Your therapist is a professional service provider
Not your friend, enemy, or social media adversary.
The Internet has made up its mind: we’ve witnessed the rise of therapy culture, and now it’s time for the fall. Recent media coverage has instructed you how to fire your therapist, why to fire your therapist, why you’re doing it all wrong, why your therapist is doing it all wrong, why therapy is a scam. If it’s not Fixing You, you should abandon it altogether.
This feels like the inevitable backlash to an industry that has grown exponentially in size and in cultural relevance. The number of Americans seeking therapy has almost doubled over the past two decades. It feels like the value of therapy has entered the realm of topics for constant public debate (or, in my case, someone I just met at a bar asking me my professional opinion on whether “therapy speak has gone too far”). It’s a major part of American life, and it feels like it’s everywhere.
As a therapist, I’ve found all of this to be a bit…much. Media around therapy often reduces its topic to its most crude, simplistic form. When men go to therapy, it’s a turn on. No…it’s a red flag. “Therapy speak”’ is the language of the workplace. Therapy isn’t helping us solve existing problems, it’s making us think we have new ones.
My experience has shown me something messier and more complicated. Famously, human emotions are not so easily summarized in a provocative headline.
Perhaps I can gently expose a little bias in the coverage. I see some cognitive distortions, a little internet-brain telling us that we need to bring justice to the antagonistic therapists promising us results and failing to deliver. Here’s a tip taken from the toolbox of The Profession called reframing: Your therapist is a professional service provider. The relationship between client and therapist is both a real, human relationship and a transactional one, with terms to which both parties need to agree.
Here’s what this can look like. You are allowed – entitled, even – to ask for what you want from your therapist. If they have skill and ethical integrity, they will tell you honestly whether they can meet that need. If they cannot, they might discuss with you why not, or they might refer you to someone else.
Thinking about your therapist this way can make decisions around therapy easier. Take the much discussed decision to “break up” with your therapist. If you decide, for any reason, that you are through with therapy, you can just say so. If you’ve been working together for a while, I’d recommend giving yourself and your therapist an opportunity to intentionally close out the process through what’s called a termination phase – a session or two during which you reflect, share some feedback, talk about how you’ve grown and what you might want to consider as you move forward.
If you just need to get out of there, that’s fine too! You can simply email them and let them know you will not be continuing with therapy. You can even let them know why, if you’re up for it. Feedback is helpful and we are used to it!
Therapy is supposed to be hard. When you’re weighing whether to terminate, consider whether the challenge you’re encountering is healthy – productive, even – or whether your therapist is not fulfilling their professional and ethical obligations to you.
Some things that are normal in therapy:
Engaging with your existing views or beliefs in a challenging way
Feeling frustrated or stuck
Having an emotional reaction to your therapist (see: transference)
Giving feedback, asking for more or less of something in session
Not feeling like you need therapy anymore and terminating
Feeling like, for whatever reason, it’s just not a great match — and moving on
For what it’s worth, here are a few things that are not normal for a therapist to do:
Commenting on your appearance
Regularly being late or missing appointments
Oversharing about their personal life
Texting you regularly/being overly familiar
Judging your decisions, or assuming they know better than you
Pushing you to talk about sensitive topics
Like any other form of professional service, therapy is helpful sometimes, and not helpful sometimes. My goal for this newsletter is to help demystify this messy profession and engage with some of the occasionally confusing and overly simplistic media around it. I’m hoping I can cut through the noise and present a measured view of what is for many a very helpful, yet somewhat opaque, experience.
Regardless of the Discourse, remember therapy is one of many tools available to you and it’s normal to have complicated feelings about it. You should always feel affirmed and empowered with your therapist. If your therapist is worth the price of their Psychology Today membership (it’s pretty cheap), they can handle the truth. Handling the truth is basically our whole job.
Subscribe to this newsletter as I wrestle with my own complicated feelings about therapy and the culture that surrounds it. Send me ideas! I’m interested in all the thinkpieces, questionable movie therapists, fad-ish news pieces, TikTok therapists (ugh, I guess), and mayyybe even your individual therapy dilemmas. (And – if you like what I have to say and want me as your therapist, reach out to me here).