‘Mormon Wives’ Stars Jen And Zac Affleck Say Ketamine Therapy Was A ‘Game Changer’ For Their Marriage—Exclusive

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It probably comes as no surprise to viewers of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives that momtoker Jen Affleck and husband Zac Affleck separated for a while after season one of the hit Hulu reality show. After all, his infamous rage texts to Jen during a girls’ night out at Chippendales didn’t really scream “marital bliss.”

When they started filming season two, their relationship was still on shaky ground. But if you follow the Afflecks on social media, you’ll already know the couple is back together and expecting their third child. So, how did they find their way back to each other amid the chaos and controversy? The couple say they’ve been able to salvage their marriage thanks, in part, to ketamine therapy.

Ketamine is a type of dissociative hallucinogenic that is often considered a “party drug.” But in clinical settings, it’s also used for psychedelic therapy (other therapeutic psychedelics also include MDMA and psilocybin, or “magic mushrooms”). When used alongside psychotherapy, ketamine therapy can open up a client’s mind and invite new perspectives to the table, Greg Lamont, clinical director at Juniper Mountain Counseling in Bend, Oregon, previously told Women’s Health. Within the context of couples therapy, ketamine produces a wide range of therapeutic effects, from increasing empathy to enhancing vulnerability and communication, according to a 2024 study. Many study participants also indicated improved relationship satisfaction following ketamine treatment.

Before the new season aired, Jen and Zac sat down with Women’s Health to share how the avant garde therapeutic practice has helped their marriage—and what they hope viewers take away from their experience. Jen says she was skeptical of ketamine therapy at first, but when Zac suggested they try it together in late 2024 (after filming season one), she figured it was worth a shot. “We were already doing so much therapy, and we were looking for anything to really help us during that time with our mental health and with our marriage,” Jen exclusively tells Women’s Health. “If what they’re saying is true, and this can really reset my neural pathways [and] help with trauma, then let’s do it.”

Zac took the lead on finding a provider in Arizona (the couple moved there from New York after Zac transferred medical schools), and set up their first appointment.

Coming from a devout Mormon family, Zac had not tried alcohol or taken any sort of psychedelic or recreational drugs before, but he became “passionate” about trying ketamine therapy, Jen says, due to the research he’d done about the practice while in medical school. “There’s nothing in the Mormon guidelines that say you can’t do ketamine, but it’s in the gray area,” Zac says. “It can be a party drug, and it can be abused, but I think if you have the right intention and you do it in the proper setting with a doctor, it can be super impactful.”

The show only gives viewers a quick glimpse into a single treatment.

But in reality, Jen and Zac’s typical ketamine therapy sessions lasted about three to four hours and included multiple components. Working with an ER doctor from the Mayo Clinic, a nurse practitioner, and a therapist, the couple talked for a full hour before each ketamine treatment session began. Then, Jen and Zac each received an intramuscular injection of ketamine—the first of two doses administered over a one-to-two hour period. After coming down from the dissociative drug, they did another hour of talk therapy, where they’d each share what they experienced and learned during the treatment. Each session was “pretty intense,” Zac says, and took up most of the day.

Over several weeks, the couple did seven sessions—six in Arizona prior to filming season two, and one on-camera session in Utah—with two-to-four-day breaks in between each one. During these breaks, the couple did a lot of “integration work,” Zac says, which often involved processing their emotions and setting an intention before the next session.

“It’s not just the ketamine treatment itself, but it’s all the work you do along with the ketamine treatment,” Zac says. “It’s not an easy form of therapy. If anything, it’s the hardest form of therapy. It makes you face your true feelings, your true emotions, your insecurities, your weaknesses.”

Ketamine therapy helped Jen and Zac confront—and accept—some difficult experiences and behaviors.

The first ketamine therapy session was difficult for Zac because, having never taken a mind-altering substance before, he didn’t know what it felt like to lose control of his body. “You really do fully dissociate and leave your body and almost go to, like, a new dimension,” he says. ”There’s time distortion, everything is just very abstract, and you kind of lose [your] sense of self. …Everything just feels bigger. “

But that physical experience actually helped Zac confront his control issues: “You can’t be in control when you’re doing ketamine, and I like to control things. That was hard for me to let go and trust [the process],” he says. “It can be kind of scary because you really do dissociate and lose sense of everything, but you have to surrender to it and let it take you wherever your mind wants to.”

While Jen had an “amazing experience” during her first ketamine therapy treatment, she spent other sessions reliving a lot of past traumas. But embracing the unexpected emotions that emerge during ketamine therapy is a key part of the healing process, according to the couple.

“You can have a super beautiful session where you have all these happy memories, or if your brain has some trauma or some things it wants to work through, you can go to a really dark, hard place,” Zac says. “If you fight it, it can get even worse. But if you accept it, you can learn from that and have a positive experience. It can feel like you’re stuck in this spot for a super long time, and until you surrender to it, it feels like you can’t get out of it.”

For Jen, the transformative experience not only helped her heal past traumas, but also gave her a new perspective on life, she says. “Anyone who’s done ketamine knows that you walk out feeling like a different person.”

The experience reminded the couple why they fell in love in the first place.

Before each appointment, the couple made a playlist—either for themselves or each other—to listen to while receiving the ketamine treatment. One time, Jen created a playlist for Zac of all the songs they listened to when they first started dating, Zac recalls. “It was really crazy because when I was listening to the playlist as the ketamine started setting in, it took me back to all those memories, and it was almost like I got to relive it again,” he says.

The experience unearthed a well of emotion in Zac, leading Jen to offer him her hand in silent support. “I was just bawling the entire time,” he says. “She didn’t know what I was going through until I came out [of the ketamine treatment] and was able to talk about it, and that was really where a lot of the healing happened.”

“That was truly one of the most impactful [sessions],” Jen adds, “just because it reminded us why we chose each other in the first place.” She compares the experience to that of traditional couples counseling when spouses are headed toward separation or divorce: “The first thing they’ll ask you is, ‘Why did you guys get married in the first place?’ And ketamine really just took that to a whole other level because we were actually able to relive those experiences, not just recall [them].”

Ketamine therapy helped Jen and Zac learn how to communicate better.

On season one, communication was a recurring issue for the couple, and while they’re still working on this aspect of their relationship in season two, Jen and Zac credit ketamine therapy with helping them finally overcome this obstacle. “I’ve always been open about my feelings. That’s never been an issue,” Jen says. “With our therapy sessions, it was definitely harder for Zac to show up with emotion and be vulnerable, so I definitely felt like ketamine helped us break through that.”

Zac is quick to acknowledge that his reluctance to open up hindered the couple’s progress with traditional talk therapy. “But doing ketamine helped me be a lot more honest and vulnerable with Jen,” he says, “which then led to some of the best discussions we’ve ever had.”

Indeed, a scientific review shows that ketamine therapy seems to enhance the cognitive, behavioral, and emotional interventions that are commonly used in evidence-based couple therapies, because it can increase neuroplasticity, decrease inhibition, and reduce avoidance behaviors. Jen and Zac experienced this firsthand, saying that ketamine helped them communicate more effectively during their therapy sessions and likely “sped up [their progress] by years.”

Those ketamine-infused conversations also helped improve Jen and Zac’s communication outside of therapy. “I feel like progression can’t happen in a relationship until you’re able to be honest, and I’ve realized communication is everything in a relationship,” says Jen. “That was definitely the game changer [for us], and I didn’t realize how much we were lacking that until ketamine and therapy.”

Their experience with ketamine therapy has inspired them to reevaluate their relationship with Mormonism.

Since trying ketamine therapy (and other different forms of therapy), Jen’s perspective on Mormonism has changed, she says. Now, she admits that she’s facing “a bit of a faith crisis” because she’s finally asking herself “those questions that I never asked my whole life.”

Still, she welcomes the uncertainty. “If you don’t ever face a faith crisis, are you really in it because you believe in it?” Jen says. “I’m still trying to make sense of everything and what I believe in, but I do know that I believe in a God, and I believe in Jesus Christ.” She adds that, like therapy, her faith has ultimately “helped [her] be a better person.”

Meanwhile, Zac says that although he’s grateful for his experience growing up in a devout LDS family, and many aspects of the religion still resonate with him, he no longer relies on “following the rules” of Mormonism to determine his self-worth. “We’re focusing less on the little things like, ‘Oh, if you do or don’t drink coffee, you’re a good or bad person,’ and more just focusing on who we are as individuals and human beings,” Zac says. “One thing I took away from ketamine was this sense that God or the universe or whatever you want to call that, it’s just so much greater than what we actually can comprehend.”

And because the couple is focused on the bigger picture, they’re not worried about what their fellow Mormons might think about them doing ketamine therapy. “[During] season one, Jen and I both felt a lot of pressure and kind of put on this facade to be these perfect Mormons, not our authentic selves,” Zac says. “After season one, all that went out the window, and we faced so much backlash from both the church [and] people outside the church that we really don’t care anymore… We’re really just doing it for us and for our marriage.”

These days, Jen and Zac are still both members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but they don’t actively go to church every Sunday. Rather, they try to pray with their kids, read the Bible, and incorporate God into their life in ways that make sense for them.

While ketamine therapy isn’t solely responsible for saving Jen and Zac’s marriage, it made an undeniable impact.

Even though Jen stopped treatment after finding out she was pregnant, she plans to resume after she gives birth and gets medical clearance from her doctor. “I will forever incorporate ketamine in my life, especially during hard stages,” she says. “I went in with no expectations, and it ended up being one of the most impactful methods of therapy for me.”

In the meantime, the couple has done other therapy modalities, including traditional talk therapy. Jen has also done EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy to help her work through prenatal depression. “We both have done every form of therapy at this point, and it’s been life-changing,” she says. “I don’t know where our relationship would be without it.”

Zac agrees: “Without the help we’ve got, I don’t know if we would be married, to be honest.” He credits Hulu as a valuable resource for them during their struggles. “They reached out and basically found all these practitioners for us and connected us to all these different therapists and provided everything we could possibly need,” Zac says. “That not only saved both of us individually, but our marriage, so we have a pretty big appreciation not just for the therapy itself, but for all the support systems that helped us get to those points.”

After they finished filming season two, the couple has continued to take their mental health “very seriously,” Jen says, doing talk therapy six to eight hours a week. “The time I would’ve spent doing the show and doing work, I put towards therapy and treated that as our full-time job because if we’re going to do the show, if we’re going to expose our life, we need to take our mental health and our marriage equally as important,” she says.

They remain committed to making their marriage work and, since experiencing ketamine therapy, are now willing to try (almost) anything to do just that. Even ayahuasca. “We’ve talked about doing that?” Jen says. “If it’s beneficial and it can help us, why not?”

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