Talk Therapy: Hindering Divorce Recovery, Reinforcing Codependency

Today, I want to discuss talk therapy and how it might be hindering your divorce recovery.

Firstly, I want to acknowledge the fact that I’m a therapist. I’ve wanted to be a therapist since the sixth grade. So, I understand it’s weird that I’m saying that talk therapy is possibly detrimental to your healing process, but this comes from very sound experience – personally and professionally. Our understanding of how the body-mind works and what truly has a positive impact on our healing is always evolving.

If you’re going to talk therapy and you’re not having a transformative experience, then it’s not working. And if it’s not working for you, then it’s probably working against you.

What is Talk Therapy or Psychotherapy?

Talk therapy, also known as psychotherapy, is a safe space where you can openly discuss your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with a trained therapist.

It’s a collaborative process aimed at helping you understand yourself better, develop healthier coping strategies, and work through any challenges you might be facing.

The goal of talk therapy is to support you in achieving emotional well-being and help you reach your goals.

Very often when we women go to therapy, we are telling our stories. We’re told that storytelling is powerful and transformative. And that’s true. But why is telling our stories on the one hand transformative, but on the other hand, a problem?

Moving from a Place of Suppression to Transformation

It’s all about the intent and how we tell the story. What makes that storytelling transformative is that we’re moving from a place of feeling suppressed and repressed.

A place where we can’t talk, share, or tell our story. We have too much shame, embarrassment, and fear to use our voice, to speak about our experiences, to connect with others, and to heal in that connection.

When we women are talking in psychotherapy, very often we go to therapy and we rehearse our wounds, we rehearse the injustices, we rehearse our resentments, and we go into a session with the newest ways we have been injured by the people around us.

We are venting, complaining, and rehearsing the problem and prioritizing that more than healing or having a transformative experience.

Venting Without Healing

What’s the difference? I want you to think about what it’s like when your kid starts complaining halfway through the day on Christmas. They’re having this amazing day; they’ve opened their gifts, and you’ve turned yourself inside out to make it an amazing Christmas for them. Then, they start complaining.

They don’t have the perspective of how good they have it compared to most people. Even though they’re dealing with hard things, everyone can make the most out of everything. In this scenario, they are not feeling grateful.

Very often as a therapist, this is what it feels like to sit in a session and listen when someone comes week after week to unpack the things that they’re dissatisfied with in their life after divorce. Therapy was never meant to be a place where you just unpack your dissatisfaction.

Psychotherapy is meant to be a place where we treat mental and emotional imbalances.

The Root Cause of Spiritual Imbalance

Very often, therapists get in the habit of asking you for an update in your post-divorce life.

When you come to a 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. I don’t need you to tell your story over and over and over again.

Stepping into Your Personal Power

When Brene Brown talks about storytelling to create connection and healing, she’s talking about creating unity. She’s talking about building relationships. She’s not talking about doing it from a place of dissatisfaction. She’s talking about stepping into your personal power. She’s talking about living from a place of empowerment.

When we go to therapy, it’s often from this place of bitterness, love, and resentment and not from a place of empowerment.

Releasing Negative Emotions Without Accountability

We go to psychotherapy, and we want to get the dopamine hit from venting.

We want to release our negative emotions and then not be accountable for digging deeper to transform our pain. This is a codependent pattern.

What is Codependency?

Codependency is a pattern of behavior where someone is excessively reliant on others for approval and identity.

This can manifest in relationships where one person constantly puts others’ needs ahead of their own, often to their detriment. A codependent pattern is: “If you’re feeling okay, then I’m feeling okay.”

When we women go to therapy and you want to get your negative emotion out, but you don’t want to dig deeper, that is a codependent pattern.

This means when we go to therapy and say, “I want to feel better at the end of the session, not worse,” we’re probably in a codependent relationship with our therapist.

What are the Patterns of Codependency?

Recognizing the patterns of codependency is the first step towards healing and developing healthier relationships.

Common patterns and behaviors include:

• People pleasing
• Lack of boundaries
• Low self-esteem
• Excessive caretaking
• Dependency on others
• Poor communication
• Feeling resentment because of unmet needs
• Perfectionism or unrealistic standards

From a neurobiological perspective, when we women go to talk therapy and we re-rehearse the things we’re dissatisfied about, we’re reinforcing neural pathways in our brain for struggle, suffering, negativity, unhappiness, anxiety, depression, for victim consciousness.

We are rehearsing and reinforcing the synapses that fire one message to the other.

In the brain, there are these little trees of nerve pathways in your brain and the places where you’ve rehearsed negativity over and over again.

When you feel depressed, anxious, and negative, and you can’t figure out why that’s not going away, it’s because you’re rehearsing your dissatisfaction and not your habit of rehearsing positivity and gratitude.

When a therapist is permitting rehearsal of victimization session after session after session, it is having a detrimental effect. It is working against your healing process.

What is a Detrimental Effect?

The majority of our population is deeply suppressed and repressed.

We are thinking about our feelings, but we don’t want to feel them.

If I had a dollar for everyone who came to a session and said, “I hate crying,” I could probably retire. We’re so avoidant of feeling and processing our emotions that we are bypassing the transformative process of getting to the bottom of our emotional wells. In this way, we’re reinforcing this suppression.

Reinforcing Suppression

Where there is suppressed emotion and suppressed energetic pathways, there is disease. It could be a physical disease in the form of headaches, migraines, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, or mental illness, like depression or anxiety.

When we’re not in therapy that’s promoting the expression of deep feeling, we are contributing to the problem and not the solution.

Now, let’s talk about the fact that the issues that we’re facing today in the healthcare space are more complex than ever. We know that chronic disease is on the rise and that there are more and more of us who are on multiple prescriptions and are dealing with complex medical issues. How many more people have ADHD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, or anxiety than they used to?

Why is that? Why is there so much more disease today?

Healing the Body to Heal the Mind

When you have complex physical health issues, you typically go to someone who has trained extensively to treat those issues.

But do you know that many counselors and coaches do not have anywhere near the level of education, training, or experience to understand the interconnectivity of the body and mind?

You can’t heal the mind without healing the body because it’s all interconnected. We understand that when we women are healing from divorce, we’re most likely needing to heal attachment-style issues and deep grief that could be tied to a history of depression or anxiety. These are not things that can be transformed by talking about them.

When you’re anxious, the more you talk about the things that make you anxious, the more anxious you’re going to become.

Healing Your Central Nervous System

When you want to heal your nervous system, 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 mind-body into fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

Talking about your pain is not going to heal it. It will reinforce it. It will cause it to become more deeply entrenched.

Healing Tools

This doesn’t mean I don’t ask my patients to talk to me about their pain, but we talk while we are treating it with bilateral stimulation and somatic processing. It’s why I advocate for immersive journaling, EFT tapping, or homeopathy, which gets directly to the core of the energetic imbalance and allows all of the suppressed content to become expressed.

I always advocate for a style of therapy that will treat the root cause and not reinforce the surface-level issues.

If you’re doing anything in a healing space that’s not getting deeply to the root cause, you’re causing your process to become more difficult to treat and you’re contributing to your pain.

So, where do we go from here? What to look for in a therapist?

We need therapists who:

• Understand the underpinnings of codependency
• Understand the interconnectivity between the body and the mind
• Refers out to people like chiropractors, acupuncturists, functional medicine practitioners, and homeopathy
• Can do techniques like brain spotting or EMDR
• Who are deeply skilled in trauma and understanding the layers of the healing process

I had someone come to me recently who was listening to the podcast and said she had recently started dating after her divorce. Her therapist told her to go ahead and start dating again, but she was still dealing with deep resentment towards her ex. And if you’re still experiencing deep resentment towards your ex and your therapist graduated you to dating, I have concerns.

In this scenario, you will attract dating partners that resonate with you, being active in resentment, which means you’re going to attract more of the same love.

Are You Willing to Do What It Takes?

Very often when therapists hit a wall, they don’t know how to get you past that and to get you to make more progress, so they will often encourage you to go out and try living. This isn’t all the therapist’s fault because, as patients, we women need to ask ourselves, how willing am I to work when I step into my therapist’s office?

Do you step into the therapist’s office saying, “I’m willing to roll up my sleeves and 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. I can feel that.

I only attract the coolest patients, because when people come to work with me, they know that we are going to get better, and we are not messing around, it will feel very uncomfortable, but you will get results. I rarely have a patient who just wants to dabble around in the shallow end. Typically, if they are that sort of individual, they don’t last past a first or second session.

I want you to ask yourself:

• How ready to work do you show up right to your sessions?
• How capable, trained, and skilled is your therapist?
• How far are they willing to go?

It’s hard for a healer to take you further than the spaces that they have gone.

So, healers can typically only facilitate healing to the depths of which they have healed.

Evaluate Before Starting a Talk Therapy

Let me tell you, in graduate school, one of the very first things they teach us is, “Heal thyself first.” It’s an interesting consideration that when selecting a therapist, you have to look at

• how much healing work they have done,
• how much healing work they have experienced, and
• how integrated their healing has become in their own lives.

That doesn’t mean that therapists can’t have their problems. We all have problems. We are human. We’re going to have problems with our children, our partners, and our colleagues – that is a normal part of life.

But how they deal with those things and the depth to which they have sought healing in their own lives will indicate the depth to which they’re able to facilitate healing in yours.

Be prepared to roll up your sleeves, do the work, and find a therapist who will do the same.

You’ve got this. I love you.