Season 3 Ep 3: Unraveling Popular Ideas: Challenging Neuroscientific Narratives in Therapy with Kristen Martin

Apr 30

If you’re a therapist in 2024, odds are you have given a client a neuroscientific explanation for a symptom they’re experiencing or an intervention you’re using. You’ve probably done it sometime in the last week. So have I. Neuroscience-based language is the lingua franca of our field nowadays.

As a field, we have largely abandoned the languages of behaviorism or psychoanalysis, though there are still therapists who use those frameworks. But if you asked most therapists right now why they think what they do works, you would get an answer about the brain and nervous system.

This would be fine, except that at this moment, as our scientific knowledge rapidly grows, so do our claims about what that knowledge means, sometimes outpacing real understanding of the emerging research and its practical implications.

So when I encountered an article in The Washington Post titled “The Body Keeps the Score offers uncertain science in the name of self-help. It’s not alone” by writer and cultural critic Kristen Martin, I was intrigued by the way she shed light on some of the neuroscience that we increasingly use to justify what we do as therapists.

I invited Kristen to join me to unpack some of the all-too-common misrepresentations and over-interpretations and the wide-ranging implications for our field and the people we treat.

Kristen Martin is a writer and cultural critic. Her debut narrative nonfiction book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, will be published in winter 2025.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Why we are so compelled to seek out neurobiological explanations for human experiences

The significant limitations of the research that routinely gets cited to justify neuroscientific models of mental illness and trauma
How poor communication, low science literacy, and social media exacerbate the spread of “folk neuroscience.”
How neuroscientific explanations for mental health struggles are being co-opted and exploited by bad-faith actors and systems
How biologically-based explanations for mental health issues can increase stigma
How neurobiological models let us bypass our collective responsibilities to mitigate systemic issues associated with trauma

About Riva

Riva Stoudt is a therapist based in Portland, Oregon. When she's not working with patients, she likes to talk about all the things a therapist isn't "supposed" to talk about.