Why talk therapy isn’t enough (and yoga isn’t either!)
I’ve always been a person who processes through talking – with friends, my mom, my husband, in therapy, even with myself when I'm out for a walk.
But so often, though I cover a lot of ground with my thinking and talking, I don't end up anywhere new.
Worse, I don't find a lasting sense of relief from my stress, worries, and anxiety just from ideas and words.
This is why part of what appealed to me about yoga and mindfulness.
I hear this a lot from clients, too – many people come to yoga to manage their stress and worries through conscious movement and breath.
When I first tried yoga, I was struggling to develop a healthier, more loving relationship with myself.
Something clicked in my very first class.
As I moved and breathed, I had a sense of coming home, of recognition, of something that was both brand new to me and so familiar that it felt like I had been longing for it without knowing what it was.
When my teacher cued me to feel my breath and to arrange my body in complex shapes, I had to concentrate in a way that gave me a break from the tyranny of my self-critical thoughts.
I didn't have to worry about the future when I was trying to balance on one leg.
When yoga masks the real problem
Yoga can be incredibly helpful in teaching you to feel your body in the moment and create states of calm and wellbeing.
Mindfulness practices offer beautiful tools for bringing your awareness out of the loops of endless thinking and planning, although mindfulness is usually quite hard if your self-critical thoughts are loud and relentless (like mine were when I first started).
If you’ve come to yoga to find relief from symptoms caused by anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, or relationship issues, all those down dogs will only mask the problem without addressing the root cause.
I love yoga and consider it an essential part of my well-being toolkit.
But yoga on its own is not enough to address the wounds that may have initially brought you to the practice (whether consciously or unconsciously).
The body keeps the score
I had a lot of mistaken beliefs about who and what therapy was for, and it was hard to get over the stigma I had associated with it.
For a long time, I couldn’t see how talking would help and thought I should be able to figure all this stuff out on my own.
By the time I finally started the search for my just-right therapist, I knew I needed something more than traditional talk therapy.
Bessel van der Kolk, author of the groundbreaking book The body keeps the score, has a lot to say about what makes therapy most effective based on decades of research.
Talk therapy is good, but not enough on its own.
Yoga, mindfulness, and other embodied movement practices are necessary, but not enough on their own.
According to van der Kolk and other leading researchers in the field, the key to shifting nervous system states and our relationship with past big and small traumas, is in the integration of talk therapy and embodiment techniques (aka Somatic Therapy).
What does your body do when you feel emotions?
If our bodies are so clearly the canvas upon which our stress, anxieties, joy, and sadness are painted, how could we possibly hope just talking and thinking could make a lasting shift?
If you think about a recent time when you’ve felt a strong emotion, there's likely a body-based marker of that emotion, either in the moment or for a period of time afterwards.
I know that with my back “goes out,” I'm usually already stressed.
When I tap into an old sadness, a feeling that I was unseen or unheard, my throat tightens up.
When I get nervous, I sweat like crazy.
When I'm anxious, my sleep is disturbed.
And when I’m mad, my body gets hot.
We take these reactions for granted.
There's no cheat sheet for what’s going on in your body
Researchers have tried to pinpoint whether there are certain somatic or body-based reactions that correlate universally to particular emotional states.
And while in my work with both somatic therapy and yoga clients I’ve had clients report body-based reactions to emotional states that look very similar person to person, there are also many outliers.
One client described feeling her anxiety in her arms and hands. Another who was processing a small T trauma from childhood of feeling unseen and unknown (despite having loving parents) felt her sadness and anger as tension in her forehead.
It's less important to develop a cheat sheet of where emotions live than it is practice learning to feel what's happening in your body in the moment.
This is called interoception, and it’s an essential life skill that most people never really learn.
You don't need a cheat sheet once you've developed the skills to feel.
Somatic therapy can help you learn to do just that.
You’ll be guided to oscillate your awareness between the words you are saying as you process, the sensations you observe in your body, and the thoughts and emotions that emerge in the moment.
It sounds kind of simple, and on some level it is.
But it’s also incredibly powerful.
I just needed relief - enter somatic therapy
After so many years of trying to manage symptoms of anxiety on my own with yoga, it was hard to take the leap.
I was nervous and embarrassed to say that I was going to therapy.
I knew I shouldn’t be. I knew that was unreasonable. But it was really hard to shake.
As an ambitious, successful, resilient person, I had internalized the belief that I should have been able to figure this out myself.
But honestly, I just needed relief.
And so, I found a somatic therapist and began my work with her.
I had no idea what to expect in my first somatic therapy session.
My therapist was kind and compassionate and she gave me space to process both with words and with my body through simple movements, breath, visualization, and relaxation.
It wasn’t like venting and it wasn’t like going to a yoga class.
It was a different sort of space and a therapeutic relationship that enabled me to create shifts that weren’t possible with talking or yoga alone.
Breaking the therapy stigma
Almost everyone feels comfortable talking about going to physical therapy. There’s no stigma there.
As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I encounter minimal stigma about those practices.
One of my missions is to continue the work that’s already begun to destigmatize therapy.
I’m passionate about painting therapy in a different light: it’s not about being broken or needing fixing.
I invite you to join me in the somatic therapy revolution.
Engage your thoughts and words, your mind and body, your breath and nervous system as you pursue the beautiful goal of better knowing yourself so you can live a more satisfying, enjoyable, enlivening life.
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