Why You Don’t Need Therapy
- Mar 6
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 9
Jayden Aubryn is an innovative healer who has quickly become an expert in their field. As the founder of TISE Consulting and Therapy and co-founder of Chaotic Healing, they specialize in making healing accessible and fun.
Feeling sad or overwhelmed doesn’t always mean you need therapy. While many seek therapy to feel better, it can initially make you feel worse. Read on to learn when therapy is the right choice for you and when to explore other healing options.
What makes therapy special?
The scope of psychotherapy is vast, with many techniques and methods. What makes the therapy field unique from other professions, though, is the exploration of subconscious thoughts, unidentified core beliefs and feelings, and childhood experiences. Therapists are trained to make the unknown known and to help clients integrate their personal discoveries into their daily lives.
This is notably different than most helping professions: a doctor may run tests on your physical body, but they do not lead you through self-discovery. A dietician may help you understand your feelings around food so you can follow a meal plan, but they do not process the trauma that caused the feelings in the first place. A coach can help you reach future goals, but they do not treat symptoms related to suppressed emotions.
When is therapy right for you?
Therapy is amazing with many benefits, but there is one key thing you need to truly reap the benefits: commitment.
Whether you want to reduce symptoms, improve your relationships, or prevent burnout in the future, therapy is an amazing option if you’re willing to make a commitment to understanding your inner workings and experience. What does this commitment entail? Time, finances, emotional labor, and mental energy.
Simply put, exploring your childhood memories and unconscious beliefs requires a lot of capacity. Not only does each individual therapy session require significant energy, but it can also make your daily life more difficult in the short term.
Have you ever learned a new word, and then suddenly see that word everywhere you go? Therapy does something similar with feelings and thought patterns.
Once you learn to recognize anger, for example, you’ll notice that many things in your day cause you to be angry. Now, you must spend energy every day feeling angry and regulating your emotions. Or therapy may help you realize that you often criticize yourself. Once you can recognize the critical voice, you must practice being kinder to yourself throughout the day.
If you’re ready to do that deep dive into yourself, therapy is almost certainly right for you!
When therapy goes wrong
Emotional growth requires energy. Without the necessary energy, doing deep emotional work can lead to emotional injury.
Imagine you wanted to train for a triathlon. If you only have 30 minutes a day to train, and you’re often exhausted or undernourished during those 30 minutes, training for a triathlon could be very dangerous. Your body simply doesn’t have the capacity to train at that intensity. It would be much safer to train for something less intense, like a 5K, while you build your capacity to train at higher intensities.
This applies when you want to go to the “mental health gym” as well. If you’re already undernourished, sleep-deprived, irritable, and frequently sick, doing deep emotional work or trauma processing can drain you to the point of illness and injury.
Additionally, trauma processing requires a sense of safety. If you don’t feel safe, your body will utilize its survival responses of fight, flight, and freeze. Instead of releasing stored trauma, you strengthen the trauma response in your body instead.
Consider someone who just survived a natural disaster. Immediately after a disaster, we don’t ask people to process their feelings about a situation. The first thing you do in any crisis protocol is establish safety and stabilize. This is also true when experiencing an emotional or mental disaster.
Unfortunately, in today’s political climate, many people are experiencing internal disasters. People of all beliefs and ideologies are feeling increasingly unsafe in their homes, workplaces, social media, and communities.
Establishing safety and building your capacity for deep emotional work is essential to not causing emotional harm. This includes hydrating, eating, sleeping, regulating your nervous system, and developing effective coping strategies. In trauma treatment, this is called Phase One. However, therapy is not the only place where you can develop these skills.
Other forms of healing
Preparatory work for deep emotional processing can often be done outside of a clinical setting. Join a local dance class to get more in touch with your body and meet new people. Join a choir or band to improve breathwork and your ability to express yourself. Schedule a weekly dinner with your friend to improve your nutrition and strengthen your social support. Dress up and take yourself on a date to practice confidence and explore new things. Even listening to podcasts or reading self-help books may be a good place to start.
Of course, there are also professional supports that can be helpful. Massage or acupuncture appointments can help you find relaxation. Getting fitted for a mouth guard at the dentist can help you sleep at night. Primary care physicians can check your bloodwork for any vitamin deficiencies or hormonal imbalances. Strengthening your body will strengthen your ability for deep emotional work.
Three reasons this is important
Not everyone has access to therapy. Barriers can include finances, location, ability to take time off work, specialists without availability, and poor therapeutic fit with the therapists in your area. That doesn’t mean they can’t access healing, though.
Informed consent means knowing all your options. If you want to get in touch with your body and emotions, you may consider somatic therapy, mindfulness practices, a gym membership or fitness classes, cold plunges, massage, BDSM, the list goes on. To decide what’s best for you, it’s important to know your options.
It’s not your fault if therapy doesn’t work. It’s easy to blame ourselves when we try therapy but don’t see any improvement. However, there are many reasons this could be, from not being a good fit with the therapist to not having the capacity for therapeutic work. Either way, if therapy isn’t working, there are other options.
What to do next?
You want to heal, but maybe therapy isn’t what you need right now. How do you choose among the many healing options available? Start by considering a Holistic Life Audit, which helps you focus on your current needs outside or alongside therapy.
A Holistic Life Audit looks at your daily life, identifies your goals, and helps you make small, meaningful changes over three to nine months. It focuses on sleep, nutrition, movement, breath, relationship to self, social life, sexual wellbeing, spiritual health, and whatever else is meaningful to you.
A Holistic Life Audit is highly personalized to accommodate your individual circumstances. Whether you’re a disabled spoonie in chronic pain, a new parent trying to care for yourself and your child, or a successful professional grappling with age-related changes, you deserve support in feeling good and confident in your body.
Read more from Jayden Aubry
Jayden Aubryn, Psychotherapist and Consultant
Jayden Aubryn is an accomplished psychotherapist, personal trainer, and consultant with two professional licenses and eight active certifications. As a lifelong dancer, artist, and healer, they believe in utilizing the healing powers of movement, food, music, art, and BDSM. Traditional therapy and medicine are not accessible or effective for everyone. Jayden's mission is to empower people with the knowledge they need to make their healing journey successful and fun.
