When therapy doesn’t work
When therapy doesn’t work for you, it’s easy to assume you did it wrong.
Or didn’t try hard enough. Or didn’t find the right type of therapy. Maybe you need CBT, DBT, IFS, EMDR…
But in my experience, it’s often something else: therapy didn’t reach the level where things actually changed.
Feeling depressed? Get some therapy.
Feeling stuck? Get some therapy.
Unhappy? Get some therapy.
So you do. And nothing really changes.
Sure it was good to chat, and your therapist was nice. But were you wrong to expect something more? And what was even missing?
Where’s all this ‘life changing’ stuff people bang on about? Did you miss it?
When people tell me that therapy hasn’t worked for them, there are usually a few patterns I notice.
They often already have the insight
Insight does not necessarily translate into change. Some people arrive saying ‘I know that my childhood wasn’t great. But that was a long time ago and I don’t know how to change what happens in my life now.’
It looks more like this: ‘you have low expectations going into relationships because of how you felt in your family as a child. You try to ignore the signs that something feels off because you don’t think you can expect better. So you tell yourself it’s fine and you stay.’
Then we look for ‘tells’. The tell might be you ask your partner to help with dinner and he says ‘do I have to do everything around here?’ You tell yourself it’s fine and he’s tired.
And over time you end up in a life that doesn’t feel like yours.
They intellectualise their emotions
It’s not always overthinking that needs unpicking. Sometimes you need someone who sees the stomach dropping feeling that you’re a disappointment and helps you bear it.
You’re used to thinking your way out of things. But you can’t think your way out of feeling angry that you were abused as a kid. And you can’t talk your way out of feeling sad that your sister died and you miss her.
At some point you have to feel it.
Therapy isn’t clear enough for you
I had many years of therapy that felt like me bringing up endless topics hoping to hit on the right one. I didn’t know what the right one was. Some therapy doesn’t provide much guidance offering relief by voicing the problem. That didn’t help me.
I wanted someone to say ‘you’re unhappy because you don’t dare go after what you really want and you don’t really want what you go after. Here’s why and here’s what we’re going to do about it’.
My problems were often ‘I darent’ say that’
And I repeated that in therapy. I didn’t say to people ‘yeah I don’t want to have casual sex with you I want a relationship’ or ‘you were really rude to the waiter and that was mean’. I knew what was wrong and I didn’t know how to say it.
So in therapy when I felt we weren’t really addressing the problem, I didn’t say that either. Or when I thought ‘I don’t think my therapist likes me’ I didn’t say that. Years of conditioning to be ‘nice’ and ‘polite’ meant my therapy was a replica of my life. Feeling stuck in situations I didn’t know how to get out of because I didn’t want to upset anyone. So instead I upset myself.
Your therapist is stuck where you are
You don’t have to be perfect to be helpful but if therapy feels generic you might feel stuck. Like the time you followed your Sat Nav only to end up shouting ‘that’s not a road!’ when it tried to direct you down a dirt road because of course a Sat Nav hadn’t actually been that way in real life.
And I get it. I had 5 therapists without really understanding what was wrong or how to change.
I joke to my clients that I trained as a therapist because I couldn't find the answers and that it might have been easier and cheaper to find a different therapist.
I’ve worked with many clients who’ve had numerous therapies that didn’t help. I work selectively and actively don’t take clients I don’t think are a good fit for my way of working.