The Never Loved Blog
Not making progress in therapy? This might be why...
As someone who was in and out of traditional talk therapy for 7 years with little improvement, I know all too well how hopeless it can feel. At one point I even swore off therapy entirely, believing it to be unhelpful at best and a total joke at worst. I had experienced unintentional dismissals of my childhood trauma, unhelpful advice, religious (conversion) therapy, and so on. I don’t blame any of my past therapists as they are not omniscient nor are they perfect. They did their best to help me via the therapeutic modalities they had been taught, and they were good, intelligent, kind human beings at heart.
But what I learned from these experiences is that talk therapy alone isn’t always the answer. Despite benefitting millions of people, some of us find that we need more help. When this happens, it’s normal to feel all kinds of emotions: dejected, lost, hopeless, “broken.”
But therapy is supposed to fix me, right?
I had this mindset once, too. And I couldn’t seem to figure out why 7 therapists over 7 years had barely made a dent in my mental health struggles. I thought I would never get better.
Then I started learning about somatic healing. It was my current therapist who introduced me to this practice and has guided me for the last 10 months. Somatic Experiencing Therapy is the art of engaging both the body and mind through a variety of exercises and practices. It utilizes body awareness and movement to facilitate the release of trapped emotions and the rewiring of the nervous system.
The reason why somatic healing is so crucial for healing trauma is because trauma and its effects can essentially be boiled down to one simple definition: dysregulation of the nervous system. This system comprises the brain, spinal cord, and nerves. It controls functions such as breathing, thinking, speaking, sight, movement, sweating, blushing, and blinking. But this system can experience interruptions from living in an unsafe or dysfunctional environment. This dysfunction can show up in many ways, not all of them being overt or obvious:
One of the greatest curses of complex trauma is that it has a tendency to fly under the radar. It’s a “silent” killer. It sneakily hijacks our relationships, health, jobs, decisions, and our ability to be our authentic selves, sometimes without us ever realizing. These traumas cause our nervous system to integrate the experiences into a protective system, which controls how we navigate the world and how we respond to our own emotional reality.
This system is meant to shield us from further harm. For example, if you grew up with a single father who was emotionally distant, you may have felt abandoned, unloved, and unheard. As a result, your nervous system would have developed a response to those emotions in order to get his attention. You may have learned that throwing a tantrum or crying could get your father to come to your rescue and engage emotionally. Therefore, it served a very important function: to get your needs met by your caregiver. But when this learned behavior continues into adulthood, it can wreak havoc on our relationships and our ability to self-regulate.
On the contrary, if your tantrums and emotional pleas were consistently ignored growing up, you likely would have learned to dissociate from your emotions and shut down. It’s too painful to experience the emotions of being neglected by your caregiver so you learn to detach from your emotions entirely. But as you grow up and start to go out into the world, you will likely struggle to connect with your peers. You may not be able to make or maintain friendships and later, may completely shut down in the face of more intimate relationships.
This is where our nervous systems can keep us stuck and prevent us from reaching our full potential. Which is why it is absolutely crucial that we incorporate a body-aware approach to healing. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of these approaches in this post, but I want to list a couple of simple exercises/practices that almost anyone can do to get back in touch with their body:
- Deep breathing. This activates the vagus nerve and helps take us out of a fight or flight response.
- Body-scan. Ex. What am I feeling in my body right now? Where do I feel anxiety in my body? What sensation(s) am I feeling?
- Going for a walk. The simple act of moving your body and scanning the environment with your eyes can be incredibly regulating.
- Yoga or stretching.
- Art, making music, dancing, cooking, or anything that involves creating something.
- Spending time with animals.
- Tossing a rock or dense object between your hands for a couple of minutes. This one sounds silly but I promise it can help.
- Grounding. Sitting on a chair with your feet planted on the ground and focusing on breathing + bodily sensations.
- Taking a cold shower.
- Holding an ice cube for 30 seconds.
You may find that as you add these practices to your daily routine and you begin to move towards a more regulated place, you might begin releasing trapped emotions. For instance, recently I started crying towards the end of my first yoga session and have had random bursts of crying throughout the week. I made sure to not judge myself or intellectualize the reason for the crying—I just allowed it to happen. On top of this, I have experienced more healing progress in the last couple of months since incorporating these somatic approaches than I have in years of talk therapy. My anxiety and depression are the lowest they’ve been in a decade, I am able to navigate triggers, I can take myself out of an overthinking spiral, I’ve started to trust myself and my decisions, my physical health is noticeably improved, and I’ve become a much more authentic version of myself. I still have set-backs and I am by no means healed (no one is), but the difference is day and night.
So, if you’ve been in therapy for a while and it seems like things aren’t really improving, I highly recommend incorporating some somatic exercises into your journey. And if you can, finding a counselor who practices somatic therapy.
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p.s. If affordability is an issue, give this site a try (it’s where I found my therapist!):
https://openpathcollective.org/
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