Talk therapy will save your soul
Lots of people think healing, especially trauma, is beyond the reach of words. Is it true?
“Talk therapy will save your soul” is a five-part romance with (and investigation of) talk therapy. We’ll cover existential philosophy, encounter, the crisis of experience, the uprooting of language, what healing is, and more. It’s the first series of essays on Interpersonal.
I often hear people shit-talk talk therapy. I saw it referred to recently in an article on the therapy portal Alma as “the standard talk therapy,” something like a base model rental car with its barren plastic and poly interior. The case against talking suggests it doesn’t work when the terrain gets bumpy: Talking doesn’t work for serious mental health disorders. Talking doesn’t reach the deepest layers of healing that are possible. Talking is ineffective because it tends to just go in circles. Talking about your story actually makes you feel worse.
The crux of it is that talk therapy is insufficient for trauma.
“When someone is overwhelmed by trauma, talk alone isn’t going to do very much,” writes Peter Levine, one of the honchos in the field of somatic therapy and founder of Somatic Experiencing. “We must go to the unspoken voice of our bodies: one that doesn’t use words to create experiences that contradict those of the fear and helplessness we actually feel.” SE is a popular therapy modality that helps people release stuck energy accumulated from traumatic experiences. It reaches fragmented traumatic memories that are “deep in the body, beyond the reach of most talk therapy.”
The theory here is that we humans have a hard-wired evolutionary process for dealing with overwhelming experiences that gets short-circuited in the modern world. If we were polar bears or tigers we would feel the terror and helplessness of a traumatic event at the moment of its conclusion, shaking and howling like the wild creatures we are. (This turns out to not necessarily be consistent with observations of wild animals, but let’s set that aside for now.) Instead, we conscious-of-self humans offer detached explanations for what troubles us and store our pain neatly in our fascia and organs to haunt us at a future date. The bill eventually comes due.
And it’s not payable in your flimsy words.
More than a century later, many in the healing arts see words as second class healing instruments.
We understand trauma in this schema and in today’s therapy-informed culture in a broad way.
Depending on who you ask, “my trauma” refers to the events and/or complex of symptoms and experiences caused by (quoting Levine again) “a wide variety of stressors such as accidents, invasive medical procedures, sexual or physical assault, emotional abuse, neglect, war, natural disasters, loss, birth trauma, epigenetics, systems, or the corrosive stressors of ongoing fear and conflict.”
Most of us are more or less traumatized, in other words. And fair enough. I had very severe obsessive-compulsive disorder for 35ish years, so I generally agree that we are shaped by the past and that it’s possible to have an absolutely deranging assortment of physical symptoms carried forward from chronic childhood or other kinds of stress.
This is a wide view of trauma, for sure, but its basic function isn’t new. It’s there at the beginning of Freud’s psychoanalysis. Freud developed what his pseudonymous client Anna O. called “the talking cure.” Conversation—with an orientation toward sharing freely and tending to relationship dynamics (among other things)—was the revolutionary cure for physical symptoms including visual disturbances, paralysis, loss of sensation, you name it. It included emotional experience, or what he called catharsis.
This stood apart from other healing methods of the day for nervous disorders, namely hypnosis, which was trending hard in Europe at the end of the 1800s. Freud dabbled in hypnosis—healing through suggestion. I want to point out that hypnosis implies that the healer knows what needs to happen for the sick, something I’ll come back to later in the context of today’s therapy. Freud visited with its leading practitioner Hippolyte Bernheim, practiced hypnotic healing himself, and translated a book about it into German. Then he happened on the talking cure.
More than a century later, many in the healing arts see words as second class healing instruments.
In the somatic or “bottom-up” worldview, to treat your deepest wounds you’ve got to trade up your standard talk therapy beater for something with a few features and upgrades. These go by the following names: embodiment, inner knowing, resourcing, rewiring the nervous system, expanding consciousness itself. There are many therapy modalities designed to get you out of your words and into your body—again, with the kind of gentle disdain or at least indifference toward your words and story that Levine expresses above.
I’m looking mostly at the viewpoint of somatic therapy, but we can head upstairs into the mental realm and find a similar loss of faith in words. Therapy modalities considered “talk therapy” are more or less opposed to talking. What do I mean by that? Well, cognitive behavioral therapy isn’t really talking, is it? Look at a 12-16 session CBT protocol for generalized anxiety disorder and what you find is not a conversation and meeting of two humans, but a technology that rides on the backs of words to carry out a pre-programmed treatment. The words themselves are already fully colonized by strategy and desired outcome based on experimental data. You are: 1) educated about your alleged condition, 2) introduced to a model, 3) learn cognitive and behavioral techniques, 4) given a plan in case of relapse.
For a program of treatment to be evidence-based—that is, supported by scientific research that was carried out “objectively”—you are more or less no different than any other person doing the therapy. It could be your or your neighbor Phil dragging his long bag of trauma behind him. Doesn’t really matter. It’s more like taking medicine or being connected to a device that stimulates your brain with electricity than it is having what I would call talking or having a conversation. All of which is fine if that’s what a person exercising agency wants to do. It’s just not talking.
I used to share this skeptical view of talk therapy.
Er, that’s not super honest.
I used to look down on talk therapy from my high throne of enlightened embodied psychedelic wisdom. In working with my own distress, I spent six years trying exposure therapy, shaking out trauma from my childhood, sequencing it, tapping on my face, wearing bilateral stimulation bracelets, laying on Shakti mats, taking high doses of psychedelics with a blindfold on, and “regulating my nervous system.” That last one offends my sensibilities the most.
On balance I started to inhabit this stout 5’5” body of mine with more nuance and creativity. I could tell you what emotion was stored in my left groin (nothing at the moment, stay tuned) and then tremble it out with a kundalini shiver and a few tears. I healed my chronic back pain with the help of alternative medicine like Network Spinal Analysis. I developed a nascent connection with the divine.
So we’re clear: I’m not anti-body, not looking to upload my brain onto a machine, not even a huge fan of rational and scientific thinking.
In my development as a therapist—I’m back in school for my M.A. now—I oriented first toward the body. I studied Hakomi Mindfulness-Based Somatic Psychotherapy for two years and became a teacher’s assistant. I also trained as an underground psychedelic guide with the now-defunct School of Consciousness Medicine. As a rule, what we call “psychedelic therapy” has a strong preference for body over words. Clients in my former community who took MDMA or mushrooms and wanted to talk for hours were considered to have lower capacity than those who could “go inside” with the blindfold and access the inner healer.
In a cosmically cheeky way, it was my own good fortune of having severe OCD that eventually led me to question some of the body-over-words dogma. OCD is a brute force check on any kind of inflated ego about therapeutic progress or spiritual enlightenment. Four grams of mushrooms? Boom. I’m a brontosaurus turning my long neck to look out at all my dinosaur friends, realizing that all of evolution lives in each one of my cells. I am rebooted from Source. Healed.
Okay chief. Tell that to my beloved partner at the time, who sat at my feet on the bathroom floor, arm around my leg, singing, while I stared at my teeth in the mirror because the most real thing to me was that they're going to fall out and I’ll be destitute and alone forever. Every moment of every day, without pause, thinking about my teeth falling out. Let’s not even call that thinking. I spent years hallucinating a dental emergency.
Body-oriented, mindfulness-based, even guided psychedelic experiences didn’t really help me dismantle the fear-based reality I was living in—what you might call my trauma. Those therapeutic relationships that, however subtly, tried to fix me and adjust me actually seemed to make things worse or more confusing over time. The feeling that something was wrong with me hammered deeper into my psyche even as I spent tens of thousands of dollars and couldn’t get any better with all of the most advanced therapies.
“Psychotherapy must remain the obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.” - R.D. Laing
It was real conversations with my mentor Bruce Sanguin that brought me back to life. In fact, it was his very precise use of words that helped me demystify the web of symptoms we call OCD and let it go for good. (And where psychedelics made things worse for me before, they were on occasion very helpful here.) There’s something about his words, and when I say his words I also mean him. How he is with me. His beingness.
To speak true words requires presence, attention, love.
The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote, “Psychotherapy must remain the obstinate attempt of two people to recover the wholeness of being human through the relationship between them.”
I think many people outside of the dominant medical model of mental health would agree that the wholeness of being human is what we’re after. Healing from trauma has something to do with reclaiming our whole experience. It’s the part about “the relationship between them” where most therapy turns in another direction. It becomes about doing the inner work, healing the nervous system, getting your personal trauma out of your personal body. Even when the relationship is part of the therapy, it’s strongly mediated by technique and method.
There is a safe distance between me and you.
We might even say, hey, forget about words, to create even more space between us. Think about how strange it is to devalue our words as part of a therapeutic worldview. It puts us in conflict with ourselves and a fundamental way we reach to each other for connection. The logical extension of that is kinda nuts. If our words aren’t powerful enough to heal, what does that mean for all the conversations we’re having every day—in our relationships with each other, in the work we do in the world? It suggests a kind of hopelessness.
Instead, we might wonder: How did we lose faith in our words to impact each other in the first place?
Why, in Levine’s view, would we start to deceive ourselves with our words?
Why aren’t we able to say what is true for us?
Said another way, why aren’t we able to just be ourselves?
I want to look at these questions in the next few essays and suggest that talking—real conversation—is fundamental to reclaiming lives worth living. My suspicion about the talk therapy shit-talking is that real talk therapy goes too deep. It’s too confrontational. It’s too dangerous. The fear of real intimacy and the responsibility of freedom are too high.
There’s wisdom in this orientation toward our bodies, so my intention here isn’t to start a beef with somatic therapists. The recognition of our bodily experience points to our alienation from ourselves and our lives. Compared to the possibilities for connectedness, inspiration, and love that’s available as humans walking on this Earth, most of us are, in the words of Mary Oliver, “breathing just a little and calling it a life.” And despite the best efforts of divisive politics and the doom of runaway technology, many people are walking the road that connects misery and nihilism to a full-hearted participation and aliveness.
We need our bodies for that walk, but just as much our souls need somebody to walk and talk with.
What do you think—is talk therapy old news?
Next up: part two of the series
What is this highfalutin “talk therapy”?
Welcome to all of the new subscribers! Thanks for being here. I’d enjoy hearing from you in the comments, and if you have a Substack send me a link to your writing. This is part two of “Talk therapy will save your soul,” a five-part love story with (and redefinition of) talk therapy.
This is such important work, Jeremy - I'm here for it. The idea of talk therapy is nonsensical - there is no such thing as talking without a body. Our need to dismiss in order to build up another modality is always suspicious to me. I've been on "both sides" as well - talk therapy, and be trained in the art of it, made me who I am. And I have benefited tremendously from both the somatic and psychedelic fields. But still I come back to conversation that transforms and have been a patient for a long time. There is another piece about talk therapy - it is ongoing in a way that the other modalities rarely are. Trust takes time, unfolding takes time, vulnerability takes time, healing takes time... in recovery I rely on my therapist to be in it for the long term - I'm not looking for a weekly breakthrough, I am slowly but surely coming into relationship in a way I never thought possible. Thanks for this great writing I am looking forward to more.
Your reflection on healing captures something profound: it’s not just about processing trauma but about making meaning through relationships. Your critique of talk therapy, particularly structured forms like CBT, raises important points. Some approaches do feel mechanical, prioritizing technique over connection. But research shows that Trauma-Focused CBT consistently outperforms many alternatives in treating PTSD, anxiety, and OCD. Maybe the issue isn’t talk therapy itself, but how it’s practiced—some versions fail, while others succeed through presence, attunement, and real conversation.
Your discussion of trauma and the body is compelling. The idea that trauma is stored and must be somatically released, popularized by Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk, has gained traction. But this risks creating a false dichotomy. Your own experience suggests something paradoxical: when words are used with care and precision, they are not weak but profoundly embodied. Maybe healing isn’t about choosing between talk therapy and somatic work, but integrating both.
One of your most striking insights is that we have lost faith in words not because they don’t work, but because real conversation is too dangerous. Perhaps the rise of self-regulation and nervous system healing reflects an avoidance of the rawness of real dialogue. If deep conversation is the key, how should therapy evolve to reclaim that space? How do we step off the self-improvement treadmill and into something deeper?
Looking forward to your next thoughts.