#carl needs help

A few remarks regarding therapy in Dept Q. First of all, I think it is a good thing that the police mandate therapy sessions for officers involved in shootings. After one goes through such trauma, support is necessary. Second, I am not talking here about some of the things Rachel did in the sessions (not everything seems ehm ‘traditional’), and, of course, this is a TV series, not a psychology course.

Nevertheless, I would like to state the obvious, namely that there are different types of therapy, and although talking about your experiences might initially be helpful, talk therapy alone most probably will not be sufficient. Trauma is stored in the BODY, and it needs to be released through the body. Those tennis balls might be a good starting point, but pushing down your anger and grief is not the way. It blows up in unexpected places and moments, as we see repeatedly with Carl.

There are many therapies that go beyond traditional talk therapy. They include EMDR, IFS, Somatic Experiencing and other somatic modalities, Janina Fisher’s TIST, ketamine assisted, polyvagal and others. I don’t know what’s in the original books, but I am hoping something of the following or similar comes up in Season 2:

Carl decides to go to a kickboxing training and one day just punches a bag with rage until he collapses,

Or he visits Akram at home and one of his daughters shows Carl a favourite cat video and the cuteness overload (from the cat and the daughters) just gets him into uncontrollable sobs,

Or he finds a lost kid in the street and helping the kid find his mom triggers a childhood memory that, again, gets him sobbing, maybe later that night in the shower,

Or he investigates a new case in which a trauma therapist disappears, and so Carl needs to learn in detail about that person’s work and thus he finds out about a modality that helps him.