The Commercialisation of Trauma: Where Therapy Sits in the Wellness Industrial Complex

You scroll through Instagram and everyone's suddenly a nervous system expert. Polyvagal theory in the captions. Trauma language in the reels. Someone's selling a course on regulation. Someone else is offering a certification in somatic healing after a weekend workshop.

Then someone walks into my practice who's done all the work. They've taken the courses. Read the books. Followed the programs. They can name their attachment style, explain

polyvagal theory, talk fluently about nervous system states. But they're here because something still feels wrong. They can't quite name what's missing, but they know it's there.

And I see this more and more. People who understand everything but feel like nothing has actually shifted.

The Commercialisation of Trauma Language

Clinical language has become marketing language. Terms that came from decades of research, from working with people in the mess of healing, have been flattened into products you can buy, content you can consume, transformations you can achieve in 30 days.

Polyvagal theory gets reduced to Instagram graphics. Attachment styles become personality quizzes. Nervous system regulation becomes a morning routine you can purchase. The nuance disappears. The complexity gets stripped away. What's left is language that sounds clinical but functions as a sales pitch.

Every influencer is suddenly trauma-informed. Every coach is certified in something after a weekend. The language creates credibility, but the depth isn't there. And people can't always tell the difference between someone who's studied this work for years and someone who took an online course last month.

 You see ads promising to heal your nervous system in 30 days. Courses that guarantee breakthrough. Content that uses clinical language to sell products. People calling themselves trauma experts after minimal training. Terms like regulation, somatic, and polyvagal used without understanding what they actually mean in practice.

The Wellness Industrial Complex

Here's what's important to understand: this industry exists because real barriers to therapy are massive. Cost, waitlists, accessibility, the time it takes, the discomfort of it. Therapy isn't easy to access, and when people are suffering, they need support. The wellness industry steps into that gap.

People aren't stupid for buying courses or following programs. They're trying to help themselves with the options available. The problem isn't people seeking support. The problem is an industry that commodifies their pain and sells them substitutes for what they actually need.

Quick fixes, transformation programs, 12-week breakthroughs, these become responses to inaccessible care. And they promise what therapy can't and shouldn't promise: certainty, speed, and guaranteed results.

The industry thrives on desperation. Not in a deliberately malicious way necessarily, but it fills a market need created by a system where real support is hard to find and harder to afford.

People spend thousands on programs because therapy waitlists are six months long. They buy courses because individual sessions are too expensive. They follow content because it's immediately accessible when they're in crisis. The wellness industry capitalizes on genuine need that the healthcare system isn't meeting.

Your Nervous System Isn't a Marketing Tool

Somewhere along the way, nervous system regulation became something you could buy rather than something you develop through relationship and practice over time. The language gets used to sell everything from supplements to courses to retreats.

But regulation work, actual somatic work, isn't something you learn from a PDF. It's not a morning routine. It's slow, often uncomfortable, relational work that requires being with your experience rather than managing it away.

The buzzwords empty themselves of meaning when they become sales tools. Somatic. Embodied. Regulation. These words describe processes that happen in relationship, in time, through practice. They can't be purchased. They can't be consumed. But they can be marketed.

Real nervous system work looks different from talking about nervous system work. One involves actually feeling what's happening in your body and staying with it long enough to develop different responses. The other involves understanding concepts about the nervous system without your actual nervous system changing much at all.

You buy a course on regulation but still respond to stress the same way. You understand polyvagal theory but your window of tolerance hasn't actually expanded. You know the language but your relationships haven't changed. You can explain your nervous system states but you can't actually shift between them with more ease.

Spiritual Bypass with Clinical Language

Using trauma talk to avoid actually feeling has become its own form of spiritual bypass. The old version was "good vibes only" and toxic positivity. The new version uses clinical language but functions the same way: avoiding discomfort through understanding rather than experiencing.

"Just regulate" becomes the new "just think positive." It's a way of suggesting that if you had the right tools, the right knowledge, the right practice, you wouldn't feel what you're feeling. Your experience becomes a problem to be solved rather than information to be received.

Understanding becomes a substitute for healing. People can talk fluently about their attachment wounds without actually doing the work of developing earned secure attachment. They can explain their trauma responses without their responses actually changing. The intellectual understanding provides temporary relief from not knowing what to do, but the patterns stay the same.

In my practice, I see this constantly. People who've spent thousands on courses and programs. They know all the language. They understand the concepts deeply. They can explain their patterns with clinical precision. But they're sitting with me because something still feels wrong.

Substitution relieves the pain but the problem remains the same. The understanding, the content, the processing, it temporarily makes the discomfort of not knowing more bearable. But the underlying relational patterns, the nervous system responses, the attachment wounds, these haven't actually shifted. They've just been intellectualised.

 You process everything but feel nothing. You can explain your trauma but can't actually be with the feelings that arise from it. You understand your attachment style but keep choosing the same relationships. You know why you do what you do but you keep doing it anyway. Understanding becomes another way to avoid the actual experience of healing.

The Anxious Push for Certainty and The Addiction to Processing

Voltaire said: "Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one."

The therapeutic process requires sitting with not knowing. Not having answers but being curious about that space. Not having solutions but attempting to accept rather than just understand. But uncertainty is unbearable for most people. So they seek certainty through understanding, through processing, through finding the right framework that will finally make sense of their experience.

There's an addiction to processing everything that's happening in the wellness space. Every feeling needs to be understood. Every reaction needs to be traced back to its origin. Every discomfort needs to be worked through, regulated, integrated, processed.

But here's what gets lost: sometimes discomfort is just there to be experienced and felt, not worked through. Sometimes not knowing is the appropriate response to complexity. Sometimes the goal isn't to have no emotional response or to conquer every uncomfortable feeling. Sometimes experience is meant to be lived rather than analysed.

The push to solve, fix, and move on comes from anxiety about uncertainty. Is the goal really to have no emotional reactions? To manage ourselves so completely that nothing touches us? Is experience something to be conquered and avoided? Put into a neat box so there's no need to feel it anymore?

We're not meant to know everything about everything. The addiction to processing is often another form of control, another way to avoid actually being with what is. It's substituting analysis for experience, understanding for feeling, certainty for the uncomfortable reality of not knowing.

And we pacify this discomfort immediately through scrolling, through consuming more content, through finding the next framework that promises to finally make sense of it all. But the relief is temporary because the need for certainty can never actually be satisfied. There will always be more to understand, more to process, more to work through.

 You can't sit with a feeling without immediately trying to understand where it came from. You process every interaction, every emotion, every response. You're constantly looking for the framework that will finally make everything make sense. You feel anxious when you don't have answers. You consume endless content trying to figure yourself out. You can't just be with discomfort without trying to regulate it away.

What Actually Gets Lost

When healing becomes a product, what gets lost is the thing that actually creates change: relationship.

Healing happens in relationship. Not in consuming content about relationship. Not in understanding theories about attachment. In actual, messy, uncomfortable relational experiences where you're seen and you stay, where rupture happens and repair follows, where you learn through experience rather than through explanation.

Time gets lost. Real change is slow. It doesn't happen in 30 days or 12 weeks. It happens over months and years of showing up, of trying something different, of your nervous system slowly learning that new responses are possible. But time doesn't sell. Transformation sells. Breakthrough sells. Quick fixes sell.

The discomfort of not knowing gets lost. Therapy, real therapy, often involves long stretches of not knowing what's happening or where it's going. Sitting with uncertainty. Being with experience that doesn't fit neatly into a framework. The wellness industry promises answers. Therapy often offers more questions.

The mess gets lost. The parts that don't make good content. The sessions where nothing seems to happen. The slow, unspectacular work of just showing up week after week. The times when you try something different and it doesn't work. The reality that healing isn't linear and doesn't photograph well.

 You expect immediate results and feel frustrated by slowness. You want certainty about what's wrong and what will fix it. You look for linear progress and feel discouraged by setbacks. You want the process to be clean and clear when it's actually messy and confusing. You consume content about healing but avoid the actual discomfort of changing.

Where Therapy Actually Sits

I need to acknowledge something: I write blogs. I'm on these platforms. I create content that gets consumed. So where's the line?

The difference, at least the way I understand it, is this: I'm not selling transformation. I'm not promising breakthrough. I'm not packaging healing into a 30-day program or a weekend workshop. What I'm offering through this content is perspective, connection, maybe some language for experiences that feel isolating. But the actual work of therapy can't happen through content consumption.

Therapy sits in a strange place in all of this. It's not selling you certainty or quick fixes. It's not promising that you'll heal your nervous system in a specific timeframe. It can't be productized or scaled. It's fundamentally relational work that happens slowly, over time, in the discomfort of actually being seen.

What therapy offers that products can't is relationship as the healing mechanism itself. Not relationship as a nice extra feature. Not support alongside the real work of whatever program you're following. Relationship as the actual place where change happens.

Therapy is being with rather than fixing. It's staying present when there are no answers. It's offering consistency rather than intensity. It's boring in all the ways the wellness industry can't afford to be boring because boring doesn't sell and doesn't scale.

The slowness matters. The not knowing matters. The mess matters. These aren't bugs in the system, they're features. They're what makes actual transformation possible rather than just intellectual understanding.

 Sessions where nothing dramatic happens but something subtle shifts. Weeks where you feel worse before you feel better. Learning to tolerate discomfort rather than immediately regulating it away. Building trust slowly over time. Experiencing repair after rupture. Staying even when you want to leave. Being seen without having to perform or achieve.

The Difference Between Information and Transformation

You can know everything about attachment theory and still have insecure attachment. You can understand nervous system regulation and still be dysregulated. You can explain your trauma responses and still be responding from those same patterns. Knowledge isn't the same as change.

Information has value. Content can offer language, normalize experience, reduce isolation. But information doesn't transform anything on its own. Transformation requires experience, relationship, time, and discomfort. It requires doing something different in real time with real people, not just understanding why you do what you do.

The wellness industry sells the idea that understanding will free you. Learn the right framework, take the right course, understand your patterns, and you'll change. But I see people all the time who understand everything and have changed nothing.

Integration, actual integration, requires relationship and time. It requires your nervous system having new experiences that compete with old patterns. It requires staying in discomfort long enough to learn you can survive it. It requires relationship as the mechanism of change, not just the context for learning information.

Less consumption, more connection. That's usually what people actually need. Not more courses. Not more content. Not more frameworks to understand themselves through. Connection with someone who can handle their full experience without needing to fix, explain, or optimise it.

What People Actually Need

Real relationship over another course. Space to not know rather than certainty about what's wrong. Permission to be messy instead of pressure to have breakthrough. Time to actually feel rather than endless processing of feelings.

Someone who won't sell them the next solution. Someone who can sit with them in uncertainty without needing to make it go away. Someone who understands that healing isn't linear and doesn't promise it will be.

People need less content consumption and more actual connection. Fewer experts with answers and more honesty about not knowing. Less transformation marketing and more permission to just be where they are without it being a problem to solve.

The wellness industrial complex can't offer this because it doesn't scale and it doesn't sell. Real relationship, real time, real discomfort, these can't be packaged. But they're usually what creates actual change.