What To Do When Talk Therapy Isn’t Working
If you’re wanting more out of therapy, you’re not alone.
Ever feel like things in life have gotten a little beyond your control? Maybe your anxiety is running amok. Maybe you and your partner aren’t seeing eye to eye on something. Whatever it is, your stress response is out of whack. So you hop online and start looking for a therapist to help. Many of us who get this far in the process often just pick someone and go with it. The next thing we know, we’ve been in therapy for a while, without seeing the progress we were hoping for.
If you’re wanting more out of therapy, you’re not alone.
Traditionally, talk therapy is the first option we go with. This “top down” approach helps us sort through our thoughts to understand things better. The thinking here is that if we understand the situation better, change our thoughts about it, or learn some skills and strategies to deal with it, then we’ll feel better.
While helpful, the solution may not be what we need. It’s more like symptom relief—temporarily relieving pain with new insight, skills and strategies. For many, though, learning skills doesn’t produce long term change because it doesn’t address the underlying causes of the pain or stress. Most clients who come to work with me have been in talk therapy for months if not years, and they’re not lacking in understanding about their issues. What they’re lacking is change.
What do you do if you’re not getting relief through talk therapy? You try a different approach.
Over the past few decades, the latest research in neuroscience, trauma and attachment has shown that talking about painful experiences in our lives is helpful and supportive, but sometimes it’s insufficient for resolving underlying issues and creating change. Thanks to these advances, we now have therapeutic approaches that go beyond symptom relief and allow for resolving underlying issues.
These “bottom up” approaches rely more on emotional and physical, or somatic, parts of the brain than on logical and cognitive parts. These somatic approaches to therapy are becoming more in demand as more people experience them and the powerful results that they offer. One such approach, and my specialty, is EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).
So what is the difference between talk therapy and EMDR?
When we engage in talk therapy, we’re accessing the part of our memory that cognitively remembers events and experiences, using words and language to describe it with our “thinking brain.” What have emotional memory, physical memory, too though. These live in other parts of our brain that are more subconscious and don’t respond to talk therapy since we’re not accessing those parts of our brains when we’re simply describing what bothers us. EMDR helps us access those other aspects of our experience in our emotional and physical memory, which is where painful unresolved experience is stored.
Our brain doesn’t process overwhelming experiences in the same way that it processes and integrates other experiences. Most of our daily experience gets processed into long term memory or sorted through during sleep each night. But some painful life experiences – such as growing up with a critical parent – are emotionally overwhelming and aren’t able to be processed through to completion. Instead of being processed through, these unresolved experiences sit in a messy bundle along our neural pathways – a bundle of emotions, physical sensations, images, thoughts and beliefs about ourselves and others.
Over time these unresolved experiences take on a life of their own and become survival strategies that we needed back then, but later become limiting in our adult lives. For example, a child who adapts to a critical parent by trying to please them through excelling in school may grow up to be an adult who struggles with perfectionism and people-pleasing, even though childhood is over.
The assumption underlying EMDR is that your brain can digest in the here and now whatever it couldn’t back then, and you can bring these unresolved experiences to completion. You can feel, think, believe and act out of a more present-day, adult perspective. In other words, the adult who is repeating patterns of perfectionism and people-pleasing can come to see this experience through a present-day lens and learn that it’s OK to be imperfect and to disappoint others sometimes, instead of continuing to react out of the unmet needs and survival strategies that they developed in childhood.
How do you know when it’s time to consider a bottom-up approach to therapy?
Clients often tell me that they know what they should be doing, but don’t do it. Maybe it's more visibility in your industry, but you aren’t pitching yourself for any events. You’re trying to finish your dissertation, but you freeze up every time you sit down to write. Our conscious mind, in other words our thinking brains, have goals and make plans. But our subconscious minds and unresolved beliefs – for example, I have to be perfect – are in conflict with those goals, so you find yourself unable to move forward. In other words, we get in our own way.
EMDR helps us access the subconscious emotions and beliefs that are interfering with and often sabotaging our ability to succeed. When we access these parts of ourselves, we can bring them into conscious awareness and allow them to come to resolution. In this way, our thoughts, feelings and actions can all come into alignment with our goals and plans.
Are you ready to stop getting in your own way? You always have options. Now may be the time to try something new.
Words: Christie Pearl, EMDR Therapist & Consultant
To discover more about Christie's work, visit christiepearl.com. Now booking online EMDR intensives for adult children of alcoholics in Virginia and Massachusetts.
