Whether or not you’ve been in therapy before, it can actually be quite hard to know what to expect when you start with a new therapist. Is talking about my problems for an hour a week really going to be enough? In fact, there’s a lot more going on than usually meets the eye.
While I never know exactly what our sessions will hold when a new client walks through my door, there are several key principles that guide the way I approach my own work that can help explain how and why therapy works. So before you get started, it might be helpful for you to get familiar with a few ways of thinking about the process of therapy, too:
Therapy addresses our core circuitry
Clients usually understand the expectation that we’ll be exploring some of their past in therapy, including but not limited to their with their relationship with their parents and their childhood. Some laugh at the cliché, but others sometimes counter with some resistance - “my childhood was fine,”“the past is past” or “it just doesn’t matter anymore.”
Yet when it comes to unconscious thoughts and behaviors, more often than not the past is still present. This is because we know from neurobiology and developmental psychology that the brain is extremely malleable and plastic when we’re young. Its job is to take in experience and to build neural connections for future reference, and so the whole nervous system becomes organized and evolves around your experiences over time.
So while it might sound simple, we can start to see how even years later, when we can recognize that what we learned early in life was not right or necessarily true, we still often find ourselves run by these deep-seated systems that can be hard to knock.
New experience is a powerful agent in relearning
Therapy works because not only does it helps us become more aware of and begin to separate from these unconsciousness parts and processes, but the kind of deep and intentional work we do in therapy can actually provides new experiences (and affiliated neural connections) required to “rewire” them.
Oftentimes simply talking - as in traditional talk therapy - can still allow great progress here. From a place of compassion and curiosity we begin to question early narratives, connect new dots, ad create new beliefs.
But have you ever found yourself saying you can understand something “logically,” but you still can’t seem to “feel” a certain way? That’s because it’s also important in therapy to work at the emotional and somatic (physical) level. Just like our mind and nervous system was originally built through experience, “rewiring” our brain also requires new experiences to form and strengthen different neural connections.
Consider working through trauma. While some clients can talk about their experiences in a detached and clinical way, while others avoid remembering it all together, when we hold onto a trauma without fully digesting the pain or letting others hold it with us, feelings can become almost “stuck.” Working through with a caring professional can can both release bottled-up emotions as well as create a new experience of safety and connection a survivor never had before. Moreover, when we revisit past memories, research now shows that they, too, become malleable, and we have the opportunity to actually reprocess traumatic memories them with a new experience and meaning.
Other opportunities to create new experiences in session might look like a subtle focus on your process - like noticing your tone of voice or body language when talking about something. Sometimes we’ll get into a state of mindfulness. This can strengthen the “muscles” that allow you to ground and regulate, but it can also provide an opportunity to try on new, more healing experiences through somatic-based experiments, like having you give voice to and dialogue with different internal “parts,” or stay with and fully processing an emotion.
All of these things allow us an opportunity to continue to create and strengthen new neural connections in both the mind and body, thus integrating learning across left and right brain.
Because we’re wired relationally, the relationship in therapy is particularly healing
Finally, research shows that the number one predictor of therapeutic success is the relationship you have with your therapist. In many ways, it’s important to work with a therapist you feel safe enough to venture into some of your most vulnerable places with, as well as someone you trust enough to be fully honest with. A sense of comfort and safety while addressing hard subjects helps them to not feel so overwhelming while we find a way to work through.
But healing with another person is also so powerful because we are, by nature, social animals. In fact, most of the significant wounds we work with in Marriage & Family Therapy are relational in nature - be it from a parent, a teacher, or a romantic relationship. Even wounds from the larger culture or society often stem most greatly from things like loss of connection or belonging.
In therapy, we create space for clients to be vulnerable, but to still be held and accepted at their most vulnerable. We allow space for them to f*** it up, but still know they are loved when they f*** it up. This is an incredible form of experiential healing because we tend to have so many negative, critical and judgmental voices in our heads. Having someone who really sees and accepts us un for who we are, as we are, is a deep need that is rarely met enough. However, through the experience of the therapeutic relationship itself, we continue to build and more greatly internalize this sense of self-acceptance and self-love.
Putting it all together…
There are so many additional tools and approaches I love integrating into my sessions from approaches across the board, but most ultimately work in the same fundamental way. Week after week, little by little, we take something at the tip of the iceberg - the fight you bring in with your partner, the frustration with work or a colleague, the panic attack from over the weekend - and we use it as a window into the patterns that often find a small way to manifest into each, as well as an opportunity to shift and experience something even just 5% different. This is why therapy often evolves into a long and beautiful relationship, yet you can also blink and it sort of feels like magic - you know you’ve changed, but you can’t quite put your finger on exactly how.
Our lives are built on everyday experiences. Together, we work by undoing and redoing it the exact same way - 50 minutes at a time.
