I Got Divorced. I Moved Across the Country. Then I Quit Therapy.
Reading Time: 6 minutesActually, Not Everyone Needs Therapy! After My Divorce, I Realized I Didn’t., It turns out you don’t always have to work on yourself., After my divorce, I quit therapy.
This is part of Quit It, a series of essays on stopping things—or not.
A lot changed for me over the past two years: I got divorced; I left one job and started another; I moved cross-country from New York to Los Angeles; I fell in love. Each of these changes felt more good than bad, on balance, which is not to say I didn’t cry more cartoonishly than I thought possible. Still, even amid the relief, I worried I wasn’t really OK—having crammed a lot of life experience into a very short period, I feared that the real fallout was yet to come. I couldn’t accept the uncertainty. So I did what struck me as the responsible thing to do, and found a therapist.
I interviewed two candidates and picked the one I liked more, whom I’ll call Sam. Though I balked at her youth (how can someone in her mid-20s understand meee?), she was clearly smart, queer-affirming, and receptive to my request that we abstain from the woo-woo stuff, like asking me where I feel that in my body. Our first session was promising; the next few sessions, less so. But I stuck with it, largely because I thought I was supposed to.
Sometimes I’d text a friend to recap things my new therapist had told me, seeking to confirm this new observer’s assessments. When I told my friend that Sam had (gently!) suggested I was ‘inflexible,’ my friend politely objected, as any good friend should. When I told her Sam had called me ‘grandiose,’ she sent back a long string of question marks, adding: ‘This is the second time she’s been kind of mean?’ Maybe so, I replied, but hearing oneself described in unflattering terms was a penance paid in working on oneself. ‘Who says you need to work on yourself???’ my friend wrote back. This shocked me.
This dear friend of mine has never been to therapy, and in the past, I’ve tended to regard her skepticism toward it as unearned. This time, though, it landed differently: Who says, indeed? Sure, I’d gone through a lot, but I was more than functional; could that be enough? What if, instead of excavating my various inadequacies week after week, I … let myself be? Not wanting to hurt Sam’s feelings, I hesitantly raised the subject in our next session, and a little over three months after we’d started working together, with her support, we finished. I quit.
Before I moved to New York in my mid-20s, going to therapy had never occurred to me, though perhaps it should have. I’m broadly anxious, with specialties in health anxiety (I’m too young to die!), social anxiety (I want to go home!), and a barely managed fear of flying (I’m too young to die!). Growing up, I thought this was just my personality—and my siblings’, and my parents’. In my late 20s, though, I began struggling more acutely with my sexuality, which I’d more or less ignored in years prior. Following the example of the many young, neurotic New Yorkers around me, I sought referrals for a therapist. The first one I met was a disaster: When I told her I sometimes wondered if my underwhelming relationship history with men might mean I was gay, she said she didn’t think so. I knew enough to know that this was wrong, and kept looking.
The next therapist I met—I’ll call her Jessica—was perfect for me: chatty, funny, expressive, and blunt. She asked sharp, incisive questions, none of which invoked mindfulness Instagram. In her tiny midtown office, I felt safe and supported, and more like myself. I don’t know how or when I would have come out without her.
I saw Jessica regularly for a couple of years, and irregularly for a few more, mostly just to keep my Prozac prescription up to date. I adored her, but after so much self-discovery, I grew bored. I would have kept her on my wellness back burner forever, probably, but she later left New York (which I took personally) and couldn’t see out-of-state patients.
The next time I found myself in therapy, it was couples therapy, which I initiated in 2020 (a rough time for relationships, among other things). Though she was prone to penetrating stares, I liked the couples therapist for trying to help me fix what I couldn’t: my marriage. Because she had witnessed its demise, I thought she might be the right person to steer my life postdivorce. We reacquainted after a year apart, but a few sessions in, it felt stilted and strange, like trying to bring a high school friend up to speed in a grocery aisle. I needed a fresh set of eyes on the mess I assumed was lurking inside me. Enter Sam, who meant very well. Sam, whom I have nothing against—who I pray to God doesn’t read this, because even if she is young, I view her as an authority figure, more qualified to judge me than I am.
Which was maybe part of the problem. On this latest go-round, I was in therapy largely for approval: my therapist’s, yes, but also whatever prevailing cultural ‘wisdom’ had wormed its way into my brain. When I downloaded dating apps postdivorce, I noticed a few new trends since I had last been on them seven years earlier: Basically everyone was ethically nonmonogamous, and basically everyone was looking for someone in therapy. (My green flag: working on yourself.) I don’t spend tons of time on TikTok (I’m 37), but when I do, it’s hard not to run into therapists and—even more so— armchair psychologists, all of whom are convinced I have undiagnosed ADHD. I would like to think I’m not so easily influenced, but these forces compound; I developed a belief in therapy as a moral imperative from somewhere.
But this idea—that everyone belongs in therapy, all the time—isn’t just untrue but counterproductive, says Lori Gottlieb, author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed. ‘There are a lot of people who use therapy like yoga: You come in, do your weekly emotional workout, and you leave,’ she says. ‘That’s more like talking to a friend.’ At its most effective, Gottlieb says, therapy is goal-oriented and fixed-duration (though, of course, duration may vary). ‘Therapy is meant to help you understand yourself better so you can function better out in the world without therapy,’ she explains. ‘Our goal is for you to leave. It’s a terrible business model, but it’s true.’
Moreover, therapy isn’t the solution to all the challenges of simply existing as a human. ‘It doesn’t make you a more balanced human being if you’re in therapy or have been to therapy,’ says Gottlieb. (Really? I wanted to ask. Are you sure???)
It’s always worth considering whether your dissatisfaction is therapist-specific, says Reid Kessler, founder of Coastal Therapy Group. ‘I don’t think people shop around enough for their therapists,’ says Kessler. ‘I think it’s helpful for people to go on more ‘first dates’ before they commit.’ Rather than move forward with the better fit between just two candidates, I probably should have kept looking … if I wanted to be in therapy at all. Which, as it turned out, I didn’t.
By leaving therapy when I did, I saved myself an hour a week, and several hundred dollars a month; spending these resources felt worth it before, but now their accrual is a different kind of satisfaction. I was seeking therapy in order to A) improve myself immeasurably while also accepting myself exactly as I am (?) and B) prevent further personal disaster. The latter is, regrettably, impossible. The former presents a philosophical crisis in which I lost interest: How can one ‘be oneself’ and ‘become a better version of oneself’ at the same time? What if one’s self isn’t that good to begin with? Who decides if one is ‘better’ enough?
Also, who cares about any of this? Not me, anymore! I’m as healthy as can be reasonably expected, and content more days of the week than not. There’s freedom in deciding that this is as good as it gets.
The past few years have proved a truism I previously believed only in the abstract: Life can dramatically change on a dime. I would never say I’ll never do therapy again, just as I know better now than to claim very much at all with total certainty. Complete certainty—in my choices, my character, my health and happiness in perpetuity—is all I’ve ever wanted. But I’ve been told there’s no such thing. When I quit therapy, it was a step toward accepting that no one has the answers I’m looking for—not even the professionals.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG