Unpopular Opinion: Just Changing Our ‘Thinking’ Will Never Give Us The Lasting Healing We’re Searching For

In our self-made world that prizes independence and a ‘can-do’ attitude, where many believe that changing your thoughts and beliefs are the key to unlocking wellbeing and freedom, I’m probably going to ruffle some feathers with this statement.

But as an experienced trauma therapist, birth worker, researcher and educator, I stand behind it. 

The reason for this is that many of our illnesses, thought patterns, even mental states, are driven by unconscious and automatic perceptions within our bodies, not in our minds.

This isn’t to say that examining our thought habits has no value; in a world where we have been trained to disconnect from our bodies and bodily sensations, these thought patterns give us much-needed clues about where our nervous system is at. 

But, as Deb Dana is often quoted, ‘story follows state’. By this she means, the underlying state of our nervous system drives our thinking and the meanings we make, not the other way around. The story we tell ourselves over and over, through thought, behaviour and emotion, is rooted in biology. It begins in the body.

In my work, I used to focus a lot on thinking patterns, beliefs, fears, emotions and stories. Because they are important clues, this work would help lots of people, and for a little while they felt better. But inevitably, old patterns would re-emerge and I noticed many people, including myself, having to work so very hard to maintain these gains. I started noticing this included sticking to healing protocols – initial gains would be made, then there’d be a day now and then where the exercises, tablets, or tools prescribed for healing would slip, and it was downhill from there. 

I can’t help but ask questions. It’s a fundamental part of my make up. And through this questioning, I discovered that unresolved stress and trauma were at the heart of many of these challenges. 

You see, when our bodies meet stress – no matter whether it’s real or perceived, truly life-threatening or just inconvenient – we launch survival responses to address that stress. These survival responses have a clear trajectory; an evolutionary pattern that goes up, defeats or escapes the stressor, then comes down again so that we can re-engage with life and return to a baseline of healing, connection and vitality. 

But in our modern day lives, very often this process is interrupted. From being made to get back on the bike before our little toddler nervous systems had properly processed the fall, to being told to stop crying as a child or we’d be given something real to cry about, to having to pause our own settling after a difficult event to manage the people around us, to the constant ‘ping’ of notifications stimulating us into a never-ending cycle of to-do. And let’s not even enter the enormity of the pandemic…

As harmless as these interruptions may first appear, the effect of preventing the body from resolving the stress and ‘keeping on’ means that, within the invisible threat detection systems inside our bodies, our nervous systems keep detecting danger. And when we are in a constant state of ‘danger, no amount of positive thinking, affirmations, regular appointments or daily mantra is going to down-regulate our nervous systems to a place where we can relax in the flexible and dynamic vibrancy that is our birth-right. 

We can spend so much time, effort and money reaching for wellness, wondering what is ‘wrong’ with us that we aren’t seeing the gains we want, when sometimes all that is actually needed is to resolve the stress or trauma driving it in the first place. 

This is why changing our thinking only takes us so far. The true magic lies within our bodies, within our nervous systems. (If this piques your interest, you might like to check out some books on this like “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel van der Kolk, “Waking the Tiger” by Peter Levine or “Call of the Wild” by Kimberly Ann Johnson.)

As an integrative counsellor, I combine my traditional counselling and spiritual modalities with cutting-edge somatic trauma healing to offer you a unique and individualised approach to wellness and wholeness. We work together to resolve traumas from the body (somatic) first, widen your tolerance for challenges, and re-train your nervous system to find on-going health and healing. It’s an honour to offer modalities such as Somatic Experiencing (there are only five of us in Canberra!) to support you to be able to live your best life without having to work so hard. 

Anna is available for in-person and Telehealth appointments, you can learn more about her and book online here