June 9, 2026
Coming from Christmas Lake Press
Welcome Home: Reclaiming My Body Through Coffee, Drugs, Dance, and Psychoanalysis fuses personal storytelling with professional insight to explore the transformative potential of psychedelics. Written by Dr. Natalie Cohen—a clinical psychologist, trauma expert, and pioneer in psychedelic-assisted therapy—the memoir-in-essays traces her lived experience healing from sexual violence, ancestral trauma, and institutional betrayal. Each chapter is anchored in a psychedelic journey (ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca), followed by creative integration practices including somatic movement, dreamwork, and psychoanalytic reflection. Think Michael Pollan meeting Alison Bechdel to create an ecstatic dance of becoming.
Woven with lyricism and a refreshing sense of humor, Welcome Home contributes a nuanced and deeply feminist voice to the current psychedelic conversation. Dr. Cohen’s story disrupts the dominant medicalized model, centering a woman’s body as both subject and site of transformation, offering a radical blueprint for healing that reclaims the voice and makes space for grief, pleasure, tenderness, and resistance. A necessary book for our times, Welcome Home is an offering for anyone seeking not just to heal, but to come home to themselves.
Early Praise for Welcome Home
A truth-teller who weaves love, grief, curiosity, and humor into her visceral story of becoming, Natalie Cohen has written a fierce, feminist joyride of a book, charting the healing power of psychedelic medicine, the subtle intimacy between psychoanalyst and patient, the elation of reclaiming the body through movement and dance. Raw, courageous, and deeply embodied, this is one survivor’s journey from silence to liberation. I raced through Welcome Home with my heart in my throat.
—Diana Whitney, author of Girl Trouble
In this brave and gorgeously rendered memoir, Natalie Cohen takes us on a profoundly sacred journey—one in which the body becomes both compass and oracle. With startling honesty and a poet’s lyrical precision, she chronicles how she dared to dance in the flames while rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Memory becomes movement and pain reconfigures as possibility. Welcome Home is pure alchemy—be prepared to be transformed.
—Karen Brailsford, author of Sacred Landscapes of the Soul: Aligning with the Divine Wherever You Are
A rare insider’s guide to two typically sequestered and enigmatic realms—psychoanalysis and psychedelics—showing, with striking persuasiveness, how powerful they can be as healing allies. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, the book opens a portal between dreaming and dance, sexual violation and bodily integrity. It is, ultimately, a love letter to feminine power in its many guises and transmutations amid abuses both insidious and overt. Accompanying Cohen on her intimate, revelatory journey, one cannot turn away without feeling an upsurge of fury, pain, and ethical resolve to confront patriarchy, misogyny, and their intersectional forces, while simultaneously cheering the heroic dimensions of one woman’s quest to heal and reclaim her mind, body, and the sheer joy of being alive.
—Jill Gentile, PhD, psychologist/psychoanalyst, author, Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, & the Voice of Desire
Rich, beautiful, and elegant…Natalie’s emotions are raw, her words pierce into your soul.
—Ilaria Montagnani, Founder & CEO Powerstrike and producer of the documentary Stronger for Life