The Therapy Technique That Sounds Weird But Works: Slowing Everything Down

A moment of connection: embracing the simplicity and serenity of slowing down.

In a typical fifty-minute therapy session, you might expect to cover a lot of ground. Maybe you'll talk through the fight you had with your partner last week, process your anxiety about an upcoming work deadline, explore that thing your mother said on the phone, and touch on your childhood wounds for good measure. More topics mean more progress, right?

Not necessarily. Sometimes in my sessions, we spend nearly the entire hour with a single sentence. Or we sit in silence for what feels like an eternity while someone notices what's happening in their chest. We might explore one moment, one feeling, one body sensation- and go nowhere else. And paradoxically, this is often when the deepest work happens.

This is one of the core principles of Hakomi and other somatic therapies: the profound power of slowing down.

Why Therapy Needs to Move Slowly

We live in a culture that values speed, efficiency, productivity. Even in therapy, there's often an implicit pressure to make progress quickly, to solve problems, to feel better faster. Insurance companies certainly want you in and out as efficiently as possible. But emotional healing doesn't work on the same timeline as fixing a broken faucet or completing a project at work.

The experiences that shape us most deeply - trauma, attachment wounds, core beliefs about ourselves - don't live in our conscious, verbal mind. They live in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in parts of our brain that don't process words and logic. You can't think your way out of these patterns. You can't rush them. They need to be felt, witnessed, and metabolized at their own pace.

When we slow down in therapy, we create space for what's actually present to emerge. We stop skimming the surface of multiple topics and instead drop below the narrative into the embodied experience underneath. This is where real transformation happens - not in the explaining but in the experiencing.

What Slowing Down Actually Looks Like

Here's what this might look like in practice. A client comes in and starts telling me about a difficult week. As she's talking, I notice her shoulders tense up and her voice gets slightly higher when she mentions a text message from her mother. I might gently interrupt: "Can we pause here for just a moment? I noticed something shift when you mentioned that text. What's happening in your body right now?"

She might initially want to keep talking, to explain what the text said, to give me the context I need to understand. But I ask her to stay with the felt sense instead. "Just notice what's happening in your shoulders right now. What's there?"

This is uncomfortable for many people at first. We're trained to move quickly, to explain, to make sense of things with our minds. Sitting with a wordless sensation in your body feels inefficient, awkward, maybe even pointless. But if she can stay with it - if we can slow down enough for her to actually inhabit that tension in her shoulders - something deeper emerges. Maybe she realizes she's bracing. Maybe she feels young. Maybe she contacts the part of her that never knows what to expect from her mother, that's always waiting for criticism.

That's the moment therapy shifts from talking about her relationship with her mother to actually feeling the lived experience of being her mother's daughter. And that feeling - that embodied knowing - is what allows change to happen.

The Discomfort of Slowness

I'll be honest: this approach challenges my own parts too. I have parts that want to be a good therapist, which often translates to being helpful, efficient, and productive. When we're sitting in silence while a client tracks a sensation in their belly, those parts get nervous. Are we wasting time? Should I be doing something? Is the client bored? Frustrated? Thinking I'm incompetent?

But I've learned that those are my parts, not the client's reality. Most people, when given permission to actually slow down and feel what they're feeling, experience relief. They've been moving fast their whole lives. They've been explaining, managing, performing. The invitation to just be with what is - without having to fix it or understand it or move past it - can be deeply nourishing.

That said, slowness is hard for many people. If you're neurodivergent with ADHD, sitting still and tracking subtle sensations might feel nearly impossible. If you have a trauma history where freeze or shutdown was a survival response, slowing down might trigger that familiar sense of being trapped or helpless. If you grew up in a chaotic environment where hypervigilance kept you safe, the absence of urgency might feel dangerous.

This is why skilled pacing matters. A good therapist knows when to slow down and when to speed up, when to stay with a feeling and when to come back out, when depth is helpful and when it's overwhelming. Slowing down isn't always the answer, but it's an essential tool that many of us - therapists included - underutilize because it feels counterintuitive.

Sixty Seconds of Staying Versus Sixty Minutes of Talking

I often tell clients that sixty seconds of truly staying with an embodied experience can do more than sixty minutes of talking about it. That's not an exaggeration. When you can actually be present with the raw feeling underneath the story - the fear, the grief, the shame, the longing - your nervous system gets new information. It experiences something different than it's experienced before.

Let's say you're working on a belief that you're not enough. You can spend months analyzing where that belief came from, how it shows up in your relationships, what it costs you. That's valuable insight. But if you can spend sixty seconds actually feeling the young part of you who internalized that message - really inhabiting that experience with presence and compassion - something shifts in a way that all the analyzing never quite achieves.

This is the difference between understanding your wounds and healing them. Understanding happens in your thinking brain. Healing happens in your body, in your nervous system, in the actual felt experience of being met with care and presence.

The Paradox of Progress

Here's the paradox: slowing down often leads to faster progress in the long run. Clients who learn to drop beneath the narrative and stay with their experience tend to move through their stuck places more efficiently than clients who spend years analyzing everything from the head level.

Why? Because they're working with the parts of themselves that are actually driving their patterns. They're not just understanding their defenses intellectually - they're meeting them, feeling them, and creating the conditions for those defenses to soften. They're not just knowing about their pain—they're being with it in a way that allows it to metabolize and transform.

I had a supervisor once say that therapy should feel like "productive discomfort." Not so overwhelming that you shut down, but not so comfortable that nothing's actually happening. Slowing down creates that productive discomfort. It asks you to be present with what is, even when what is isn't pleasant. It invites you into an intimacy with your own experience that our fast-paced world rarely allows.

What This Means for You

If you're considering therapy or already in it, here's what I want you to know: you don't have to cover everything in every session. You don't have to perform or produce or make sure your therapist knows all the details. Sometimes the most powerful work happens when you stop trying to get somewhere and just let yourself be where you are.

If your therapist asks you to pause, to notice what's happening in your body, to sit with a feeling that doesn't have words yet - that's not a waste of time. That's the work. If a session feels slow, if you spend twenty minutes with a single sensation or emotion, if you leave feeling like you didn't "accomplish" much - you probably touched something real. Something that needed exactly that kind of spacious attention.

And if slowing down feels impossible right now, that's okay too. There might be good reasons your system needs to keep moving. A skilled therapist will meet you where you are and help you build the capacity to slow down gradually, at a pace that feels safe enough.

But for many of us, the invitation to slow down is the invitation we've been waiting for. The permission to stop performing, stop producing, stop managing - and just feel. That's where healing lives.

If you're looking for therapy that honors your pace and helps you move from understanding to embodied healing, I'd be honored to work with you. My approach combines Internal Family Systems, art therapy, and Hakomi somatic techniques to create space for genuine transformation. Contact me to learn more.

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