Talking Until You're Blue in the Face: Including the Body in Talk Therapy

I spend a lot of time talking about the body when it comes to therapy and overall well-being, particularly when the discussion involves anxiety, stress and trauma. In fact, some might think that I talk until I'm blue in the face when it comes to including the body in the healing process. I don't disagree. It's that important. Let me explain:

In my post entitled "I Thought I Got Past This", I described the experience of working to get over something that upset or hurt you only to find yourself triggered by it again and again. You might want to read that first so that what I share here has more context.

Our whole being experiences our experiences. While our minds may recall what we go through in pictures and words, our bodies hold the emotional and experiential memories. We use language and stories to unpack and process our experiences. Our stories are important and we deserve to feel heard. But, when we rely on talk alone, we leave out a crucial component of our being - our bodies.

For example, let's think about fear. How do you know when you're afraid? Do you only think fear-based thoughts or do you feel afraid? What signals does your body give you to indicate fear? In those moments, does talking about the fear or telling yourself that you shouldn't be afraid remove the fear that your body is experiencing?

An easier example may be to consider hunger and exhaustion. These are emotions that we have based on physiological signals from the brain. We then feel them and attend to them by responding to the embodied experience that grabbed our attention. Talking about hunger or tired feelings doesn't relieve us but talking might give us a temporary distraction...until we are reminded again that we need to eat or sleep. It's only when we attend to these needs that the emotions subside.

I know that stress, trauma, emotional pain are not the same as hunger and exhaustion, which we've accepted as a part of our daily existence. But I think it's safe to say that we do not want to keep experiencing emotional pain the way we keep experiencing hunger. The point that I'm trying to make is that attending to the emotional responses stored in our bodies can support relief in ways that talking about them alone may not fully resolve.

As mentioned in "I Thought I Got Past This", the brain is meant to be efficient but it is not always accurate. So, the emotional and sensory information that it associates to painful, stressful and traumatic experiences can trigger our stress responses even when our lives are not under threat. This can be incredibly frustrating and overwhelming when it happens during every day activities or negatively affects our most valued relationships.

The good news is that we can support the brain's threat detection system via its own design. The brain has a powerful process referred to as neuroplasticity. Without getting too science-y, this process is the brain's ability to change how it functions in response to stimuli. While we know that our brains can learn, we can find hope in the fact that our brains can also unlearn and re-learn.

Recall what I shared in the other post: our brain's threat detector relies on sensory and emotional stimuli to determine if we are safe or in danger. Therefore, with certain techniques, we can leverage the brain's neuroplastic capabilities to detach the associations it has stored from past experiences. Further, we can also support it's ability to create new associations to help you experience a more neutral or pleasant reaction. This approach is often referred to as reprocessing. It can complement traditional talk/ thought-based reprocessing approaches for a more comprehensive and effective therapy outcome.

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