Therapy Doesn’t Work

When therapy doesn’t work, it’s because you are talking about your feelings or talking about events that happened in the past, you aren’t feeling them. Talking and insight alone have no magical qualities. In order to experience a change in the way you feel in your body, you have to experience the feelings in your body. When you experience feelings and integrate them with the spoken memory of events, then therapy works, but not until then.

There are times when therapy is just a good place to release tension that has built up in you over a period of time by talking it out or a place for you to get an outside perspective on things you don’t want to say to anyone who knows you. But really, you don’t need a therapist for that. A coach, a mentor, or a good friend will do just fine in those cases. Therapy is for when you are not happy, can’t control your feelings, or have problems with your relationships at home or work and nothing you’ve done is changing those issues significantly. When you’re already “successful,” it’s for when you want to dive deeply into your feelings in order to reach your highest personal potential. In either case, it’s not talking that’s going to help significantly.

In fact, talking is probably just going to get you angry about or bored of repeating the same story over and over again and not getting anywhere. The reality is, the most likely reason you can even talk about whatever it is that’s bothering you is because you have learned to numb the feelings associated with the event and “move on.” Unfortunately, when you do that, the problem gets worse, therapy doesn’t help, and you think it’s stupid.

To be quite honest, sometimes therapy doesn’t work. Sometimes what you need is to be in a relationship where you can go through feelings of dependency, vulnerability, fury, rage, longing, and many others, and experience the fact that those feelings exist in you, experience not be rejected for having them, accept them in yourself and love yourself anyway. You need to experience, in relationship, that just because those feelings exist in you doesn’t mean that you aren’t a strong, loveable, creative, independent, accomplished person who doesn’t need anyone. Sometimes that’s just too hard to do, and sometimes therapy will never work for you.

Think you can do it? Call me, we’ll talk… among other things.

Leah Benson Therapy icon

Contact me now to set up your free 15-minute phone consultation.

Mindful exercises, grounding, journaling, relationship

Share this article

Get your anger under control today with an experienced anger management counselor.

Emotional Utopia

WE ARE IMPROVING THE BOOK WITH THE LATEST AND GREATEST BRAIN SCIENCE.

Just tell me who you are and we will notify you when it is released.

REQUEST A FREE COPY OF THE INTRODUCTION OF

EMOTIONAL UTOPIA

Just tell me who you are...

leah benson on mobile phone zoom meeting

Online
Therapy
Available

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. By continuing to browse on this website, you accept the use of cookies for the above purposes.

Skip to content