jesus served up had a little something else in it as well.) But the church wouldn’t have it. Big mistake.

I wrote a bunch of books on evolutionary spirituality. Don’t ask. A couple of them won awards. My latest one didn’t but I’d give it a gold medal if it was my call. It tells the story of how psychedelics and love saved me. Sorry Jesus. If you want to save your eyeballs and read a retrospective of them, a friend and colleague did me the honour.

What I Love

I’m the lucky father of two daughters, one 43 and the other a one-year old. — and married to my soul mate to boot. Which proves to me there is a god.

I also love my work. It’s a joy of my life to work with people who want more than anything to live their own life; to fall in love with themselves; to break out of the prison of self-obsession; to wear different colour socks and not care what anybody else thinks; to call bullshit on the bullshit; to love madly, get your heart broken and do it all over again, except better; to know what it feels like to stand out from the crowd when the crowd simply got it wrong; and who want to open their hearts in compassion for this off-kilter world we’ve made.

Lots of stuff gets in the way of you being unrepeatable you. That’s where I come in. Work with me. And let the clearing begin. Think of it as your gift to a world waiting for you to show up in all your glory.

How I Work

I come into relationship with you and patiently persuade you, however long it takes, that you are not who you think you are. I mean, you are not Fortress Ego that you built to protect yourself from failures of love.

I listen. I promise not to hurt you. It’s not my job to change you. You’ve had enough of that, enough cajoling, enough of feeling like a failure. Change happens when you start loving yourself, your true self. I let you be without leaving you alone.

I encourage you and support you and help you to treat yourself well. I will help you identify all the negative beliefs about yourself that you may still be lugging around with you. They were formed a long time ago when you had to make sense of why you weren’t treated well. They aren’t true, not a single one of them. They hold you back and stop you from opening your heart to the beauty and mystery and love that is on offer.

Freud got a few things wrong. But he was right when he wrote in a letter to his student, Carl Jung, that psychotherapy is, in essence, a cure by love.

“The psyche is not inside us but between us”

(Donald Winnicott)

“The psyche is not inside us but between us”.

(Donald Winnicott)

Testimonials

“The felt sense of love working with Bruce has been the springboard from which all clarity is now budding. Feeling his care and believing he loves me came at the exact moment I was ready to finally be DONE with the unconscious negative beliefs about myself that I desperately clung to. I did decades of work trying to improve myself.

There was nothing to improve. I needed his steady, loving presence to encourage my practice of self-compassion, self-acceptance and self-love”.

— Mary

"Working with Bruce has been a great experience. Over the years I have worked with several counselors often feeling like no real change or growth was occurring in my life. However, in the time that I have been working with Bruce, I have experienced profound changes to my health and well-being physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Today I feel more peaceful, grounded, and confident.

I experience far less anxiety in my body, sleep more soundly, and have a much greater capacity to manage and hold everything in my life.

These changes have rolled over into every area of my life positively impacting my relationships, business, physical health, and even my spiritual life. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with Bruce and continue to refer friends and family."

— Dr. Joseph

"The principles that guide Bruce’s work aren’t a marketing strategy. They are foundational to who Bruce is and how he showed up with me during therapy.

Some therapists approach their work by inhabiting a role. Not Bruce. His forthright honesty, transparency, steadiness, calm, and gentle humor was the beautiful thread, the how, of Bruce’s humanity. This cannot be faked. His humanity touched those places within me that had gone underground and been cut off, providing permission for their expression.

We were two human beings meeting and discovering what wanted to be revealed during those therapeutic meetings. I’ll always be grateful for the great good fortune to have met and worked with Bruce. Everyone should be so lucky."

— Elaine

BOOK OUT NOW!

Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart and Put Him Back Together

This book describes my healing
journey with psychedelics.

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Bruce Sanguin

Psychotherapist