Aaron Reads the Blog: Feb 9th, 2026

Ever leave therapy thinking "we got deep but nothing changed"? You're not alone. In this video, I read from my latest blog post exploring why insight alone doesn't create transformation—and what neuroscience tells us actually does. I break down the work of two leading researchers in neuropsychoanalysis—Richard Lane and Mark Solms—who've revolutionized our understanding of how change happens. Lane's research on memory reconsolidation shows that memories aren't set in stone: they can be updated through new emotional experiences. Solms reminds us that feelings aren't obstacles to overcome—they're the foundation of consciousness itself and the messengers we've been ignoring. The bottom line? Your brain is a prediction engine, not just a recording device. Change happens when you feel something new, not just when you think something new. Understanding your patterns is the beginning, but transformation lives in emotional experience that updates what your nervous system believes is possible. If you've ever wondered why therapy sometimes feels intellectually interesting but emotionally stagnant, this episode offers both explanation and hope.

Why Knowing Yourself Isn't Enough: What Neuroscience Teaches Us About Real Change

Ever leave a therapy session thinking, "we got deep but nothing feels changed"? You're not alone. A common pitfall in therapy is finding thoughts that are interesting, even illuminating, but never making that leap from idea to actual change.

Here's why: change requires experience, and the hallmark of experience is emotion. You can know everything about yourself—your patterns, your triggers, your history—but if that knowledge isn't accompanied by lived emotional experiences that update your brain, change remains unlikely. Insight without emotion is like having a map but never taking the journey.

I've been deeply influenced by the field of neuropsychoanalysis, a newer branch of psychoanalysis that takes science seriously without making it a new religion. It seeks to understand how we work so it can leverage those mechanisms clinically, all while keeping space for the art and practice of therapy and relationship. Within that field, two voices often overlap and sometimes disagree: Richard Lane and Mark Solms. Understanding their work offers real hope for anyone struggling to turn insight into transformation.

Richard Lane: Your Brain Can Rewrite Its Own Story

Richard Lane is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies what he calls "memory reconsolidation." Here's the revolutionary part: your painful memories aren't set in stone. When you recall a memory, it briefly becomes changeable—like opening a file to edit it. If you have a new emotional experience during that window, the memory gets re-saved with new information attached to it.

This is why therapy isn't about endlessly rehashing the past. It's about bringing up old patterns in a context where something different can happen. When your therapist responds with empathy to something that once brought shame, or you feel safe where you once felt terrified, your brain literally updates the file. The old memory doesn't disappear, but it loses its chokehold on you.

Lane also studies emotional awareness—the ability to distinguish between "I feel bad" and "I feel disappointed that my effort wasn't recognized." Think of it like developing your palate for wine. At first, you might just know "red" or "white." But with attention and practice, you start noticing complexity, nuance, layers. The same is true for feelings. And here's why it matters: people who can't differentiate their emotions tend to have more physical health problems. Your body keeps the score when your mind can't read it.

The practical takeaway? Therapy should help you not just understand your patterns but feel something new about them. And developing your emotional vocabulary isn't navel-gazing—it's a health intervention.

Mark Solms: You Are Your Feelings (And That's Good News)

Mark Solms comes at this from a different angle, but arrives at a complementary truth. He argues that consciousness doesn't start with thinking—it starts with feeling. Your emotions aren't reactions to your thoughts; they're the foundation of your entire conscious experience.

This might sound abstract, but it has profound clinical implications. If feelings are primary, then the goal of therapy isn't to think your way out of emotions—it's to learn what your emotions are trying to tell you. Solms describes emotions as an "extended form of homeostasis," meaning they're your system's way of signaling what needs attention to maintain balance. Anxiety isn't irrational—it's information. Depression isn't weakness—it's a signal that something in your system needs addressing.

Solms also illuminates why you can't remember your early childhood but still feel its effects everywhere. Those early experiences create patterns that show up in your relationships, including with your therapist. You might not remember being dismissed by a caregiver, but you'll feel a familiar anxiety when you sense your therapist is distracted. This isn't a problem—it's the mechanism of healing. The pattern shows up so it can be worked with in real time.

The practical takeaway? Your feelings aren't obstacles to overcome—they're the messengers you've been waiting for. And the patterns you can't remember are still accessible because they play out in present relationships, where they can finally be updated.

Where They Agree: Memory Is About the Future, Not the Past

Here's where Lane and Solms converge beautifully: memory isn't primarily a record-keeping system. It's a prediction engine. Your brain stores the past to help you navigate the future.

This reframes everything about therapy. You're not doing archaeology, digging up artifacts to examine. You're doing architecture, using old materials to build something new. When you update a painful memory through a corrective emotional experience, you're not erasing history—you're teaching your brain new possibilities for what comes next.

This is why insight alone doesn't create change. Understanding why you have trust issues is interesting, but it doesn't update your prediction system. What updates it? Having an experience of being vulnerable with your therapist and discovering it's safe. Feeling the edges of panic and learning you can tolerate it. Expecting rejection and receiving attunement instead.

What This Means for Your Therapy

If you've been in therapy that feels intellectually stimulating but emotionally stagnant, these frameworks suggest why: change happens through felt experience, not just conceptual understanding.

Good therapy should include moments when you feel something new—not just think something new. That might look like:

• Finally saying something you've been ashamed of and feeling accepted instead of judged

• Staying present with a difficult emotion instead of reflexively avoiding it

• Experiencing your therapist's genuine care even when you're convinced you're unlovable

• Noticing you can tolerate uncertainty without collapsing into anxiety

These aren't dramatic breakthroughs. They're quiet updates to your prediction system, teaching your nervous system: this time, it can be different.

Lane would say you're reconsolidating memories through corrective emotional experiences. Solms would say you're learning to read and respond to your affective signals more effectively. Both would agree: your feelings aren't the problem—they're the path forward.

The Hope in All This

Both Lane and Solms are working to rescue psychoanalysis from its reputation as interminable navel-gazing by grounding it in neuroscience. But they're doing so without reducing human beings to brain scans. They're holding space for both the measurable and the meaningful, the empirical and the experiential.

For you, the person sitting in the therapy chair wondering if change is possible, their work offers this: Yes. Your brain can change. Your patterns aren't permanent. But the vehicle of that change isn't willpower or positive thinking—it's emotional experience that updates your predictions about what's possible.

You don't need to understand the neuroscience. You just need to find a therapist who gets this: that knowing yourself is the beginning, but feeling something new about yourself in relationship—that's where transformation lives.

The Part of Therapy No One Explains—and Why You Keep Baking a Cake When You Need a Sandwich

Therapy has two parts - but our culture usually only talks about one of them.

The Consumer Part

The first is the consumer part. A person has a problem, seeks help, and wants relief. This part fits easily into medical and business models - diagnose, treat, improve. It’s familiar, structured, and culturally comfortable. This is the one we hear about.

The Relational Part

The second part is relational. And this is where therapy becomes harder to define—and harder to market. This is the one we don’t hear about.

Why Therapy Is Hard to Simplify

One reason therapy resists simple explanations is the sheer range of what shows up in the room. Therapy isn’t working with just one kind of problem. Even when someone feels a single symptom - like anxiety - that doesn’t mean the cause is singular or simple.

Good therapy is personalized. It works with personality patterns, attachment histories, developmental interruptions, single overwhelming events, repeated traumatizing experiences, and acute crises. Often, it’s working with several of these at once.

And they don’t exist in isolation.

Layered Problems, Not Either/Or

For example, developmental trauma can create a nervous system that is more vulnerable to being rocked by later events. This means a person can be impacted - or even traumatized - by experiences that might be merely stressful for someone else. Those later events often deepen the original coping patterns, creating a vicious cycle.

The work isn’t either/or. It’s layered.

Second-Hand vs First-Hand Knowledge

Most people are comfortable talking to their therapist about what happened between them and someone else outside the therapy room. That matters and is valuable - but it’s also second-hand knowledge. It’s memory filtered through time, interpretation, and self-protection.

Something different happens when people talk about what’s happening between them and the therapist. That’s first-hand knowledge. The reactions are live. The body responds. Old patterns don’t need to be reconstructed - they show up on their own.

This is why it can be valuable to name how the therapist is being experienced in the moment. Whether they seem bored, interested, distant, irritated, calming, perfect, or completely incompetent, those impressions often tell us less about accuracy and more about which old patterns are coming online. When they’re spoken out loud, they become something we can actually work with.

This isn’t being rude or oversharing. It’s allowing material that might feel culturally awkward to surface - material that, psychologically, is often where unconscious emotions and memories are trying to be seen and heard.

Why Old Patterns Feel So Real

Our brains are designed to keep us alive while using as little energy as possible. When we survive emotionally overwhelming moments - especially ones where fear, shame, anger, or grief couldn’t be fully expressed - the brain records what worked.

Not as a list of details from the event, but as a total recipe.

That recipe includes coping strategies, body responses, and beliefs about the self and others. Because it helped us survive, it gets coded as accurate and efficient. Later, when enough familiar ingredients show up in the present - tone of voice, closeness, authority, disappointment—the brain automatically pulls that recipe back online.

The problem is that memory doesn’t feel like memory.
It feels like now.

So we don’t realize we’re trying to bake a cake in a moment that actually calls for a sandwich. Both situations may include similar ingredients - salt and flour - but they require entirely different outcomes. The cake recipe once made sense. It kept us alive. But it was never meant to become permanent.

It was a survival solution that got stuck, leaving us less flexible when familiar ingredients appear again in the future.

Where Clinical Judgment Comes In

This is where therapy becomes more than technique.

Some incomplete self-protective responses are best worked through intrapersonally—with the therapist coaching from the outside as sensations, emotions, and impulses are noticed and allowed to complete.

Other patterns work best interpersonally—with a therapist who is both coaching and participating, a kind of player-coach.

The Therapist Is Part of the System

The therapist is not outside this process.

Imagine gently dipping your hand into the water along a riverbank. You’re not just observing the river—you’re interacting with it. The water is impacted by your hand and may react to that impact; it may get warmer or colder, or move faster or slower around your hand. That reaction holds information.

In therapy, the therapist’s internal responses matter in the same way. Feeling a sudden chill or warmth can signal a coded moment emerging. At the same time, a skilled therapist knows their own hands. They work to recognize what belongs to them and what belongs to the shared moment. This part, by human nature, is a little inefficient and messy.

However, this unavoidable interplay isn’t a flaw in therapy. It’s part of how therapy works.

Why Analog Holds Both Parts

There is no simple model that captures all of this. Medical, expert, and influencer models are easy to communicate - but they ignore the relational part. When that part is missing, disappointing outcomes collapse into blame: the clinician failed, or the client failed.

At Analog, we refuse to separate the two parts of therapy, even though holding them together is difficult and messy. We aim to be both player and coach - guiding the work while knowing we are part of it.

This is why integrating psychoanalytic therapy with Somatic Experiencing matters so much to us. One helps us understand patterns and meaning. The other helps the nervous system complete what was once interrupted—so old survival code can loosen and something more flexible can take its place.

It’s harder to explain.

And it’s why it works.

Trauma Isn’t Intensity — It’s What the Nervous System Learns

When people hear the word trauma, they often picture something overwhelming: extreme fear, intense emotion, or a catastrophic event. And while trauma can involve intense experiences, defining it primarily by emotional intensity actually misses the heart of the matter. Trauma is not best understood as how big something felt — but as what the nervous system learned when survival was at stake.

From a nervous-system perspective, trauma begins with threat. When we perceive danger, the body mobilizes automatically to protect us through fight, flight, or freeze. This mobilization requires a rapid surge of energy — heart rate increases, muscles tense, attention narrows. This temporary dysregulation is not a problem; it is the body doing exactly what it is designed to do.

Under normal circumstances, that survival energy is spent. We run, resist, escape, or orient toward safety. Once the threat passes and the energy is discharged, the nervous system returns to its baseline rhythm of regulation and flexibility.

Trauma occurs when that process is interrupted.

When a threat cannot be escaped, fought, or fully responded to — because of powerlessness, overwhelm, developmental immaturity, or relational constraints — the nervous system is forced to cope rather than complete the survival cycle. The energy meant for action remains trapped in the body. This unresolved dysregulation is profoundly uncomfortable, and the system adapts in whatever way it can to endure.

Over time, this unfinished survival response becomes encoded as learning.

As Mark Solms explains in The Feeling Brain, affect is fundamentally tied to homeostasis — the body’s drive to regulate internal states. Trauma represents a disruption in this regulatory process. The system does not simply remember what happened; it remembers how it survived.

Similarly, Stephen Porges shows through Polyvagal Theory that our nervous systems continuously assess safety and danger beneath conscious awareness. When safety cannot be restored, the system defaults to defensive strategies — hyperarousal, collapse, shutdown — not as pathology, but as protection.

Crucially, the coping strategies used during the original threat often replace instinctive responses in the future. Instead of fluid fight or flight, the body replays learned patterns. This is why trauma can show up in two seemingly opposite ways: explosive emotional reactions that feel disproportionate to the present moment, or a puzzling absence of response when action would be appropriate. In both cases, the nervous system is responding to past threat in the present.

As Allan Schore emphasizes, trauma is ultimately a disorder of affect regulation. It is not the event itself that defines trauma, but whether the nervous system could return to regulated flow afterward — especially in the presence of attuned support.

Understanding trauma this way reframes healing. The work is not primarily about revisiting intense emotions or retelling the story in greater detail. It is about helping the nervous system complete what was once impossible: restoring regulation, releasing trapped survival energy, and relearning that safety and responsiveness are possible now.

Trauma is not intensity. It is unfinished survival — and the body remembering how it had to cope when there was no other choice.

Implicit Memory, Attachment Trauma, and the “Overreaction” That Isn’t

Sometimes a small piece of news hits your nervous system like a freight train. An unexpected post. A colleague changes plans. A friend forgets to respond. A partner sounds distracted. Suddenly your stomach knots, your breath shortens, your throat tightens, and tears hover. A part of you knows the situation doesn’t warrant this level of distress — but it still arrives in full force.

This isn’t irrationality or emotional fragility. For many people in Kansas City seeking therapy for relational patterns, it’s often implicit memory and attachment trauma showing up in the nervous system.

Implicit Memory and Attachment Trauma in Adulthood

Implicit memory is a body-based memory system that develops before language (Schore, 2003). It stores early attachment experiences as sensations, emotions, and autonomic states rather than stories. When early needs were unseen or inconsistently met, the nervous system learned to predict disconnection and prepare for loss.

In adult relationships, small signals can activate these predictions quickly. Shame often arrives in the body before the mind can explain it. Shame’s physical signatures — collapse, tightness, downward gaze, heat in the face, inhibited breath — are part of a freeze/appease response aimed at preserving connection (Porges, 2011; Gilbert, 2007).

Internal Working Models and Insecure Attachment

John Bowlby called the mental templates formed through early patterns Internal Working Models. These models guide expectations such as:

• Are people available when I need them?

• Am I safe in relationships?

• Am I worthy of care and belonging?

For people with insecure attachment, minor relational cues today can activate the working models of yesterday. What looks like an “overreaction” is often a proportionate response to an old threat stored in the nervous system.

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fawn in Kansas City Therapy Clients

The nervous system organizes survival responses through fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (Levine, 2010). A snub may evoke fight (“How could you?”), flight (“I should just leave”), freeze (“I don’t know what to say”), or fawn (“I’ll fix it so they don’t get upset”). These strategies once protected attachment bonds.

Recognizing Implicit Memory in Real Time

A helpful marker is mismatch: your internal reaction feels much bigger (or smaller) than the situation. That’s often implicit memory activating.

Many Kansas City trauma-informed therapists use bottom-up approaches to help the nervous system update old attachment predictions, including Somatic Experiencing, nervous system tracking, and shame awareness work.

These approaches involve:

• orienting to the environment

• tracking body sensation

• allowing affect (tears, yawns, trembling)

• completing autonomic cycles

This helps the body metabolize what once had no support (Levine, 2010; Siegel, 2020).

The goal isn’t to erase early models, but to update them. When implicit memory becomes explicit — when one can say, “my body thinks I’m alone again” — new relational options emerge.

For Kansas City Readers

If you grew up with emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, or insecure attachment dynamics, these patterns are common and treatable. Trauma-informed counseling in Kansas City, Overland Park, and Johnson County can help update attachment predictions, reduce shame-driven responses, and build secure relational capacity.

Click here to schedule a free consult or your first appointment today.

References

Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss.
Gilbert, P. (2007). The Compassionate Mind.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Porges, S. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory.
Schore, A. (2003). Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self.
Siegel, D. (2020). The Developing Mind.

Not Every Hard Moment Is Trauma — And That’s Actually Good News

A Kansas City Perspective on Stress, Trauma, and the Nervous System

If you spend enough time on social media or listening to mental-health podcasts, it can start to feel like every difficult experience is trauma.
A stressful job in the Kansas City metro? Trauma.
A painful breakup? Trauma.
An awkward childhood moment that still makes you cringe years later? Definitely trauma.

It’s understandable why this language has become so common. For many people, learning about trauma has been clarifying and deeply relieving. It gives shape to suffering that was once invisible, dismissed, or misunderstood. And for those who truly live with the lasting effects of trauma, accurate language matters a great deal.

But here’s the good news that often gets lost:

Not every hard moment is trauma — and that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.

Hard Experiences Are Not the Same as Trauma

Human nervous systems are designed to respond to challenge. Disappointment, grief, conflict, fear, and stress are not design flaws — they are part of being alive and attached to other people.

Feeling overwhelmed during a hard season does not automatically mean something is wrong with you.

As Peter Levine helps us understand, trauma in a clinical sense is not defined by whether an experience was painful. Trauma occurs when an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to respond and leaves the body stuck in survival mode afterward. Trauma lingers. It reshapes perception, memory, and bodily response. Long after the danger has passed, the body continues to act as if it hasn’t.

Most difficult life experiences don’t do that.

They may hurt deeply. They may stretch us or temporarily knock us off balance. And then — often slowly and imperfectly — the nervous system settles and recovers.

That recovery matters.

Why Over-Labeling Trauma Can Backfire

When everything is labeled as trauma, two unintended consequences tend to follow.

First, real trauma becomes harder to see clearly. The word loses its precision, and people who genuinely need trauma-specific therapy may struggle to recognize themselves in the noise.

Second, people begin to experience themselves as more fragile than they actually are. If every painful experience is framed as injury, the nervous system learns to expect collapse rather than adaptation. Over time, we lose trust in our capacity to endure, grieve, and change.

Paradoxically, this often makes people feel worse — not safer.

A More Grounded Way to Understand Emotional Pain

Some experiences truly call for trauma-informed therapy. Others call for time, support, reflection, or simply being allowed to hurt without rushing to diagnose the pain.

Iain McGilchrist writes about how modern culture tends to break experience into isolated problems to be fixed rather than understood as part of a larger, living whole. When suffering is reduced solely to pathology, we lose something deeply human: the ability to metabolize difficulty through relationship, meaning-making, and growth. He links this cultural tendency and the consequences to an over focus on left brain thinking.

Bessel van der Kolk helped bring attention to how trauma lives in the body. And Bonnie Badenoch reminds us that healing happens in connection — not just correction. This is true whether we’re working with trauma or with ordinary human pain.

The Reassuring Truth

You can have:

• A painful childhood without being traumatized

• A stressful season without being broken

• Strong emotional reactions without having something “wrong” with you

And if you are dealing with trauma, naming it accurately can be profoundly freeing and stabilizing.

The point isn’t to minimize suffering.
It’s to locate it properly.

Not every hard moment is trauma — and that’s actually good news. It means your nervous system is doing what it was designed to do: respond, learn, recover, and keep going.

Sometimes the work isn’t healing an injury.
Sometimes it’s trusting your capacity to be human.

Why Couples Get Stuck (And How Therapy Helps You Move Again)

Many couples come to counseling because they feel stuck in the same arguments, shut-downs, or misunderstandings. Most don’t know why it keeps happening, especially when both partners say they love each other and want things to improve. It can feel confusing and discouraging.

Couples counseling can help, not by assigning blame, but by helping you understand the patterns underneath the conflict.

Patterns Are Like Loops

Most couples don’t just have “fights.” They have loops—the same dance repeated with new content. One partner reaches out, the other pulls away. One pushes for clarity, the other protects by shutting down. One gets louder, one gets quiet. The topic changes, but the loop stays the same.

These loops form because each partner is trying to protect something important—usually a longing or a vulnerability they stopped showing a long time ago.

It’s Not Just Communication. It’s What Communication Is Protecting

Communication skills matter, but skills alone often don’t solve the deeper issue. Many couples already know how to communicate—they just don’t know how to stay connected when they feel misunderstood, criticized, or afraid.

That requires understanding what’s happening inside the relationship space between partners. Therapists call this the intersubjective field, but practically it means:

“What is it like to be me with you, and what is it like to be you with me, especially when we are stressed?”

That space between partners is where relationships actually get repaired.

Improvisation: The Opposite of Keeping Score

When conflict loops form, couples often start keeping score: who apologized last, who’s trying more, who should change first. Scorekeeping feels organized, but it makes relationships rigid.

In couples counseling, we help partners learn something closer to improvisation. Instead of sticking to defensive scripts (“here we go again,” “I already know how this ends”), partners learn how to stay responsive and curious in the moment.

Improvisation creates openings. Openings create repair. Repair builds real trust.

Why This Approach Works

This style of couples therapy focuses on:

• recognizing your shared pattern
• understanding how each of you protects yourselves
• identifying the longings underneath conflict
• creating space for new emotional experiences
• practicing repair in real time

When couples experience successful repair—not perfection, but repair—their nervous systems begin to trust each other again. Arguments become less about survival and more about connection.

You Don’t Have to Stay Stuck

If you and your partner feel trapped in a loop, it doesn’t mean your relationship is broken. It means the two of you are due for a new way of relating—one that allows both partners to feel seen, understood, and safe enough to show what they actually feel.

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help couples across the Kansas City metro learn how to repair, reconnect, and build new relational patterns. In-person and telehealth options are available.

FAQ: Couples Counseling

Why do couples get stuck in the same arguments?
Most couples repeat patterns because each partner is protecting a deeper longing or vulnerability. Therapy helps reveal and repair the loop.

Is couples counseling just communication skills?
Communication skills help, but lasting change comes from understanding the emotional patterns underneath conflict—not just the words.

How long does couples counseling take?
Most couples attend between a couple of months to a year or two of weekly sessions depending on goals, pace, and level of conflict.

Is it too late for counseling if we’re considering separation?
Not necessarily. Many couples wait until things feel urgent before seeking help, and repair is still possible.

Do you offer in-person or telehealth sessions?
Yes. We serve the Kansas City metro through in-person sessions in Overland Park and secure telehealth for Missouri and Kansas residents.

Is This Trauma or Just Stress? How to Tell the Difference.

Many people in Kansas City come to therapy unsure whether what they’re feeling is stress, burnout, or trauma. With trauma being talked about on podcasts and social media, it can feel like everything counts as trauma now. Commentators like Scott Galloway even argue that therapy tries to “explain everything with trauma” on The Prof G Podcast (Galloway, 2025).

There’s a real point here: when clinical words leave the therapy room, they often get stretched and lose their meaning. Trauma is one of those words.

A Simple Way to Compare Stress and Trauma

Here’s a helpful way to picture the difference. Think of reactions like money:

• A $10 reaction to a $10 problem → normal stress

• A $10 reaction to a $1 problem → a bad day

• A $100 reaction to a $10 problem → old experiences may be involved

• A $100 reaction to a $1 problem → often trauma residue

Not all distress is trauma, and not all trauma looks like the size of the situation you’re in.

So What Actually Counts as Trauma?

Clinically, trauma is not defined by the event.
It’s defined by what happens after the event.

Somatic researcher Peter Levine describes trauma as what happens when the nervous system can’t complete its stress response and return to normal (Levine, 1997; 2010).

In plain language:

Trauma is not what happened. Trauma is what stayed in the body afterward.

Two people can go through the same experience and have different outcomes:

• one returns to baseline → stress

• one stays stuck → trauma

This difference is about physiology and survival, not personal weakness.

Stress Is About Now. Trauma Is About Then.

A simple way to tell the difference:

Stress

• has a clear cause

• matches the size of the problem

• fades when life calms down

Trauma patterns

• show up in different situations

• feel too big for the moment

• don’t automatically go away even when life improves

Stress is your nervous system responding to today.
Trauma is your nervous system responding to back then.

How Trauma Shows Up (Even If You Don’t Call It Trauma)

Unfinished stress responses can look like:

• shutting down during conflict

• panic around feedback

• feeling “on alert” in relationships

• expecting the worst in small situations

• people-pleasing to feel safe

Affective neuroscience shows these reactions begin in deeper emotional circuits (Panksepp, 1998; Solms, 2021), which is why you can’t simply “think your way out” of them.

Trauma Therapy in Kansas City

If you’re asking “Is this trauma or just stress?” a more useful question might be:

Am I spending today’s money — or yesterday’s?

At Analog Counseling in Overland Park, we help clients from across Kansas City complete unfinished stress responses and return to regulation. We use trauma-informed approaches including Somatic Experiencing, psychodynamic therapy, and neurobiological models.

We see clients from:

• Overland Park

• Kansas City, MO

• Leawood

• Olathe

• Prairie Village

• Lenexa

• North Kansas City, MO

• Lawrence

• Gardner

• And more!

A Note on Worthiness

You don’t have to wait for things to “get bad enough.”
Trauma therapy is about helping your nervous system settle and feel safe again — not proving that something happened.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). DSM-5-TR.
Galloway, S. (2025). The Prof G Podcast.
Levine, P. (1997). Waking the Tiger.
Levine, P. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice.
Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience.
Schore, A. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy.
Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring.
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

The Seven Core Emotions: How Your Brain Helps You Understand What You Feel

If you’ve ever wondered why emotions can feel so big—or why they sometimes take over before you have time to think—you’re in good company. Emotions are biological. They come from deep, ancient parts of the brain, and they exist to help us survive, connect, and navigate life.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp identified seven basic emotion systems that all mammals, including humans, share. Each one creates a unique emotional experience and shows up in the body in its own way. When you understand these systems, identifying your feelings becomes easier and more intuitive—an important first step in managing them.

Here’s a simple guide to each emotion system and the typical body signs associated with it:

1. SEEKING – Curiosity and Motivation

This system gets you moving toward goals.
Body Signs: alert eyes, energized posture, slight increase in heart rate, interest, leaning forward.

2. FEAR – Anxiety and Threat Response

Helps you detect danger and stay safe.
Body Signs: fast heartbeat, tense muscles, shallow breathing, freezing or wanting to escape, wide eyes.

3. RAGE – Anger and Frustration

Activates when something blocks your path.
Body Signs: heat in the face, clenched jaw or fists, raised voice, tight shoulders, narrowed focus.

4. LUST – Sexual Desire

Supports bonding and intimacy.
Body Signs: warmth, arousal responses, focused attention, physiological sexual readiness.

5. CARE – Warmth and Affection

Supports closeness, empathy, and nurturing.
Body Signs: softening facial muscles, relaxed breathing, warm tone of voice, desire to comfort.

6. PANIC/GRIEF – Sadness and Separation Distress

Activates when connection feels lost.
Body Signs: tightness in the throat or chest, tears, heaviness, low energy, slumped posture.

7. PLAY – Joy and Social Connection

Encourages bonding through fun and laughter.
Body Signs: smiling, laughter, loose movement, lightness in the body, bright eyes.

Why This Matters for Managing Emotions

The first step in emotional regulation is identification—being able to notice and name what you’re feeling (as psychiatrist, Dan Siegel says, “name it to tame it”). When you recognize the body cues, you can understand what your system is trying to communicate. From there, you can use specific tools to regulate, soothe, or support the emotion in a healthy way.

Learning these seven systems gives you a map:
not just what you feel, but why you feel it—and what your body is asking for next.

References

Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. Harcourt.

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J., & Bryson, T. P. (2011). The whole-brain child: 12 revolutionary strategies to nurture your child’s developing mind. Delacorte Press.

Solms, M. (2019). The neurobiological underpinnings of psychoanalytic theory. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 1–13.

The Pendulum of Truth: What Postmodernism Taught Me About Mental Health

In college, I signed up for a course on postmodern culture and philosophy—thinking I’d spend a semester reading dense texts and debating abstract ideas. What I didn’t expect was to find myself in the pages of the textbook.

At the time, I was volunteering for a nonprofit organization. Coincidentally, the director of that very organization had been invited to adjunctly teach the postmodernism course. One day, as we worked through a chapter describing institutions that embodied a rigid, modernist mindset—unable or unwilling to adapt to cultural shifts—I saw a familiar name. There it was: the nonprofit I volunteered for, listed as an example of a modernist holdout.

It was ironic. It was awkward. And it was a perfect window into how theory meets real life.

Postmodernism and the Pendulum of Truth

One of the central themes of postmodern thought is the loosening of our reliance on external sources of truth—institutions like churches, governments, or other authority structures. The deconstruction of these systems often creates space for individual thought, personal conviction, and deeply subjective experience.

There is a real gift in that shift. People who once felt silenced by institutional “truth” suddenly have permission to listen inward, speak freely, and trust their own lived experience.

But pendulums tend to swing hard.

In many circles today, subjective experience has been elevated to a new unquestionable authority. If I feel it, think it, or experience it, the logic goes, then it is true.

This is simply the mirror opposite of what modernist institutions once imposed: truth dictated from the outside, regardless of inner conflict. Now it is truth dictated from the inside, regardless of external reality, community wisdom, or historical perspective.

Neither extreme is stable. Neither honors the full complexity of being human.

Holding the Tension: A Healthier Approach to Truth

Historically—and psychologically—the most resilient way of understanding truth is to hold tension rather than collapse it. A mature sense of truth weaves together:

• Inner truth: What I feel, think, and experience

• Relational truth: How others experience me and the world

• Historical and communal truth: What generations before us have learned, named, and passed down

When one of these is ignored, the system breaks down.

And this brings us to mental health.

What Is Mental Health, Really?

Mental health is often defined clinically, but at its core it is something simple and profoundly human:

Mental health is the ability to think, feel, and act with flexibility—while holding both our own viewpoint and the viewpoints of others.

In other words, it is the capacity to be rooted and responsive. To know what we know, while remaining open to how others see it differently. To inhabit our inner world without losing sight of the outer one.

This requires humility. Curiosity. And an ability to tolerate discomfort without either collapsing or hardening.

If reading this definition feels offensive, destabilizing, or irritating in any way, that may actually be a meaningful invitation. What part of you feels threatened by holding multiple truths at once? What inner or outer authority feels at risk of losing its position? What do you fear might happen if truth becomes something shared rather than owned?

These are not questions with quick answers. But they are the very questions that open the door to growth.

Why This Matters

We are living in a cultural moment shaped by both deconstruction and hyper-individualization. Understanding how we arrived here—and how these forces shape our inner lives—can help us find a more grounded, resilient path forward. This is not to repeat a sense of outward knowledge being dominate. It is to voice a song that might be worth hearing in the midst of the moment.

Mental health does not live at either end of the pendulum. It lives in the tension between inner wisdom and communal wisdom, between personal truth and shared truth. Without such a tension debate and growth can’t exist.

And holding that tension well is one of the most important skills we can cultivate.