Most people who've done years of therapy know the feeling: you've talked about it endlessly, you understand it intellectually, and yet somehow nothing has shifted. In this episode, Aggelos and co-host Manuel Mendez get into why.

They look at what traditional talk therapy touches and what it misses entirely — and make the case that real change often has to happen in the body before it can happen anywhere else. It's a conversation for anyone who's ever felt like they're circling the same ground in their head and wondering why that isn't enough.

Aggelos brings the practitioner's view: what he sees when clients intellectualize their way through sessions, why the body's signals are often more honest than the polished version of events the mind produces, and what somatic work has changed in how he works. Manuel adds the personal dimension: what it took to move from talking about emotions to actually feeling them, and why the tool that got you this far may not be the one that gets you further.

Tune in to hear about:

Why venting to a therapist can become its own trap — and what's being avoided
The lion and the thorn: a story that captures how most people carry pain without realizing it
What somatic shaking revealed to Aggelos about the limits of everything he'd been taught as a therapist
How the body stores emotional patterns that even years of talk therapy never reach
Why the goal of therapy isn't to remove the feeling — and what happens when you try
What your first thought reveals about the emotions already running in the background

Full transcript

Aggelos: I was curious to ask you if you are familiar with somatics, somatically held tension. I'm very excited about that topic generally.

Manuel: Yeah, it's a good topic. I think it's often one that's a bit overlooked in the traditional way that we approach psychology nowadays. CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, just talking to a therapist about your problems and trying to get to the root of them — that's mostly where people start and where people stay. You hear it all the time: I've been in therapy for five, ten years, just been talking to a therapist — which has also been proven to not work as well, or even to not work sometimes, because oftentimes you're just venting. And venting doesn't do anything. If we have an engine that is overheating and we open a vent, yeah, the engine is going to get better, but then we're going to close that vent again and the engine is just going to overheat. We're not addressing the issue. We're just letting some steam out every time we can.

For me, I had to learn somatic therapy because a lot of the therapy work I've done is with psychedelics, psychedelic-assisted therapy. And psychedelic-assisted therapy is very in the body. What these medicines do is they will enhance your perception of your own body. So if you're feeling anxiety in a certain place, it's going to 2x, 3x that. So you need to learn how to be with that, how to not escape from that. There are also studies about this — proprioceptive perception. The more aware you are of your own body, the less likely you are to be experiencing mental illness such as depression. A big reason for this is because we've become so detached from our bodies. We process so many things intellectually that these emotions are kind of just running amok in the body and we don't realize them.

A great story to explain this is the story of the lion and the thorn. There's a lion in the jungle and it's angry and attacking everyone, and then a human comes and somehow gets close to the lion and sees that he has a big thorn on his paw. And when he removes the thorn, the lion calms down and is back to his normal self. I think this is a great example of how a lot of people live their lives. We have these pains where we can't really identify where they are and they just run our lives. For a lot of people, going into the body is actually very scary, because going into the body means to feel that emotion fully. And the reason that emotion is causing all this chaos is because you're running from it in the first place. It doesn't go anywhere until it's processed.

Aggelos: I fully agree with you. By the time that I discovered forms of somatic therapy, I also realized that just talk therapy might be touching only literally 20%. Reason being that talk therapy requires cognition, conscious processing. So we have the same brain that is causing this tension, processing this tension, and then putting this tension into words and communicating it. It's like we are asking the company that is being audited to audit itself and then produce the report of itself.

And I noticed that particularly in men — of course it's not only a male thing, but men tend to be, at least in my practice, hyper-cognitive. Even if they speak about their feelings, you notice sometimes that the way they're speaking about them is so polished, so perfect, that something doesn't make sense entirely. And lots of junior therapists tend to believe that. Especially if you have to do with a highly intelligent client, it's quite easy to be fooled by that. Another thing that happens frequently is you might have a client that wants to please you. So you have reached some level of therapeutic alliance, and there is some transference, which makes some clients say the thing that they think you want to hear. So there is a lot of recycling of the same patterns, just being projected into the coach or the therapist. So just talk therapy sometimes can even mislead the conversation. It's not only 20% of the job — it can also be misleading.

I'm a big supporter of more holistic approaches. One of them is somatics, and especially what I'm focusing on — somatic shaking. But also trauma approaches like EMDR, which pretty much work in the same way. What does EMDR do? It tries to reconcile memories, reconcile all the bits of a memory. You are keeping one part of the memory — the conscious part — and intellectualizing. But then there are other parts of that memory being scattered across your brain. Maybe a smell is part of the memory. Maybe the sensation of the body is part of another. So it tries to reconcile all of that so that you re-live it, remember it, and desensitize it. What we call in psychology desensitization — which is the mother of getting over trauma. The way to get over trauma or a fear is to experience it and desensitize from it.

In somatic shaking, through shaking and tremor, we ultimately try to remember and get conscious of states that are being linked with somatic tension. And for me that was a breakthrough in therapy and coaching. The value comes from what you mentioned about resistance in the body. When someone starts tremoring, they might re-live feelings of panic or tension. And when you release from one part of the body, typically another part gets tense. This is exactly the resistance. You are afraid to go there. And what we advise is that you shouldn't push it. When you get into somatic therapy with expectations, you are putting ego into the process, and ultimately you are pushing the body to release something that is not ready to release. The body is guiding you hand by hand towards what it's ready to do and what it's not ready to do.

Manuel: I particularly like the part where you mentioned the pushing through — that happens a lot in psychedelic therapy, because to me they're the same. It's very common — a lot of people will go into a psychedelic experience and come out like, I know what I need to do because the mushrooms told me this. And I'm not saying it doesn't work — for some people they get the insight they needed. But what you see in people who have repeated psychedelic therapy and keep getting these insights and nothing changes is usually because you're retreating to the mind. And retreating to the mind usually means that you have an emotion that's so powerful that you really don't want to experience it.

Therapy as a whole has this part of pushing through — which is also a very manly thing. It's: I am broken, I need to fix it, burn my entire being so this goes away. And often, where you were trying to heal that part of you, you're actually adding more trauma to it. Because it's like, no, I need this to be gone. And when you need it to be gone, you're just adding energy into it. I always like to think about emotions as either scared animals, or kids. If you talk to a kid who's done something wrong and explain it logically, he's not going to understand. If you criticize him, he's going to retreat and do the same thing. But if you come with understanding and compassion, and there's space for him to exist as he is — that's what works.

People will go into therapy with an expectation of who they want to be after. But that expectation is also what keeps you from becoming whoever you want to be. Because as long as that expectation exists, there's a denial of who you are right now. The only way to transform is the full acceptance of whatever you're feeling right now. That's just a shame narrative you're talking yourself into — I should be better, I could be more successful. But that same emotion, the more you say that, is feeling unaccepted, and it's just going to grow.

The desensitization is successful when we realize that the emotion we were trying to avoid will not kill us, will not break us. Because often what the psyche is afraid of is a death — not a physical death, but the death of a dream, the death of a narrative, a grief that wasn't processed. One of my mentors told me: the full feeling of an emotion is its own funeral pyre. When we feel the emotion completely, we allow it to go away and really let go. We're not built to harbor and carry emotion everywhere we go. We're meant to feel it, and then let go. And that's for sadness as much as it is for happiness. Carl Jung — the depth of our grief is the depth of our happiness. But if we're holding on to either one, it doesn't really work.

Aggelos: This is why sometimes I don't agree with mainstream psychotherapy the way it is practiced — because what I've been taught is that you should always serve the client's request. I understand that psychology has some boundaries to guarantee a certain level of quality. But in reality, it's like you're teaching an art as a technical skill. And that doesn't work, because psychotherapy requires the skill of adjusting according to who you have in front of you.

In lots of cases, my clients come and their basic request is that I help them achieve the outcome of their shame. One might be a high achiever having a difficult time in their career, and they come and ask me, help me not feel like that. But the same person is not ready to confront the system that is causing that. So I disagree fundamentally with the request. Because the request, if I would create it for them, would be: help me accept that I feel like that. Or even better — help me feel worse so that I feel better. Help me face that, not stop feeling that. Now, is any therapist in a position to dictate what your request will be? No. It falls into the relationship that you have with your client to gently influence the request they're coming with.

But the best teacher for those things is our body. What the body teaches is not just revealing things you don't see — it also teaches you how you should approach those things. At first, when you see your body involuntarily shake by itself, at the same time you just feel that it tells you to move to certain places. It's literally how the subconscious works as well. It is here, guiding our decisions, but we don't understand it. It just feels like someone is whispering something in the ear and manipulating our decisions all the time. So that is the first big teaching from the process — the teaching against intellectualization.

When you're telling me in therapy that you are experiencing your shame, and all the psychological words you have read somewhere, I don't buy that. Because at the very core, what you, me, and everyone is feeling is extremely basic. It has the simplest words possible. When you're using all these fluffy words, I understand that you are intellectualizing. But your body can teach you. When you're doing the shaking and you're experiencing tension in the stomach, and I ask you what is that tension — and you tell me, I feel fear — I believe that answer. Because that is a simple answer. And then we might explore that thing cognitively again — now we turn into cognitive, but the cognitive is fueled by the somatic. Cognitive therapy fueled by somatic is what works best for me.

When we get some tension that you've experienced and I ask, is that tension familiar, what does it strike — always, 10 out of 10 times, they go to childhood. They remember that feeling on the shoulders, or that feeling on the stomach, reminds them of when their mum was asking trap questions. So every time someone asks me a question, I feel like I must give the right answer, therefore I tend to lie. This is literally a quote from a client. I tend to lie, because every time I feel like I will be caught — that's what I'm trained from my parents, they ask trap questions, and that feeling in the stomach reminded me of that. So then we have something to work on that is less intellectual and more real.

The second teaching is the resistance. Sometimes when you get into solving a trauma with the expectation to solve it, you're not letting go. You're adding more layers to the same trauma, because it's a very meta thing — when you're trying to fix something by controlling it, you are resisting the fix. So when someone lets go in somatic shaking and they see their body reacting in ways they didn't expect, or the tension that leaves the body without talking about it, they realize how the cognitive part of the brain is literally misleading all of us.

I remember the first time I did somatic shaking. I had the same breakthrough as when mushrooms worked on me for the first time. When we process trauma, we process them in a post-production way. We process the post-production of these memories, the summary, certain bits. For example, when I did somatic shaking, I felt something on my body that reminded me of a specific posture I was taking in a specific place at my house when I was feeling very tense — and I even remembered what I was looking at, the whole memory came. But if you would ask me, do you remember a very specific tension you had on your body at your bed at a specific time — you wouldn't remember that. You would only remember it if you re-experienced that tension. If you don't remember that tension, you don't remember the trauma. We cannot desensitize because you don't remember. You only remember the polished, post-production part — the intellectualized version of it.

Manuel: It's the narrative. Usually when I'm going through my own somatic or psychedelic therapy and I notice myself going into explanation after explanation — I feel like this because this happened, now I understand this — I have a practice of just telling myself I'm going into narrative, and really shutting down that process quickly, because it doesn't serve me. We can't expect the tool that has gotten us to a certain place to be the same tool that will lead us to the next place. We think the mind is the answer for everything — we've been taught that way. You go into school, it's all memorize, learn frameworks. And often the somatic part is actually devalued. Even exercise is a somatic way of releasing tension. I've had a lot of very spiritual friends that did not go to the gym for a long time, and when they went, they said it's a very therapeutic process — because we're engaging with the body, holding on and releasing tension.

There's also something to be said about the therapeutic process between the client and the therapist. My best experiences with therapists have been when they've been able to mirror my state of mind back to me — not in the sense of I'm giving them something and they give me something back. It's more: I give them something and that something comes back to me, and I'm able to process it through that channel. When you have the relationship of I give you something and you give me something, the information gets muddied, because it's no longer me — it's me plus one. So I'm very against a therapist saying you should do this or that. If it's somatic exercises, like ten minutes of breathwork every day, okay. But you should break up with your spouse, or leave your job — we get into very unethical territory, because we don't know where the other person is.

What I really liked is your share with the client about the stomach and the trap — such a profound insight that literally could change your life. But the real challenge then becomes: I feel that emotion — how do I rewire the new behavior? And it's not that you go against the emotion — it's that you reframe it. It lives inside you in a new light, perhaps one that can serve you versus one that doesn't.

One thing people often don't realize when we're talking about the body — there's this kind of whisper. If you look at how the nervous system works, the brain is just connected throughout the body. The mass of it is in your head, but that doesn't mean that's the only place where it operates. So the body is the mind, and the mind is the body. A really good way to see how this enacts in the background is through the way we attach to other people. You're dating someone new, and you call them and they don't pick up, and you call again and they don't pick up — notice what kind of thought comes up. Is it, I did something wrong? Is it, something happened to them? Is it, they must be busy? That thought alone will show you which emotion is present towards that person. Abandonment is an emotion that resides in the body. Notice how that emotion that's trapped is actually deciding what you're going to think.

This is very common in the business world — where people have been manipulated, lied to, or scammed, and they don't process that, and then they go with that emotion into other business relationships. You'll always be suspicious of someone, because your entire emotional body is on guard, playing defense. Sometimes we think our thoughts are the ones leading the boat. It's often the opposite. The thought is the last iteration of a whole process. The body feels it first, your senses process it first, it goes through the emotional body, and then the output goes into the brain as a thought. And you think, no, I have complete independence in what I am thinking. Not really — you're already seeing it through a lens that you are completely unaware of.

Aggelos: There is a paper about that. Between an actual perception of reality and the thought, there is some time lag. We experience consciously the thought and assume that the thought and the perception of reality happened at the same time. Therefore we tend to believe that our conscious thoughts are the active processing of reality — but the processing of reality has already happened, it has concluded, and then the thought comes after. It is official that we have the illusion of processing our reality with our thoughts, because the reality is already processed and determined for us before.

I don't want to be arrogant, but since I discovered the somatic stuff, talk therapy feels completely inadequate. I question my own past therapy since I discovered that. Psychology recently tends to rewrite itself in many aspects. We have neglected men's psychology. The whole psychology playbook is based mostly 80% on female psychology. We have completely neglected somatics. Trauma-focused therapies are some form of extra certification you're getting, when it should be the base knowledge of what you're doing. I don't know how you can call yourself a therapist if you don't know about the body, if you don't know about trauma, if you cannot treat those things.

I remember a few weeks ago when I did some somatics with a client — a very sweet client that came to visit me and we had a little walk and then did our session in nature. I only do somatics when there is already trust and alliance between us, because it's a little awkward, especially remotely. I might ask you to lie down, open your legs and spread your hips — that tends to get a little funny. But we started doing it, and you saw this guy who started shaking like crazy. And he was telling me that he felt the tension in the stomach, exactly like when he had a panic attack. He was enthusiastic about what the tactic was revealing. And then he was greedily trying to inflict that even more on the body, with expectation and ego — which is extremely aligned with the reason he comes to my practice. You discover so many things through the body.

Have you tried somatic shaking yourself?

Manuel: Yeah, I've had a few sessions. They were pretty good. For me, in my own journey, I tried a lot of stuff that didn't necessarily work. For four or five years I thought CBT was the only therapy that existed. And then I tried hypnosis. Somatics definitely helped, but it was somatics and psychedelics combined that really worked wonders for me. When I started psychedelic therapy, I thought, this is it, everyone needs to do it. And as I matured, I'm like, no, this is for some people, but it's not for everyone. The same is true of every option of therapy. What's important is for people to know that they have options — whereas when we say therapy, people instantly think that's sitting down and talking to someone, versus so many options.

And to me it really doesn't matter which one you choose as long as it works. But what's the definition of working? Where do we want to get to? That comes from talking to the therapist and really outlining the goals in a way that is sustainable for the client's psyche, that they're not just putting their ego into it. Like, I'm in therapy because I want to become a multimillionaire — okay, let's go down that path, and why do you want to become a multimillionaire, what does that mean to you — really going down where that's coming from versus achieving the external goal that the client thinks they need in order to escape a certain way of feeling.

I do agree that psychology is constantly reinventing itself. If we look only through the lens of the Freudian aspect — what happened — nowadays we're already finding that just that alone doesn't allow you to see the full spectrum. I particularly like Adler's approach of, I am because something is happening in the present that allows me to be X, Y, and Z. And a small note I found very interesting — you said that psychology has been mostly done on women, and it's because women are more prone to be open to go to therapy. Which speaks volumes about men.

Aggelos: To therapy the way it is designed at the moment. Because when therapy only means talk about your feelings, then of course it's not a welcome environment for a lot of men that don't have the same vocabulary. I was watching a video from Dr. K the other time — and he was literally saying that he develops a wheel of emotions for guys, because the wheel of emotions for guys is totally different. Men don't identify with the wheel of emotions that you can find online. And I see it in my practice — they struggle to find the feeling. A very common feeling that guys report is feeling like a failure. There isn't a word-for-word equivalent in the Wheel of Emotions to describe that. Or I feel less. It's super common. It's not there.

Manuel: One of the things that teaches us to abstract from our feelings is from a very young age — you're about to give a presentation to your class, and you turn to your teacher and say, I'm feeling something in my chest that's uncomfortable. And one teacher says, that's excitement. And the other teacher says, that's anxiety. See how that is going to reframe your entire life. We are taught to put labels on what we're feeling, but who is exactly giving us these labels? So we need to abstract from whatever labels we learned to put on the feeling, and just feel the feeling itself, as fully as it is. It doesn't matter what label we put on it — is it anxiety, excitement, sadness, grief? Who cares? It's there. It needs to be processed.

Aggelos: Thank you very much. That was an amazing conversation. See you next week.

Manuel: Thank you.