Claiming Each Other is Therapy Prevention!
As someone who works in the therapeutic field, I’m well aware that despite all the great reasons to go to therapy, there are plenty of really good reasons to not want to go to therapy. Here are four of my favorites:
Reason #1 to not want to go to therapy
It can be expensive. A cost that is determined by many factors like insurance coverage, therapist qualifications, local economies, etc. And how long will you be in therapy? How many sessions will be required to meet your goals? Averages range wildly from 10-to more than 50. Multiply that by the average cost of hourly sessions and therapy can start to seem like something of an indulgence.
Here are some average costs per 1-hour session
Portugal: €50-€100 (€500-€5,000 for 10-50 sessions)
US: $100-300 (€1,000-€15,000 for 10-50 sessions)
UK: £40 - £150 (£400-£7,500 for 10-50 sessions)
Canada: $60-$250 ($600-$12,500 for 10-50 sessions)
EU: €100-€200 (€1,000-€10,000 for 10-50 sessions)
Reason #2 to not want to go to therapy
It’s not often very pleasant, fun or convenient.
Let’s be real. Therapy can suck. It’s not most people’s idea of a great time to dig into our shadows, into all the ways we self-sabotage and into how we contribute if not largely create the struggles we experience. It can be deeply unpleasant to face ourselves, the toxic accumulation of our past, our traumas, the reality of the mess we find ourselves in and the reality of how we actually feel about it all (angry, resentful, depressed, lost, betrayed, etc).
It can also be deeply unpleasant, scary, inconvenient and intimidating on another level to face this stuff together, in the context of couples, group or family therapies. Many people can be ‘stuck’ in this phase of therapy for a long time and never get to the ‘solve’ they want which may depend on their capacity or willingness to face all this stuff to begin with. It may also depend on the skillfulness of the therapist you find yourself with.
Reason #3 to not want to go to therapy
It's hard work.
Once you’ve done the deeply unpleasant tasks of facing your reality, triaging the situation and coming into some clarity about what you really need and want, you are now faced with the monumental if not seemingly impossible task of changing your life, your bodymind, your beliefs and/or your own situation. Some might call this ‘healing’, and there are many traps and tricks along the way. Why should you have to do all these things when it’s really the responsibility of the people who have hurt you to change their minds, to make amends, to level up?! Childhood trauma is not your fault! Ditto covid, war, your sister’s politics, your friend’s overwhelm, your partner’s shutdown, your mom’s and dad’s unprocessed trauma! You’re fine!! If only these other people would handle their own shit, it wouldn’t affect you so negatively!
Be that as it may, deep down we remember that maybe we can’t or shouldn't force change on anyone. That change under threat, coercion or manipulation doesn’t create real trust, healing or relational resiliency. Perhaps it just creates more problems. So then we have to keep looping back around to our own response-ability. Old-habits die hard, they say. Especially ones we adopted to survive. It's not always easy to grow, learn, take responsibility and change. It's understandable why many people avoid doing it.
Reason #4 to not want to go to therapy
There’s some compelling evidence that ‘therapy doesn’t work’.
There are so many different kinds of therapy and just as many, if not more reasons why it might not work for people or be the right thing at the right time. Cognitive based models have been seriously questioned for people with trauma and there are some interesting considerations for why various therapies seem to be more unappealing or less accessible for men vs women. Furthermore, given the demographics of academia, training programs and the respective fields of medicine and mental health for the last 100 years, therapists are under-educated, mis-educated and under-equipped to serve the gloriously diverse demographic of humans given their own hugely homogeneous pool.
From reclaimed indigenous knowledge of the primacy of the mindbody connection to the importance of community and connection to spirit, many therapists altogether miss or underestimate the impacts of living in a dissected, disconnected and spiritless world. Many also underappreciated the complexity of embodied experiences related to gender, race, culture, sexuality, physical ability, neurodivergence or other ‘marginalized’ facets of the human experience. Mis-handling these very important aspects of a person’s reality can do more harm than good.
It’s easy then to question the efficacy of many therapeutic approaches or interventions whendespite the rise in people attending therapy, chronic issues like anxiety, depression, loneliness and their related psychosomatic and social manifestations continue to rise as well.
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With this very compelling list, it's easy to understand why some people might feel resistance or flat out refuse to go to therapy. You might have a host of unnamed reasons of your own which are well beyond these. And yet… in increasing numbers, many of us find ourselves in therapy at least once in our lives.
So can Claiming Each Other really keep us out of therapy?? Is CEO really therapy prevention?? Maybe…. Maybe not. More precisely perhaps than ‘CEO is therapy prevention’, is ‘CEO is harm prevention’... And harm prevention can certainly be therapy prevention! At the very least, CEO might just lessen the severity and duration of a therapeutic process by not compounding recent, more preventable hurts on top of older, unhealed wounds.
For example, a mundane disagreement between friends, lovers or family members may unknowingly irritate or rip open a years old, unhealed wound from the past. A simple opinion or perspective shared by someone we know may trigger our deepest fears of safety and belonging. Feedback or critique from a spouse may trigger childhood wounds and everyday annoyances may trigger a deep down rage from some existential relational, social or ecological injustice. When these things happen, it's all too easy to judge ourselves and each other for being too dramatic, too sensitive, too intense, too emotional or otherwise unreasonable. And when we don’t catch what's actually happening, and don’t pause to make a simple repair, we might find ourselves bleeding on two fronts… our now opened wounds from the past and the fresher wounds inflicted in the present.
If left untreated, wounds can start to really inter-affect each other and it can be very difficult to discern exactly where to start in a healing process. Do we go for the root cause (if we even know what it is) or attend to the flesh wounds first? Symptoms scream for attention while deep down, we can sometimes sense that treating them is like trying to treat a hemorrhage with a bandage. Discerning how to approach healing can be made more complicated when dealing with trauma that is precognitive, systemic and ancestral…. Especially when many in the modern ‘western world’ do not have language or frameworks for those types of wounds… or even belief that they are real.
Enter Claiming Each Other’s model of Somatic First-Aid for Everyday Relationships. With a sound somatic relational practice, we can come to know ourselves and each other on many levels and then practice caring for ourselves and each other accordingly. CEO is not technically therapy, but it does have the potential to be deeply therapeutic when practiced skillfully for both relational ‘flesh wounds’ and deeper, ‘root cause’ woundedness. When so much hurt is accompanied by feelings of disconnection, aloneness, and being uncared for, Claiming Each Other is an immediate corrective response which can establish safety, stop the bleeding, dress the wounds, find more help as needed, unwind stress and build greater relational sanctuary. Thus, Somatic First-Aid is not only effective for preventing and repairing surface level hurts, but can also prevent old wounds from re-opening, giving them a chance to self-heal over time, be it in therapy or in any number of ways life works to restore itself.
Physician and trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Mate famously offered, ‘Safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection’. Where experiences of conflict, distress, trauma and intensity can threaten relationships with a sense of disconnection, Claiming Each Other is a commitment to practicing our interconnectedness with deeper care, skill and respect when these qualities are most urgently needed. No special skills or prerequisites are required to learn and practice Claiming Each Other’s model of Somatic First-Aid. Just a willingness to learn and practice giving and receiving attuned care in the context of your everyday relationships.
Registration is open for the Spring 2025 cohorts. Give yourself and your people this precious gift of more skillful relating. Who knows…investing in your relationships now might just prevent the need for future therapy for yourself or someone you care about. And that might just be worth its weight in gold.
I hope to meet you there and look forward to learning and practicing together.
With love and solidarity,
Lorie