People Want to Talk (on the quiet persistence—and surprising power—of words in a somatic age)

“I don’t want just talk therapy.”

“Talk therapy doesn’t work.”

I’ve heard these sentiments more than once—from new clients, as well as from people in broader social circles.

It feels, in some ways, like part of the current Zeitgeist.

There is a collective zeal for embodiment—for healing processes that feel more experiential, more sacred, more able to cut straight to the marrow of the emotional and spiritual heart of human life. Without the need to talk in circles, or get caught in the thickets of ritualized personal narrative—the kind that ego defenses (or, in Internal Family Systems language, “protector parts”) can loop in.

And it’s true.

Sometimes, if a therapist is not careful, talk therapy can become a rehearsal of a wound narrative. So much so that a depressed client may leave a session more dysregulated than when they came in.

And there certainly are many shamanic, somatic, and psychedelic healing processes that can take someone directly into a sense of the sacred—into the very place where transformation wants to occur.

This is why I’ve gone out of my way to train in, and experience, a range of these modalities. And why I offer some of them to my clients.

Believe me—I want to go there too.

And yet, I remain fascinated by how often a client will begin by saying they prefer somatic work or don’t want talk therapy…

…and then, as if we’ve stepped through some unseen fairy portal together, I find myself listening—with time-altering absorption—to a long, intricate story about some matter of the heart.

It leads me to a simple conclusion:

People want to talk.

They don’t think they want to talk.

But they do.

I’m guilty of this too.

For the past several years, I’ve sought out almost exclusively somatic practitioners for my own healing. And yet, as if pulled by an undertow, our sessions often fill with words—my words—interspersed with quieter, more concentrated descents into the body.

Often, there is something I need to say. Something that wants to be spoken, like scratching a mighty itch.

Perhaps it’s because the satisfaction of finally articulating—finding the right words for—some previously unspoken layer of experience, and having it met, mirrored, or understood, is unparalleled.

It’s why we love good writing.

In psychoanalytic circles, it’s been said that we enter therapy in search of an adequate biography—a way of telling the story of our lives that finally makes sense of what once felt arbitrary or unfair.

A story in which our wounds are contextualized.

Our peculiarities are redeemed—or at least honored.

Our choices become more intelligible.

Our lives feel coherent.

A biography, in this sense, is a story.

And in many ways, people seek therapy for help in revising, deepening, or continuing that story.

Storytelling is how we have always come to know ourselves, each other, and our place in the world.

It seems to me that our instinct to weave stories—to talk—is as fundamental as the instinct to hunt down a sandwich for lunch.

We are hungry to be known through our stories. To bridge the vast gulf of aloneness between individual units of consciousness with words.

And perhaps we are hungrier for this now than ever.

Loneliness has become alarmingly epidemic. And in these complex, often demoralizing geopolitical times, the little fingers and branches of fracture run deeper into communities, into ever more intimate spaces, even into the self.

Words become a kind of net—woven across those fractures. A very human kind of magic, cast across increasingly oceanic distances of separation.

I’m not saying I’ve become a staunch “talk therapy” purist.

I begin where my clients are—that’s the foundation of client-centered work. And more often than you might expect, where we begin is with words.

Sometimes those words lead us somewhere unexpected. A sensation arises. A shift in the body. A quieting.

We follow it.

We listen beneath the words—to the deeper layer of the story. Sometimes that leads further into the body. Sometimes it circles into imagery or back into meaning-making and language.

Back into rich, crunchy words sprouting directly from the textured darkness of the body.

I’m a perpetual student of what it means to be human. And when I notice a pattern like this in my practice, I feel called to wonder about it—to stay with it long enough to learn something.

Talking to each other strikes me as a deeply human impulse.

Imagine this: you’re having a terrible day at work. A trusted colleague notices and says, “Hey, want to take a walk?”

What they’re really saying is: let’s talk.

They’re saying: I see something in you. I want to hear your story. I want to be with you in it.

In that moment, yes—perhaps a somatic ritual or ceremony could be beautiful, even transformative.

But I wonder if a simple walk-and-talk is just as ancient, just as magical, just as infused with care.

It’s simply such an ordinary magic that we forget to notice it.

And yet, our nervous systems seem to reach for it again and again.

And isn’t talking, in its own way, a somatic process?

Aren’t words shaped in the body?

Doesn’t tone shift as tightness moves through the throat or belly? Doesn’t rhythm change? Breath? Pace?

Doesn’t speaking open a doorway into our embodied emotional life—sometimes even a floodgate?

I tend to notice what the Zeitgeist elevates—and what quietly falls away in the process.

And (Piscean spirit that I am) I often feel compelled to write in defense of what’s being lost.

So perhaps this is, in part, an apologia for the life of the mind.

Not because somatic or sacred approaches are misguided—not at all—but because I sometimes sense the mind being gently dismissed in their wake.

Perhaps this is part of a broader cultural movement: a return to the Feminine principle (often associated with the body), and a flight from the toxicities that are associated with the Masculine (often associated with the mind).

But there is magic in the mind, too.

I feel it most poignantly in A Little Cloud (a short story in Dubliners) by James Joyce.

Little Chandler and Gelleher sit together by a canal in Dublin after a crackling, ceilingless conversation. The closing line reads:

“They drank, however, a great deal of smoke and talked loudly; … and sat for some time in thought-charmed silence.”

The air itself feels altered—charged by what has just been spoken, thought, felt.

Because truly generative thinking requires an interlocutor.

We are changed through conversation—through the meeting of minds, nervous systems, imaginations.

Something emerges between us that neither could have arrived at alone.

Our thoughts want to be sharpened.

Our stories want to be witnessed and, perhaps, redeemed.

And this happens through the subtle, collaborative dance of talking together.

People want to talk.

And I think they need to.

I think we–as a collective– need to.