How Therapy Failed Me and How I Failed Therapy
By: I Told The Moon
Tags: Personal Growth, Depression, Therapy, Mental Health, Self Reflection

10 Reasons I Hate Therapy

1. Fixed Schedule

Thoughts and emotions don’t happen on a schedule. I can’t show up at 7 pm every Tuesday and expect to be in the headspace to be energized enough to summarize and explain in detail what’s happening. To be emotionally vulnerable, yet have the clarity and sense of logic to have a mental breakthrough. That’s ridiculous. I needed something that’s available on-demand that could bend to the whims of my emotions.

I also get it though. Routine can be comforting. Adhering to a schedule forces you to partake in an activity that you might not have otherwise made time for.

Perhaps this may be why so many people enjoy their daily run, the trip to the gym, or weekly church. It’s time specifically set aside for you to be alone with your thoughts.

So which is it? Do I need routine or flexibility? Can’t I have both?

2. Disorganized Thoughts

I couldn’t organize my thoughts from earlier sessions to connect them to today’s session. This is a combination of terrible memory and new issues arose every week.

I never knew where one story would end and the other one would begin. Or why I’d even choose to tell any specific story at all.

It was all disjointed tangents that lacked purpose.

Maybe I needed a mission or goal to achieve. But therapy would unearth so many distractions along the way. Was it all relevant? Or was none of it relevant? Using talking as a tool alone was such a disorganized way for me to learn from myself.

This is probably because I’m not an auditory learner. It was about time I explore kinesthetic and visual forms of introspection too.

3. Lost Progress

Ah-ha! moments were often lost to my short-term memory. I could remember the feeling of relief of therapy. The general positive sentiment throughout the week. But the actual mantras and breakthroughs that are supposed to help me for the rest of my life? Those disappear almost instantly. In my heighted emotional state, my memory turns into that of a goldfish. I’m left repeating the past.

4. Talking to the Void

One-sided conversations are hard. I thought with therapy, I’d be signing up for a conversation.

Or even better, I thought therapy would be more like the movies. You could sit there in brooding silence and a therapist could psychoanalyze your actions like a psychic. Most of the revolutionary thoughts would come from them, not from you.

But no… You pay someone to listen. And then they just repackage what you said and bounce it back to you like a mirror so you can come to the conclusions yourself. It’s annoying. It felt like I was wasting time and money just to hear an echo.

5. She’s an Imposter

The one opinion I’ve been craving to hear this whole time, I often discredit the second she opens her mouth. In the blink of an eye, I dismiss her multiple advanced degrees and years of clinical experience.

Emotions are cannot be studied to be fully understood. They must be lived.

And that is why her textbook advice will never carry the same weight as someone who has lived through the pain — the chaos. I do not have time or energy to waste being vulnerable with someone who cannot help me. So, I mentally check out. Self-sabotaging my own therapy.

6. Context Needed

There was so much burden in explaining the context of a new story to a stranger.

Nuance in describing the behavior of the other players. The history. The politics. The already thought-out alternative options and why I have decided they won’t work.

I felt this overwhelming need to justify my emotional reaction to something. So I wouldn’t be judged by the one person that I paid not to judge me. Providing context can reveal overarching themes. But it can also make you dwell on the past and not look to how you can change your future.

All this wasted breath on storytelling just to get someone else up to speed. It’s boring and not always productive.

But I never know what might help, so I tell the story anyways. As if my therapist is a detective reading a mystery novel, finding clues along the way to solve your life puzzle.

News flash: They aren’t sitting around trying to solve your problem. Apparently, I’m supposed to do that all on your own. Self-reflection and all. Ugh… what am I even paying them for.

7. Recycled Advice

I’ve already analytically dissected my own problems a thousand times before speaking to you. I’ve tried everything I could before deciding to finally pursue therapy. You are my last hope.

And you’re going to give me breathing techniques? Are you kidding me?

I am not impressed. I’ve already tried that. You have brought nothing new to the table. You’re treating my session as if I am a generic patient that can mold into your generic solution.

I know that I’m really not all that complicated. And I do not want to act like an entitled unique snowflake., I do apologize in advance for this reaction. But any one-size-fits-all approach to anything in life will always irk me.

You have a hammer and it’s clear that you see everything as a nail.

I do not feel seen. I do not feel heard. I do not feel validated.

8. Pressure to Perform

There’s too much self-imposed pressure for me to perform within the hour. Everything I did felt like I was wasting precious valuable time.

I couldn’t allow myself to cry too long during that hour — even if I needed the emotional release. I couldn’t over-explain — even if I needed to process. I couldn’t tangent into the open-ended abyss of my life — because I came here to fix a specific issue.

All of these stipulations only made me more guarded because I knew my time was limited and I needed to use it wisely. I needed to use to use that expensive hour as efficiently and effectively as I could. Even if therapy was free, my time as a new mother was too precious to waste on sitting around with a stranger just to complain about my life.

I was a demanding patient. Requiring a new takeaway each time in order for me to feel the experience was ‘worth it’. And I rarely was given that satisfaction.

9. No Measures of Progress

The analyst in me needed a KPI to show my ROI. Yep, in such a qualitative field, I needed to prove to myself that this was all ‘worth it’.

Without measures of improvement, I felt like these sessions could prolong indefinitely.

What was their incentive to have me understand I had improved when I could just become their steady paycheck?

10. And Finally…The Bad Fit

Still in love with therapy? Then I know exactly what you’re thinking. It’s the exact same piece of advice everyone says when I proclaim I don’t like therapy.

“You just need to find the right fit.”

Why do people even give this advice? There is no therapy speed dating. You get what you get.

You pick a name basically out of a hat. Maybe just because they came recommended. Maybe just because they take your insurance. Maybe just because of their location or schedule aligns with yours. In the end, its just a stranger that you picked pretty randomly. And you’re just supposed to ‘fit’. Even Tinder prescreening could provide you with a better match.

By the time I’d figure out we were a ‘bad match’ for each other, I had already invested too much into the relationship.

Walk away too early: I hadn’t given it a fair chance.

Walk away too late: The sunk cost of building up the cadence and all that context would be lost.

The pressure to resolve the actual reason I needed therapy in the first place was too high. There became a sense of urgency to continue with any forward momentum to solve my problem.

So I stayed. And probably due that feeling trapped mentality, I ended up with a string of bad therapists.

Some just lacked actionable guidance. But others were much worse. Some victim blamed. Some fear mongered. Some requested I become their guinea pig in experimenting with highly specialized trauma treatments they were not properly trained in. When incorrectly executed it left me improperly still hypnotized for months.

Talk about trigger warnings — that kind of therapy will pretty much paralyze you.