When You’re Too Self Aware For Talk Therapy: How Bottom-Up Therapy Might Be Your Answer

Introduction: When Awareness Stops Helping

So many individuals come into therapy already understanding their trauma and their patterns better than their own therapist. They come in self aware and sometimes even wondering if therapy will work for them: “I’m so self aware, what are they going to do? Tell me what I already know about myself?” And that’s a fair concern. What a waste of time and money it would be to come into a therapy session and just have a therapist reflect back all of what you already know about yourself. But that’s not what therapy is supposed to be… especially not bottom-up therapy.

As a therapist, and before becoming a somatic therapist, I wondered “how the actual f*ck do I help my highly intellectual clients get unstuck?” I noticed that clients that weren’t self aware before became incredibly self aware, which was great progress. I also noticed that clients that became self aware, and clients that were previously self aware, liked coming to therapy for the vibes, but still struggled to intervene on their own patterns. In fact, I found that a lot of clients sort of became a little bit dependent on that weekly session, “I’ll save this for Gaby.” Now I love that clients know that I’m here for them and that I’ll help them walk through any challenge, but I didn’t love that they were- apparently- lacking some skills.

Over time, the more I integrated mindfulness skills in sessions, the more I saw clients successfully interrupt patterns of anxiety, reactivity and defensiveness. It was beautiful work, but I also noticed that clients either wouldn’t cry in therapy or would get flooded by cries. Mindfulness didn’t always seem like enough, while it does count as a bottom-up approach. It was when I started applying somatics, another bottom-up approach to therapy, that I saw things shift in incredibly powerful ways. Suddenly, clients knew how to describe their emotional sensations and knew how to work with their emotional sensations. Suddenly clients didn’t need to think things through or explain things through in order to find regulation and balance. Suddenly clients started pausing in session to slow, quiet, and go inwards without me even prompting them to do so. Suddenly clients came back to session to report on how they connected to emotions in their body and had a dialogue with those emotions. I was shook.

The Hidden Downside of Self-Awareness

When Insight Becomes a Defense

Self awareness is a powerful thing. Self awareness is also a protective mechanism that knows it can keep the system safe from overwhelming feelings by intellectualizing them instead. A self-aware part is one with an agenda: never again do I want to feel that overwhelmed, ashamed, embarrassed or fearful, so I’ll continue to identify, name, and explain how my trauma has affected me and how I react on auto pilot as a result. This self-aware part is so good at reminding a person about where they’ve been and what they’ve gone through, but here’s where that becomes a trap: the self-aware part can also fixate and get stuck on the story, without actual movement towards processing and releasing the stress or trauma.

For example, clients come into therapy all the time and express details about their life stories and traumas but will do it with a smile. Clients will speak of their experiences in a rational, logical, analytical way. In fact, I work with many therapists, and the therapists I work with as clients could probably write their own intake assessments and treatment plans (I’ve literally made this joke with highly intellectual clients, and it lands). But here’s what I see:

highly intellectual and self aware parts that have used understanding as a way to cope with overwhelming emotions underneath it all.

These protective parts aren’t malicious, but they do engage in some emotional bypassing through that self awareness. It’s the difference between insight and healing: insight does not equal healing.

The Comfort of the “Analytical Part”

In IFS, we refer to the “system” as your internal makeup of parts; we all have protective parts (managing and firefighting) as well as exiled parts. These parts are all pieces of our personalities: aspects of ourselves that have adapted over time to our experiences and stressors.

Many highly sensitive people with anxiety develop a protective, “analytical part,” and this part is often in its role to “make sense of things” that feel emotionally overwhelming to the system. If you’re someone that tends to intellectualize your feelings instead of actually feeling your feelings, you might be operating from an analytical or intellectualizing part.

The analytical part might spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about situations. It might even spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about feelings; but this protective part typically works to help the system avoid having to feel to feelings. While this part is really good at intellectualizing for you, it’s not always really great at providing space for messy emotions to be felt, processed and released.

This protective managing analytical part, according to IFS, is not bad; this part serves a purpose and we want to help you unblend from it so that you can show up for the part, not as the part, and so that you can re-assign the part a new, updated role that better serves the system.

… an updated role that doesn’t get in the way of you processing and releasing emotion.

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: How the Healing Actually Happens

What “Top-Down Therapy” Means

Let’s talk about the difference between “top-down” therapy or top-down healing and “bottom-up” therapy and healing. The difference lies in which brain region we tend to primarily with the intervention and which brain region is meant to be tended to secondarily. In a top-down therapy approach, a therapist helps a client by tending to operations in the upper region of the brain, in the frontal cortex (responsible for executive functioning skills: planning, organizing, communicating, problem solving). By making changes to those operations, things begin to shift in how the client experiences the lower region of the brain: responsible for sensory and emotional processing.

But here’s where things get tricky with a top-down approach… trauma changes the brainand damages connections between the upper and lower regions of the brain. The info that’s meant to pass from the rational thinking brain down to the emotional brain doesn’t make it all the way, and isn’t absorbed.

The person with trauma, or the person with an over-active limbic system, will still have automatic fight or flight reactions in stressful situations, despite the discoveries they make in top-down therapy.

This is why people in talk therapy sometimes feel like they’re facing two major problems:

1) They’re too self aware for therapy; it feels like their therapist is just telling them what they already know about themselves

2) Talk therapy doesn’t help clients with trauma ground, regulate and find emotional balance real-time when triggered, they keep automatically reacting from the dysregualted nervous system

When talk therapy feels like it isn’t doing enough for you, because you’re either too self aware or because your nervous system still becomes reactive in-the-moment, bottom-up therapy is probably what you need.

The “Bottom-Up” Difference

Bottom-up therapy or bottom-up processing is all about how we work with the body’s sensations, tend to emotions as they arise physically, and how we work with the messages that come directly from those emotional sensations in the body.

“Somatic” means “of the body” and so somatic therapy is essentially mental health treatment that prioritizes processing emotions and traumas through the body. There are different types of somatic therapies, including somatic experiencing, EMDR, sensorimotor, and IFS when integrating somatic interventions.

“Bottom-up” therapy uses interventions that make changes to the limbic system first and foremost. Bottom-up therapy addresses the nervous system, sensations and emotions first and then that information travels up to the frontal cortex to be integrated in the rational thinking brain.

Somatic therapies are bottom-up approaches to therapy because their interventions focus on making changes in the lower regions of the brain first to make changes in the upper regions of the brain second.

This is key for individuals with trauma, since trauma weakens those connections between upper and lower regions of the brain. Somatic therapies help rebuild those connection andhelps cultivate safety in the body so that we can think more clearly in the mind.

Here’s the thing about these “bottom-up” approaches to therapy; they help us move through emotion without having to make sense of it, they help us release emotion without feeling overwhelmed by emotion, and they help us start cultivating calm, confidence and clear wisdom from within.

Rather than forcing counter-thoughts that don’t feel authentic, we move through and release emotion first, and then we tap into calm and confident wisdom second. We don’t need rational information to travel from the frontal cortex to the limbic system (which is harder to do in a brain healing from trauma).

Instead we get grounded, embodied, centered wisdom from the limbic system up into the frontal cortex.

The Brain Science Behind Bottom-Up Healing

Why Thinking Can’t Heal Trauma Stored in the Body

When a person experiences trauma, the neural connections between the frontal cortex (responsible for rational thinking, problem solving, planning, organization, communication) and the limbic system (responsible for survival responses, sensations and emotions) are weakened. This causes a person to become more chronically dysregulated.

Trauma can also lead a person to go into fight or flight more quickly than a non-traumatized person when triggered. Someone that’s experienced trauma, especially complex trauma, might have their frontal cortex (that rational thinking brain) going off-line during triggering and dysregulating situations, causing them to lash out or shut down; feeling almost entirely unable to control the reaction.

These sometimes uncontrollable, automatic reactions in highly upsetting or triggering situations don’t come from the rational thinking brain and so can’t necessarily be addressed by thoughts from the rational thinking brain.

Rather than tackling these nervous system reactions through the frontal cortex, we tackle them through the limbic system.

How Bottom-Up Therapy Reconnects the Whole Brain

Somatic therapy and parts work (internal family systems informed work) can help us slow down our reactions, connect with our protective and adapted parts and patterns from a place of compassion, gently unwind from those automatic patterns, and softly begin cultivating emotional balance and mental clarity. We focus on shifting how the body experiences itself through breath, visualization, meditation, and micromovement; and when we notice things shift in the body, we almost certainly notice things shifting in the mind too.

Bottom-up therapy helps us softly shift out of the survival response. When we understand that we can’t think our way out of a survival responses, we can focus on learning and practicing how to feel our way out of a survival response.

Why This Matters for Preverbal and Early Trauma

The bottom-up approach to therapy is incredibly important for when we’re working with therapy clients that are healing from preverbal trauma (trauma that occurred before the individual had verbal skills). If a person experiences trauma when they’re a baby and they’re now in therapy processing adaptive patterns that still exist today as a result of that preverbal trauma, top-down talk therapy might just keep the client feeling stuck.

Bottom-up therapy helps clients get into the felt experience so that emotions can be processed and released. Bottom-up, somatic therapy will help a client notice what types of sensations arise in the body when particular topics come up and then might help the client stop talking altogether. Bottom up therapy can help a therapy client process and release without speaking at all.

Working Compassionately with the Intellectual Protector

Meeting the Part, Not Fighting It

Even when we understand the power of somatic work, that intellectual, analytical protective part might still want to pop up in session… a lot. And that’s really okay. It’s important that we don’t shame or judge this protective, managing part and that we consistently make room for it too.

In IFS, we’d actually address this protective part with a lot of respect and patience, rather than trying to push it away for the sake of feeling through everything. Instead, according to IFS (internal family systems therapy), we get to know when this intellectual part first showed up in it’s role. We get to know what this part values, what this part is worried about, or what this part thinks might happen if it were to relinquish it’s role and take a step back.

We want to build trust with the intellectual, analytical protector, we don’t want to fight it. We want it to feel so safe that it’s willing to disarm on it’s own, willing to gently step aside on it’s own, and willing to allow us to do the deeper therapeutic work.

From Thinking to Feeling: The Path Toward Embodied Wholeness

Self awareness is so powerful; understanding your patterns, where they come from and what you need to be doing differently now is absolutely life changing. But self awareness is also not the endpoint… it’s really more of a starting point.

When we understand something intellectually, but we still feel stuck… when we want to see something changing, but we still keep doing the same thing over and over again… when our mind says one thing, but the body still chooses to do another… it’s time to explore bottom-up approaches a little bit more and it’s time to start doing the deeper work.

Closing

If you’re curious about learning bottom-up approaches to managing your own emotions,purchase the HSP’s Guide to Processing Emotion (a 3 step mindfulness based and somatic approach to processing emotion). This guide will help you interrupt cycles of overthinking, intellectualizing and analyzing by helping you 1) label your thoughts, emotions, sensations 2) embody and process emotion 3) release emotion. I laid out cheat sheets to support your mindfulness practice and to help you get to know your somatic experiences on a deeper level. Start deepening your relationship with yourself through this comprehensive guide and discover and more emotionally balanced you.

If you’re looking for somatic therapy in California, consider booking a 20 minute consultation call with me. Let’s explore your needs and goals and let’s determine if I’m the right therapist for you.

Have you taken my FREE QUIZ yet? It’s for highly sensitive people navigating relationship issues. Get to know your defensive patterns so that you can start intervening on them+finding repair in your relationship today. Take the QUIZ here.