Some Reasons Not to Do Therapy

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

It’s probably not often that you’d go to buy something and the salesperson would give you reasons why you shouldn’t buy it. It would be like a car salesperson pointing out that walking is better for you than driving. Or a TV salesperson telling you that watching TV is not a good thing. Or a travel agent pointing out the dangers of sun on the skin. It would be hard to imagine it happening.
But the decision to undertake psychotherapy can often benefit from people questioning themselves a little before they go ahead. Unlike, however, the salesperson who tries to put people off, the exercise is designed to strengthen people’s resolve to go ahead.
The first reason not to do psychotherapy is that it involves a commitment. This does not mean a life long commitment. But it does mean that for however long or short you decide to do it, that you do it. And it’s not simply about showing up at the appointed time every week because the analyst or therapist wants to see you. It’s about committing oneself to approach it with a degree of resolve, consistency and, yes, maybe courage. This is usually a good indication of a sense of inner strength and purpose. Recognising that the decision to approach therapy from a committed perspective is evidence of this internal strength often comes as a surprise to people. Yet, those who want to but never do therapy haven’t found a way to tap into this simple but often overlooked resource. The decision to approach it this way also tends to mark out those who begin therapy as having a greater chance of getting something out of it. If it doesn’t sound like you, then it’s a good reason not to do therapy.
The second reason not to do psychotherapy is that it involves engaging in a relationship. Naturally it is a professional relationship in which all the professional and ethical rules apply but it is a relationship nevertheless. As such it involves taking oneself along to spend time in the company of another person, hopefully a suitably trained person and someone whose contributions might play a significant role in the experience. If, however, the experience of engaging with an other person is one that is overshadowed by distrust, or doubt, or cynicism or resentment, then this element of therapy is going to be problematic. For some people it is the stumbling block on which therapy falls. They simply cannot get past the negative connotations which the professional relationship, in the way it mirrors their broader relationship experiences, represents. If, however, a person is able to bring all that ‘baggage’ with them and still allow themselves engage in the process, then a productive outcome is far more possible. The element of being able to sustain a relationship with an other person is as much a part of the therapeutic process as anything that gets said or discovered during the sessions. If you are not able to reach out and conduct a relationship, in spite of the personal, internal forces that can try to undermine it, in spite of the damage to trust that prior relationship experiences have created and to however limited an extent the professional relationship might manifest itself, then it’s a good reason not to do psychotherapy.
The third reason not to do psychotherapy is that it involves the potential for change. One hundred per cent of people who walk into a psychotherapist’s office will say their objective is to change something in their lives or in themselves. Yet not all of them achieve this. Why? Because change is impossible? No, because change can be uncomfortable. I’m thinking of two instances of people who stopped very early on in their therapy because they each discovered, in their own way, that key relationships in their lives had not in fact been loving relationships but had instead been abusive and manipulative ones. In one of those of examples, the potential existed for the relationship to have breached legal definitions of consensual sex. This is just an example of what change can involve for some people. We are talking about someone seeing themselves in a new and not so positive light. The downside of change can also exist for those who are fixed on their ‘issue’ and hold on voraciously to all aspects of its place in their lives. They refuse the possibility that their experiences, the stories of their life, the place of key relationships in their personal formation, in their details and in their potential meaning, have anything to do with where they are now. Are their issues impossible to resolve? No, but they are unwittingly refusing to allow change take place. So if the possibility of change is too difficult a concept to accommodate then perhaps it is a good reason not to do psychotherapy.
I’m going to leave it there for this week and next week come back and look at further reasons why someone should not do psychotherapy.