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

For twenty years I was a therapist, and almost every day I heard the same sound. The long breath a person lets out as they sit down in the chair, before a single word is spoken. Relief and exhaustion in one exhale.

This is about what that chair can reach, and what it never quite does.

Therapy, for most people, teaches you to cope. To manage. To survive your life. For anyone who has been drowning, learning to keep your head above the water is everything, and I will never take that 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, and why I closed the practice and walked away from the chair completely.

Twenty years as a therapist. None of this is contempt. It is what I saw from both of those chairs.

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