Latest / Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce / 134. Why Talk Therapy Might Be Holding Back Your Divorce Recovery and Reinforcing Codependency

Transcript

134. Why Talk Therapy Might Be Holding Back Your Divorce Recovery and Reinforcing Codependency · Dear Divorce Diary: A Fresh Approach To Healing Grief & Building A Life Of Confidence After Divorce

• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Hi love, today we have a surprising topic from a therapist.
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: We're going to be talking about the ways that talk therapy is actually detrimental to healing from this divorce healing codependency and healing your nervous system.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Hi love, welcome to Dear Divorce Diary, the podcast helping divorcees go beyond talk therapy to process your grief, find the healing you crave and build back your confidence.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, dawn Wiggins, a therapist, coach, integrative healer and divorcee.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Join me for a fresh approach to healing grief and building your confidence after divorce.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: In today's episode, I'm going to unpack three of the major ways that talk therapy is actually detrimental to your healing process, and those three things.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: They're complex, it's a lot to unpack, but we're going to do it.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: The next thing we're going to talk about is what to look for in a therapist so you don't actually have this detrimental effect.
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: And then, finally, we're going to have our Getting Unstuck segment, where Blair writes in she recently began EMDR therapy and she wants to know if what she's feeling after session is normal, and we will answer that question for her and for you.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Let's dig in.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's just acknowledge the fact that I'm a therapist.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: I've wanted to be a therapist since the sixth grade.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: I was practically born you practically born as an infant already into the role of therapist in my family of origin.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: So it's weird that I'm saying that talk therapy is possibly probably detrimental to your healing process.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: But this comes from very sound experience personally, professionally, the data that is evolving and just really understanding how neurobiology, how the body-mind, works collaboratively and what truly has a positive impact on our healing and what doesn't.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: And so this is a topic that I'm very, very passionate about, because the reason I ever wanted to be a therapist was for you to be.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Well, I wanted to when I was in the sixth grade, right, I wanted to spare all the children from having to experience the impacts of toxic marriages and toxic family dynamics.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And so if you're going to therapy and you're not actually having a transformative experience, deeply transformative, then it's not working, and if it's not working for you, then it's probably working against you.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: But let's dig deep and understand why.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: Now, the first thing, kind of a surface level reason, but when we are going to talk therapy, that's what I'm specifically talking about here, not EMDR therapy or brain spotting or some other somatic modality, talking specifically about talk therapy.
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Very often when we go to therapy, we are telling our stories right, which we're told, that storytelling is powerful and transformative, and that's true.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: So what's the difference, dawn?
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Why is telling our stories in places, on the one hand, transformative but, on the other hand, a problem?
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: Well, it's all about the intent and the way in which we tell the story.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: Now, when we're storytelling and it's transformative, the thing that makes that storytelling transformative is that we're moving from a place of feeling suppressed and repressed, like we can't talk, like we can't share, like we can't tell our story, like we have too much shame, too much embarrassment, too much fear to actually use our voice, to speak our experience and to find the connection between my experience and your experience and to heal in that connection.
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: In that I see you, you see me.
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: We are in this together kind of lived experience.
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: When we're talking in therapy, very often what has happened over time is that we go to therapy and we rehearse our wounds, we rehearse the injustices, we rehearse our resentments and we go into session with the newest ways.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: We have been injured by the people around us and we are venting and we are complaining and we are rehearsing the problem and we are prioritizing that venting more than we're prioritizing having a healing deep healing or transformative experience.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: What's the difference?
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: Well, I want you to think about what it's like when your kid starts complaining halfway through the day on Christmas.
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: Right here, they're having this amazing day and they've gotten gifts and you've turned yourself inside out to make it an amazing Christmas for them, even though you know you've been dealing with all this stuff with your ex.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: And then they start complaining and you've, like, literally done everything you can to make an amazing experience for them and they're just kind of not getting the perspective of how good they actually have it compared to most people, even though they're dealing with hard things.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: We can make the most out of everything and you can kind of just get the ways in which that they're not feeling grateful not kind of grounded in their heart.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Not, you know, this is just a thing that kids do sometimes right.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Very often, as a therapist, this is what it feels like to sit in session and listen when someone comes week after week to kind of unpack the things that they're dissatisfied about in their life.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: Therapy was never meant to be a place where you just unpack your dissatisfaction.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: Therapy is meant to be a place where we treat mental and emotional imbalance right, where we actually transform the root cause of mental and emotional imbalance and I might even say, dare to say, spiritual imbalance.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: If you've gotten in a habit and very often therapists get in a habit love of just asking you for the weather report of the state of the union or the update in your life right Now, when you come to session, I always want to know the update, but I want it in five minutes or less because then we're going to move on to treatment.
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: I don't need you to tell your story over and over and over again in the context that you're dissatisfied.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: When Brene Brown talks about storytelling to create connection and to create healing, she's talking about creating unity.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: She's talking about building relationship.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: She's not talking about doing it from a place of dissatisfaction.
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: She's talking about stepping into your personal power.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: She's talking about living from a place of empowerment of I can, of, I am of, I love, I will, I do, I am right.
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: And when we go to therapy I just know this because you know experience right, it's coming from a place of I can't believe I shouldn't have to, would you ever?
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: How could this?
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: It's from this place of bitterness, love and resentment and not from a place of empowerment.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Now I made an Instagram post this last week about vagal breathing.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: It was hysterical.
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: It was about my kid and I and she coached me to use my vagal breathing and it was hysterical.
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: And she's like it's annoying when you coach me to do my vagal breathing right.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: And that's the thing how my kid, my nine-year-old, feels resentful or annoyed by being coached to use a tool that's you and I love.
• 9:41
  Speaker 1: We go to therapy and we want to get the dopamine hit from venting.
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: We want to release our negative emotion and then not have to be accountable for digging deeper to actually transform our own pain.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: And that is a codependent pattern.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: A codependent pattern is if you're okay, then I'm okay.
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: If I'm okay, then you're okay.
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: And that means when we go to therapy and we say I want to feel better at the end of the session, not worse, we're probably in a codependent relation with our therapist.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: When we go to therapy and we say I want to get all my negative emotion out and I don't want to dig deeper, that is a codependent pattern.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: It's I don't want to feel it, to heal it, I just want to feel good without having to do what it takes to actually transform what's underneath there.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: So from a neurobiological perspective, when we go to talk therapy and we rehearse the things we're dissatisfied about, we're actually reinforcing neural pathways in our brain for struggle, for suffering, for negativity, for unhappiness, for anxiety, for depression, for victim consciousness.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: We are rehearsing and reinforcing literally the synapses that fire one message to the other in the brain.
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: There are these little trees-like of nerve pathways in your brain and the places where you've rehearsed negativity over and over again, those synaptic pathways are dense love.
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: And then when you feel depressed and anxious and negative and you can't figure out why that's not going away, it's because you're rehearsing your dissatisfaction and your habit of rehearsing positivity and gratitude.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: Those neural pathways are not as densely populated and the more we rehearse these things, whatever it is we rehearse, is what gets reinforced in terms of our neural pathways.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: And then the mental, emotional imbalances they perpetuate.
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: And we are doing that in talk therapy and more therapists than not aren't calling you on it.
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: More therapists than not are allowing it and they're not recognizing their role in that pattern.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: So first thing is talk therapy.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: When a therapist is permitting rehearsal of victimization, session after session after session, that is having a detrimental effect.
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: It is actually working against your healing process Now.
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: The next reason that talk therapy is probably detrimental for you is that the majority of our population are deeply suppressed and repressed.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: We are thinking about our feelings, but we actually don't want to feel them.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: If I had a dollar for everyone that came to session an extra dollar, a bonus dollar for everyone that came to session and said I hate crying, I could probably retire and just do podcasts every day Because we are so suppressed and repressed, we're so avoidant of actually feeling and processing our emotion.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: We are kind of bypassing, really, the transformative process of getting to the bottom of our emotional wells and we say I can't go there because I'm not going to ever come out, I hate to cry, I don't like how it feels, and so we're going to therapy and we're talking and we're actually reinforcing the suppression.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: And where there is suppressed emotion and suppressed energetic pathways, there is disease, and that could be physical disease in the form of headaches, migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, the ongoing effects of complex post-traumatic stress disorder so many things that people call ADHD or you name it right is a lifetime of suppressed and repressed emotion, along with various other right intersecting issues.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Complex diagnoses mean that there are probably complex things contributing to the diagnosis, but know that the tendency to suppression and bypassing emotional processing is again reinforcing those neural pathways of suppression and it is promoting the advancement of disease, whether it's physical or mental and emotional, in your body-mind.
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: And so anytime we're not in a therapeutic approach that's actually promoting the deep expression of deep feeling, then we are contributing to the problem and not the solution.
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: Now let's talk about the fact that the issues that we're facing today in the healthcare space are more complex than ever.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: We know that chronic disease is on the rise, that there are more of us that are on multiple prescriptions than not, that there are more of us that are dealing with complex medical issues than are not, in addition to complex mental health and emotional issues, right, and so how many more people relate to having ADHD or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, cptsd, depression, anxiety, you name it right?
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: These things have become more and more and more commonplace and are being talked about in popular spaces, on social media and in popular culture.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: And why is that?
• 15:09
  Speaker 1: Why is there so much more disease today?
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a whole different episode.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: But let's just look at when you have complex physical health issues, you go typically to someone who has trained extensively to treat those issues I might say a doctor.
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: That's not me, though.
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: I go to a homeopath or I go to a chiropractor or I go to an acupuncturist.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: You know, for certain issues I would go to a doctor, right, if I needed an antibiotic or if I broke a bone, I would certainly go to a doctor.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: But any way you slice it right, if you have a complex medical issue, you're going to go to someone who has been trained at great lengths to treat things medically.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: They're going to be well-versed in anatomy and physiology.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: They're going to understand the interconnectivity of the organ systems in the body.
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: They are going to know their stuff if they're effectively going to help you heal from whatever your disease experience is.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: But do you know that many counselors and coaches do not have anywhere near the level of education, training or experience in the complexities or well-versed enough or trained enough to understand the interconnectivity of the body-mind and the importance and necessity of processing things somatically, of understanding that you can't heal the body without healing the mind and you can't heal the mind without healing the body, because it's all interconnected and that very many people that we are going to with our complex issues we understand that when we're healing divorce, we're probably also needing to heal attachment style issues, deep grief that could be tied to a history of depression or anxiety that these are not things that can be.
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: They're not things that can be transformed from talking about them.
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: In fact, when you're somebody who is anxious, the more you talk about not things that can be.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: They're not things that can be transformed from talking about them.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: In fact, when you're somebody who is anxious, the more you talk about the things that make you anxious, the more anxious you're going to become when you are wanting to heal your nervous system.
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: The more times you talk about the things that make you anxious or scared, the more you're activating your nervous system and sending the signals to your body, mind to go into fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: So, love, this is a challenge.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: What are you doing to heal right now?
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: And so if you're someone who also doesn't go to therapy and you're like my best friend is my therapist or my hairdresser is my therapist, guess what Everything that we're saying here today applies, because talking about your pain is not going to heal it.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: It's going to reinforce it, it's going to cause it to patients to talk to me about their pain, but we are treating it.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: While we do it, we're adding bilateral stimulation, we are adding somatic processing.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: It's why I advocate for immersive journaling or EFT tapping or homeopathy, which gets directly to the core of the energetic imbalance and allows all of the repressed content to become expressed.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: So you're always going to hear me advocate for a style of therapy that's going to treat the root cause and not reinforce the surface level issues.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: And if you're doing anything in a healing space that's not getting deeply to the root cause, you're actually causing your process to become more difficult to treat and you're contributing to your own pain.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: So where do we go from here?
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: What to look for in a therapist, right?
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: So we need therapists that understand the underpinnings, the underpinnings of codependency, which is attachment style concerns.
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: We need a therapist who understands the interconnectivity between the body and the mind.
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: We need a therapist who has a tendency to refer out to people like chiropractors, acupuncturists, functional medicine practitioners, homeopaths.
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: We need a therapist who is able to do a technique like brain spotting or EMDR.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: These are techniques that allow you to really process memory in a somatic way, so that you're resolving the things that are driving your tendency to repeat your pain, repeat your pain, repeat your pain.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: We need therapists who are deeply skilled, very experienced in trauma, in understanding the layers of the healing process.
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: I had someone come to me recently who was listening to the podcast and said she was recently graduated to dating.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: Her therapist recently told her go ahead and start dating again, but the things that she was still dealing with were deep resentment towards her ex.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: And if you're still experiencing deep resentment towards your ex and your therapist graduated you to dating, I have concerns because you're going to attract dating partners that resonate with you being active in resentment, which means you're going to attract more of the same love.
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: But very often when therapists kind of hit a wall and they don't know how to get you past that wall they don't know how to get you to make more progress then they'll say let's go try some living right Now.
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: This isn't all therapist's fault, because as patients, we need to ask ourselves how willing am I to work when I step into my therapist's office?
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: Right?
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: Do you step into the therapist's office saying like I'm willing to roll up my sleeves and I'm willing to get to the root of this because I don't want to deal with it for the rest of my life, because that's the difference, right, I can feel that and PS, I only attract the coolest patients Like I have the coolest, most powerful, most special patients period.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: Because when people come to work with me, they know that we are going to get better and that we are not messing around and that it's going to feel very uncomfortable but that you are going to get results.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: And so I rarely ever get a patient who's like just going to dabble around in the shallow end.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: Typically, if they are that sort of individual, they don't last past a first or second session because they're like this is not for me.
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: And so I want you to ask yourself how ready to work?
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Do you show up right to your sessions and how ready to work?
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Or how capable, how trained to your sessions and how ready to work?
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: Or how capable, how trained, how skilled, how deep is your therapist able to go?
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: I think there is something to be said, for it's hard for a healer to kind of take you further than the spaces that they have gone, right.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: So healers can typically only facilitate healing to the depths of which they themselves have healed.
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: Let me tell you, in graduate school, one of the very first things they teach us is heal or heal thyself first.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: It's an interesting consideration that when you're selecting a therapist, to really take a look at how much healing work have they done, how much healing work have they experienced and how integrated has their healing become in their own lives.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: And that doesn't mean that therapists can't have their own problems.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: We all have problems.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: We are human.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: We're going to have problems with our children and our partners and our colleagues and whatever.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: That's just, you know, a normal part of life.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: But how they deal with those things and the depth to which they have sought healing in their own lives is certainly going to indicate the depth to which they're sought healing in their own lives, is certainly going to indicate the depth to which they're able to facilitate healing in yours.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit in our Getting Unstuck segment about how Blair recently began EMDR therapy and she wrote in to me this week and she said Dawn, I recently began EMDR therapy and I want to know if what I'm feeling after session is normal.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: I often am feeling worse and not better, and I find myself weepy, sometimes agitated, sometimes feeling mean.
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: There are times that I'm reevaluating old experiences that I had, but I'm seeing them from a different perspective and they kind of flash through my mind rapidly.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: Is this normal, blair?
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: Oh my goodness.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, it is so normal when you begin EMDR therapy in the early stages of it that you feel worse before you feel better.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: And it goes back to what I was saying about how suppressed.
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: We are right that as we kind of take the lid off of everything and we start peeling back the layers of the onion, we start to really feel in the body, not just mentally right, but we start to physically and emotionally feel everything that we've been keeping in boxes, on shelves inside of our body, mind, and so, as you're processing all of that, it can feel really unsettling, and this is where we want to use supportive tools like breath work and essential oils and calling a friend and going for walks and really holding your support system very close, being in close contact with your therapist and just supporting yourself really really well while you process all that stuff.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: I find that the first few sessions are kind of where you see the biggest purge, if you will, and then after a handful of sessions, things start to kind of plateau a little bit more and then maybe it only happens in pockets, here or there where you get to really kind of deep crunchy stuff, if you will.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: But this is the kind of attitude that we have to have coming into EMDR therapy and other various modalities is, it may feel worse before it feels better, because healing is a throbbing, hot, uncomfortable process.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Right, you slam your finger in the door and your finger immediately starts healing.
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: But what does healing look like?
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: It looks like red, hot, throbbing discomfort, and so if that's how it feels after an EMDR session, rest assured you are doing it well and you are rewiring those synaptic pathways.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: Eventually, you will start to experience that you no longer feel the urge to rehearse your painful stories over and over again.
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: You will start to notice that you sleep a little better, that you worry a little less.
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: You will start to notice that you're more optimistic, that you handle things better, right, that you respond to typically triggering events, that you respond to them better, and so it's a small price to pay to feel temporarily really uncomfortable in order to have this kind of lifelong capacity to move through life with less pain, less resistance, less struggle, less suffering.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: So, blair, I am so proud of you for moving through this and for being willing to go there to have this deeply transformative experience.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: It is going to do wonders for your nervous system.
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: It is going to help you interrupt codependent patterns and it is definitely going to help you recover from this divorce.
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: All right, what an amazing session today.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: In this episode we talked about the three ways you've learned right, the three ways that talk therapy can be detrimental to healing not only your divorce but underlying codependent patterns and your nervous system PS.
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: Those three things.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: How you heal from those three things is going to dictate the future partners you attract and it's going to dictate your children's attachment experience with you.
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: We also learned what to look for in a therapist PS.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Dm me anytime if you have questions about this.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: And then we also learned from Blair that it is completely normal to feel worse before you feel better when beginning EMDR therapy.
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for spending your time with me today.
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: I love you.
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Peace, dear.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: Divorce Diary is a podcast by my coach, dawn.
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: You can find more at mycoachdawncom.