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. What’s actually holding it up The relationship is the healing intervention. Everything else is a tool the relationship lets you pick up. If a person doesn’t trust you, it does not matter how precisely you follow the protocol. You can have every certification. You can have paid five thousand dollars for the training. If they don’t feel safe, they will not close their eyes in front of you. They will not risk looking silly. They will not say the ugly thing out loud, and the ugly thing is usually the door. Flip it. Say you never learned a single named modality. No CBT course, no EMDR, nothing. But you have empathy, you have real positive regard, you can hear a person’s story and the story underneath the story, and you don’t judge them. People will heal in front of you. Not everyone. Some people need the homework. Some people need the tapping. Some people need to walk. But every one of those people also needs the relationship, or the tool is just a tool. This is what I keep hearing from people, by the way, and not only from clients. Anytime someone finds out I’m a therapist they want to tell me about their therapy. And I hear two things in almost exactly equal measure. Either “this specific intervention changed my life,” or “I was in therapy for twenty years and nothing worked until I met this one person.” When I ask what that person did differently, nobody can tell me. It just worked. It was the relationship. It’s always partly the relationship. About the veteran There’s a story early in The Body Keeps the Score about a Vietnam veteran in prison for rape and murder, and the podcast hosts are disturbed that van der Kolk doesn’t condemn him. He writes about him with sympathy. They found that unforgivable. I understand why it reads that way from outside the room. I also understand exactly where he’s coming from, because when someone like that is sitting across from you, you cannot treat what they did as the whole of who they are. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because if that’s where you start, there is no relationship, and without the relationship there is no healing, and without healing you have just warehoused a person. I’m not excusing anything. I want to be very clear. I’m saying there’s more to a person than their behavior, and if you can’t hold both of those at once you cannot do this work. People ask me all the time how I do this job. Part of the answer is that I look at everyone in front of me as someone doing their best with what they were handed. The other part is that the fact that they showed up at all means they’re more resilient than they know. Therapy is like cleaning out your closet I tell clients this constantly. You start with good intentions and within an hour there is stuff all over the floor and the bed and you cannot walk through your own room and you think, this was a catastrophic mistake, I was fine before, why did I do this. Then you can’t stop, because you can’t go to bed with everything on the bed. So you finish. And at the end there are bags by the door and your shoes are lined up and you feel lighter and clearer and genuinely proud, and you make yourself a promise. Never again. One in, one out. I will never let it get like this. You mean it. You really do. And then six months later, or a year, something happens and the closet is a disaster again. That’s fine. That’s the whole thing. Nobody’s closet stays pristine unless they never use it. Doing the work doesn’t mean you never feel a feeling again. You will be sad. You will be furious. You might sit down six years later feeling exactly the way you did the first day, because something new hit the same nerve. That is not failure. That’s not your therapist failing, or the method failing, or you doing it wrong. That’s being a person. What you want is someone you can go to and say, well, the closet’s on the floor again, and have that be a safe thing to say. The intervention changes. The relationship is what stays. So if you’re looking for a therapist, or you’re wondering why therapy isn’t working, look there first. Not at the method. At whether you feel safe enough with that human to be a mess in front of them. No expert, no book, no TED talk, no next big intervention is going to be the thing without that. Nurture the relationships. The rest falls into place. Wonder in the Weeds this week Relationships, appropriately enough. I’m recording an episode soon with Carla Bernberg, who I’ve known since we were both mom bloggers a hundred years ago. It reminded me that I once sat at a computer in the dead of night while my kids slept and wrote about my life, and somehow made real friendships doing it. My friend Jessica showed me how to set up a Blogspot page twenty years ago because I was moving away and wanted my family to keep up with my kids. A few weeks ago one of those internet people was in Minneapolis and a group of us had dinner. I got to hug her in person after all these years. She’s one of my favorite people on earth and we met through a blog. I have a whole web of these, all over the country and a few around the world, and it’s been carrying me through the last few weeks of Minneapolis madness. That’s the wonder. Also I’m watching women’s sports and listening to podcasts about women’s sports and reading absolutely nothing. Send me a book. I’m serious. Reply to this or leave a comment, I need something. Until next time, keep looking for the wonder in the weeds. Get full access to Cristie Ritz-King, PsyD at critzking.substack.com/subscribe
