Ask a Therapist

If you don’t think that therapy is helping anymore, what can you do? Therapy can be a bit like climbing a mountain. Sometimes you make a lot of progress in a short amount of time; sometimes there’s false peaks and you think you’ve reached the top and then you realise there’s far more work to do, you slip down; and sometimes you plateau. And I guess this is, what do you do when you reach a plateau?

The first thing that you could do is you could carry on doing exactly what you’ve been doing. Someone wiser than me once said that if you carry on doing that and expecting a different outcome, then that’s the definition of madness, so maybe that’s not such a fantastic idea.

The next would be to maybe do something differently with your current therapist, and a good place to start there would be to let them know that you think that progress is stalling, and then you can explore together why that may be and what your expectations are perhaps. And maybe the therapist and you can come up with some things that you could do differently in future, and maybe try it for a defined period of time and then check back in.

Another thing you could do is you could swap therapists – you’re totally allowed to do that. You’re the boss, you can change therapists whenever you like. We’re all different. We all have different approaches. So, maybe you could find someone who does things in a different way, or has different life experiences or beliefs, perspectives about therapy. And you can change it up a bit and see if that makes a difference, and see if that kind of kicks you into a new period of progress.

Or maybe progress seems to have slowed because you’re generally feeling better. Great, that’s the idea. So perhaps now would be a good time to either reduce the frequency of your sessions, or maybe even bring things to a close and go it alone, at least for a while. See if you run with it, or if you start regressing and falling back, you can always pick up again at a later date, either with this therapist or with a new one.