Recently, a friend said during a conversation: “I went to therapy, but I didn’t feel it helped me.” While I understood where they were coming from, the finality and unchangeable tone surprised me. Because it’s true that therapy might not help sometimes—but there’s usually a reason. Maybe we didn’t approach it with the right mindset, maybe we’re not working with the right therapist for us, or, most often, we simply didn’t give it enough time to take effect.
From my experience, going to therapy is anything but easy. Sure, there are comforting conversations, but mostly it’s serious inner work that every nerve in your body resists. Breakthroughs and insights can be powerful signs that the effort is worth it—but if those don’t come, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking: therapy just doesn’t work.
It’s like we forget that most wounds we bring to therapy didn’t appear yesterday. It’s not a bad week or a failed conversation—it’s years, often decades of imprints. Words we heard as kids. Situations where we had no choice. Patterns that once helped us survive but now hold us back. And yet, deep down, we hope a few sessions and some realizations will suddenly "fix" it all.
The Desire for Quick Fixes Is Totally Understandable
We live in a world where everything is instant: food, information, answers, feedback. Headache? Take a pill. Phone acting up? Restart it. Something’s wrong? Fix it and move on—fast. But the soul doesn’t work that way.
There’s no reset button, no update that makes everything fall into place overnight.
Therapy isn’t surgery—it’s more like gardening. You don’t cut something out; you watch, nurture, dig, and wait for a long time. And that waiting is one of the hardest parts of mental work. Especially because there are moments—when your shovel unearths old skeletons—that everything seems worse than before we started digging. What was dull becomes sharp. What was buried surfaces. What we were used to becomes uncertain. It’s common for someone to want to quit therapy because it’s “too much.” But often, that’s a sign that something is finally happening.
It’s tough to accept that the system that kept us going for decades—even if painfully—won’t collapse in a few months. That our nervous system needs time to believe: there’s no danger anymore. That we don’t always have to be on alert, defending, adapting. It’s a learning process. Slow, full of repeats and setbacks.
Therapy is a game of patience because it teaches us to wait for answers. We won’t understand everything right away, and sometimes it even takes time to find the right questions. And while we wait, we have to learn to tolerate uncertainty.
One of the most important realizations for me in therapy was that I’m not "broken," so I don’t need to be fixed as fast as possible. I just have a story, with layers, reasons, and threads.
I write the next chapters, but I can only be a good author if I understand what drove the story so far.
When we accept this, therapy stops being an emergency fix and becomes a long, slow, sometimes painful, but deeply transformative process. Not a band-aid. But maybe that’s the price for real change—not just covering up.
