Why therapy doesn’t work
"I have the awareness, the insight so to speak, and it's not enough. Nothing is changing for me. If anything, my awareness makes me feel more frustrated and disconnected from my self and my life. If I know why I am the way I am, shouldn't I be able to do something about it? And if I can't, does that make me insane?"
This is what I commonly hear from my clients when we first meet. Change for them often means getting to a point where they can let go of trying to control everything, surrender enough to allow themselves to be—just be. It sounds so simple theoretically yet this is the peak of their individual mountain. They yearn to pause, rest, take in the view, and experience the joy of their lives. On the peak they don't have to do anything else or be anyone else. On the peak they are enough. Being is enough. They are already complete.
What gets in the way between them and their Peaks of Being? What weighs down on them as they attempt to make the climb? They are like Sisyphus, condemned to carry a boulder up a steep hill only to find that just as they are about to reach the peak the boulder rolls down hopelessly forcing them to begin again. This is what traditional therapy, especially talk therapy, often feels like.
Traditional therapy is not for everyone. I would go so far as to say, the more intellectual, analytical, and hyperaware you already are, the less effective it will be for you. Chances are you have a strong critical thinking mind, you can shift between perspectives easily, you can relate to many sides of an argument, and you can focus your attention so inwardly you drown out the noise of life altogether. You may have a special knack for dissociating from the present and disconnecting from what matters to you most. And what matters most is showing up for yourself and others authentically and wholeheartedly with a sense of purpose, belonging, and aliveness.
Traditional therapy can pull you in the opposite direction. It can throw your boulder back down the mountain and force you to begin again regardless of how hard you try. That's because it reinforces the already hardworking intellectual parts of you that believe knowing more and knowing better will make you feel better and feel whole at last. You may seek to gain an understanding of what plagues you as a means to get rid of vulnerability and never again feel the same pain. Knowledge and information can become a type of armor, shielding us from the deeper wounded parts of our psyche that don't need to know more. They need to be known by us and communed with. The more they are ignored, silenced, or exiled, the louder and more intense they will become to get our attention and be seen, heard, and loved by us.
Traditional therapy can leave you feeling more stuck, traumatized, and desperate for change than ever. I can relate because I've been there. I've made it my life's mission to help other trauma survivors not have to go through what I went through, especially since I now know there IS another way.
4 reasons why therapy doesn’t work:
1. It’s unsafe and re-traumatizing.
Traditional types of therapy, especially talk therapy, either focus on symptom management without addressing the underlying root cause of trauma or go straight to the deepest pain point bypassing, invalidating, or challenging defenses and coping mechanisms that have been essential for the client’s survival. These survival strategies need our acknowledgment, gratitude, and compassion in order for true transformation to occur. If they are not given the respect they deserve, the result is no change and/or backlash leading to a worsening of symptoms, re-traumatization, and a downward spiral of hopelessness and helplessness. In other words, therapy can not work in the best case and make clients worse in the worst case.
2. It’s pathologizing and stigmatizing.
As a culture we have focused all our efforts on squelching or turning away from pain and suffering while moving toward “positive” experiences. We have lost touch with the Yin-Yang nature of Being. We want the impossible—the ascent to our Psychic Heavens without the descent into the Shadow Underworld. Everything in our Shadow Underworld has become medicalized or clinicalized to the point of being devoid of meaning that resonates on a soul level in deep primal, ancestral, and mystical ways. The misguided world of traditional psychotherapy has helped vilify and exile the vulnerable parts of our selves dwelling in the shadow realms. These are the very parts of us that hold hidden treasures and powers buried within them. Trauma at its most fundamental level is a vehicle for transcendence and traditional therapy misses the mark.
3. It’s one-dimensional and outdated.
Transformation is not linear and we are not monolithic minds driving around in flesh vehicles. We contain multitudes. There are entire worlds within us that carry personal, universal, spiritual, and biological truths. The parts of ourselves that we experience in our everyday life are more than meets the eye. We are divine beings having a human experience. At our very core, there is a Self that remains intact, undamaged, and a source of unimaginable wisdom and healing regardless of our wounding. Our bodies are sacred living, breathing organisms that shape and are shaped by our experiences. We now know more than ever what trauma does to our bodies and how healing interventions can target different pathways or structures in the brain and nervous system to bring about real change. Modern day psychotherapy still has not integrated this cutting-edge, evidence-based knowledge.
4. It overlooks the high-functioning trauma survivor who has coped with their woundedness by performing and achieving.
In traditional psychotherapy and psychiatry, there is a huge emphasis on functionality. For example, a patient meets the criteria for a diagnosis based on the degree to which the symptoms impair functioning in personal, social, and/or work domains. What about those amongst us who are the walking wounded? We look like we are thriving yet we are struggling to survive in the psycho-spiritual dimension of life. Perhaps our traumas have propelled us upward on an ascent from which great feats of success have been attained in the visible world. All the while we suffer an invisible spiraling descent into the Shadow Underworld. The walking wounded are masters of their hyper-functioning, orderly, busy, external lives and slaves to their chaotic, unknown, mystical yet mystifying internal lives. These individuals need specialized trauma therapy and a customized healing process that honors their outward journey of achievement and their inward journey toward deep healing and transformation.
What can you do now? How can you heal your trauma?
1. Envision your healing journey.
Visualize, journal, reflect or meditate on what your ideal healing journey would look like and feel like. What do you wish therapists could get about you and your experience? What frustrates you about the current booming culture of therapy, healing, self-help, or self-care? How would you like to feel as a result of embarking on your own unique healing journey?
2. Open your eyes and look beyond your current horizons.
There are so many types of therapy today that are cutting-edge, evidence-based, and trauma-focused. Do your own research, read the books, attend the workshops or retreats, and expose yourself to diverse ways of deepening and expanding your healing. You can start by reading books like "The Body Keeps the Score” by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. You may want to look into Internal Family Systems therapy, Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. You can stay up to date on the latest through the Trauma Research Foundation.
3. Widen your circle and play.
You can widen your circle of healing to include other types of therapy and a spirit of play. You get to define what therapy is for YOU. Therapy can be contributing to your community, expressing through art, moving your body, finding a mentor, becoming a mentor, learning a new skill, providing a service for others, reconnecting to the divine or your higher power through spiritual practices. The beauty of the wound, trauma, or whatever calamity has befallen you is that it becomes a door, a passageway, an initiation leading you back home to your Self. Sometimes finding your home, your center, means widening your circle to welcome the vulnerability and woundedness of others. Sometimes healing means withdrawing into the caves of safety nursing your shadows and sometimes it means venturing out into the seas of freedom riding the waves as they come. You get to experiment and play with it. There is no one solution for everyone and there is no one solution for every season of your life.
Therapy becomes another way to fight or flee from our vulnerability that is desperate to be known, loved, and healed.
It's human nature to move away from discomfort or reel from pain. It's also within our human capacity to move towards our pain and suffering. We can become intimate with our own vulnerability and gather around our own and each other's woundedness with love and compassion. Our body knows what to do—white blood cells migrate toward the infected, vulnerable part of our body to help us heal without us having to thinking about or understand the mechanism behind "leukocyte extravasation." Similarly, our core Self, who we are at our core as divine beings, knows what to do.
And I hope by now I've made it clear, no—you are not insane for being aware and not being able to change or transform in the way you want to. Yet. You are awake and present to the fact that healing happens at a deeper, primal level that calls you to brave the inner wilderness of your psyche and befriend your vulnerability. You know deep down that there's a missing piece here and there's some divine wisdom that can lead you back to wholeness and inner peace. I'm here to tell you that yes, you can climb your Peak of Being, release your boulder, and ascend to your Psychic Heavens to experience your joy, peace, love, and aliveness. But first, let’s get to know who in there is stuck carrying the boulder of your woundedness. Let’s honor and celebrate all the parts of you that got you to where you are today. If you’re a survivor of complex trauma, you showing up at all for your healing is a miracle.