Why You're Still Stuck (Even If You've Been in Therapy for Years)
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Episode Summary
If you’ve been in therapy or doing inner work for a while but still feel stuck in the same cycles, this episode is for you. I’m sharing a conversation that comes up over and over with clients: what happens when you’ve become deeply self-aware but change still isn’t happening. There’s nothing wrong with you—and there’s nothing wrong with therapy—but there comes a point where knowing your patterns just isn’t enough. Today, I talk about why noticing alone won’t create transformation, what to do when you hit a growth plateau, and how coaching and brain-based tools can help you finally move forward. This is the first of a two-part series—next time, I’ll talk about how noticing can be your greatest tool for change (when you use it differently).
Topics:
The limits of traditional talk therapy when it comes to long-term change
Why self-awareness doesn’t always lead to transformation
What “the therapy wall” feels like and why it’s common
The difference between venting and rewiring your brain
How coaching tools help you shift patterns instead of staying stuck in them
Episode Resources:
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Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.486)
Hey, and welcome to Calmer Conversations. I'm Cecelia, your host. If you're watching this on YouTube, you will know that you were joining me from that time with one of my kids. And if you're not watching this on YouTube, I might just tell you that I am in bed lying with my, one of my kids and we're on vacation right now. And I've just kind of been stuck here for a little bit, so I figured I might as well record this because it's something that's been on my mind and this
It's chance for me to talk about it and I'm a mom. So sometimes I multitask as I'm sure other moms or other human beings who are listening do. Okay. So this is going to be one of two episodes. And the reason why I want to record this is because it's something that comes up a lot with my clients. So a lot of people who come to work with me have been in some kind of talk therapy or mental health space before they come to me.
And a lot of them have gotten a lot of really amazing things from that space. Some of them for a couple years or a year, some of them for a decade, some of them for multiple decades, they've been in some kind of therapy, whether it's traditional talk therapy or psychoanalysis or CBT or something like that. Then they reach a point where they feel like it's not really working anymore. And then they find me. So this episode today, I want to talk about
what happens when knowing about your problem isn't enough. And then, because I love flipping things around, and sometimes these things are both and, next episode I want to talk about how noticing is a path for change and how powerful it is when you want to make change. But I think that it's important to start here because so many people are here. I also want to preface this by saying that I trained as a counselor. I went through internship as a counselor. I never got licensed.
I might have made a decision to go into coaching instead of getting licensing in as a counselor. So I am, while I do not have decades of experience as a therapist or as a talk therapy counselor, I do have familiarity with the world and with different kinds of therapies and modalities. I will also say that I think therapy is incredibly powerful for a lot of people. I'm somebody who has also been in therapy and it helped me at different times in my life.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:23.884)
I also got to a place where therapy felt like I'd kind of reached my end point. There are so many different kinds of therapy. And I think that at different points in our life, we need different kinds of mental health support. I cannot answer for you. And I certainly cannot answer for you in a podcast episode.
But I cannot answer for you which kind of support is right for you. So I am, I want it just to be abundantly clear that this is not a knock against therapy at all or therapists at all. And I really do think that there is a place for different kinds of mental health support, depending on where you are in your life. What I'm going to specifically talk about is people who tend to come to me and what they get from me that they perhaps aren't getting in therapy. And I also want to acknowledge that therapy
I kind of hinted at this, it is a very broad range. It is an umbrella that has lots of different modalities underneath it. And so your specific therapist and the specific modality that the therapist is using really matters for what you're getting from them.
Okay. So a lot of people who come to me, as I said at the beginning, have been in something like therapy for a while and they feel like they've hit a wall.
So they get to a place where they feel like they're not really getting what they used to get from therapy. And at the beginning, they found therapy really powerful and they really got a lot of ah-has from it. But then they got to a point where it didn't feel like they weren't getting something from it. So I'm gonna tell you specifically, this is a quote from a client. It says, I spent about five years in traditional talk therapy and I learned and grew a ton until I hit a wall and I felt like I knew everything I could about myself, but I still didn't feel good about it.
I still had habits I wanted to change and knowledge I felt really needed to internalize instead of just thinking about it." I think that that quote really sums it up. A lot of people who, again, come to me and are at this place where they're ready for coaching instead of something like talk therapy, they've learned about themselves. They've learned about their relationships. They've been given the space and validation to explore their own opinions, what's going on in their own brain.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:35.776)
I think that talk therapy is so powerful for that. It gives you a space to really be heard and seen as yourself and to actually be able to voice opinions, to get out of your own mouth things that are bothering you or frustrating you or perhaps are hard in your life or talk about past traumas. It's so powerful for that. I don't actually know if this was in one of my counseling, when I got the master's in counseling, one of the classes or not.
It's essentially that, you know, if you, if somebody went and talked to a telephone pole every day, it would be helpful, right? Or once a week, essentially talking to somebody and having somebody's, somebody listening to you is really powerful. And then it gets to a point for a lot of people where you start getting diminishing returns, right? You've shown up, you've regurgitated the same things over and over. You've told about the same story, the same frustration you have.
with your partner or with a friend the same habit that you're in and you're there in a space where you're talking about them, but oftentimes because of the nature of therapy, you're not necessarily getting the tools to start to change them. And so I said that this episode is really about how when noticing isn't enough, and that's what I mean by that. When you notice, I get really pissed when my partner talks to my kids in this way. I get really angry.
And myself, when I fall into the same habit every single afternoon, I sit down in front of the TV and drink a glass of wine and watch reality TV shows. You're aware of this. You've watched yourself in these situations. So you notice it, but because of the nature, again, of therapy, you're not necessarily given the support or tools to start to change it. Sometimes you are.
again, in different modalities, but very often if you're in traditional talk therapy, you're really exploring like feelings around your partner, you're really exploring your own ideas and opinions around your partner, but you're not necessarily prompted with the questions and tools to start to work with your own mindset. You're not necessarily given the tools to start to take responsibility for the way you feel within yourself. And because of that, a lot of people reach a point where they say, okay, I've actually done what I can do.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:55.83)
I can't go any further here. And I feel like, and this, I've also got another email from a different client about this. I, they said, I got to the point where I'd realized I've had the same session five weeks in a row. It felt like I had the exact same pattern of what I was telling my therapist. I thought, I don't want to be stuck in this place anymore. I don't feel like I'm actually making progress in this place. And so I want to look for something different.
So when you're in a place and you're just, this is kind of like when you vent to friends or you have like maybe a group text with a bunch of friends and you vent and you're kind of aware, like I'm so pissed when so-and-so does this or my boss says this and you're there and in some way there's like a dopamine hit you get from the venting and it feels kind of good to vent. But then it gets to the place where the venting,
isn't doing anything and you just notice that you're in the same spot over and over and over again. And for a lot of us, we get to the place where we say, I don't want that anymore. I've noticed my habit. I don't necessarily have the tools to change it from this place where I'm getting support. Or if you're not in therapy, maybe I don't have any tools to get support. I know I want it to change.
I've used what I think I can use to change. I've used willpower, I've used shame, I've tried to use self-discipline. I keep coming back to the same place. I keep having the same problem over and over again. I keep ending up in a relationship with the same people. I keep making friends with not necessarily the same person, but the same kind of person over and over again. I mean, I have the quote unquote same boss, right? It's not the same boss, but I keep getting jobs and I keep being in the same situation and I'm ready to change my patterns. And that's what I'm gonna talk about in the next episode, but in this
When I just, if you're in this place, this kind of noticing is really powerful. But knowing that if you just repeat the same thing over and over again, you're essentially just, you're in a spin cycle, right? You're just like going around and around on like a track and you're just seeing the same thing and you're saying the same thing over and over again. And you're not actually giving yourself the opportunity to see it differently or work with your brain differently. And that's what you need to do to make actual change. Right? So this kind of noticing
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:11.668)
where you vent the same, where you talk about your boss in the same way to your girlfriends every night, or you notice that you're in the same pattern. This kind of noticing is not necessarily the kind of noticing that helps you change, but it might be the impetus to create change, right? So again, a lot of people who come to me suddenly say, I notice that I'm having the same conversations. I notice that I'm in the same patterns. I notice that even though I'm in therapy, I'm talking about the same thing every week and nothing's changing in my
right at this point. And this is probably a shift from at the beginning when perhaps they were talking about things and they were starting to see changes because maybe they were setting boundaries in a different way or maybe were becoming aware of how they felt about somebody so maybe they were leaving a relationship or shifting how they showed up to it. But then there gets to a point where they can't necessarily change from that place. If that's you, you're not alone.
But you probably just don't have a way to work with your brain and nervous system to make the changes. That's what I do with people. And so often people say to me, I've made more changes working with you in six months than I did in five years of therapy. I don't want to discount that therapy because the therapy probably prepared you to make those changes. And knowing that oftentimes the therapy is in the place where sometimes that happens. So.
If you're in this place of venting, regurgitating, you feel like you've had the same conversation going on in your group chat for the past year or something, you might just want to go to a new place. You might try and get some different tools so that you can actually work with your brain to change. Because you working with your brain is the thing that's going to help you actually make change in your life. We don't get to change the people around us. We don't get to change the situations around us, but we do get to change how we show up, and that changes our reality and our life.
So in the next episode, I'm going to talk about noticing as when it starts to shift and it can be the power behind your change. It's a different kind of noticing, but knowing that this noticing that things aren't changing is also really powerful. If you are there, reach out to me, come join the Life Lab, make these changes in your life. I promise, I swear. So it's the most common comment I get from my clients. I made more changes with you in six months and a year than I did in years of therapy.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:26.146)
So know that it's possible if you feel stuck in one those places that you can shift and change it. All right, I will see you next time.