I often get asked either directly or indirectly by patients about how therapy is going to help. When we suffer from mental distress and mental illness, one of the barriers we often feel is that what we suffer from what cannot be seen. Similarly, how and why talk therapy works was difficult to explain in the past.
With new brain studies and data emerging, we now have a greater understanding about how the brain is changed not only through medication, but also through talk therapy alone. Medications have shown to cause changes in the amygdala while talk therapy has shown to affect prefrontal control systems which increases cognitive control.In addition, there has been evidence that changes in the way genes are expressed occurs through talk therapy because we are learning and through this learning, connections between synapses are strengthened.