When the therapist tells Will “it’s not your fault,” Will answers “yeah, I know” over and over. Joe names this move: speed bumping. It’s the “yep, I got it, yeah, I know, blah blah blah” that lets the words pass by without ever landing in the body.
“The therapist sees that he is not actually letting that [ __ ] in. We call this speed bumping. Yep, I got it. Yeah, I know.”
Speed bumping is how shame defends itself. Will knows the therapy speak; he can agree intellectually with “it’s not your fault” precisely so he never has to feel it. The agreement is the deflection.
The therapist’s response is not to argue or push harder, but to keep his heart open and simply repeat the message. That constancy is what eventually forces the buried response to the surface—first as anger, then as the sadness underneath. Love that refuses to be speed-bumped is what finally cracks the pattern.
Related Concepts
- When love arrived with abuse, love later gets met with aggression
- Being loved within the shame dissolves it
- The endurer pattern survives by refusing to feel pain
- Trauma controls you until you feel the hurt underneath it
- Fully feeling a pattern ends it without figuring anything out
- You can express anger without directing it at anyone