When Therapy Starts Feeling Like Something You Have to Get Right
- Katie Helldoerfer
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
You show up prepared. You've thought about what you want to say. You explain things clearly, maybe even insightfully. You're doing therapy "well."
And somehow, that's part of the problem.
If you're looking for trauma therapy in Columbus, Ohio, and you already feel pressure to succeed at healing, you're not alone. I see this pattern constantly with capable, high-functioning adults. The same skills that helped you survive difficult things - managing yourself, reading situations, staying composed - can actually get in the way once you're in the therapy room.
When Competence Becomes the Problem
Here's what often happens: You understand your patterns. You can articulate your attachment style, describe your family dynamics, and connect the dots between past and present. You're intellectually clear about why you respond the way you do.
And yet.
Your body still tightens during conflict. You still go numb when stress hits. The understanding doesn't translate into actual change in how your nervous system responds.
This is where somatic trauma therapy works differently than traditional talk therapy. In approaches like Hakomi therapy and Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), we're not trying to help you understand yourself better. We're paying attention to what's happening in your body right now, and creating space to allow your nervous system to be exactly where it is at
.
The Speed Problem
Sometimes therapy moves too fast for the body to trust it.
There's often this assumption that once you have rapport with a therapist, you're ready to dig into the hard stuff. But watch what actually happens in those moments. You might get more articulate, not less. You describe everything perfectly while feeling almost nothing. Or you leave sessions exhausted in a way that doesn't quite make sense. Maybe you feel slightly distant from what you're talking about, like you're narrating someone else's story.
That gets labeled as resistance a lot.
It usually isn't resistance. It's your nervous system regulating how much exposure it can handle.
What Somatic Trauma Therapy Actually Does
In trauma-focused somatic therapy - especially Deep Brain Reorienting - those early, subtle shifts matter more than big emotional releases.
We're tracking what happens in your body just before fight-or-flight kicks in. That orienting response - the split second where your system tries to assess threat and figure out what to do - often got interrupted during traumatic experiences. If we blow past that moment too quickly in therapy, the deeper pattern stays locked in place. If we stay with it carefully, your nervous system gets a chance to complete something that got stuck.
There's a principle in this work: change happens when conditions allow it, not when we force it.
When something overwhelming happened - whether it was a single incident or years of chronic stress - your body adapted. Those adaptations aren't mistakes. They made sense given what you were dealing with. They stay in place until your system feels safe enough to let them go.
Hakomi therapy works with this by slowing everything down. We pay attention to breath, muscle tension, small impulses to move or freeze. The shifts can be really quiet. Deep Brain Reorienting goes even more micro, working at the brainstem level to follow activation and settling in a very structured way. The work can feel almost boring while something substantial reorganizes underneath.
High-Functioning Doesn't Mean Settled
A lot of people seeking trauma therapy in Columbus aren't visibly falling apart. You're functioning well - maybe you're a professional, a parent, a therapist yourself. From the outside, everything looks stable.
Inside, your nervous system is partially braced. Always.
That ongoing activation becomes so familiar you might not even notice it anymore. But it's there, using energy, keeping you slightly on edge in ways that feel normal because they've been there so long.
When therapy starts feeling like another place you need to perform, that tells me your nervous system doesn't fully experience the room as safe yet. And that means pacing becomes central. Not because we're avoiding depth, but because depth that arrives too fast doesn't actually integrate. It just retraumatizes.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Somatic trauma therapy asks for less effort and more noticing.
We work with how your body organizes itself moment by moment. We track what happens when you start talking about something difficult - does your breathing change? Do your shoulders go up? Does your gaze shift? Those responses aren't problems to fix. They're information about what your system needs.
Regulation deepens gradually. As it does, old trauma patterns lose some of their grip without you having to force anything. The body reorganizes when it feels safe enough to do so, not when it's been convinced it should.
If You're Tired of Trying to Heal Correctly
If you're in Columbus looking for trauma therapy and you feel exhausted by the pressure to do it right, it might be worth asking: Is my nervous system being pushed to move faster than it wants to?
Healing isn't about willpower or insight or emotional breakthroughs on command. It's about creating conditions where your body feels safe enough to let go of protective patterns it's been holding for years.
At Lacuna Counseling in Columbus, I work with adults using somatic therapy, Hakomi, and Deep Brain Reorienting. The focus is nervous system regulation, not performance. Not dramatic catharsis. Not proving you're working hard enough.
You don't have to get therapy right.
You don't have to speed up your healing.
Sometimes the most important thing we do is slow down enough that your body can actually register safety - and reorganize from there.
About:
Katie is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC-S) and board-certified art therapist (ATR-BC) at Lacuna Counseling in Columbus, Ohio. She specializes in somatic trauma therapy, Hakomi therapy, and Deep Brain Reorienting for adults whose nervous systems are still braced from past experiences - even when everything looks fine on the surface.
Related topics: trauma therapy Columbus Ohio, somatic therapy Columbus, Hakomi therapy, Deep Brain Reorienting, nervous system healing, trauma therapy for high functioning adults, somatic experiencing, body-based trauma therapy, trauma therapy Worthington Ohio, Columbus trauma therapist, healing without retraumatizing, nervous system regulation, trauma therapy that doesn't feel like work
