Have you ever gotten to a point in your therapy journey where it feels like you’ve hit a wall? Like things have gotten repetitive and you want change but it’s not happening?
In my experience as a therapist, traditional talk therapy can be understood in two broad phases. In the first phase, you go through a period of hard realizations, connections, epiphanies and understandings. And I think most people assume this is all therapy is: just a bunch of aha! moments.
But there’s a second phase I like to call “The Working Stage.”
The Two Parts of Therapy
Part 1: The Epiphany Stage
In this stage, people start see and recognize patterns in their life. They may start to recognize their current feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and how it connects to their early childhood experiences; relationships with caregivers; the support or lack thereof in their life; and other factors. This period can be painful and activating. In this stage, things can feel worse before they feel better.
In this stage, people find therapy helpful because you get insights into your life the way you didn’t before. It’s helpful when someone can stand with you looking at your life in a bigger picture kind of way. Like zooming out and seeing the whole forest instead of just the trees. And a third party, mostly objective POV of your therapist to help you get that insight.
Eventually, though, we may reach a point where we have a pretty good understanding of our patterns. We know where they come from, we recognize when they're happening, and we can often explain why we respond the way we do. Like turning the rubik’s cube over in your hand many times and seeing where all the colors stand on the different faces of the puzzle. But understanding a pattern and changing a pattern are two very different things
Part 2: The Working Stage
In the working stage, we start taking action. We have the insight, we see the patterns, so we start exploring what we can do about it.
In the working stage, we do something about what we learned in the epiphany stage: I actually start setting the boundaries, I do the self care, I practice the vulnerability, I confront that person, I manage the emotion (examples). Many people do part 1 and then get frustrated when we get to part 2 because part 2 takes a lot of active work. We think recognizing the patterns and identifying our diagnosis could be enough, but most of the time, it’s not. Not if we want real, lasting change.
Knowing or understanding our patterns may feel familiar, even when they're painful. But changing them requires tolerating the discomfort of something unfamiliar.
For example:
Setting boundaries might mean tolerating someone's disappointment
Practicing vulnerability might mean risking rejection
Communicating your needs might mean confronting the possibility that someone cannot meet them
Changing people-pleasing behaviors might mean tolerating guilt
Regulating your emotions might mean sitting with feelings you've spent years trying to avoid
It's not just about doing the things we know we're supposed to do. It's about learning to tolerate the emotional experiences that come with doing them. The epiphany stage feels like getting hit in the face a lot. But the working stage can feel like falling on your face. There’s a potential for “failure” and many people are intimidated by that. Sometimes it’s easier just to recognize the hard stuff rather than do something about it because that way, I can’t fail. I can’t get more hurt. I can’t lose more.
The Value of Both Stages
Neither stage is more important than the other. We need understanding to know what we're working with. But understanding alone doesn't always create the change we're looking for. Both stages are important in their own right to create the change most clients are looking for.
There are also certain modalities of therapy that don’t work like this. For example, Somatic Experiencing therapy doesn’t require the conscious intellectual understand patterns in order to start healing. Please know this doesn’t apply to all experiences and modalities of therapy.
Questions for reflection:
What stage are you in?
What’s getting in your way of moving through the stages in the way you want to?
What's one thing you understand about yourself but haven't quite figured out how to put into practice?
What would it look like to take one small step toward doing something differently, even if it feels uncomfortable?
