The Power of Relationship: Why No Therapy Works Without It

The Relationship Is the Intervention

I listened to an episode of If Books Could Kill this week where the hosts took apart The Body Keeps the Score, and I felt myself get defensive in a way I usually don’t.

I love that show. I love watching them expose the grifters. But this one is a sacred tome in the trauma therapy world, and I caught myself thinking, hold on. Hold on.

They were kinder to this one than they are to most. They know he’s an actual expert. They poked at the research, or at the places where the research is thinner than the confidence suggests, and they were right to. Some of what gets cited in that book isn’t research in the published, peer reviewed sense. It’s thirty years of sitting in a room with people.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think that makes it worthless. You can work in a trauma center for three decades and know things. That knowing just doesn’t get an asterisk at the bottom of the page. The trials cost money. The publishing takes years. So there’s a category of true thing that never makes it into the literature, and we have decided that category doesn’t count.

Bessel van der Kolk is not a con artist. What he is, is a piece of the puzzle.

The thing we keep doing

Here’s what actually got me thinking, and it’s the same thing I keep circling back to on this show.

We are desperate for the answer. The one book. The one intervention. The thing that finally does it. So we find something that works, we go all the way in, and then we either defend it past the point of reason or we turn on it completely and decide it was a hoax the whole time.

All in on one therapy or it’s junk science. All in on GLP-1s or they’re cheating. There’s no version where this thing is good and that thing is also good. No version where something works beautifully for some people and not for others, and that’s just information, not a verdict.

The physical intervention stuff is genuinely useful. EMDR, yoga, tapping, walking across my office while you talk because your body needs to move to get the words out. I have watched people get somewhere in twenty minutes of that which they couldn’t reach in two years of sitting still. It’s real.

It’s also not the thing. It’s never the one thing.