About Me
Amy Wong Hope, MSW/LCSW, is a licensed clinical social worker in New Mexico (C-08692) and Colorado (CSW.09931484); and a Licensed Natural Medicine Clinical Facilitator iin Colorado (NMCF.0000013) working exclusively with psilocybin. She has completed several psychedelic trainings and certificates: MDMA-assisted Therapist Training (MAPS, 2018). She is certified as a Psilocybin Facilitator (Innertrek, 2024), and also earned a certificate in the first cohort of the Psychedelic Social Justice Program at Chacruna Institute (2021).
Amy is the Director of the Psychedelic Studies Certificate Program at Southwestern College, in Santa Fe, NM (founded and written by Amy in 2023). With few published textbooks to refer to, Amy curates a relevant snapshot of psychedelic studies and how it is profoundly influencing science, culture, psychotherapy, ethics, policy, and humanity by inviting guest speakers and presenters into the program to share their expertise and discuss ideas and issues with students. She sees this program as an opportunity to educate healthcare providers and other community members about psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy, to cultivate critical and ethical thinking, and to consider ethical issues through experiential learning to increase outcomes and safety, and to reduce harm for the general public.
Amy is an expert trauma therapist who worked in The Trauma Center at JRI in Boston, Massachusetts after earning her MSW at Simmons College. At The Trauma Center, which at the time was led by medical director Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, she learned from colleagues researching, writing, and practicing cutting-edge trauma modalities with clients and their transformation process. Amy works with individual clients seeking transformation. Amy incorporates all of her clinical skills into an approach that is closer to coaching than regular psychotherapy. As a whitewater kayaker and former instructor who taught students how to graduate their skills from calm pools to whitewater rapids, she believes that most transformation occurs in the small moments where we become aware of and where we enact different choices aligned in one’s authentic values.
Amy is the co-author of Small Doses of Awareness: A Microdosing Companion (February 2024 by Chronicle Prism Books). In this guided journal, she brings her clinical and psychedelic knowledge into a journaling guide for microdosing to facilitate readers into being their own guide with their experience.
Amy maintains a private practice with a focus on providing trauma-informed modalities and approaches that support clients in restoring emotional, somatic, and relational resiliency. Amy integrates Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, EMDR, mindfulness, spirituality, and integration of non-ordinary states of consciousness into her client work. She incorporates the shame-resilience and vulnerability practices of Dr. Brené Brown, and is a certified Daring Way™ Facilitator.
Amy has an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Comparative Religion, which led her to switch her career in mid-life to pursue becoming a psychotherapist and Clinical Social Worker, with a special focus on the neurobiology of trauma, and the study of phenomenology and spirituality as it relates to consciousness, within her psychotherapy practice.
While at Simmons College (class of 2010), Amy was awarded the Iris McRae award for excellence in writing and was an Albert Schweitzer Fellow (2010). Prior to moving to Santa Fe in 2013, she completed a post-graduate fellowship at The Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute (JRI) and Metrowest Behavioral Health Center, under the direction of Medical Director Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., where she was supervised by, and learned from many cutting-edge leaders in the trauma treatment field. She is always inspired and surprised at the ways in which clients recognize and reckon with their own consciousness. As a former developmental and technical editor at Adobe Systems in her former life, she finds it a great honor to witness clients as they revise and edit facets of their lives to fit their expanded understandings of authentic self.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to Liz Hasset at Moonlight Studios for your profile photos of me and the book; to Diana Rico for her expert eye and mind with editing my website; and to Justice Berhman at Sweet Justice Productions for designing this website.