You’ve Been in Therapy for Years. Why Do You Still Feel Broken?

If you’ve done years of therapy and still feel broken, you haven’t failed at healing. You’ve been working with the wrong tool for the job.

There’s a thought that visits people who’ve been in therapy for a long time.

Usually late at night. Sometimes after a session that felt like it went really well. It goes something like this:

What is wrong with me? I’ve been doing this for years. I understand my patterns. I know where this comes from. So why am I still like this? Why do I feel broken?

And underneath that, quieter and more shameful:

Maybe I’m just defective in some way. Maybe I’m the one person this doesn’t work for.

If you’ve had that thought – or some version of it – I want you to read this carefully.

You are not broken.

But the model you’ve been given? That one has a flaw.

What therapy does brilliantly

Before I go any further, let me be clear about something: I’m not here to dismiss therapy. I work with therapists. I train them. Many of them use Head Trash Clearance alongside their existing practice because they’ve seen what happens when the two are combined.

Therapy is genuinely powerful for exploring what I call the architecture of your emotional life – the stories, the patterns, the beliefs, the attachment styles, the reasons behind the way you show up. Understanding that architecture matters enormously.

It gives you language for your experience. It helps you make sense of yourself. For many people, that understanding alone brings real relief.

But here’s the thing about architecture.

Understanding the structure of a building doesn’t fix the damp.

The part therapy struggles to reach

Beneath the architecture – beneath the stories and the insight and the beautifully articulated patterns – there’s something older.

Your emotional operating system.

This is where the actual charge lives. The survival coding that got wired in before you had language for it. The identity decisions your nervous system made when you were small and didn’t know any better: I’m not safe. I’m not wanted. I have to earn love. If I’m too much, people leave.

These aren’t thoughts you chose. They’re conclusions your system drew – and then built everything else around.

And here’s the critical thing: they’re not stored in language. They’re stored in the body, in the nervous system, in layers of emotional charge that formed long before you could think your way around them.

Which is why you can understand a pattern completely and still react from it.

Which is why you can trace the abandonment wound back to the exact moment it formed, articulate it with real precision, even feel genuine compassion for the child you were – and still freeze when your partner doesn’t text back.

Insight maps the wound. It doesn’t clear it.

The moment the model breaks down

Imagine you’ve been shot with an arrow. It’s lodged in your shoulder and it bloody hurts.

The person you go to for help sits you down and asks a series of thoughtful, careful questions.

Where do you think it came from? Who might have fired it? How does it make you feel? What does the arrow symbolise for you? What might it be here to teach you?

And you have insights. Real, meaningful insights. You become very fluent in the language of your arrow.

But the arrow is still in your shoulder.

That’s what happens when you have a good tool for exploring the architecture – and no tool for clearing the charge underneath it. You get extraordinarily articulate about your pain. The pain stays.

This isn’t a criticism of therapists. Most of them are doing exactly what their training equipped them to do. The limitation isn’t in their skill. It’s in the design of the model – a model built around talking, and talking can only take you as far as your conscious mind allows.

The charge beneath the wound lives somewhere talk doesn’t reach.

READ: Childhood Wounds: How Early Experiences Shape Adult Patterns

What changes when you work at the root

Head Trash Clearance – and specifically the Absolute Healing Process for wound-level work – is designed to work directly with that charge.

Not by retelling the story. Not by reliving the pain. By targeting the emotional imprint at the level where it actually lives – beneath narrative, in the operating system itself.

When the charge clears, a few things tend to happen that feel almost disorienting at first.

The trigger loses its grip. The situation that used to send you spiralling becomes ordinary. The relationship dynamic that kept repeating starts to shift – not because you’ve worked harder at it, but because the thing driving it from underneath has been dismantled.

The identity decision – I’m not safe, I’m not wanted, I have to earn love – goes quiet. Not because you’ve replaced it with a more positive belief. Because the emotional charge holding it in place has been cleared.

This is not insight. This is structural change.

So why do you still feel broken after years of therapy?

Because you’ve been working on the right problem with the wrong layer of the tool.

Therapy gave you the map. That map is real and it matters – it tells you exactly where you’re going. But you’ve been standing at the entrance to the cave with a candle. A very good candle. Carefully held. Thoughtfully pointed.

The cave is still mostly dark.

Head Trash Clearance is the floodlight.

And the reason you’re still feeling like this is not that you’re broken, or defective, or too complicated, or the one person healing doesn’t work for.

It’s that the charge is still there. Untouched. Waiting.

That’s what we clear.

Where to go from here

If this is landing – if you recognise the years of insight without the shift – start with the free Anxiety Assessment. It takes a few minutes and tells you exactly what’s driving your anxiety at the root: the value conflicts, the wounds, the nervous system patterns that keep the charge alive. That clarity alone is worth more than most people get from months of journalling.

→ Take the free Anxiety Assessment

If childhood wounds specifically are what you suspect is underneath it all, the Heal Your Childhood Wounds programme goes directly after the root architecture – the ten universal wounds that quietly shape everything. No retelling required. No endless processing. Just structured, layered clearing that works beneath the story.

→ Heal Your Childhood Wounds: Heal Your Childhood Wounds Programme

You’ve been doing the work. You deserve tools that actually match the job.

Head Trash Clearance is not therapy and is not a replacement for clinical mental health support. If you’re experiencing a mental health crisis, please seek professional help.

Alexia Leachman
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