BEYOND TALK THERAPY: You Don’t Have to Talk About “It” to Heal “It!”
And often times talking about it, is not enough to lead to healing and the resolution of symptoms.
I think about healing as integration. We are a whole-body system with physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, social, and psychological parts. When our systems encounter an experience that leads to overwhelm, stuckness can result. This stuckness shows up as symptoms.
Symptoms related to mental health such as sleep disturbance, low mood, anxiety, irritability, negative beliefs, and interpersonal issues are typically rooted in stress or trauma responses.
Talk therapy absolutely can be beneficial and uses our higher thinking brains. Yet at some point, talk therapy is limited because it is not able to access the lower parts of the brain where we hold stress and trauma responses. Talk therapy alone is often not enough to heal human issues.
In my practice, I offer three types of intervention that are able to access the lower brainstem and middle emotional brain to metabolize stressor and trauma responses:
1) EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy
3) free-form dance movement
EMDR and Brainspotting are brain-body based interventions that are able to access stored material that talk therapy alone is not. Free-form dance movement works with the whole person system towards processing and integration.
If you have tried talk therapy for months or years without resolution of symptoms, please reach out. I am currently accepting new individual teenager and adult clients in MN and WI for EMDR and Brainspotting. To deepen your processing and support your healing journey, I’m hosting Outside Ecstatic Dance classes June 4, 2021 and August 14, 2021 in collaboration with Inspiring Actions. See you soon!
