Why Therapy Stops Working: I Sat in That Chair for Twenty Years, Then I Left

For twenty years I was a therapist. Almost every day I heard the same sound, the long breath a person lets out as they sit down, before a single word is spoken.

Therapy, for most people, teaches you to cope. For anyone who has been drowning, that is everything, and I will never take it lightly. But coping is not the same as being free. The great gift of traditional therapy is that it gets you to cope, and the great limit of traditional therapy is that it gets you to cope. It is the same sentence read twice. For most people it hands them the ceiling and calls that ceiling the sky.

Where that ceiling comes from. The one thing underneath it that therapy so rarely reaches. The supervision session in my fifteenth year that I could not shake. And why I closed the practice and walked away from the chair completely.

None of this is contempt. I trained in it and practised it for two decades. It is what I saw from both of those chairs.

In this episode

0:00  The sigh I heard almost every day

1:04  This is not an attack on therapy

1:23  Coping is not the same as being free

2:27  Meet the client where they are

3:49  Everyone has a therapist

5:37  The limited map

6:54  The supervision session. Is that it?

8:04  The part of you that got exiled

9:53  The three hour block

11:33  The Wednesday you turned up on

12:43  Why I closed the practice

13:52  It never forgets

15:25  Why a chatbot will agree with you

16:27  What I built

17:02  Who this is not for

18:18  The door

Lines worth pulling

"The great gift of traditional therapy is that it gets you to cope. And the great limit of traditional therapy is that it gets you to cope."

"You cannot lead someone past the edge of a map that you still stand inside of."

"Your life happens in all the days that you are not sitting in that chair."

Where to start

The door is free to walk through. Go to codexofthearchitect.com and do the Atlas in one sitting, with nothing between you and it but a cup of tea, and let it name the thing that has been running your life. Then decide for yourself.

The Atlas is free and takes one sitting. It names the pattern that has been running your life.

https://app.codexofthearchitect.com/get-started?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=pod-510

How this page was made: the text is the episode's own show notes from The Architect Speaks, written by Michael Lauria.