Therapy works | Here's how...

Usually, you are coming to therapy because you are suffering. Life has perhaps become unmanageable. You may be feeling lost or lonely in your pain, without a way out. Therapy provides a step in the journey of healing. Therapy is not a miracle cure, or quick fix solution. It won’t provide a life without pain, with enduring happiness. Far from it in fact; therapy provides the space to safely express, feel and embrace all parts that have had to be banished or repressed, leading to anxiety, depression, addictions and other ongoing painful cycles that may have brought you here. As Gabor Mate states; “all western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing. Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain”. I believe in this to my core. Therapy really does work. Here’s how...

There are different aspects and levels to how therapy works, but broadly speaking, we can break it down into two intertwining systems: working with the “mind” and working with the “body”, often called the “Top down, bottom-up approach” .

Top down helps you to make sense of your world by talking and exploring the experiences that have led you here. It helps us understand the patterns at play that may be exacerbating your pain and where these have stemmed from, helping us to break the negative critical narratives that are convinced it is because “we are shit”. In gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves and our patterns, it provides the freedom to choose what we want now, even if it’s the choice for things to stay the same in certain areas; you are choosing them now with full awareness and ownership without just being dragged through life by the unconscious processes at play. With greater understanding of yourself, you can begin the process of returning back to the person you always were before you inherited the unhealthy values, beliefs and systems that led you to this point today. To live more authentically and embrace the parts of our identity that we previously felt we had to erase.

The space we create together allows a sense of safety to open up to things that may have been left unspoken, and within this there can be a natural physiological release or catharsis in itself. The power of sharing your pain whilst sitting in a room with another is its own source of magic. But we also create a space to deepen our connection to the body, otherwise known as the “bottom up” approach. This works on the belief backed up by rigorous ongoing research that our emotions, memory and trauma is stored within our body and therefore paramount to the healing process. Through pain, we have often become so disconnected from ourselves and our bodies that we don’t even know how we feel. We may be feeling completely numb, or shut off. Or we may feel things so intensely that become all-consuming and overwhelming that we find a way to shut them down (for example through using substances, intense physical exercise, drowning ourselves in work etc). Therefore, reconnecting to our body through therapy, known as somatic experiencing, enables us to acknowledge these parts that have been wounded, and helps us find ways to heal through a range of techniques such as movement, guided meditation, music, art, nature and so on…

The top-down bottom-up approach offers the space to reconnect mind and body, reconnect back to yourself, reconnect back to the world and others in a way you now choose. It helps us to heal the wounds left by painful experiences. It helps us to the transform to a life that was always meant for us; a life more enriched, enhanced and free.