Talk therapy is an excellent tool used to treat a plethora of emotional issues including (but not limited to) trauma, sexual abuse, and mental illnesses. It’s a model that is widely used and, in many cases, highly effective at treating people who are seeking reliable mental health treatment. However, talk therapy has the best chance of working if the individual involved can access their feelings.
Not everyone can easily get to the core of their emotions. One of the causes of blocked emotions is severe trauma, where people have frightening repressed memories; these flashbacks make it painful to get in touch with the feelings associated with the traumatic event.
Men can’t express feelings, or can they?
There’s a false societal assumption that men do not show emotions. Unfortunately, this results in many men repressing and bottling up emotions such as sadness. When a man cannot articulate his sadness, he needlessly suffers further experiences emotional stagnation. His feelings become temporarily or (in some cases) permanently inaccessible. Sometimes it is an unwillingness on the part of the patient to express feelings of pain or sadness while other times, the trouble has to do with societal oppression towards men.
When Talk Therapy Doesn’t Work
If a person’s emotions are inaccessible, talk therapy is ineffective. The ineffectiveness can lead to patients feeling like they are running on a human hamster wheel trying to get to the core of their problems but making no forward motion. When an individual is emotionally shutdown it can also result in their therapist feeling a level of frustration. Either of these things may lead to a premature termination of therapy. When treatment ends like abruptly, the patient can often lose faith in counseling and give up entirely on getting help.
Men are especially at risk because of the societal expectations put on them to never show reveal emotion. When men repress their emotions over an extended period, they can quickly become inaccessible and render talk therapy limited in efficacy. While the expectations of men are changing in society and it is growing more and more societally acceptable for men to show their emotions, there is still a sort of stigma associated with an emotional man. People might call him “emo,” weak or a girly man but certainly not a real man.
Stigma such as this can keep men from attempting to engage in any form of therapy. What happens when talk therapy doesn’t work? it’s easy for them to give up and stop working through their emotional blocks.
Other Types of Therapy
If a man represses his emotions they will eventually come out in a variety of different ways, which are often emotionally unhealthy. Often a man will express anger, anxiety, or have an inability to handle stress. Many times these uncontrollable surges of emotion are directed at their partner, family, or friends. Unless the emotions are accessed and worked through, no amount of talk therapy can adequately address these powerful feelings. There are times that talk therapy becomes ineffective other types of treatment can help. Used in conjunction with talk therapy they will likely lead to a patient getting beyond emotional roadblocks and repressed feelings.
There are treatments like hypnotherapy that can help the patient relax enough to access their feelings. In such a calm state, repressed memories and emotions come to the surface and the man can talk about them. Jungian Sand play therapy can be used in conjunction with talk therapy. Here, the patient plays with sand and various sculpting tools to construct a scene that helps to reflect their inner emotional state.
The Goal of Any Therapy
These are only two types of therapy that work in conjunction with talk therapy to help people access emotions; there are many more. When used in tandem with talk therapy, these types of treatment can help people work through trauma, abuse, repressed emotions, and a host of other severe mental health issues. The goal of any of these therapies is wellness for the patient. Though on the surface treatments like art therapy or sand play therapy can seem silly, especially to men when society tells them not to be childlike, they have a proven track record of aiding patients in the path to emotional wellness.
Talk therapy is recognized in the mental health world as the backbone of treatment, and it is more accessible than ever. When you see an online therapist, talk therapy feels more intimate. You can see a counselor from own home with online therapy. Whatever method of treatment a patient decides to use, it is essential to stick with it to get past emotional blocks and repression.
This is a featured post by site sponsor Better Help.
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