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.