When Talking Doesn't Work (Alternative Approaches to Helping Series)

Show Notes:

I’ve been trying to lean in to the openness to the not knowing more generally in life these last many months. It’s not my knee-jerk – I’m pretty hardwired toward planning, perseverating, anxiety and hyper-controlling. Settling in to the unknown and trusting that I’ll have what I need whenever I end up needing it – trusting that I have done what I can and allowing the rest to fall where it may – is not usually in my comfort zone. Yet, I’m finding it to be my saving grace lately. Curiosity and trust. Those are the muscles I am exercising a lot more regularly, and it’s been really cool to see how this allows me to relax into uncertain situations without sacrificing any of my capacity to be meaningfully involved or capable. I don’t think I’m alone in trying to micro-manage and control things in an effort to make everything be ok – my hunch is you might be in the same boat. Given that, you may also understand how uncomfortable it can be to try to shift from that mode to something less vigilant and “on top of things”. But it’s been simpler. Calmer. Nicer in a lot of ways. And it has allowed me to consider and explore ideas I wouldn’t normally have even allowed space to exist. Now, that has been true in my world and life generally but also as it relates to my work and the topic we’re kicking off with for Season 3 of Behind the Line. 

A few months ago we had a guest on the show, you might remember, Kelsi Sheren from Brass & Unity. As a quick recap, Kelsi is a retired artillery gunner with the Canadian Armed Forces. She shared her story of experiencing PTSD and struggling with treatment resistance to traditional or conventional therapeutic interventions. I so valued this conversation and her calling out of the limitations of many conventional therapy models – because the truth is that they don’t work for everyone. And I really appreciated that she brought up a topic that in my profession is still pretty controversial, but I believe is really important, and that is the topic of psychedelics for PTSD treatment. When she brought it up I honestly had a moment of shock – not because of what she was sharing but because I realized that we had not yet spoken of this in a year and a half of this show existing. We did a whole series on therapy in the fall of 2021, and somehow I missed talking about some key pieces. As soon as I got off the interview with Kelsi, I reached out to 2 colleagues and asked them to schedule interviews for a new series I wanted to do to kick off season 3, and so here we are and we are jumping in talking about alternative treatment modalities for those who are struggling to find the right fit in conventional therapy.

Over the coming weeks I am going to introduce you to two amazing clinicians and the ways that they work outside of the conventions of traditional talk therapy to support healing and change. You’ll hear from my friend and colleague, Claire Weiss who specializes in Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy, as well as my colleague, Michael Mariano who specializes in neurotherapy. You’ll also hear from me about non-verbal trauma processing approaches like EMDR which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing; and OEI which stands for Observed Experiential Integration. 

For today, I want to start by talking about why talking doesn’t always work. 

Let’s start with this. As a therapist, I may be biased, but I genuinely believe therapy works. I have witnessed time and time again the incredible power of the therapeutic process, including the influence of talk therapy in shaping or reshaping how we think, feel and engage in the world. I have had so many opportunities to watch people make substantial shifts and live lives more aligned with their core values. I have seen people re-write their internal narratives and discover freedom from the stories they were handed. I have myself been shaped by therapy, growing from the opportunity to look more closely and intentionally at myself, my choices, my ways of perceiving, and considering alternative ways to going about it to be more the person I want to be. I want to be clear that I am not saying that talk therapy isn’t helpful – on the contrary, it can be incredibly helpful and consequential in changing someone’s life. That said, it has it’s place and it has it’s limitations, and chief among it’s limitations is in the processing and healing from trauma.

We have talked on this show a number of times about how traumatic experiences get encoded into our brains. We’ve talked about how the regions of the brain associated with trauma memory as unique and struggle with things like time and context. One of the other things these regions struggle with is language. That’s right, when we store traumatic memories, we store them in a part of the brain that doesn’t have particularly keen access to our language center. Our brain has to work hard to connect the memory to words to describe it, and often when people share about their traumatic experiences they find that they stumble trying to find the right words, or randomly blank on words. The part of our brain that is awesome at language is our frontal lobe, which is also where we do our really good thinking, decision making, learning, and so on. As we’ve identified in many other episodes, the frontal lobe part of your brain essentially gets turned off when trauma happens, and this also occurs when we go into memory recall of traumatic events. Whenever we are putting demand on the part of our brain that manages stress and stores trauma, our brain recalibrates itself to give more resources to the stress center and less resources to other parts of the brain including our frontal lobe. 

So think about that for a minute – if you are going for therapy to work on traumatic experiences or the impact of trauma over time, and you are being asked to recall or share about the impact trauma has had for you – the act of doing what needs to be done means that language is automatically reduced. Which means that talk therapy is going to have a MUCH harder time accessing what it needs to, and supporting you in navigating what you need to move through, in an effort to rewire how your brain has stored that traumatic information. Talk therapy for trauma can feel very slow and very difficult, as it leaves people sitting in their traumatic experiences with minimal equipping to move through and out of it. It rests heavily on talking being the tool that gets us through, but the part of the brain that connects with that isn’t likely to be online. Unfortunately when people have tried talk therapy and found it ineffective in helping them with their trauma and symptoms, they tend to scrap therapy altogether. But what if there are other ways at getting to your brain that don’t rely so heavily on a skill that isn’t online? What if we can find some workarounds that get us there through some sneaky back doors?

For decades now trauma therapists around the world have been searching for the back doors. We have been working to be creative and emerging brain science has helped move us forward in better understanding how we can access and reprogram trauma. I won’t say that we have all the answers, because man alive, the brain is a complex thing and I’m not sure we’ve even scratched the surface of all that there is to know about how it works. But I will say that we have learned a lot and that we’re taking what we’re learning and working really hard to find better ways to provide support to people who don’t find conventional therapy to be doing the trick. 

I remember about 6 years ago I went to a training by one of my psychology idols, Bessel van der Kolk. Dr. van der Kolk is known as a trauma expert. He has been at the forefront of the most significant and consequentia...