Awareness & Why Talk Therapy Fails

Explore spirituality and awareness on this wisdom podcast. Discover enlightenment and mindfulness through somatic healing with therapist Jess...

In this eye-opening conversation, therapist Jess reveals why talk therapy alone often falls short — and what's actually happening in your brain when you try to "think your way" out of trauma, anxiety, or chronic stress. Drawing on the neuroscience of the brain's three layers (neocortex, midbrain, and brainstem), Jess explains the critical difference between "top-down" and "bottom-up" healing, and why your nervous system must feel safe before any amount of cognitive reframing can stick.

As an empath and highly sensitive person (HSP), Jess brings both clinical expertise and lived experience to her work. She shares why breathwork, yoga, somatic practices, and mindfulness aren't just wellness trends — they're direct conversations with your nervous system in its own language. Whether you've spent years in talk therapy without lasting change, or you're simply curious about the body's role in healing, this episode offers a profound reframe: safety isn't something you think your way into. It's something you feel your way toward.

5 Key Topics:

Why "top-down" talk therapy often fails to create lasting change — and the neuroscience behind it
The brain's three layers (neocortex, midbrain, brainstem) and how each processes experience differently
"Bottom-up" healing: why the nervous system must feel safe before cognitive work can take hold
How breathwork, yoga, and mindfulness speak directly to the nervous system in its own language
Reconsolidating memory through body-based work — creating new experiences so the body responds differently

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[00:00:00] Speaker A: So Jess, you mentioned that clients often come to you when talk therapy alone hasn't been enough. What are people experiencing or seeking that conventional talk therapy might miss? And how does your somatic and energetic work address those gaps? [00:00:18] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, I'm going to geek out a little. This is stuff that I get really excited. I'm really excited about just a little bit about, about our brains first. And that'll give a little, a little prep work into why, why some of the somatic work, why the energetic work and why that's so important. So, you know, our brain, very basic. This is very basic also. I'm not a bit like a brain scientist, but if we look at, in therapy, there's kind of like two camps. One is top down and one is bottom up. And so when we look at the human brain, right, we as humans have this neocortex. It is the uppermost part. It is the layer of the brain around. It's why we can like think thoughts and tell stories and rationalize and philosophize. And then we have the midbrain, which is like our emotion. It is our ability to like vocalize like dogs. You know, we have a midbrain is sort of that like action reaction type part of the system. And then we get into the, the lower the brainstem and we're looking at things like survival, fight flight. We're looking at the regul of our heart rate, our breath, things that we don't have to think about all the time. And so traditional western psychology starts from this top down. You know, we look at, you know, people would be like, oh, they're having weird thoughts or they're having this, or this is going on. And so we're going to start from their thoughts, we're going to start from this. And then so a lot of original therapies come out of talk therapy. Come out of if we can think about the things different, if we can talk about it, if we can tell a different story, cbt, cognitive behavioral therapy comes out of this top down. I actually love some of those schools of thought and I do use some top down. But I'm primarily a bottom up because the bottom up starts to look at, oh gosh, we're in fight flight. This person doesn't feel safe. We need to help them regulate that process. Because you can tell a person till they're blue in the face. You're safe right now, you're safe, you're safe. And if their nervous system does not feel safe, there's no amount of telling them that they're safe, that's going to make them believe that. And then it can actually become really right. It can actually do the opposite. It can actually cause more damage. And so, you know, in the last, I mean for many years there have been these practitioners that have done real body based work. But of course in the western sphere and research in the last 10 years it's really hit the scene, right? So like breath work and yoga and meditative and mindfulness has these amazing impacts on our nervous system, on our, our capacity to be able to speak to the nervous system in its language and start to bring it into some resilience and bring it into some regulation which we'll talk about here in a little bit. And it's in that space. Space. Then we can start to look at our thoughts differently. We can start to question, we can go back into how memories felt in our body and sort of, we call it reconsolidating memory. We can go back and have a different experience so that our nervous system has a different response now. And there can be actual change and healing and resilience that happens. And so I think that there are a lot more therapists that are starting to weave in some of these practices. You know, emdr, ifs somatic based breath work, mindfulness based stress relief. There's a lot that is kind of coming into play with some of that. And for me I very strongly, again because I'm empathy and hsp, highly sensitive person, my physical body experiences a lot. I somatically sort of sense the world. I feel my emotions strongly. That fight, flight response can be really strong. And so a lot of people I work with tend to have some similar veins and doing that work and creating that foundation is going is a very, very different experience from. We're just gonna like think our way out of something and that might work for a little bit, but it doesn't stick. And it also doesn't honor the person's experience and life.

Awareness & Why Talk Therapy Fails | Jess Ryan

Show Notes

Episode Transcript

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