The Limits of Talk Therapy + Life Coaching: What to Do Instead

I’ve done it all.

All the psychotherapy, all the coaching.

I’ve worked with at least four therapists and at least seven different coaches over many years.

It all helped in many ways. Sort of.

I don’t regret all the hours and money spent, not at all. I’m glad for all the insights, all the learnings.

But eventually I hit a wall. I kept feeling stuck, I kept having the same painful and co-dependent experiences when dating and in relationships, I kept on struggling with depression and loneliness and, on top of all that, I had to deal with chronic health issues.

After all those years, I was at a loss, I was frustrated and desperate.

It took me a long time to understand why I was stuck.

Why Talk Therapy and Life Coaching Work

On the one hand, for my rational brain it’s important to understand cause and effect and to analyze past experiences to explain current challenges and fears.

Talk therapy and life coaching are great first steps to bring awareness to patterns, stories, beliefs and unhealthy habits.

Therapy is a powerful way explore the roots of our personality and current struggles by going back to our childhoods. It helped me a lot in making sense of my past and uncover dynamics.

CBT therapy can also be very beneficial when needing immediate strategies to improve our mental health.

Also, by naming something and shedding light on our shadow parts, we de-shame secrets and stories in a safe environment. Something that was really important for me as I struggled a lot with shame and keeping things un-expressed.

Life coaching definitely also helped me gain new perspectives, as well as adjust my habits and thinking.

All the work I did with therapists and coaches served as an entry into exploring my psyche and unhealthy thinking patterns.

Why Talk Therapy + Life Coaching Don’t Work

We are not just our minds - even though Western culture tries to make us believe that.

The thing with talk therapy and coaching is -

We stay on the level of the mind and try to intellectually understand and change things that happened on an emotional and somatic level.

As Bessel van der Kolk’s book title says: “The body keeps the score.” Trauma and big emotional experiences are stored in our physical body, our nervous system and our emotional body. Unprocessed and unexpressed emotions don’t just disappear, they are buffered.

When the body holds the memory of the trauma, people can get stuck in chronic fight, flight, freeze responses in the body which cause a variety of physical, mental, and relational issues to occur.

““We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.

(…)

Psychologists usually try to help people use insight and understanding to manage their behavior. However, neuroscience research shows that very few psychological problems are the result of defects in understanding; most originate in pressures from deeper regions in the brain that drive our perception and attention. When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.”
- Bessel van der Kolk

Most developmental and shock trauma can't be treated linguistically, it can't be processed 'as a story' before it is processed somatically.

Talk therapy is considered a “top down” approach, as it relies heavily on verbal expression and cognitive functioning. Talk therapy often heavily relies on intellectual insights for change and for talking as growth. Also, it can encourage people to get stuck in patterns of thought or narratives that do not serve them for their evolution.

A big reason we get stuck with talk therapy is also because a lot of trauma happened to us before we were able to speak or before we were able to form distinct memories of the experience. Some big experiences are buffered in our bodies purely somatically and as an emotion, eg. pre-verbal trauma, birth trauma, pre-natal trauma or even ancestral trauma that was passed on to us (it is said that trauma is passed on through seven generations).

On top of all that, the things we struggle to change usually sit in the unconscious. But talk therapy and coaching usually only help us access conscious material, which only makes up about 5-10% of our total mind.

Plus, never once did I explore nutrition in therapy, though it can deeply affect mental health.

Medication is often prescribed as a first stop instead of a last resort (which in some very serious cases might be necessary).

A lot of therapy also doesn’t teach easily available and incredibly powerful tools of how to regulate the body's nervous system, which is often a driving factor in anxiety.

Lastly, many life coaches and even therapists are not trauma-informed or trained in trauma awareness.

Beyond Talk Therapy: The Alternatives

There is so much more beyond talk therapy that I have found way more effective on my journey to lasting transformation and healing.

I have divided them into two categories:

• Somatic modalities to heal and reprogram our nervous system and stress responses in our bodies.

• Practices that help us access our subconscious mind.

Somatic Therapy Approaches

Somatic psychotherapy instead works from the “bottom up”– reducing stress and anxiety physiologically, through changing the autonomic nervous system and discharging trauma.

Through somatic modalities, I learned to

• re-connect to my body and listen to the signals it gives me

• create a sense of internal safety and feel safe feeling my emotions

• self-regulate my emotions and find more inner calm

Here are some somatic therapy approaches to healing and transformation:

• Somatic Experiencing

• Grinberg Method

• Feldenkrais

• Breathwork (daily to regulate nervous system and regular deep dive sessions for releasing emotions and unprocessed trauma and access subconscious )

• EMDR

Practices to Access the Subconscious Mind

Here are ways to access to the other 95% of the material that make up our minds:

• Psychedelic and MDMA-assisted therapy methods

• Plant Medicine (eg. Ayahuasca, San Pedro..)

• Dream Analysis

• Internal Family Systems

Talk therapy and life coaching are good entryways in the beginning when we are starting our journeys into healing and transformation.

However, to experience true lasting healing, a deeper approach is often necessary - one that goes beyond the conscious mind into the body and into our subconscious.

(This is atomic essay #28, which is part of 30 Days of Writing #Ship30for30)