5 Reasons Psychoanalysis Can Hinder True Healing

The article you probably don’t want to read.

I say it is the article you don’t want to read because this is the article I wouldn’t have wanted to read when I was in the thralls of my psychoanalysis habit. It would have shattered too much. It would have left me feeling too exposed.

I wouldn’t have wanted to read this article, but I desperately needed to.

However, leaving you feeling this way is not my intention at all. I hope you feel the opposite by the end of this article. I hope you feel more hope.

Let this article be an invitation to embody all of the insights you have in that brilliant head of yours. Let this article help you both remember and embody your inherent worth.

To my past self and to all who read this: May Love slip through the cracks of your robot parts and remind you just how beautifully human and worthy you are.

I’m Swearing Off Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is my best defense against the raw pain inside of me. Not to mention I am the queen of psychoanalysis.

I have psychoanalyzed literally everything since I was 12. And after over a decade of dedicated practice, I’ve become an expert. That is, the insights my psychoanalysis brings me are spot on 9 times out of 10.

So why am I swearing it off? A few important reasons that I’ll get into later in this article. The short answer, though, is in favor of embodiment.

Embodiment was not the hero I wanted, but it was the hero I needed. And after years of resisting embodiment, I’ve finally begun to surrender to her healing power.

One thing I want to make really clear is that this article is not about trying to get you to swear of psychoanalysis, too. Because then I would slip into psychoanalyzing your use of psychoanalysis. You do what you want.

My intention with this article is to shine a light on my own experience of psychoanalysis so you can see yourself in my words and learn from my mistakes so you don’t have to make the same ones.

Here are the five reasons psychoanalysis has been detrimental to my healing process. These are the reasons I am consciously working to give it up.

Psychoanalysis is A Trauma Response

I come from a childhood of narcissistic abuse and emotional incest. There was no tolerance for me to express, feel, or think anything other than what my father wanted me to.

The message was clear: If I wanted to get my needs met, get love, and survive, I had to manipulate myself not only into doing the right thing, but feeling the right thing and thinking the right thing. “Right” was defined by whatever my father praised me for expressing, thinking, and feeling.

As a result, I can hardly remember a time where I wasn’t thinking about what I thought about. This was a means for survival and the beginning of my psychoanalysis habit.

For a very long time, I thought my adept psychoanalysis pointed to my maturity. Which, I suppose it did. But there was an even larger finger pointing to my survival instinct not to get too close to my actual thoughts or feelings, much less the actual thoughts or feelings of others.

At its roots, psychoanalysis served only one purpose: To keep a protective layer between me and myself and me and other people.

The problem with this is that all I am ever really craving are meaningful connections with myself and others. On my deathbed, it will become quite clear that what has always mattered most in life is my relationships.

If I stay committed to my psychoanalysis habit, I will miss out on truly connecting with myself and others. It is time that I step out of survival mode, stop hiding behind the insights of psychoanalysis, and start actually connecting with myself and others.

More on how to do this in this article.

Psychoanalysis is a Way To Talk Myself Out of What’s Alive In Me

After a childhood of being gaslight, of course I learned to gaslight myself. I genuinely believed I was bad if I expressed, felt, or thought anything that would upset my father. So in order to save myself from experience the extreme pain that comes with the belief of being fundamentally bad, I would talk myself out of any “wrong” emotion or thought.

Psychoanalysis became a way to talk myself out of anything that was alive in me. It was a way to talk myself out of my own needs, much less asking for them to be met.

After decades of psychoanalysis, I wonder why I am so twisted up inside yet feel so dead all at the same time.

Even though I haven’t spoken with my father for years, this pattern still shows up in my personal relationships. I unconsciously psychoanalyze myself out of having needs and setting boundaries that will get my needs met. In this way, psychoanalysis is a tool whose intention is to keep me safe from abandonment, but at the cost of completely dissociating from my true self.

Even to this day, if an emotion or thought comes up that was deemed “wrong” by my father (or that is deemed “wrong” by whoever I am around), suddenly I find myself psychoanalyzing why I am feeling the way I feel and psychoanalyzing why other people did what they did. Psychoanalysis makes it easier to see through the eyes of the other person instead of through my own eyes. But I end up dissociating from the truth of what is alive in me under the guise of “empathy” and “maturity.”

This results in me feeling dead and disconnected in my relationships, most of all the relationship with myself.

If I want to stop feeling so dead and instead begin to feel alive, then it makes sense that I must reconnect with what is alive in me instead of distancing myself from it through psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis Does Not Heal

Psychoanalysis thinks “healing” is synonymous with “fixing.” My psychoanalysis part thinks that if I can just get to the bottom of my trauma and “root it out” then I can be happy.

There are so many unhelpful aspects of this lens.

For starters, this is a very aggressive way to treat myself and my wounds. It starts with the belief that there is something wrong with me that must be identified and rooted out. This is like trying to heal my trauma with the same aggressive energy that caused it. It won’t get me anywhere closer to actual healing and in fact, the psychoanalysis energy reinforces the idea that there is something wrong with me in the first place.

Whenever I’ve experienced actual healing, it has happened when I stop trying to “heal” myself and instead just hold myself. The truth is that my wounds are not broken parts of a machine, they are children inside of me. They do not need to be “healed,” they need to be held.

Psychoanalysis is like a computer program trying to dismantle itself. Or maybe a better analogy is like a robot who knows it's a robot trying to make itself human. It can’t. Psychoanalysis can’t save itself from its job. It only reinforces its job.

What my wounds really need is for me to embody my humanity and enter into a relationship with them. Healthy relationship heals. Love heals. Curiosity and compassion heal. Embodiment heals.

Psychoanalysis actually does the opposite, even though it might be working in the name of “healing.”

Embodiment leads to integration whereas psychoanalysis leads to greater disintegration.

Psychoanalysis Does Not Lead to Embodiment

I’m not going to lie, psychoanalysis has brought me amazing insights into myself and others and humans in general. Like, really amazing insights. Amazing enlightened knowing.

But enlightened knowing can only take me so far. That road does not go all the way.

Just like in Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. The White Queen, who symbolizes enlightened knowing, needs a champion to slay The Red Queens, Jabberwocky. The White Queen has sworn off ever harming a living thing, so she cannot do what needs to be done to save the land from total peril.

Alice becomes that champion. Alice represents embodiment. Embodiment is the path to slaying all of the lies we believe about ourselves so we can actually experience our inherent worth.

Psychoanalysis and enlightened knowing might be aware of our inherent worth as a concept, but they can only get us so close to actually experiencing it. Embodiment is the only path to experiencing the peace and fulfillment we crave.

Psychoanalysis Blocks Me From Thriving

Psychoanalysis is a survival mechanism I developed as a kid to distance myself from the pain inside of me and try to make sense of why that pain is there in the first place. But the strategies I use in survival mode do not lead to thriving. Thriving requires a totally different mindset.

In this way, my biggest blockage to thriving is my commitment to continue using my survival mode strategies.

Letting go of psychoanalysis and my other survival mode strategies feels like dying. It feels like it will surely lead to abandonment and death. Like, literally. The transition from surviving to thriving is the hardest thing I’ve ever done and it has required everything of me and more. It requires me to let go of every last survival mode strategy, including psychoanalysis.

So the more I hold on to psychoanalysis, the more I resist my own thriving.

Even though giving it up feels like I am dying, I must. I must choose embodiment. I must choose trust. I have come to the point where it hurts more to live in survival mode than it does to let it all go and trust I am enough without it.

What I’m Choosing Instead: Embodiment

I truly think I could have learned everything I’ve learned from psychoanalysis 10x faster if I would have done the work of embodiment first. But I’m not beating myself up about this, because the whole point of growing a massive psychoanalysis muscle was to protect myself from embodiment because that was what I was afraid of more than anything. Embodiment is vulnerable. It requires me to show up and be my full self, which is the bravest thing I could ever do in a world that is constantly telling me I am not enough.

I wasn’t ready to do that until now, but in hindsight, it is clear to me that psychoanalysis isn’t necessary to heal at all. It is actually a protective mechanism against true healing. It is my attempt to find every other way to heal other than feeling my feelings and truly connecting with others.

That’s why I am letting go of psychoanalysis and moving toward embodiment.

Here’s what embodiment looks like for me:

Connecting With What’s Alive In Me

Both Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and Internal Family Systems (IFS) have been paramount to helping me to connect with what is alive in me.

NVC has taught me that underneath all my judgments and psychoanalysis there are needs and feelings. Those needs and feelings are what is alive in me. So when I’m feeling something uncomfortable, it is no longer an invitation to psychoanalyze it in order to distance myself from it. Uncomfortable feelings have become an invitation to connect with them as well as with the unmet need that is causing these uncomfortable feelings.

IFS offers a robust and comprehensive inner language that helps me explore my inner world through relationship instead of analysis. With IFS, I can actually talk to the part of me that is feeling upset and ask it what its unmet needs are, and then meet them.

If you’d like to learn more about NVC, check out Marshall Rosenburg’s book, Nonviolent Communication. And Dick Schwartz’s audio program, Greater Than The Sum Of Our Parts, is my favorite introduction to the IFS methodology and language. (Affiliate links).

Asking About What Is Alive In Others Instead Of Assuming I Know

Awkward conversation in an earnest attempt to connect with one another is far more fulfilling than psychoanalyzing one another from a distance.

Embodiment means getting curious about what is alive in the other person, and expressing what is alive in us as well. It is about connecting with others as they are in this moment instead of with the psychoanalyzed version of them I have in my head.

Now, whenever I think I know why someone did what they did, I take that as an invitation to let go of my psychoanalysis and ask them. Even if my psychoanalysis was on point, it feels so much better being able to connect with a human in real-time about it. Almost always I end up feeling more understood and understanding on the other side of these conversations.

But don’t get me wrong, these conversations are terrifying. They feel too alive, sometimes. They are awkward and clumsy. But they are true. They are human-to-human interactions that are scary, but also they are the only way I can find the connection and belonging and understanding I am craving.

Kinesthetically Experiencing My Enlightened Knowing

I have tons of great insights from my psychoanalysis. But experiencing is different than knowing.

This is where the English language falls short. In other languages such as German and Spanish, there is a verb “to know” that means to know information about something and another “to know” verb that means to know something through having experienced it.

Embodiment means taking what I know information about and putting myself in situations where I can actually experience it.

For instance, I had this thought that healing is like trying to put a puzzle together all the while not ever having seen the whole image of what it is supposed to look like when it is complete. This was a concept I was interested in actually embodying. So I asked my boyfriend if he would buy me a puzzle and dump out all the pieces on the floor for me to put together so I can experience what it is like trying to put it together without a picture to reference. Through this experience, I am embodying this knowing on an even deeper level and coming to new insights about healing all the while.

Overall, embodiment means choosing to be human. I am choosing to be human because it is far more painful to feel the disconnection of pretending to be a robot.

I mean, being human hurts, too. In fact, being human hurts so bad it is constantly breaking my heart. But it is real. It is a pure sort of pain. It is the sort of pain love can heal.

Robot pain resists love. Human pain needs love. Human pain helps me genuinely connect with others in their pain, which brings a sense of belonging I’ve never experienced as a “robot.”

Human pain also allows for human joy. Only when I fully feel and let love alchemize my human pain can I laugh in the places that hurt, can I dance with joy, can I truly experience my worth.

The belonging and healing I experience through embodying my humanity is so worth the awkward and painful parts.

For this reason, I am swearing off anything that tries to distance myself from my human experience, including psychoanalysis.