Therapy marketing has become increasingly disconnected from what the research tells us about how therapy actually works. Different approaches promote themselves as uniquely effective, each with polished language and confident claims, while the evidence points in a different direction entirely. It’s worth examining what’s being sold versus what we actually know.
The CBT Fundamentalists
The first camp branded Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as “evidence-based” while dismissing everything else as unscientific. The pitch is clean: you don’t want old-fashioned therapy that dwells on the past—you want modern, scientific CBT with proven techniques.
Except the research tells a different story. When well-established therapeutic approaches are tested head-to-head, they produce equivalent outcomes. CBT isn’t superior to psychodynamic therapy, or interpersonal therapy, or several other legitimate approaches, but for some reason its proponents keep implying that it is. We have to ask ourselves whether this tendency to sound like laboratory scientists reflects reality. Is it driven in part by insecurity? A need to demonstrate medical necessity for insurance reimbursement?
The Therapy Gurus
The second camp is even more concerning, and it’s growing rapidly. Therapists are guiding clients through “VOO sound” exercises: deep vocalizations meant to stimulate the vagus nerve. Others have clients create scribble drawings with both hands and eyes closed to “release trauma stored in the body.” Rhythmic movements and humming exercises are presented as methods to “activate the ventral vagal complex” and help clients “climb the polyvagal ladder” back to safety.
If this sounds like a foreign language, that’s part of the problem. These practitioners have adopted polyvagal theory, a framework about how our nervous system responds to safety and threat, as the scientific foundation for their work. The theory has become wildly popular in therapy circles, offering appealing explanations for why we freeze in danger or feel calm around trusted people.
These body-based practices, borrowed from various somatic and expressive arts traditions, are now being sold with confident neurobiological claims. The explanations are specific: “these movements regulate your autonomic nervous system,” “these vocalizations shift your nervous system state,” “this drawing releases implicit trauma stored in your body.”
I’m not claiming these methods don’t help people. Some might. Nor am I against mind-body approaches to therapy. The problem here is that the mechanism of action being sold and the precise neurobiological explanations lack robust empirical support. Polyvagal theory itself, despite widespread adoption, has significant gaps in its research foundation. More fundamentally, therapy operates at the psychological level, not the neurobiological level. We don’t manipulate vagal tone or nervous system states with the precision these explanations suggest.
When we misrepresent how therapy works, we’re not just being imprecise. We’re misleading people about what they’re actually receiving.
What Actually Works
The research over the past two decades points to something less marketable but more honest: the therapeutic relationship matters most. The quality of the alliance between therapist and client predicts outcomes better than any specific technique.
The best therapists (and some really are better than others) share certain qualities: strong interpersonal skills, genuine humility about what they don’t know, and the flexibility to adapt their approach to each person’s needs. They don’t rigidly follow protocols. They don’t promise neurological fixes. They focus on building real connection and working collaboratively toward meaningful change.
A Different Path
At Kingsbury, we built our practice around what the research actually demonstrates, not what markets well on social media. We’re trained in multiple approaches—CBT, psychodynamic therapy, and others—because we know different people need different things. We don’t get trapped defending a single method or selling a branded technique.
We focus on what matters: building genuine therapeutic relationships, adapting flexibly to each person’s needs, and working toward depth and understanding rather than just symptom suppression. Some therapists are more effective than others, and the difference isn’t the techniques they use; it’s their capacity for connection and their commitment to following the evidence.
The field has become cluttered with marketing noise. We’re here for people who want the real thing.