There are times in therapy when your therapist suggests something to help difficult emotion or thought, and it doesn’t work. Or perhaps you tried therapy for a while and eventually decided that it wasn’t working or wasn’t particularly helpful.
Sometimes that is simply the case. A strategy or therapy intervention may not have been helpful for you. Sometimes the therapy, therapist, timing or approach isn’t the right fit. And sometimes therapy doesn’t help in the way we hoped it would.
But sometimes, it can also be helpful to explore what help means to you.
I often think it can be really valuable at the beginning of therapy for your therapist to ask:
“How do you believe therapy actually works?”
Exploring this question together can uncover an expectation that often sits underneath therapy. For many people, the answer is something like:
Therapy helps by making my uncomfortable thoughts and feelings go away.
And that’s completely understandable. If you’re anxious, depressed, ashamed, overwhelmed or panicked, of course you want those feelings to stop.
But there can be a tension here. Because while reducing distress can absolutely be part of therapy, another important part of therapy is learning to have a different relationship with the thoughts and feelings that inevitably arise.
This doesn’t mean accepting that you will be deeply depressed all the time or that you have to tolerate excruciating panic without help.
It means developing the capacity to experience difficult emotions without immediately needing to get rid of them.
Strategies and skills can help reduce the intensity of an experience. They can give you enough space to stay with what you’re feeling, manage it, and perhaps even become curious about what the feeling might be communicating to you.
Sometimes the goal isn’t:
“How do I make this feeling disappear?”
but:
“How can I be with this feeling differently?”
This can be a subtle but really important shift.
You may still get triggered after therapy. You may still feel anxious before an important event, hurt when someone disappoints you, ashamed when something touches an old wound, or overwhelmed when life becomes difficult.
Therapy doesn’t necessarily mean that difficult emotions stop happening.
It might mean that you recognise them sooner. That the feelings don’t feel quite so frightening. That you don’t immediately have to act on them or escape from them because you have more ways of responding. And also that you recover more easily after something difficult happens.
And sometimes, importantly, therapy may not have helped. An intervention may genuinely not have been useful and you may have needed something different. Or the timing or therapeutic relationship may not have been right.
So the next time you notice yourself thinking, “That didn’t help,” you could pause and wonder whether something can be helpful even when the difficult feeling is still there.
Did it not help because the feeling is still there?
Did it not help because you were hoping the feeling would disappear, when what was being offered was a way of relating to it differently?
Or did it simply not help because it wasn’t the right approach for you?
Those are very different questions.
And sometimes, one of the most useful things therapy can offer isn’t a life without difficult feelings. It’s the growing sense that you don’t have to be afraid of every feeling you have.
