Therapy Won't Fix You

The Need to be Healed and the Need to be Discipled

In the early 2000s TV series The Sopranos, Mr. Soprano, a mafia boss from Newark, New Jersey, decides to see a psychiatrist after he begins suffering from panic attacks. The premise is an amusing one; he tells his psychiatrist a PG version of his week, the scene often cutting to what really happened, and she asks him what his relationship with his mother was like, among other things. In an early session with the psychiatrist, Mr. Soprano calls into question the benefits of therapy:

Nowadays, everybody’s gotta go to shrinks ... Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn’t know was once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings that they wouldn’t be able to shut him up!

Mr. Soprano’s dismissal of therapy may sound old fashioned, but underneath a layer of hyperbole is a suspicion of how unnervingly ubiquitous therapy has become. What if therapy, as in the case of Gary Cooper, is fundamentally ill-equipped to solve the problems we entrust to it?

It has become an implicit cultural assumption that therapy is a staple for wellness. Seeing a therapist is comparable to a doctor’s visit, and in the same tone a worried parent or a hypochondriac friend might suggest we go to one, or both, when we have troubles. Though some have disregarded the widespread use of therapy as a mere sign of self-centeredness in our culture, I argue that it is not as simple. Many, like Mr. Soprano, recognize rightly that there is some indefinite part of us that needs to be made right. We need to be healed.

As the physical demands of modern life wane in comparison to what our grandparents and great-grandparents endured, the great hurdles we face are less often external obstacles and more often internal struggles of the self. For many, the great journey made by modern man is understood not as an embodied journey through life, but as a journey of self-discovery. Going to therapy is seen as an essential first step towards this self-discovery. Whereas in the past seeing a therapist was taboo, even shameful, nowadays it is almost more regrettable to not have one. Therapy is simply what’s done.

Except, like Mr. Soprano, most of us still aren’t healed. Despite increases in mental health treatment, despite the ubiquity of therapy speech and calls for radical self-help, depression rates are climbing. Especially among adolescents and young adults, who receive therapy at the highest rates, mental states continue to worsen, not improve. Why is therapy failing to treat a culture that so desperately wants to be healed?

Not too long ago, I quit therapy. There were many reasons, but one of them was an increasing conviction that therapy, as a paradigm for treatment, was wholly inadequate to treat the average person.

The problem begins with the premise. Client and therapist meet as strangers and agree to form an asymmetrical, transactional relationship. Client pays therapist a co-pay of $35, give or take, for a 50-minute session (assuming insurance covers the rest). Therapist gives client their undivided attention and understanding. Though therapy in practice should require pushback, the therapist is obliged to put their client at ease. It’s difficult to deliver hard truths to the one who signs your paychecks.

A good therapist has to tacitly believe that their client is telling the truth, even as they know that people are masters of self-deception. This is a necessary concession because therapy is an inherently decontextualized practice. Even with years spent on the couch, a therapist can only know one dimension of you. They may know a great deal about your past trauma, your addictions, how your mother didn’t support your comedy career, and that you definitely consider yourself a good listener, but ultimately they can only know what you tell them. Though with time a therapist may earn the right to question the way a client processes various experiences, the relationship still requires the assumption that the client is the best authority on themselves.

If a therapist does decide to question their client’s version of events, they do so at the risk of jeopardizing the very service their client requires of them: uncompromised understanding. After all, many of us turn to therapists because we need someone to understand us, because we have been so wounded from others’ lack of understanding. To be treated with suspicion and incredulity would reinforce the very wounds that led us to therapy in the first place.

The therapist by necessity must become, at least in part, a sort of sycophant, a prototype to artificial intelligence insofar as they regurgitate your own words back to you, albeit reshuffled and in compliance with the DSM-5!, all while reassuring you that you’re special, that your perspective on life is unique, and that they’re here to listen if you need them.

What about those who do benefit from therapy? These people fall into two groups. The first are those whose maladaptive behaviors so impede daily life that they require a mental health professional to diagnose them, prescribe medication, and provide treatment to properly function. I am not referring to your average ADHD millennial or anxiety-wracked Zoomer. I mean people with meaningful mental health challenges who, without the right help, might end up on the streets or as someone’s crazy ex-girlfriend who really should be celibate. The second group, one that is often mistaken for the broader population, are those who would benefit from a season of concentrated self-reflection, perhaps with limited medication for a specific, identifiable intervention. Most of us do not need to think about ourselves more. But there are some, namely the dads and the severely undersocialized, who require a space where someone forces them to consider their life.

The trouble is that many of us, including myself, have thought at one time or another that we belonged to one or both of these groups. Much has been written elsewhere concerning the consequences of lowering the threshold for diagnosis, but less has been said on the temptation of self-knowledge. While self-knowledge can help us identify where we need growth, it is an insufficient catalyst for healing and can become a counterfeit for actual transformation. Self-awareness is not, in fact, a virtue. It may also become a form of self-deception when we believe that arriving at wholeness happens when we become aware of what wholeness is, or become especially aware of the lack of wholeness in others. Herein lies another flaw in therapy; the more we delve into ourselves, the more we become subject to our own tyranny. While a therapist may try to break unproductive thought patterns, the very practice of therapy primes us to talk about ourselves and expect to receive a reverberation of ourselves in return. As the Soviet poet Arseny Tarkovsky puts it, we become “alone - among mirrors - fenced in by reflections.”

Therapy is inadequate to heal us because the process of becoming whole requires walking in relationship with others who are obstacles to our self-enablement. There is a reason why maturity and healing is not correlated with New Year’s resolutions or personal regimens. It happens sneakily, while we’re awake with an infant at 2 a.m and realize that for the first time in our life, we are devoted to someone other than ourselves. It happens when caring for a parent on their deathbed, when old wounds maturate and give way to forgiveness. It happens at your first job, when you find yourself more capable of hard work than you realized, simply because the occasion called for it. Healing begins when we have no other choice but to change. In the Christian conception of the world, it is only when we come to the end of ourselves, and die, that we become wholly who we are.

What is it about therapy that still resonates as an effective means of healing? The problem is that the client-therapist relationship deceptively mirrors the dynamic of healthier asymmetrical bonds, such as that of the mentor-mentee relationship, or a rabbi and his disciple. A therapist, in one sense, disciples his client, but discipleship can only go so far when you’re sitting on a couch. True discipleship is not transactional, and requires a master to say, “Come, follow me.” To follow your therapist, literally, would violate the ethical boundaries of the practice. Therapy in its essence is disembodied; it is a form of psychic gnosticism in which possessing higher knowledge — in this case, about oneself — is equated with a superior state of enlightenment. The fact that it so closely resembles the discipleship relationship, which resonates with us deeply as an ancient bond, is what makes therapy such a deceptively attractive option.

The trouble is, it’s not altogether our fault. If therapy is a weak counterfeit of discipleship, where are we to find our rabbi, our master? While this would be a convenient time for those of various faiths to insert an absent-from-the-earth religious figure, triteness will not do. Even St. Paul, writing to Christians in the first century, instructs them to imitate him as he imitates Christ.

No, our woundedness is, in part, festering because we lack someone we can trust who puts demands upon our life. We, of course, have many people who demand things of us. But they are not to be confused with the sort of person who we trust enough to make our lives more difficult, if only for a while, so that we can be wrought into something we could never have achieved by ourselves.

We show up to therapy, week after week, having failed to put into practice what was recommended. It’s no matter — they’re still getting paid. And we’re still being understood. But unlike a therapist, rabbis and disciplers put genuine demands upon us, and when we fail to heed them, we strain the relationship and anticipate their disappointment, even if they are gracious. While therapy is transactional, discipleship is covenantal. It is in covenantal bonds when we are confronted—not with ourselves but with the other — that we are tested, tried, and come out true.

But where have all the rabbis gone? A long time has passed since psychiatric practices began, and inevitably along the way there was a shift in the ethos. When the factories started humming and whirring, when the people began moving away from their villages, when information, once a rare resource, was so prolific it could divide us against each other, when our grandparents, who clumsily thumb at their iPads, appeared like fools to us, we lost the people who could teach us how to live well. We have resigned ourselves instead to protracted childhoods and cling to old stories that soothe our sense of failure. And so we go to therapy, to rehearse the same old stories and unearth new ones that provide some abstract reason why. Maybe it was our mothers’ fault—poor mothers—maybe it’s because others didn’t see us for who we really were. Or maybe we have obsessive-compulsive disorder, except our therapist told us it’s only a borderline case that mostly has to do with our religious upbringing.

A couple years in, our therapist, perhaps on their seventh session for the day, lacks the usual patience to overlook our self-indulgence. They subtly call into question our retelling of events, pushing us over the edge. We switch to another therapist—they never really ‘got’ us anyway—to begin the cycle anew. Oh well, at least we’re not the strong, silent type.