Episode 16
When therapy doesn’t work… and let’s be honest, it rarely does!
This episode may provide some insight into the how and why.
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i have had countless conversations with clients who have been to therapy because they knew that they needed help but have been completely traumatized by the experience or other clients who have been in therapy for years but not actually got the results that they desired.
This particular episode of Heartscaping to share my experience and my opinion on this.
If you are a therapist this may trigger the crap out of you so I'm sorry, this is not meant to be a personal affront to anyone. I believe that most therapists are in their line of work because they truly desire to help people and they also truly desire to understand how this all works. Psychology is indeed fascinating, but this needs to be said i feel that people really need to hear this so let's dive right in.
The stigma around mental health
First of all there's a massive stigma on mental health. That's just how our current society is, we tend to perceive that if somebody has mental health issues that there's something wrong with them, which is absolutely untrue.
The truth is everyone has mental health and most people do not have very good mental health but they have become so good at numbing themselves and ignoring their emotions. We live in a society that does not encourage us give us the tools to be able to express how we feel and what we want and who we truly are.
If we feel constricted by those societal rules, which i think most of us honestly do, we start to feel very uncomfortable and therefore mental health issues come to the forefront and when we seek help we are seen as someone who has something wrong with them like some sort of default.
i would like to offer my perspective on that as I don't think there's anything wrong with someone who is trying to express how they feel who is feeling emotions who is trying to be who they are. I believe that is exactly what we came into this lifetime to do.
However, the way our current society is constructed is completely outdated and does not hold us and honor us in all that we are. It still tries to make us fit into a mould that is convenient because things have been running in this particular way for a long time.
When we look at how society, the education system, the economy and practically everything else works, it's completely outdated and desperately needs individuals to start being a little more authentic, more of who they truly are so that they can bring their own particular magic into this world and change it for the better.
That's going to take time. For now, society really does put to the side people who seek out therapy so that stigma is very much imprinted in the way that we perceive ourselves.
It’s seen as shameful to go and seek out help, which is ridiculous because honestly we cannot sort out our own problems.
We can't see solutions when we're stuck in our own perspective. That's why as a tribal species we we need one another we need to connect with one another and i believe that in so many cases what therapists are actually doing is just being in the role of a good friend in someone's life.
The therapist is the person that an individual can go to and speak their truth, say what's on their heart and what's on their mind without any judgment, without someone being emotionally involved in the situation and without someone trying to tell them what to do.
The therapist is someone who's actually just actively listening to them which ultimately we would all have a friend that is you know in that role but most of us don't we are notfully accepted and seen and heard by our family our friends and our social environment so we need to seek out therapy.
There is nothing wrong with seeking out help. We all need help at particular points in time there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing shameful about that and the fact that you have emotions means that you are an emotional being and not a psychopath. You're allowed to have emotions and it's okay to seek out someone who can help you make sense of them and help you just process them in a really safe space.
Talking about the problem doesn’t solve the problem
i don't believe that you can truly solve a problem by looking at the problem, by talking about the problem and looking at all of the aspects of the problem. I believe that the most effective solution is to zoom out and take a higher view of what created the problem in the first place.
Talk therapy tends to ruminate and go around and around, circling the problem which can be incredibly traumatic for someone if they have suffered from emotional sexual physical abuse. Talking about it and talking about all the different aspects of that can make it worse. It can keep them trapped within the vibration of the pain body and that can be very detrimental in the long run because it makes people afraid of their wounding, it makes them afraid of their shadow, it makes them afraid of their emotions. So it makes them not want to go back to therapy.
I believe that when we look at the the bigger picture, there's always reasons that explain why that particular trauma occurred but there's also the core wounding that can be shifted on an energetic level and one of the wonderful things that i find about shamanic healing is that we can heal without having to reassociate with that trauma in the first place. Once the healing has occurred, we can move past it we can rise above it.
The reason people shut off and become numb is because the pain that they have experienced is too much for them to handle and so asking for someone to re-experience it through talk-therapy and try to explain and understand is unklnd and irresponsible.
This is not about by-passing and pretending that things didn't happen, but rather not just poking at those wounds as that’s possibly the worst thing that you can do as it makes the pain last longer than it truly needs to.
There's always a lesson and there's always some sort of gold that's lying underneath that trauma that you cannot get to when you're just stuck in the pain itself.
The business of repeat business
i'd like to have a little bit of a rant about how we do business and this is not necessarily in the mental health industry but i believe that in the mental health industry people are a little bit more vulnerable to this and so it shows up so much.
There are so many people in this industry who are in the business of creating repeat business they're not actually in the business of truly helping people so we know that from a business perspective it makes so much more sense to have an active database and to have people come back again and again because that makes everything flow nicely for our business, for our finances and our business strategies fall into place.
However i really believe in focusing more on the transformation and the impact that we can have on the people around us not just that business plan and that strategy but really truly helping people transform.
If someone's creating deep transformation and really helping you heal, you shouldn't need to have them in your life for 10 years consistently and have to go to them every fortnight.
I believe that a lot of people lack the ethics to actually create the transformation that they want because it's so much better for them personally to have clients who just come back again and again. This kind of support is not deep healing or true empowerment.
There’s also this belief that once you are in therapy, you will be in therapy for your whole life. That tends to be part of the flaws and corruption of this industry that keep individuals trapped in it and lets them down.
The mental health system focusses on trying to diagnose people, basically assigning them a label and when we are focused on that particular objective we miss out on noticing everything else that makes up that person.
As energetic beings we are so incredibly complex and we are also completely unique. What will show up in one person will not show up in the same way for the other person we we can have the same core issue but have so many different manifestations throughout our life. We can also have the same symptoms but they do not lead back to the same core issue.
I have found in my work is that so many people have been misdiagnosed or misunderstood or once they have been assigned a label they identify with that label because ultimately what happens is people go and seek out help they go to a therapist or a practitioner to to get help to get someone who's going to give them a solution and sometimes that help comes in the form of a particular label or a particular diagnosis and that can be helpful it can be absolutely helpful for someone to be told “well you have adhd and look here is what happens with adhd patients…” That can make someone feel witnessed feel seen, feel that they're not crazy that it's actually a thing and that it validates how they feel that in itself i think is very important and very valuable however when we start to attach to the label we start to miss out on what's actually going on.
I've had so many clients who have been diagnosed with adhd but what they're actually experiencing are the effects of very complex trauma. Luckily there are a lot of therapists who are starting to understand this and start to guide people in the right direction but when we just look at a diagnosis and then prescribe something based on that, we miss out on actually seeing, witnessing and helping the person in what they have experienced that has led them to those particular symptoms.
Ultimately this episode is a love letter to anyone who feels that they are too broken, to anyone who has lost hope because they have tried but they are not getting the results that they desire. I would love to take that deep dive with you and get you the results that you deserve so please get in touch.