When Healing Feels Impossible: Why Therapy Didn’t Work For You
On the power of belief in the role of therapy
Many of us know that feeling of relief we get, when we’ve got a lot on our minds, and just need to talk to someone. It feels so good when we finally let it all out, everything we’ve been holding onto, in a cascade of verbal diarrhea.
Yet some of us also know that feeling of talking and talking and talking in therapy… but months later, we feel that nothing has really changed.
Many people assume therapy works just by showing up and talking. But sometimes, even after months of sessions, you still feel stuck. Not because therapy doesn’t work, but because one key piece often gets overlooked:
your belief that change is ACTUALLY possible.
When we believe that something is possible for us, we are more likely to take action on it, more likely to perceive that it works, and more likely to remain optimistic in the face of obstacles.
We are more receptive to someone’s feedback when we believe that they can help us, more likely to take their suggestions, more likely to allow them to guide us since we trust them more — basically, more likely to have positive outcomes.
One of the most difficult things to learn as a therapist is that you are not responsible for your clients’ outcome. You can educate yourself to provide better services that may increase the likelihood of their success, you have the responsibility to provide professional, ethical and legal care: but in the end the outcome is in their hands.
You can take a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.
Sometimes, it could be that perhaps you’re doing the wrong type of therapy, or with a therapist that you don’t click with. But most often, the culprit is an inherited belief from Western culture:
the perspective that patients are the passive recipients of medicine, that healing is something that is done to us, rather than requires our active participation.
Therapy isn’t quite like that, it requires your full engagement, and what you believe about the process matters.
A lack of positive belief either towards the therapist or the process of therapy, or even a lack of belief in one’s own capacity to be healed and to be in a fulfilled and wholesome state will make sure that no matter how effective a technique is - it will simply not work.
That’s why it is so common to have therapy clients who arrive to the sessions late, cynical, insisting that ‘they’ve tried everything and nothing worked’, constantly switching therapists, trying different therapies — and many times not even giving a chance for one therapy to work before quitting to try the next new thing.
Your thoughts and beliefs about therapy have an effect. Why?
Because of something called confirmation bias, where our brain filters our experience to confirm what we believe, usually unconsciously.
Basically, we experience what we expect to experience.
If deep down we don’t believe that we can be healed, hell — we can’t even imagine it! Then the likelihood of us actually getting healed is really low.
Think of it as a reverse placebo effect: we experience what we believe, so if we take a pessimistic attitude the less likely we are to have a positive experience. The data shows us that the placebo effect isn’t just ‘in your head’ but is a significant demonstration of the power of the mind: data shows that up to 80% of antidepressant effectiveness is due to placebo (Kirsch et al., 2014)*.
This means that the medication wasn’t chemically responsible for the client’s shift — their belief in it was.
Please don’t take this as victim blaming for one’s lack of progress in therapy: it’s not. In fact, I was one of these types of clients myself, years ago.
I did every therapy under the sun: CBT, Family Constellations, EMDR, TRE, psychoanalysis, acupuncture, antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, hypnosis, mushrooms, ayurveda, cutting out gluten — you name it. It was only until my first visit to the Amazon jungle that I was faced with the question:
‘Do you really believe that it is possible for you to heal?”
And when I finally was really honest with myself, the answer was “not really”.
I had spent so many years trying so many things that I had given up believing that it could be possible for me to be free of chronic pain, depression and addiction. I just kept trying new things because I didn’t know what else to do.
When a person carries unhealed trauma, or even severe burnout, many years of chronic illness or being deprived of basic needs, many years of being in an abusive relationship or a toxic environment (amongst other things); the body goes into a high stress response because this is perceived as an ever-present threat.
When we stay in that high stress state for too long (which can differ for different people) without the body being able to calm back down into safety, we go into an extreme form of stress response. This means that the dorsal vagus nerve, one of the oldest parts of our nervous system, kicks in full gear on survival mode.
Basically your brain perceived the constant lack of safety as ‘imminent death is certain’ and starts to shut down, affecting bodily processes such as digestion, sleep, heart rate and respiration. Accompanying feelings of helplessness, despair, dissociation, avoidance, deep depression, exhaustion, and sometimes also manifesting in the form of chronic pain, are all signs that the body has reached this state.
Over time, this gives rise to what we call learned helplessness, in which a person stops trying to change their situation because they’ve learned that their actions don’t matter, even if escape or improvement later becomes possible.
When somebody is ‘stuck in victim mode’ or they ‘feel like giving up’, this is the state they’re in: one of complete nervous system shutdown.
Of course, it is very difficult to be optimistic about therapy and to believe that it can work for you, when you have already spent so much time feeling helpless, depressed, exhausted and overwhelmed; and especially if the therapist isn’t trauma-informed, we find ourselves feeling stuck with no clue about what we want other than to stop feeling this way, but not really believing that it can actually change:
This is what we call a self-fulfilling prophecy.
In a nutshell:
Past trauma → Stressed Biology → Overwhelmed Nervous System → Strong feelings of helplessness/depression plus belief that nothing can really change → Nothing changes → Continue being stressed and feeling even worse because the fact that we perceive that nothing has changed, confirms our belief that nothing can change.
So HOW do we get unstuck? How do we then actually make use of therapy?
First most obvious solution, if what I described above is happening to you, and you have been attending therapy regularly (at least 3x per month) for at least six months, and you have not seen progress and your therapist isn’t trauma-informed, I would definitely say switch to one who is.
A trauma informed therapist is going to be able to help you identify what state your nervous system is in, and can provide you with proper resources to help you feel safe and self-regulate, plus help you realise that you are not your biology, and that these feelings and thoughts aren’t really who you are, but your nervous system screaming for help.
Second, get your journal (and if you don’t have one, start journaling asap, it’s basically free therapy) and really sit honestly with the following questions:
Do you believe that change and healing is truly possible for you?
If yes, what would that look like for you?
(Focus on visualising what your life would look and feel like once you were ‘healed’. If you can’t imagine this, or notice bodily symptoms, or start crying, it’s better to stop and seek the help of a trained professional as it means you are too overwhelmed to hold space for yourself right now).
Do you truly believe that this therapist/treatment can help you to change?
Do you want to change?
What is it that you currently DO have power to change?
What are the first tiny little steps that YOU can do to help YOURSELF?
Loving and taking responsibility for your health is the first step to actively creating healing.
For example, maybe I can’t go to work, but I can do my bed. Maybe I can’t eat healthy, but at least I can avoid junk food. Maybe I can’t write an entire assignment, but I can write one paragraph.
Taking small steps forward trains your nervous system to realise that it is now safe to take action again, and works on undoing the belief of ‘I cannot create change’. Give yourself permission to ask for help, and allow a space of trust within yourself where you can actually receive it.
I promise you, it’s worth it, and there IS a light at the end of the tunnel. In my language (Maltese) we have a saying:
‘Alla skont il-muntanja jagħtiha is-silġ’, which means:
God gives snow according to the mountain.
So the heavier and the bigger of a load of snow you are carrying, rest assured that it is because you’re a damn big mountain.
Trust that you have the resources within you to heal yourself, because you do.
Trust that there are people out there who genuinely care for you and will help you, because there are.
Trust your path, and trust that there is meaning to your life and your experience — even if it doesn’t make sense to you just yet.
And last but not least, remember that therapy doesn’t work if you don’t. If you’re just showing up to complain, week in week out, don’t expect change.
Change comes from actually doing the work, not from talking about doing the work.
Special post inspired by a very committed client, ST ❤
If you’re looking for a trauma-informed psychotherapist, if you want to feel safely held and guided through a healing process that actually works, you can find me here: https://www.facebook.com/AshaSinghPsychotherapy
*Kirsch et al (2014) Paper retrieved from: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4172306/
Reposted from: https://medium.com/@natashasingh_26684/when-healing-feels-impossible-why-therapy-didnt-work-for-you-251a07bea4da
Nice read !!
That is very true 👍