Why isn’t therapy working for me?
Why isn’t therapy working for me?
As someone who knows the feeling that comes after you’ve spent a lot of time in therapy only to still feel stuck intimately and as someone who now supports others who feel therapy didn't work for them, I feel very confident in saying that the reason therapy isn't working or hasn't worked is because we've been looking at it wrong.
What is therapy?
Traditional talk therapy (known as "psychotherapy") is a modality of various treatments to help you identify and change things like limiting thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. But it isn't a healing modality. It's a modality for navigating through areas of life (thoughts, emotions, behaviors, crises, etc.) and managing the symptoms of what needs to be healed.
Therapy is a process of consciously identifying "what" is happening or presenting in your life. Maybe it's anxiety about a situation, frustration in your relationship, or you've noticed a repetitive pattern that you want to fix. It might be that you're feeling unhappy or unfulfilled in life and don't know how to feel happy and fulfilled. You might seek "help" from a therapist for countless reasons.
What happens in therapy?
While seeing a therapist, you're generally working together through talking to identify what's tangled up within you that's causing the thoughts, emotions, and situations that brought you to seek out therapy. You'd likely receive help to begin seeing things from a different perspective or receive tools to change your behavior or get through your current circumstances. You might expand your awareness of where you have limitations in your mentality, beliefs, circumstances, lack of boundaries, people-pleasing tendencies, attachment style, etc., all beautiful things for self-discovery.
Traditional talk therapy may help you navigate through your current circumstances or crises with tools you didn't have before. You might feel some relief or empowerment from making changes in your life based on what you discover with the therapist, which is lovely. But, you may also find yourself feeling stuck and asking why isn’t therapy working.
The limitations of therapy
In therapy, you're working with the symptoms of your wounds. You've been learning how to manage them so that you can deal with life as it keeps handing similar things to you. You're in a cycle that continues to repeat (in your daily life, job, relationships, self-sabotage, etc.), and what you've received in therapy are tools to help you continue managing the cycle, not to break the cycle, leading to questioning like why isn’t therapy working.
Like the seed of a tree planted in mineral-rich soil - you have wound seeds that have taken root within your subconscious and have grown with purpose throughout your life. Their trunks are thick and sturdy, their branches tall and wide. These wound-trees become your limiting beliefs, patterns, and programming within your subconscious mind.
New growth is always happening because you're meant to heal and receive wisdom from this wound. So it's always going to grow, and what you've done in therapy is learn how to trim or reshape the new growth.
You may identify that you have a limiting belief (tree) that you hadn't discovered before (this is wonderful for self-awareness,) but what you're working with in therapy is the newest or outermost growth (branches) of this limiting subconscious pattern.
The tools you receive in therapy limit you to managing the continued growth of something meant to be healed at the root (the seed) because you can't access the roots or the seed that exists within the subconscious from the conscious state.
Therapy has been the frontline modality for "healing" for decades, but it's become archaic and formulaic and lacks the depth needed for actual, authentic healing. It keeps you busy staying essentially the same.
So, therapy may not work for you because you've believed, as most of us have, that therapy is the way to work on ourselves, heal, get unstuck, and get out of patterns we can't seem to get out of on our own.
But it's not enough.
I think it's doing us a disservice because those who genuinely want to heal and move beyond what's kept them stuck deserve to access legitimate healing, not spend their time, money, and energy on a modality that cannot reach the spaces that hold the wound.
What to do when therapy doesn’t work
For some, the tools they receive in therapy feel like enough. They're satisfied with things remaining the same and being able to deal with those same things, and therapy may have "worked" for them because they got what they came looking for.
But for those who feel like therapy didn't work, don't lose hope because there is a different way to do legitimate healing that will set you free.
The modality that's the most healing and transformative I've ever experienced and now use to facilitate healing beyond therapy is hypnosis or hypnotherapy. Hypnosis allows you to work directly with the subconscious (the roots and seed of those limiting beliefs and patterns within you). Why spend time trimming the branches of a tree that's always going to be growing (because it's part of your soul's evolutionary experience to have it grow until you heal it at the root and reap the wisdom from the wound) when you could work directly with the root and perhaps the seed to heal what's meant for you to heal?
I trained to become a certified master hypnotist because I knew I came here to help people heal, and I knew becoming a therapist wouldn't cut it. As a hypnotist, I also began understanding how the subconscious is responsible for our emotions, feelings, thoughts, behaviors, energy fields, and what we continue to manifest by default.
We are multidimensional beings, and traditional talk therapy keeps us limited to working in the conscious dimension, and it's the last place our limitations show themselves to us. The limiting patterns within our subconscious have run through their entire sequence by the time we consciously realize there's a pattern. So, in a conscious-based modality like therapy, you're working with the end of the pattern within the evidence that it exists, not where it begins.
I don't want to flush therapy down the toilet. There's absolutely a place for it (I've been a client of therapy for things that I needed help to navigate through, like pre-marital counseling and divorce, among other things), and I did feel supported and grateful. Therapists generally have great intentions and genuinely want to help people. I know of therapists whose eyes have opened to see the limitations of their modality and are actively working to move beyond its constraints because it's not enough.
Therapy isn't a healing modality; it keeps you managing the symptoms of what needs to be healed. In order to move past this feeling of why isn’t therapy working for me and truly heal, we need to do more than manage the symptoms and get to the root of the wound.
If you are interested in learning more, you may find this information on demystifying hypnosis helpful, and I invite you to explore ways to get started with hypnosis and hypnotherapy to move forward and begin to authentically heal.
You can also learn more about me and my work using the Soul Forward Method here.