"Why Isn't This Working?": 4 Areas That May Be Preventing An Effective Therapy Experience
It’s not uncommon to run into doubt at some point within your therapy journey. Whether you’re processing a loss and honoring a grief journey or you’re seeking skills in attempts to effectively navigate a big life transition, you may encounter a point in the process where you’re left thinking “is this working?”
4 possible factors that may prevent an effective therapy experience
While the experience of questioning whether therapy is working or not may not be uncommon throughout the process, the reasons behind why you’re running into this obstacle looks different for everyone.
Below are the 4 most frequent reasons I’ve encountered while guiding clients through their processes (as well as having gone to my own therapist and walked through my own therapy journey) that may interfere with one’s ability to having an effective therapeutic journey/experience:
Your experience isn’t matching your expectations for how quickly you achieve your therapy goals
You may not be connecting and building a relationship with your therapist
You may be connecting and building a relationship with your therapist however, the particular approach they’re using doesn’t mesh well with how you work
You’ve had bad experiences with therapy in the past and those experiences may be distorting your current view of and engagement in therapy
Are any of these reasons resonating with you? If so, I encourage you to read on as I will break each of these down and provide tools on how to best navigate and overcome these obstacles. If not, I still invite you to read on as this information may come in use later on down the road for you; or you may want to pass this article along to someone else who you know would benefit from the information.
Reason #1 = Experience Doesn’t Match Expectations
“How long does this take?” or “How many sessions will I need?” are the typical questions potential clients will ask during their consultation call. These are fair questions; especially when it comes to feeling better and experiencing relief around what’s causing you distress.
My answer? It depends. I know, I know! Classic response! Let me explain.
Everyone’s therapy journey will look different. From what you are needing guidance around to how often and how long therapy will last, each process is unique. Some factors that may influence your journey are:
Purpose for therapy: if you are processing deep rooted trauma, your process may take longer than someone who is looking for maintenance
Severity of symptoms: the intensity, duration and frequency of your symptoms will influence the timing of your therapy
Therapy history: if you’ve done therapy before, you’re familiar with the process and more than likely know how you best work. If you’ve never done therapy before, there may be a learning curve as you determine how you best respond to therapy.
Willingness: the more willing you are to put in the time and effort/energy into your therapy process, the more benefit you will find.
Therapy expectations exericse
When evaluating whether or not your expectations for the therapy process are in line with your experience, it’s worth taking the above elements into consideration. Where do you fall? To start getting an idea, I encourage you to answer the following questions:
Is this your first time in therapy? Or have you attended before?
Are you processing heavy deep rooted issues? Or are you more looking for maintenance and exploratory work?
The symptoms paired with the issues you are seeking therapy for, how often do they occur? What are their intensity levels?
Are you willing to do the work (even when you know it won’t be easy)?
Based on these answers, you can begin to adjust your expectations accordingly. If you’re unsure about the answers around some of these, I’d encourage you to chat with a current or potential therapist.
Reason #2 = Lacking Connection with Your Therapist
Your relationship with your therapist is so incredibly important when it comes to making progress in therapy. When creating a safe space to build rapport/a relationship with clients, I share with them the importance of this therapy element:
It shows the client that therapists are also human
Without a strong client-therapist relationship, the skills/tools, exercises, and interventions provided throughout therapy will only take you so far
For some, a connection is felt right away during the consultation call. While others, may need to engage in a few sessions before a rapport is built. My hope would be your current or potential therapist automatically creates space for rapport building to begin (for example, I do this through informing my client(s) that I encourage open communication around the process, as well as ask specific questions about who they are as a person; questions outside of the reasons for bringing them into my office). If not, I’d encourage you to ask your therapist how he/she/they goes about building a rapport with their clients.
Reason #3 = Therapy Approach Does not align
Now, let’s look at the other side of this therapy coin. While a strong rapport with your therapist is extremely important, it’s not everything. After all, you are there for therapeutic guidance and the skills, interventions and exercises paired with that guidance. It is possible for their to be dissonance between your rapport with your therapist and the approach they are attempting to guide you through (i.e. your rapport may be strong but the therapy approach they are using with you doesn’t align with how you best work).
“If this is the case, is it automatically a lost cause? Should I find a different therapist.”
Not at all! There is room to have conversation around this and I invite clients into this space. You may want to explore the following (the consultation call is a great time to begin this conversation):
How does the therapist typically work with clients? (i.e. how will they help you achieve your identified therapy goals)
How does the therapist navigate when a tool/exercise/intervention does not align with or work for the client?
Reason #4 = Negative Past Therapy Experiences
Whether it was with therapy or not, I’m going to take a risk and guess you’ve more than likely had one bad experience or a stretch of bad experiences that have influenced your view on similar situations in the future. This can be a big barrier to the engagement in therapy and its effectiveness; especially if that bad experience caused more harm than good. This obstacle can interfere with your process consciously or subconsciously so it’s worth exploring with your therapist your past therapy experiences (both positive and negative) to ensure awareness. To begin exploring these previous experiences, I encourage you to:
Share with your therapist the particular negative (or positive) experience from the past that may influence your current process
Discuss how this experience impacted you and your therapy process/experience
Together, determine how you will work differently (with a negative experience) to overcome that barrier
The next time you have the thought, “is this working?” when thinking about your therapy journey, I encourage you to come back to these 4 common barriers and ask yourself if any are present. If they are, use the exercises provided to help you through those. If not (or even if they are present), I encourage you to give yourself grace, be patient, and be curious in order to achieve success within therapy.
Here’s to living a better life as your best self.
Brittany Squillace, MA, LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Grief Therapist
