The end of talking therapy: Why alternative and somatic therapies are taking over, according to experts
If each generation is blessed with an idiosyncratic voice, one capable of cutting through to the truths of the time, the millennial one belongs to Jemima Kirke. The former Girls actor’s responses to questions from her Instagram followers have become the stuff of legend. One in particular on advice for unconfident young women – ‘I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much’ - has become part of digital lore. But even offline, the sentiment is catching fire.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t talk to someone’ declared The Cut for a piece, published last May, asking why rising numbers of people are quitting therapy. In it, health journalist Melissa Dahl cited a 2023 review of 19 studies that found no difference between shorter- and longer-term bouts of psychotherapy on a depressed or anxious person’s level of functioning. The conversation continued in The Atlantic in July, in a piece reporting on the legacy of the efforts to destigmatise mental health problems; among the fears articulated by researcher Dr Lucy Foulkes was the risk of pathologising mild forms of distress.
But if some are reconsidering therapy with ambivalence, others are doing so in a different state of mind. The same month as The Atlantic piece, the MailOnline reported that those offering therapy via the tele- service BetterHelp had engaged in a litany of unprofessional behaviour, from speaking about their pets to using the toilet while visible on a video call.
The claims prompted an internal quality assurance review at BetterHelp, while a spokesperson said the company doesn’t hire unqualified practitioners, its therapists don’t give out detrimental advice and any therapist found in violation of their terms would be removed from the platform. But some of those behind the allegations said their experience had led them to walk away from therapy entirely.
Of course, that’s not to say that people don’t need help. NHS data from 2024 shows 3.8 million people were in touch with mental health, learning disability and autism services that year, an increase of two-fifths since pre- pandemic; and one in five women live with a common mental health disorder, compared with one in eight men.
But it seems those with the resources to go private are investing in lesser-known practices, with both Internal Family Systems (IFS) and eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) experiencing a spike in interest. Meanwhile, bestselling books such as the (controversial in some circles) The Body Keeps The Score, which evangelises the impact of such practices, along with yoga and dance, for the treatment of trauma are only contributing to the re-examination of the dominance of talking therapy. So what’s ignited this great therapy switch-up?
What's the best type of therapy?
Much like ‘meditation’, ‘therapy’ is a word with many meanings. ‘Since [Sigmund] Freud developed modern psychotherapy, a lot of people have thought of the practice as a therapist prompting you to get your thoughts and feelings out, and that this disclosure is the most important thing [for healing]. But there’s various models of therapy, which can work differently,’ explains health psychologist Sula Windgassen.
Even within psychodynamic therapy – based on Freud’s theories – there are multiple methods. ‘From the traditional mode where you lie on a couch and explore what comes up from the “subconscious” through to short-term psychodynamic therapy, which is more focused on allowing you to access your emotions and move out of intellectualising feelings and cognitive behavioural therapy.’
Though they come under the umbrella term ‘psychotherapy’, IFS and EMDR don’t ‘look’ like the image most of us have of therapy. The former hinges on the idea that we all have a multiplicity of ‘parts’; by engaging with these parts – often by focusing on the place in the body in which they can be ‘felt’ – it’s said that you can transform their negative behaviours.
As for EMDR, it involves a therapist waving a finger above your eyes as you recall a traumatic memory, quickly moving your eyes from side to side. If this sounds bizarre, the practice sees success rates of between 70% and 90%, and is recommended by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence for the treatment of both post-traumatic stress disorder and complex-post traumatic stress disorder.
Popular, too, is somatic experiencing therapy, which works on the principle that trauma gets trapped in the body. This, and other somatic therapies such as dance, complement the aforementioned modalities by ensuring the bodily sensations tied to these parts and memories are processed, says Tommaso Barba, a neuroscience researcher at Imperial College London, who’s using IFS in his own life. ‘Traditional therapies rely heavily on top-down processing, which engages the prefrontal cortex [the part of your brain responsible for planning and decision-making] to analyse and verbalise trauma.’
But trauma impacts deeper brain structures like the amygdala [the part of your brain responsible for the fear response] and brainstem, which are less accessible through cognitive processing. Somatic therapies use bottom-up processing, starting with physical sensations, movements and breath to regulate these lower brain regions. This provides a physiological foundation for emotional safety and cognitive processing to occur more effectively.’
Why are alternative therapies gaining popularity?
That lesser-known modalities are becoming more popular shouldn’t surprise us, says clinical psychologist Emma Svanberg. ‘Therapy, like all professions, changes with new understandings. Newer models might gain awareness – sometimes due to intense levels of marketing around them and their creators – as well as people talking about their therapeutic experiences on social media.’
While body-based approaches aren’t new, they’re experiencing a spike – and the change isn’t happening in a vacuum. ‘It makes sense that we’re looking for approaches that bring us back into our bodies after a period of solitude and, for many, dissociation, over lockdown.’
The legacy of lockdown isn’t all that’s informing the shift towards embodiment, either. ‘You could say that the rise in alternative healing goes hand in hand with the rise in alternative media,’ adds Jules Evans, philosopher and editor of the newsletter Ecstatic Integration, referring to the ascent of non-traditional media, such as podcasts and newsletters from people not employed by traditional media titles.
‘I used to work a lot for the BBC. There, you can see a clear Overton Window [a span of acceptable ideas and worldviews] around spirituality. With [popular] podcasters like Joe Rogan or Lex Fridman or Andrew Huberman, they’re much more interested in alternative health and spirituality, things like psychedelics and alternative ideas in general.’
It was a podcast that brought Lara* to IFS. The 35-year-old Suffolk-based fitness trainer has been in therapy since she was a teenager. But while cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) was helpful for dealing with disordered eating, the technique isn’t designed to tackle the root cause of suffering, and Lara continued to experience anxiety. When the therapist she started seeing in her early thirties encouraged her to try IFS, she was hesitant. But after being presented with some emerging research, her trust grew. IFS enabled Lara to make progress with self-compassion, and after learning about EMDR via US comedian Whitney Cummings’ podcast, she switched to a therapist who offers both.
‘I felt silly the first time I tried it and started laughing,’ she admits. ‘[But] EMDR is the most effective treatment I’ve tried so far. By processing the emotions from past traumas, and how they’ve affected my decisions over the years, I’ve been able to soothe my nervous system. When I was just talking about incidents with no emotional connection in talking therapy, I didn’t get anywhere like this far.’
Do alternative therapies work?
Of course, when it comes to something as important as seeking help for your mental wellbeing, the devil is in the detail. For Felicity*, a 40-year-old living in London, it was major postnatal anxiety – exacerbated by parenting her infant twins in isolation during Covid – that led her to talking therapy.
‘I was grateful to get that awareness that I’d been through something hard,’ she shares. ‘But it didn’t make my anxiety go away, or shift anything for me. Over the course of three sessions, I was never given an understanding of why the body experiences anxiety, or what’s actually going on, physiologically.’ Instead, revisiting what had happened, again and again, kept her feeling stuck.
It was on the Instagram page of a wellness influencer that Felicity discovered Rapid Resolution Therapy (RRT), a modality that claims to quickly resolve emotional trauma by using metaphor and storytelling to indirectly target memories, removing their emotional charge. (There’s extremely limited evidence to support the practice, and promises of close to instant trauma resolution should be taken with a bucket of salt.) But after a single 90-minute session – conducted online – she felt better.
‘[I felt] light and energised. Rather than rehashing the past and my problems, I was thinking about the future, where I had power to make changes.’ Felicity found the modality so helpful that, five months later, she trained as a practitioner herself. Now, the former fitness trainer offers ‘unconscious reprogramming and nervous system regulation’ to clients, as well as life coaching.
Felicity’s pivot from traditional to alternative worked for her. But it’s a space in which Evans advises caution. ‘When mainstream therapies don’t work for people, they sometimes head to the fringe, and that could be helpful. But my warning would be: not everyone who calls themselves a therapist in the UK is a licensed therapist.’ That ‘therapist’ isn’t a protected term means anyone can start using it to describe themselves. A ‘licensed therapist’ will be signed up as a member of a regulatory body, such as the British Psychological Society (BPS) or the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).
And if a therapist isn’t licensed? ‘Then you’re not entirely sure what you might be getting,’ adds Evans. ‘They may behave in unethical ways that are not in accordance with industry standards. And if they do, you have no kind of complaints procedure that you can go through.’
While Felicity’s experience of RRT has been positive, the founder has had allegations of sexual misconduct made against him, which he denies, and a group complaint has been filed in Florida, where a board will determine whether an investigation will follow.
Meanwhile, Evans has reported on ‘unattached burdens’ – IFS terminology for demons or malevolent entities that bind themselves up into a person. A book by leading IFS figure Robert Falconer called The Others Within Us dives into the topic, complete with a foreword from the creator of IFS, Richard Schwartz. Evans has expressed concern about telling patients in therapy that they have a dark force lurking within them.
How to find a therapist
When it comes to finding a therapist – for any modality – Evans always advises checking that they have a professional licence. Terms like ‘integrative therapist’ or ‘functional medicine’, he says, hint at more of a fringe worldview (which may or may not be what you’re looking for).
You can also search the name of a therapist or a modality together with ‘scandal’ or ‘lawsuit’. It’s worth noting, too, that some people find talking therapy is the thing that works for them. ‘I fell out of faith with it for a while, sick of hearing myself say the same things,’ says Safia*, a 33-year-old civil servant from Wiltshire. ‘My housing costs increased and I couldn’t justify the expense any more. But when I came off antidepressants, I knew I needed help readjusting. I wince when the £60 leaves my account, and I’m going bi-weekly rather than weekly, but right now, it’s a necessary anchor.’
We live in weird and demanding times. And with high rates of mental ill health and capital T trauma, new and interesting modalities – some of which are supported by evidence – are bound to be alluring. And yet, the secret sauce of a productive therapeutic relationship often comes down to something simple: whether you click with the therapist.
‘Research shows that the main factor of a ‘successful’ outcome in therapy is about the relationship between the therapist and the client,’ says Dr Svanberg. ‘So the different benefits of therapeutic modalities and approaches will apply to different people at different times.’ This was the case for Lara. ‘My therapist has tailored an approach, using all these different modalities that she’s well versed in,’ she says. ‘I feel like she gets me, and what might work best. I think that’s the reason why I’m seeing such good results.’
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