Therapy vs Breathwork: A New Paradigm For Healing
Ever since the Western world woke up to the need to care for our mental health as much as our physical health, the preferred approach to trauma and other mental health issues has been talking therapy.
But there’s an increasing understanding that our minds and bodies are not two separate entities. Where psychologists once thought that mental trauma was experienced only by the brain and physical illness by the body, we now know that the two are inextricably intertwined.
Of course, other traditional healing systems are well aware of the link between our mental health and our bodies. From the yogic focus on the breath, prana, to the emphasis on qi in traditional Chinese medicine, many cultures have a long history of using the flow of breath and energy in the body to release stress and promote emotional healing.
Although Western medicine still focuses disproportionately on talking therapies, it is encouraging to see more and more people adopting breathwork techniques alongside traditional therapy.
If you’ve been struggling and are wondering whether breathwork or traditional therapy is a better route for you, I hope this post will help to clarify the differences and benefits of each approach.
What Is Breathwork Therapy?
Put simply, breathwork therapy is any type of breathing exercise or technique that aims to promote calm and relaxation. Breathwork supports your physical and mental health and helps you to release emotional pain and trauma.
By consciously altering our breathing patterns, we reconnect our mind, body, and spirit. We give ourselves space to process our emotions without getting stuck in our logical, thinking brains.
Although you can practice breathing exercises on your own at home, a breathwork therapy session should be led by a trained professional. They will select the techniques that best suit your aims and help you process anything that comes up through the session.
Even traditional talking therapy increasingly uses breathwork exercises to help people who are struggling with anxiety and trauma.
But a dedicated breathwork therapy session will go a step further, giving you a safe space to fully experience and release your emotions.
How Does Breathwork Therapy Differ from Traditional Therapy?
There are lots of different types of talking therapy. You may already have experienced some for yourself. Although therapists typically have a preferred approach, they’ll often use a combination of different techniques depending on your aims and the issues you are dealing with.
Whatever kind of therapy your therapist chooses, it will involve talking through your thoughts, feelings, and past experiences. The sessions might focus more on developing strategies to help you cope in the future, or they might concentrate on acknowledging past trauma and working through the emotions and thoughts connected to it.
Talking therapies can be hugely helpful. Many people find this traditional approach invaluable in helping them improve their mental health.
But what you might notice is that traditional therapy has a strong focus on being able to talk through your thoughts and emotions. And the truth is that many of us struggle to articulate our feelings clearly, even just to ourselves.
Just the process of packaging our thoughts and feelings into words can limit how we experience them. Unfortunately, spoken language is a clumsy tool for expressing the full range of human emotion.
Talking therapies also assume that our trauma sits in our brains alone. But anyone who has experienced a panic attack knows how it shows up in our physical bodies. The symptoms of emotional trauma, anxiety, or stress are usually felt in our bodies first.
Unprocessed trauma continues to reveal itself as physical symptoms long after the initial event or series of events has passed. We become trapped in a cycle of fight or flight, even when there is no longer any external event triggering the reaction.
One of the advantages of breathwork therapy over talking therapy is that it addresses both our bodies and our minds. A breathwork session helps us to release the emotional pain we store in our bodies. It also gives us space to process the thoughts and memories that come up when that release occurs.
How Does Breathwork Help to Release Emotional Trauma?
When we talk about emotional trauma, it is important to note that this can look different for each of us.
Some people have experienced major traumatic events in their lives. For others, it can be an accumulation of many different experiences.
One of the ways that breathwork therapy helps us release emotional trauma is by helping to activate our parasympathetic nervous system.
Unlike our sympathetic nervous system, which controls our fight or flight reaction, the parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for our rest and digest response.
When we have experienced trauma, we usually find that our sympathetic nervous system is in overdrive. Our hearts pound, our breathing quickens, and our systems are on high alert.
This response is useful when there is an immediate threat. It allows us to react more quickly in high-stress situations. But our bodies and minds also need time to rest and recharge. None of us are designed to operate at that level of tension for long.
Breathwork therapy activates our parasympathetic nervous system, helping our bodies and minds relax and find a state of calm.
Concentrating on our breath also brings us back into our bodies and into the present moment. It gives us space to allow the emotions we’ve suppressed to come back up. Instead of pushing the feelings down again, breathwork therapy encourages us to let them flow through our bodies and find release.
It is a technique that is increasingly finding support amongst the scientific community. Studies have shown that breathwork is effective in treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), stress, and anxiety.
Should You Try Breathwork Therapy?
It is important to note that you can use breathwork therapy and traditional talking therapies side by side. There’s no need to pick one approach over the other.
On my own journey to health, I found that therapy, nutrition, and fitness alone couldn’t take me all the way. These techniques started me on the path, but I still experienced anxiety, depression, and an autoimmune disease (Graves) due to unresolved childhood trauma.
It wasn’t until I dove deep into alternative holistic healing systems that I began to address this trauma. And attending my first breathwork session was the major breakthrough that I needed to continue on my path to wholehearted health.
You may feel you have reached the limits of what you can achieve with traditional therapy, or you may want to explore breathwork alongside talking therapy. Either way, this powerful tool can do so much to help you release emotional pain and process unresolved trauma.
If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch. I’d be happy to talk through the options and help you decide whether breathwork is the healing therapy you need.