The London Therapist

I’ve been noticing recently, particularly in my younger patients, an urgency to heal, an intense need to find this magic, elusive thing that will take away all their symptoms.

Which on the face of it makes sense, after all, they have come to see me, as a psychotherapist, because they are struggling with their mental health and they are looking to heal.

But there is a problem with this – there is no magic healing bullet. The very concept of “healing” is a troublesome one in mental health because it is so hard to define what it would look like.

Many young people are very active on social media, which is full of influencers. Everyone knows that the goal of an influencer is quite literally to influence you – to promote a product or a service via social media.

The “mental health” sphere is no stranger to social media influencers. As someone who recently joined Instagram, I was initially bombarded with posts in my feed from other “therapists” and here’s what I noticed: very popular mental health social media influencers are no different to the Kardashians and Jenners – they are trying to promote *themselves* and are influencing you into buying their product. Whether it’s a “nervous system reset”, whether it’s “trauma release through somatic work”, or maybe a “cortisol -lowering cocktail”. There are endless promises that there is*one thing* that lies at the root of your problems, and you can cure it. All you need to do is take the fruit from the tree.

Like a doctor delivering bad news, I feel there is no easy way to say this.

If you genuinely have a problem with your nervous system, please see a neurologist. The body is important in trauma, but what somatic therapy cannot address is unconscious beliefs that drive harmful patterns of behaviour that keep repeating in trauma, and drive despair. And cortisol has a terrible reputation right now but it is a necessary hormone to *manage* stress, and exercise will naturally elevate it – what is important is to consciously relax after exercise so that cortisol levels lower.

The underlying subtext of the claims that mental health influencers make is this idea that you can “heal”. But what they offer would be more similar to pain relief than healing.

So what would actual healing look like in mental health. Consider a physical wound – whether it’s from an injury or a surgical procedure – once the healing process is complete, it is very likely to leave a scar. And this is very similar to what happens during the healing process in mental health.

People who have gone through a traumatic experience often want to go back to how their lives used to be before the terrible things that haunt them happened to them. And who can blame traumatised people for wanting this. But this is why the promises made by these influencers can be so damaging – they play into the idea that going back to how things used to be is possible.

Recovery from trauma, physical and mental, leaves a scar. Things will become better, but things will be different. This is the news that no one seems to want to tell anyone anymore.

Trauma work is long and hard, and most of the time its messy, and mess is something that the modern era seems allergic to. Ready-made, pre-packaged, neat, sanitised solutions are valued over the inherent untidiness of human existence. We seem to be willing to do anything to avoid looking at the chaos within us.

If social media influencers were honest with you, this is what they would say to you: “This is going to hurt. There is no change without pain, because change is loss. Trauma work is messy and long, and a big chunk of it is grief; grief for the person you once were, grief for how life used to be”.

It isn’t the nicest news and it’s a hard sell in a world saturated with a desire for instant fixes and simple solutions. But it is honest.