Therapy Won't Make You a Better Person

Your therapist is positioned to take your side — that’s both a good and bad thing.

This piece was originally published to Medium on Sept 19, 2022. Why I’m migrating all my Medium posts to Substack.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a tweet that sadly reminds me of numerous avid therapy-goers I’ve met in real life:

A Tweet from pretrie that reads: ““i recently met a girl in nyc who kept a notes doc of everything her boyfriend has done wrong thus far so that if a breakup happens she can use it to get over it quickly — her therapist advised her to do this.”

The woman described in this tweet appears to be taking a deeply adversarial approach to dating — one I’ve heard endorsed by many straight women who attend therapy for their own betterment and empowerment. She apparently sees her current boyfriend as a future enemy in the making, not a partner she can express concerns to and collaborate with to solve problems.

Unfortunately, since heterosexual dating norms teach women to obscure their desires and expect their partners to mind-read, doing something “wrong” in this woman’s eyes could be anything from acts of violent abuse, to simply not knowing her favorite flower. Women are taught that asking directly for what they want is wrong. But they’ve also been told that in order to escape sexism, they need to be unflinchingly confident and unattached to men, who won’t ever understand them and can never be trusted. This leads to a lot of self-defeating behavior loops in straight relationships.

A woman faking sexual satisfaction without ever telling her partner how she likes to be touched (and later mocking him for not knowing something he has never been told) is perhaps the most stereotypical example of this dynamic in practice. As a young person, I used to think it was just a cliched media trope — but then over the years, I met dozens of women who shared with me that they had faked orgasms and never communicated their sexual desires with their partners. When women shared this kind of information with me, they usually sounded smug, or almost triumphant. It was as if by concealing information about their own wants and needs, they believed they’d gotten the upper hand over their partner.

As an Autistic gay man who has always been bluntly straightforward when I desire someone, this phenomenon always baffled me. Why were some women proud of having played themselves? Why are straight men, on the flip side, proud of never having their deepest sorrows known either?

Research suggests that contempt is one of the top predictors of a relationship ending. Two people who love one another can come back from a great deal of unhappiness or conflict. But once one partner views the other with disgusted self-superiority, the opportunity for healing repair is often over.

At every turn, this woman is setting herself up for compulsive negative thinking, social detachment, and relational misery. What’s worse, she believes this is a savvy strategy for self-advocacy, and her therapist is actively encouraging her to do it.

I wish I could say that I was surprised. But for a variety of reasons, dynamics like this are not rare. Quite often, a therapist will unwittingly find themselves reinforcing a client’s most negative perceptions of other people, and encouraging them to engage in stubborn, one-sided behaviors that push others away.

This does not happen because the therapist is incompetent, or has any malice, but because of how individualistic and isolated the therapist-client relationship is. Because a therapist is a hired aid with no real-world social attachments to their client, they are positioned to only know their client’s side of the story, and to validate their client’s feelings above all else. This is true even when their client’s perceptions are incorrect and their actions are self-defeating.

To put it another way: a therapist can affirm you, and leave you feeling empowered and correct when no one else in your life is doing so. A therapist can also help motivate you to live the way you want to live, and go after the things you want. But a therapist can’t make you a good person. Hell, from their limited point of view, they can’t even tell if you are one.

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I am a social psychologist, which means I’m interested in how a person’s social context impacts their behavior. I’ve also taken graduate-level courses in clinical psychology, and for nearly a decade instructed therapists-in-training for institutions such as The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and Grand Canyon University. From these sets of experiences, I’ve come to notice a worrisome gap in how conventional therapy functions.

In many counseling and clinical psychology programs, aspiring therapists will learn that building a close connection with their client is the most vital part of the therapeutic practice. There are many reasons why this is true. Whether a client comes in complaining of depression, social anxiety, compulsive gambling, or workplace burnout, the odds are good that they’ve experienced frayed social attachments over the years.

Most therapy-seekers have been invalidated or had their concerns ignored throughout their lives, and so finding a space where at last they’ll be heard and affirmed can be immensely valuable. Speaking as a pretty emotionally withdrawn and conflict-avoidant person, I can attest that it’s a lot easier to develop the language and tools of self-advocacy in the real world if you first practice them in a therapy office. Therapy at its best provides close social connection with training wheels. You get to be raw without much risk of rejection. That has a lot of value for people, and I’m not here to deny that.

The other reason that the therapist-client relationship requires closeness and trust is a lot more basic: as a therapist, you only really know what your client tells you. If you want to get an accurate read on what a person’s day-to-day life looks like, or what past experiences might inform their behavior, you have to get your client to open up and tell you. That requires earning their trust. And as you earn your client’s trust, you’re usually gonna find yourself getting warmly, compassionately attached to the client, too. Again, that’s often a beautiful and healing thing for both parties.

However, when a client’s perceptions are heavily skewed by prejudice or past trauma, their therapist won’t always be able to pick up on it, or to challenge it. Their view of the client’s situation is simply too limited — and their role as therapist biases them in the client’s favor too much.

A particularly astute mental health provider will know when to challenge a client, or ask for examples of how the client behaved, but even that does not change the fact that a therapist only gets fifty minutes of data on their client per week. Every therapy-seeker has an entire lifetime of observations, experiences, and behaviors to work with.

Most therapists work very well with what information they are given — but what they know about a client’s real life (and how the client treats others) is but a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Sometimes, the gulf between how a client presents themselves within therapy and how they behave outside of it can be immense.

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

I used to be friends with a woman I’ll call Mirabel. Mirabel’s therapist believed Mirabel to be a profoundly sensitive, empathic person who gave far too much of herself to other people. I know this because Mirabel told me so.

“My therapist says I need to be more selfish,” Mirabel would say to me, while firing off a series of scathing text messages to whichever friend or roommate had most recently earned her ire. “And more confident. She says I am too forgiving with people, because of my mom.”

Mirabel’s mom was a very demanding woman, in fact. She’d call her daughter up at all hours expecting endless praise. She’d demand money from her twenty-something daughter, then sulk and cry if Mirabel (who had over 100k in student loan debt) couldn’t provide it. Mirabel was quick to justify her mother’s actions.

So in some ways, Mirabel’s therapist was correct for wanting her to become more confident and selfish. But what the therapist did not know was that Mirabel emulated her mother’s belittling attitude and passive aggression in all her other relationships.

Mirabel liked to think of herself as loving and generous, and all her friends were expected to prop up that self-image. Mirabel would give people gifts they had not asked for, then stew in anger if she did not receive effusive thanks. She would make large sacrifices for others, such as letting mere acquaintances crash on her couch, then hold guilt over other people to make them do what she wanted.

For example, after she offered her couch to a near stranger, Mirabel pressured her roommate into buying the person new clothing and food. Mirabel had already given up so much to aid a person in need, she said plaintively. Why wasn’t anyone else picking up the slack? Did she have to do everything herself? Mirabel would go on and on for hours about how much people took advantage of her kindness. If your eyes went glassy during these hours-long tirades, Mirabel would get curt, and mentally add your name to the list of people who had wronged her.

For a long time, I believed the narrative Mirabel had about her own life — that she was so giving, too giving, and no one appreciated her. But eventually I came to realize that in our friendship, I only ever listened to and affirmed her. I was never listened to or affirmed. And so I drifted away.

It is a well-known adage that you should never go into couple’s counseling with your abuser. Therapeutic language is easily turned on its head by abusers, utilized to deflect blame, garner sympathy, and justify any number of destructive behaviors.

But this isn’t just true of abusers, it applies to just about everyone. The logic and language of individual therapy is very helpful for any person who wants to feel validated and empowered to do whatever it is they already wish to do. Therapy leaves most clients feeling more self-righteously correct, and more prepared to put their desires first. This is a neutral thing. It can harm, and it can help.

Within the one-sided confines of therapy, abruptly giving a loved one the silent treatment can be framed as protecting your boundaries. Asking other people to never say or do anything that triggers your anxieties can be viewed as “speaking your truth.” And ruthlessly keeping score of every time a partner disappoints you can be cast as “validating your reality” and protecting yourself from future heartbreak. There’s almost no behavior a person can’t justify with the support of a therapist and the right self-help language.

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I imagine that Mirabel’s therapist is still working with her, still telling her that she needs to get more demanding and take up more emotional space. The two of them had been working together for years when we had our falling out. Mirabel valued the therapeutic relationship immensely, and felt her shrink was the only person in the world on her side. In some ways, that was true. But sometimes, if we are to really grow and break out of damaging behavior patterns, we need something other than unconditional validation. We need someone who is able to call us on our shit.

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My last therapist believed my mother was a toxic narcissist and that I needed to pull away from her. I never used those words for her, but he still came to that conclusion based on the incomplete and slanted information I gave him — and then encouraged me to take steps that I was fully on board with at the time, but now regret.

I sought therapy for a couple of reasons — I was dealing with a lot of unpredictability at work, my romantic relationship was going through big changes as I transitioned, and I was simmering with anger at my conservative relatives for having voted for Trump. My therapist latched onto all my hurt feelings, and treated them as valid. But since my negative emotions are intense and my worst-case interpretations of things tend to be quite dramatic, this sometimes led him and me to unhelpful places.

My mom isn’t a very emotionally expressive person, and she’s uncomfortable with tears and rage. Sometimes, when I share that I’m hurt, she freezes up and has no idea how to respond. She’ll imply the problem I’m concerned about isn’t really that bad, or she’ll wonder why I can’t just try to be happy and stop making everything about politics. It comes across as very undermining to me. It makes me feel like she doesn’t care. It angers me. My therapist picked up on all this, and he validated my feelings.

But is my mother a narcissist? A person who only cares about her own comfort and views her children as an extension of herself? No. I have dwelled for a long time on this question and read a lot about neglect, emotionally immature parenting, and the covert incest that occurs when parents use their children for psychological support. From all this, I have concluded that my late father treated me in a profoundly inappropriate way throughout his life, and that my mom wasn’t always prepared to recognize it, or protect me from it. But she wasn’t an abuser. And she isn’t self-absorbed.

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My mom has always understood that I am different from her, that what I want out of life and how I experience reality wildly diverges from her life path. And she knows that divergence is normal and okay. She doesn’t understand everything about me, but she also doesn’t try to change me, and though her emotional toolkit is a little limited, she wants to be there for me. I know that to be true.

But when I was seeing my last therapist, I was really hurt and furious for a lot of reasons, and he wanted to be in my corner, as all good therapists do. He asked me about my relationship to my mom, and I eagerly rattled off every negative memory and resentments. When I shared with him that I dreaded the weekly phone calls I had with my mom, he encouraged me to speak with her less often. When I floated the possibility of skipping Thanksgiving because traveling to Ohio seemed like a lot of hassle in exchange for misgendering and dismissiveness, he convinced me that was an okay thing to do.

My therapist affirmed my perceptions, and helped me make the decisions I already wanted to make. But he also mirrored the view I had of myself as a put-upon victim of other people’s selfishness, including in situations where that frankly was not the case. As disappointed as I was with my mom, or my job, or my boyfriend, I was also setting myself up for a lot of hurt by not expressing my needs proactively, stewing over unspoken grievances then exploding about them far too late — exactly like the woman in the tweet I quoted at the top of this piece.

My therapist’s view of the situation was only as good as the stories I told him. Did I tell him enough about all the times I’d raged at my mom, screaming and sobbing at her and questioning her intelligence? What about all the times when she tried to explain her perspective to me and I’d just scoffed? What about all the years I spent being emotionally dishonest, pretending things in my life were fine when I was really hurting? I played a large part in our fraught dynamic. She had her limitations, and I always knew what they were, yet I blamed her for being who she was.

Photo by Gus Moretta on Unsplash

My therapist wanted me to feel free to be angry, but I’d been plenty angry already. I’ve always been angry. It’s gotten me nowhere. I’m still learning to reset my relationship with my mom, finding a careful balance between honesty and acceptance, but I know that frothing up all my worst impressions until they engulf me is not the route to change. By always taking my side in all conflicts, my therapist was doing his job as he was trained to— but I wish someone had told me to calm the fuck down and be a little more charitable with people.

The client-therapist relationship is atomizing. It’s often an emotionally intense attachment, but it’s formed outside of the client’s regular life context. What this means is that a therapist cannot reality-check their client’s understanding of events, or determine how the client’s behavior might hurt or drive away people in their life.

A person who comes across as an overly passive, giving martyr in the therapy office may, in their intimate relationships, actually be boorish, manipulative, or profoundly self-centered. Such a patient is still suffering and in need of help, to be sure, but their therapist does not actually know the ways in which the client is contributing to their own problems. All they know is how the client feels, and what treatment they expect. When a client’s expectations are oversized or unrealistic, the validation of a therapist can just leave an interpersonally ineffective, ruminating person fairing even worse.

There are a lot of good things to be said about therapy. Therapy can comfort the adrift and alone, give a brave voice to the silenced, and help the wounded develop new social and psychological tools. Therapy can make someone a happier, bolder, more self-righteous feeling person. But it can’t make them a good one. It takes a rich web of community support — and people who will challenge you because they love you — to do that.

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