When to Leave Your Therapist ($)

The relationship you need is not understanding or supportive.

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
― Carl R. Rogers, psychologist

What Therapists Do

This question is simple to ask but complicated to answer. It would be simpler to ask, “When to leave your doctor,” but a counselor or therapist is not so easily appraised.

If your doctor is wrong, find another doctor, but a therapist cannot be expected to be right. In fact, one should expect a therapist to be more a source for ideas than answers. Should you leave a therapist because you don’t like their ideas? What does that mean?

I recently lost a couple who were my clients and I thought a lot about it. Then I read the article “Deciding when it’s time to end therapy” (Segarra et al., 2023), from National Public Radio, and thought about it more.

This NPR article explained that the therapeutic relationship was one of trust, understanding, and support. It advised a client to leave their therapist if any aspect of this triad failed. The idea seemed to be that progress depended on everyone working by the same means toward the same goals.

I found this disturbing. While trust is important, it’s more a statement of character than judgement. Your therapist should be trustworthy, but that does not mean that you should agree with them.

Understanding and support are also problematic. A doctor should understand a blood test, but how do you know if someone understands you? A person can be agreeable and compassionate without understanding you at all.

It’s pretty easy to make another person feel understood, and most therapists are well-trained in evoking this feeling. In my experience, this is largely a charade to establish a compliant attitude in the client. There is no measure of real understanding, only a measure of having an understanding presentation.

The idea that your therapist should be supportive is too vague. Should they support your attitude, strategy, or goals? If you’ve gone to therapy then, most likely, your attitude, strategy, or goals are more a source of your problems than a solution for them.

It might be safe to assert that a therapist should support you as a person, but in almost every case, people only feel personally supported when their attitudes, strategies, and goals are endorsed. That is, people take criticism personally. Should your therapist be uncritical?

The article sounded reasonable if you didn’t think about it. Who wouldn’t want to feel therapy encouraged them in every way? But with even the slightest second thought, the article was wrong.

The bar for quality writing in psychology is abysmally low. Most of what you read is trash, so one shouldn’t expect much. This article seemed unusually bad, so I checked the credentials of the authors. It turned out that none of them had any experience as therapists. They are a talk show host, a fashion model, and a current events columnist.

At one point, the article said, “therapy should feel like a coffee date with a friend.” That set off my fire alarm: if there is anything that a therapeutic relationship isn’t, it’s a relationship with a friend. A therapist helps you understand why your life is crashing and your judgement is fucked up.

If you want a friend, buy a dog. Dogs are great, but therapists are paid to say the things that no friend will ever say. The things that break the mold.

To set the record straight, a therapist should help your situation, and that’s the only thing you can ask of them. Most likely, your situation won’t be seen the same way from any two perspectives, so it might be better to say that your therapist can demonstrate that they’re introducing new feelings and thoughts that are pertinent to your goals.

The only reason for a therapist to be friendly is to make it easier for you to see yourself clearly. We typically freeze when threatened, so being threatening usually won’t open another person’s mind. However, there are exceptions, and my former clients were one of those.

“I believe that the therapist's function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities.”
— Rollo May, psychologist

---

If reality is not understanding or supporting you, maybe you need a second opinion. Short conversations are free. Schedule one on my calendar.