A lot of people walk into my office already bracing for the shovel. They've decided therapy means digging up their childhood, and they want to get it over with.
Sometimes we do dig, just usually not right away.
I've started explaining it as archaeology and gardening. You'll probably need some of both. Which one you need right now is something we figure out together, and usually not in the first session.
Archaeology
This is the work of going underneath. Say your reaction is way too big for what just happened, or your body does something before you've even decided anything. Archaeology is asking where that came from.
What surprised me about real archaeology is how slow it is. Nobody shows up with a bulldozer. You get a trowel, a brush, and a square of dirt about three feet across, and you might spend days on it, because if you dig too fast you wreck the thing you came to find.
Trauma work is like that.
In Somatic Experiencing we call it titration, which is a fancy word for small doses. You get close to the hard thing, a little, and then you come back. Maybe a little closer next time. Your body gets to finish something it couldn't finish back then, at a speed it can actually tolerate.
Here's what that looks like in my office. A lot of people sit down for a first session already worked up, and the whole story starts pouring out. Honestly, it feels like one breath.
So I slow us down. I might ask her to notice her breathing, or feel the couch holding her up, and then we just pause. I tell her I don't need all the information yet. I do want to hear all of it. But spilling everything at once, to someone she met ten minutes ago, could actually be more traumatizing. If she really wants me to have some context, I'll ask for a headline.
You can see it land, usually in the body first. Her shoulders drop and her breath gets longer, and sometimes her voice softens before she even notices. She gets to set the story down a little, and she finds out nobody's going to rush her.
That's what I mean by the brush. So if the fear of having to dig everything up is what's kept you out of therapy, I get it. You won't get handed a shovel on day one.
Gardening
Then there's the stuff that's growing right now, like how you talk to yourself after a bad meeting, or whether you can say no to your sister without three days of guilt afterward.
Nothing in a garden changes because of one big Saturday. You water it and pull a weed. Then Tuesday you're back out there doing it again. It's kind of boring, and it works.
So I give people small things to practice between sessions. One I use a lot is Kristin Neff's Self-Compassion Break. It takes about five minutes, at the end of the day or whenever someone can grab the time.
I also teach glimmers. I ask clients to write down three small moments of joy from their day, and to use their senses if they can. For me it might be getting into bed with fresh, clean sheets, that first second when you just fall in. Or a whiff of something good when I walk into a room. Like any practice, it's the repetition that does it. You're building an emotional muscle.
And then one week someone comes in and tells me something shifted. An old trigger showed up, and this time she noticed it in her body first. She could name the part that was getting triggered and kind of talk to it. It's a very small change and also a big one, and clients tell me there's some freedom in it.
Boundaries grow the same way. The more you use your voice, the easier it gets to use it.
There's no cathartic breakthrough over a tomato plant. Sometimes that's exactly the work, though. Nothing needs to be dug up at all.
Usually it's the same yard
This is the part I like. The garden and the dig site are usually the same piece of land.
Someone comes in for something right-now, like work anxiety or the same fight with her husband on repeat. We start tending. Then there's one patch where nothing will grow, no matter what we plant. That's usually when I start wondering what's under there.
It goes the other way too. Digging is exhausting, and you don't have to carry all of it home with you.
One thing I teach a lot is containment. You imagine a container, whatever shape you want, put the feelings and the energy inside, and close it, with a promise that you'll come back to it, in session or in your journal.
People sometimes worry that's avoiding. It's not, because you're acknowledging it's there and you're making it a promise. After a stretch of digging, a lot of people need that kind of break, to sleep or get back into a routine for a while. You need something in the tank before the next layer.
I can't always tell you ahead of time which season you're in. A lot of the time we find out by trying.
Which one are you in right now?
There's no quiz for this. A few things tend to point one way or the other, though.
It might be a digging season if your reactions keep surprising you with how big they are, or if the same pattern follows you from job to job and relationship to relationship. Or your body tightens up around certain memories, even ones you were sure you'd made peace with.
Gardening's more likely if you already know where your stuff comes from and you're still living it out anyway, which is really common. It can also just be that you came through something hard and need to rebuild.
If you read both and thought, well, both, that's most people. Maybe that's the answer.
You don’t have to figure this out first
You can show up without knowing which kind you need. Sorting that out is part of the work.
At Simply Being we use Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP). They give us careful ways to go underneath, and they turn out to be just as useful for the everyday tending.
Mostly we follow your lead and adjust as we go.
If you're curious where to start, reach out and we can talk it through.