Why Therapy Isn’t Working: The Missing Piece
In case no one has told you this before…
Insight alone isn’t enough to rewire your brain and heal your trauma.
I find this with so many of my clients. They’ve read the books, they can explain how they got to where they are now, and yet, all it has done is put them in a worse mind hell because now they know they are doing the unhealthy patterns, but they feel powerless to stop it.
And so what usually happens? Shame sets in. They feel overwhelmed, powerless, and defeated.
But here’s the thing: you can’t think your way towards healing–you feel your way through, experience your way through. You practice the new pattern you’re terrified of. You feel that emotion you’ve been terrified to acknowledge is within you. You move your body and live into new patterns.
You can write a dissertation on your trauma story and still be as stuck as if you’ve done no work at all. At some point, you’ll have to stop observing your story and learn to lean into it, take a risk, face yourself, and discover that beneath it all is someone worth fighting for. Worth loving.
So here’s my question for you:
Are you developing a relationship with yourself or are you just studying yourself?
You won’t believe how many people will waste years in weekly therapy and get nowhere. I believe that this is actually why so many people are moving away from talk therapy and toward more body based and experiential approaches that focus on responding to ourselves in the present moment.
Healing happens when we move from dissecting our stories to relating with ourselves.
My life changed when I decided to start relating with myself rather than dissecting my behaviors and patterns. It changed when I saw myself through the eyes of compassion rather than judgement and self hatred. That’s when things began to flow.
If you are anything like me and have perfectionistic tendencies, I bet you are also amazing at critiquing every little part of you that is still not healed. You notice every mistake you make and it piles up to become a huge monument of “I’m so broken.”
The thoughts that usually flow from that sound like…
“I can never have a healthy relationship.”
“Healing just isn’t in the cards for me.”
“Maybe I should just resign to the fact that this is who I am.”
Whoa. Hard stop there.
The way you are showing up in life don’t define who you are, they show you how you learned to respond to the lack of safety in your life.
What is keeping you stuck in the healing process.
There is a huge mistake people make in the therapeutic process that genuinely keeps them stuck in their healing. You leave your therapy session feeling heavy because you are analyzing yourself rather than building a safe relationship with yourself.
This is where getting so stuck on dissecting and analyzing ourselves can be a quick path to self-abandonment and defeat. We have a huge monument to point to whenever we feel like we should just give up.
I hope you don’t give up. I hope you don’t resign to thinking that this is just who you are.
I hope that you will become the biggest advocate for yourself–that you will peel back the trauma and see the hurt little kid in there who has a whole bunch of unmet needs and truly just needs someone to hold them and respond to them.
I know you are capable of that because I know that you are able to care for almost anyone in your life other than yourself. You will bend over backwards to respond to others.
It’s okay that you aren’t able to access that for yourself yet. That’s where practice comes in. That’s where our work together comes in. I’ve got you and I will hold your hand until you don’t need me anymore.
Let’s talk about this monument of brokenness.
Therapy can inadvertantly build us a Monument of Brokenness when we focus on the wrong thing.
When we spend so much time analyzing our behaviors and patterns, we can become fixated on them. We leave therapy and find ourselves right back in those behaviors and add another moment to the monument of brokenness. It’s easy to reinforce the idea within ourselves that we are just broken beyond repair.
You see a monument of all the reasons you are messed up.
But do you know what I see? I see a person that decided that rather than giving up, they would gather together the best skills they could learn in order to adapt and survive.
Your body and mind responded and adapted exactly how they were supposed to. You are magnificent, actually.
You have been through so much. You are here today because your body did exactly what it needed to do to help you survive. Your perfectionism, people-pleasing, hypervigillence, distrust– all of it was a learned skill that helped you survive an unbearable situation.
And here you are, you survived long enough to be here today to now actually teach your body it is safe because you are now safe.
This monument is not a collection of failures. It’s a collection of specific tools that were just right for that season of survival. The tools just don’t work now because you are in a different season.
These learned skills are not your personality, but just what I said, a learned skill. And just like any skill, it develops through practice and it gets lost or put down through lack of practice.
And now we are going to learn a new skill that is appropriate for the season you are in now.
Notice I’m not saying anything about who you are or what you are capable of. We are talking about skills. Anyone can learn them. You don’t have to be lucky or special in any way, you just have to be willing to show up.
Self-awareness is the starting point, consistency is what you need to heal.
You can’t think your way to healing, your self-awareness is just the starting point.
You are probably stuck because you stopped too soon. Not because you are past the point of healing.
You can’t think your way to healing. The insight has to translate to action if you want to see tangible differences in your life.
I know, I wish self-awareness was enough because it would make the process so much easier. But here’s the thing, the alternative may not be easier, but it is much simpler than trying to dissect the ins and outs of your trauma story.
Don’t get me wrong, insight is great. In fact, I have courses that focus on gaining insight. But here’s the thing, we don’t stop there.
Because insight without action is useless. And quite frankly, it is a quick road to depression and therapeutic burnout.
You can dig up every little detail of your trauma story, dissect it, examine it, examine the ways it formed you and how it is sabotaging your life and relationships, and get absolutely nowhere. It literally paralyzes you in a debilitating depression. The voice that tells you that you are too broken and past the point of healing creeps in, we get overwhelmed, and we want to throw in the towel.
Why? Because you stopped at insight.
I’ll say it again: insight without action is useless.
Insight is the map and action grounded in compassion and responsiveness are the legs. Without the map, you might find yourself lost in the forest with no clear path forward. Without the legs, you are just plain stuck.
Let’s get your legs on solid ground and put that insight into action so that ten years down the road, you can look back and see everything you are experiencing now as if it were a distant memory.
So what is the missing piece?At the end of the day, healing trauma, even complex trauma, is quite simple. Your one task is to become a master at responding to yourself compassionately–consistently.
When we master this art, we slowly create a new normal for ourselves. We teach ourselves (and our nervous systems) that we are safe and that it is okay to release the survival skills we’ve held onto for so long.
When your relationship with yourself shifts from self-abandonment and bullying to self-compassion and self-advocacy, all of a sudden you create a new normal marked by trust and safety.
This is why analyzing ourselves without rebuilding a compassionate, responsive, and safe relationship with ourselves keeps us stuck. We become the bully to ourselves that only thrusts us deeper into survival.
And what happens when we are in survival? We go on autopilot and our survival skills that we are criticizing come back out at full force.
