Claiming Each Other as Therapy Prevention

As someone who works in the therapeutic field, I’m well aware that despite all the great reasons to go to therapy, there are plenty of really good reasons to not want to go to therapy. Here are four of my favorites:

Reason #1 to not want to go to therapy

It can be expensive. A cost that is determined by many factors like insurance coverage, therapist qualifications, local economies, etc. And how long will you be in therapy? How many sessions will be required to meet your goals? Averages range wildly from 10-to more than 50. Multiply that by the average cost of hourly sessions and therapy can start to seem like something of an indulgence.

Here are some average costs per 1-hour session 

Portugal: €50-€100  (€500-€5,000 for 10-50 sessions)

US: $100-300     (€1,000-€15,000 for 10-50 sessions)

UK:  £40 - £150   (£400-£7,500 for 10-50 sessions)

Canada:  $60-$250  ($600-$12,500 for 10-50 sessions)

EU: €100-€200     (€1,000-€10,000 for 10-50 sessions)

Reason #2 to not want to go to therapy

It’s not often very pleasant, fun or convenient.

• Let’s be real. Therapy can suck. It’s not most people’s idea of a great time to dig into our shadows,  into all the ways we self-sabotage and into how we contribute if not largely create the struggles we experience. It can be deeply unpleasant to face ourselves, the toxic accumulation of our past, our traumas, the reality of the mess we find ourselves in and the reality of how we actually feel about it all (angry, resentful, depressed, lost, betrayed, etc). 

• It can also be deeply unpleasant, scary, inconvenient and intimidating on another level to face this stuff together, in the context of couples, group or family therapies. Many people can be ‘stuck’ in this phase of therapy for a long time and never get to the ‘solve’ they want which may depend on their capacity or willingness to face all this stuff to begin with. It may also depend on the skillfulness of the therapist you find yourself with.

Reason #3 to not want to go to therapy

It's hard work.

• Once you’ve done the deeply unpleasant tasks of facing your reality, triaging the situation and coming into some clarity about what you really need and want, you are now faced with the monumental if not seemingly impossible task of changing your life, your bodymind, your beliefs and/or your own situation. Some might call this ‘healing’, and there are many traps and tricks along the way. Why should you have to do all these things when it’s really the responsibility of the people who have hurt you to change their minds, to make amends, to level up?! Childhood trauma is not your fault! Ditto covid, war, your sister’s politics, your friend’s overwhelm, your partner’s shutdown, your mom’s and dad’s unprocessed trauma! You’re fine!! If only these other people would handle their own shit, it wouldn’t affect you so negatively! 

• Be that as it may, deep down we remember that maybe we can’t or shouldn't force change on anyone. That change under threat, coercion or manipulation doesn’t create real trust, healing or relational resiliency. Perhaps it just creates more problems. So then we have to keep looping back around to our own response-ability. Old-habits die hard, they say. Especially ones we adopted to survive. It's not always easy to grow, learn, take responsibility and change. It's understandable why many people avoid doing it.

Reason #4 to not want to go to therapy

There’s some compelling evidence that ‘therapy doesn’t work’.

• There are so many different kinds of therapy and just as many, if not more reasons why it might not work for people or be the right thing at the right time. Cognitive based models have been seriously questioned for people with trauma and there are some interesting considerations for why various therapies seem to be more unappealing or less accessible for men vs women. Furthermore, given the demographics of academia, training programs and the respective fields of medicine and mental health for the last 100 years, therapists are under-educated, mis-educated and under-equipped to serve the gloriously diverse demographic of humans given their own hugely homogeneous pool. 

• From reclaimed indigenous knowledge of the primacy of the mindbody connection to the importance of community and connection to spirit, many therapists altogether miss or underestimate the impacts of living in a dissected, disconnected and spiritless world. Many also underappreciated the complexity of embodied experiences related to gender, race, culture, sexuality, physical ability, neurodivergence or other ‘marginalized’ facets of the human experience. Mis-handling these very important aspects of a person’s reality can do more harm than good.

• It’s easy then to question the efficacy of many therapeutic approaches or interventions whendespite the rise in people attending therapy, chronic issues like anxiety, depression, loneliness and their related psychosomatic and social manifestations continue to rise as well.

With this very compelling list, it's easy to understand why some people might feel resistance or flat out refuse to go to therapy. You might have a host of unnamed reasons of your own which are well beyond these. And yet… in increasing numbers, many of us find ourselves in therapy at least once in our lives. 

So can Claiming Each Other really keep us out of therapy?? Is CEO really therapy prevention?? Maybe…. Maybe not. More precisely perhaps than ‘CEO is therapy prevention’, is ‘CEO is harm prevention’... And harm prevention can certainly be therapy prevention! At the very least, CEO might just lessen the severity and duration of a therapeutic process by not compounding recent, more preventable hurts on top of older, unhealed wounds. 

For example, a mundane disagreement between friends, lovers or family members may unknowingly irritate or rip open a years old, unhealed wound from the past. A simple opinion or perspective shared by someone we know may trigger our deepest fears of safety and belonging. Feedback or critique from a spouse may trigger childhood wounds and everyday annoyances may trigger a deep down rage from some existential relational, social or ecological injustice. When these things happen, it's all too easy to judge ourselves and each other for being too dramatic, too sensitive, too intense, too emotional or otherwise unreasonable. And when we don’t catch what's actually happening, and don’t pause to make a simple repair, we might find ourselves bleeding on two fronts… our now opened wounds from the past and the fresher wounds inflicted in the present. 

If left untreated, wounds can start to really inter-affect each other and it can be very difficult to discern exactly where to start in a healing process. Do we go for the root cause (if we even know what it is) or attend to the flesh wounds first? Symptoms scream for attention while deep down, we can sometimes sense that treating them is like trying to treat a hemorrhage with a bandage.  Discerning how to approach healing can be made more complicated when dealing with trauma that is precognitive, systemic and ancestral…. Especially when many in the modern ‘Western world’ do not have language or frameworks for those types of wounds… or even belief that they are real. 

Enter Claiming Each Other’s model of Somatic First-Aid. With a sound somatic relational practice, we can come to know ourselves and each other on many levels and then practice caring for ourselves and each other accordingly. CEO is not technically therapy, but it does have the potential to be deeply therapeutic when practiced skillfully for both relational ‘flesh wounds’ and deeper, ‘root cause’ woundedness. When so much hurt is accompanied by feelings of disconnection, aloneness, and being uncared for, Claiming Each Other is an immediate corrective response which can establish safety, stop the bleeding, dress the wounds, find more help as needed, unwind stress and build greater relational sanctuary. Thus, Somatic First-Aid is not only effective for preventing and repairing surface level hurts, but can also prevent old wounds from re-opening, giving them a chance to self-heal over time, be it in therapy or in any number of ways life works to restore itself.

Physician and trauma specialist Dr. Gabor Mate famously offered, ‘Safety is not the absence of threat, but the presence of connection’. Where experiences of conflict, distress, trauma and intensity can threaten relationships with a sense of disconnection, Claiming Each Other is a commitment to practicing our interconnectedness with deeper care, skill and respect when these qualities are most urgently needed. No special skills or prerequisites are required to learn and practice Claiming Each Other’s model of Somatic First-Aid. Just a willingness to learn and practice giving and receiving attuned care in the context of your everyday relationships. 

Registration is open for the January 2026 cohorts. Give yourself and your people this precious gift of more skillful relating. Who knows…investing in your relationships now might just prevent the need for future therapy for yourself or someone you care about. And that might just be worth its weight in gold. 

I hope to meet you there and look forward to learning and practicing together. 

With love and solidarity, 

Lorie

Why “Claiming” Each Other?

Doesn’t the word “claiming” evoke a sense of ownership over one another? Of belonging to someone?

When indigenous author and scholar Kim Tallbear said, ‘It’s not just a matter of what you claim, but it’s a matter of who claims you’, she was talking about indigenous tribal belonging. Many people will claim they are 1/16 ‘Indian’ or ‘Native’ or that their great-great-great-great whoever was native.  But indigenous identity or tribal belonging cannot be confirmed with genetics, blood quantum or one-way claiming alone. From an indigenous perspective, a person’s claim of tribal belonging can only be validated by that tribe’s reciprocal claiming of that person. 

Similarly, when we talk about ‘Claiming’ Each Other, we are not talking about ownership.  We’re not talking about belonging to each other, but rather with each other. We are talking about the necessity of reciprocity in resilient relationships. 

As much as people need and want to belong, many in modern Western society seem to resist, sabotage or cannot reconcile the paradox of their own tribal belonging with their need to have their own unique identity or individuality. Many indigenous elders and leaders perceive this paradox as a symptom of unhealthy, isolated individualism, where a person feels they must often choose either themselves or their belonging. In this tension, people sometimes feel they cannot fully be or explore their authentic selves at the risk of losing belonging, safety, love or dignity.

But many indigenous elders, stories and spiritual traditions teach us that true tribal or relational belonging is not at all about losing one’s individuality. Within a resilient, shared commitment to one another, there is always an innate diversity of individuality. Authenticity, and space to grow and change is necessary for a resilient social ecosystem. And the recognition of and support for individual differences of mind, body, and expression is key for a system which is healthy, safe and overall adaptable to change. 

These days, we humans are perhaps more tribally-mixed than ever. Cross-cultural and inter-racial and relationships are increasingly common, for example. From the Civil Rights Movement to Indigenous Sovereignty Movements to Black Lives Matter, we have learned a lot about what it might mean to be in more kind, empathetic and loving relationships with people while actually acknowledging and including our racial and cultural differences rather than denying or bypassing them. We have also come to better understand our edges- what we struggle to understand or tolerate; where we close ourselves off from learning and care. 

With great thanks to the Disability Justice and LGBTQ+ Movements, many of us are more aware of the unique gifts and struggles of people in our own families and communities with neurodivergence, chronic illness, disability and those who embody the brilliance of the spectrum of human sexuality. Here too, we have perhaps met our edges in recent years when challenged by different needs and responses regarding the pandemic and the embodiments of sex and gender. 

These movements have also taught many of us about the potential of our own expansivity… including the ways society, institutions, families and our own beliefs may have reinforced suppression and repression of our more authentic selves.

There has perhaps always been the human tendency to put ‘us’ against ‘them’. But as we step into greater authenticity with the people we love and care about, including family, friends, neighbors and colleagues, we may come to understand that there is a greater diversity within our ‘we’ than we are prepared to handle. ‘We’ are perhaps not as homogenous politically, religiously, sexually, ideologically or physiologically as we once thought, as we once were or as we’d like us to be. Is our love, care and respect dependent on someone’s choice around masking or being vaccinated? What about their voting choices, relationship configurations, or ideas on climate change, Zionism, Marxism or mental health?  Can we really Claim Each Other when suddenly one of ‘us’ starts to look and sounds more like one of ‘them’? 

And what of the everyday stresses and traumas of illness, depression, chronic anxiety and even death? What of the uncertainty of the economy and the instability of secure housing? How do we Claim Each Other when life’s merciless challenges seem to unleash the more unlovable faces of our human nature? When we are angry, sad and frustrated with one another’s vulnerabilities and self-protective responses?

I don’t claim that Claiming Each Other is easy. Nor do I suggest that it’s something that anyone specifically should do. I can’t exactly recommend Claiming Each Other, because I do not presume to know what is good or right for anyone else. Sometimes things fall apart. Sometimes they get burned to the ground. Sometimes we just have to walk away or cut ties with someone for good. If it reduces harm, maybe that is Claiming Each Other. Maybe it is a mutual act of love and care. No matter what you decide, Claiming Each Other is not a prescription, a quick fix solution or a suggestion that you should stay in toxic or trauma-bound relationships in the hopes that someone will change.

Claiming Each Other is a calling. It is for people who know we can do better with each other and want to learn to love each other more kindly in the complexity and messiness of our unfinished humanness… especially when things get really tough. 

I hope you’ll join us for a training soon. I intend that in the three months we spend together you feel acknowledged, supported, and respected in all that you bring to your relationships. And, that you leave with a deeper sense of affirmation that your inner knowing is valuable, wise and worthy of guiding your journey. 

Until next time, 

Lorie 

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” -Abe Lincoln