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.

Beyond Talk Therapy: Discovering Somatic Experiencing

Why We Think and Talk

We think and talk for lots of reasons. One of those reasons is to feel better. Let's explore this more.

How Thinking and Talking Help Us

When we feel something strong inside, we want to let it out. This brings us relief and contributes to our life. Here are some examples:

- When we're sad, talking to someone helps us feel less sad and understand ourselves better

- When we're angry, we might want to rant to someone about what's bothering us, think about how to solve what’s bothering us and maybe even fantasize about what we could have done differently, all in an attempt to feel less angry.

- When we do something good, we want to share it with others, this helps us feel more whole and happy.

- When we’re intrigued about something we think about what’s grabbed our attention in order to enjoy the exploration and hopefully to eventually feel the relief of understanding

Our feelings are like messages from our body. They tell us what is going on and what we need to feel better and live happier lives.

Why Some Feelings Are Hard to Notice or Talk About

Sometimes when we share our feelings, things don't go well. Maybe someone didn't listen, or we got hurt. When this happens, we might start automatically hiding these feelings, even from ourselves and even before we know we’re having them. This can make us feel worse over time. They can even cause us to misunderstand the present, to confuse our current situation with the past and react poorly because of that. With feelings that are stuck, out of our awareness and causing us problems talking and thinking alone are about the slowest ways there are to feel better. And often then only keep us stuck.

A Different Way to Feel Better

There's a special way to help with feelings that are hard to access or even know about. It's called Somatic Experiencing. Instead of just talking, we:

- Pay attention to your body and the sensations inside

- Allow some of the movements from spontaneous impulses in the body

- Learn how to navigate activation and de-activation in the body which helps you deal with stuck, pent up feelings little by little instead of in an overwhelming way.

- Empowers you

- Plus much more

Someone trained in Somatic Experiencing helps you do this safely. They teach you how to listen to your body and understand what it's telling you. While you still talk about your feelings, you also learn to feel them in a way that's comfortable and safe. This brings things that are unconscious to the light of day and lets them out so you feel better and live easier.

All of which helps you find answers that come from deep inside yourself, making you feel more sure about what you need.