The #1 Mistake That People Make in Therapy

Nick Fager

Therapy is a different experience for everyone based on a huge variety of factors, and what works for one person often doesn’t work for the next. If your therapy is working for you in its current form, then there is no reason to change anything. But if you’re finding yourself stuck or unsatisfied in therapy, or unsure how to improve the experience, it may have less to do with your therapist and more about the way you are utilizing the space.

Your mind is a muscle. It needs to be strong to be able to handle and process the wide range of your emotions. Mental health = mental strength = having the capacity and the courage to handle intense emotions without being overwhelmed and resorting to ineffective coping mechanisms.

In order to keep our mind strong, we need to keep it active and keep working it out. This is no different than your physical muscles, and there are lots of ways to work it out. Mental exercises like meditation and yoga are great, but our mind is ultimately very relational and needs to feel connected to others, so the best workout is authentic and vulnerable emotional exchanges with other people.

Training your Relational Mind

If you’re going to a personal trainer to build physical muscle, typically you would go to that trainer once a week. You work out with your trainer, but more important than that, your trainer is teaching you how to take care of your body and work out by yourself, and you need to keep working out by yourself outside of your training sessions in order to make any progress. Essentially, a good trainer is teaching you how to become your own trainer. If you only went that one session a week with your trainer, and otherwise laid around all week doing nothing, you wouldn’t make progress, and you might be inclined to blame your trainer for the lack of results.

This is the number one mistake people make in therapy. They save up all their emotions from the week for therapy and stay fairly emotionally isolated in their lives outside of therapy. They open up to their therapist, but not to other people. Instead of being a space to support, nurture, and hone the mental muscle, therapy becomes the muscle itself.

Not only do we miss out on building mental strength when we do this, we also miss out on the opportunity to build a network of people in our lives with whom we can be vulnerable and get support. Ultimately this can result in a form of dependency and pressure on therapy, and stagnation when it comes to your mental health.

Therapy is a space to work out your mind, a safe space to do the reps of being with and sharing your vulnerable emotions in relationship. The therapy session is a mental, emotional, and relational workout, but the ultimate purpose of therapy is about learning how to replicate that workout in your outside life. Therapy is not going to build the mental muscle by itself, 45 minutes a week is not sufficient for that, just like personal training in and of itself is not sufficient for building physical muscle. If you’re saving all your emotions for therapy each week and avoiding vulnerability and intimate connection outside that space, therapy becomes a dumping ground, which provides short term relief but ultimately doesn’t build mental strength.

Finding Your People, Opening the Space

If you’re feeling stuck or stagnant in therapy, you might want to bring the focus to your life outside of therapy. Can you use the skills you learn and the muscles you start to build in therapy to begin having vulnerable, emotional conversations with people who aren’t your therapist?

Choosing which people to do this with is very important as many people do not have the mental strength to be with emotions (their own or yours). You wouldn’t choose a gym buddy who never worked out, had no intention of working out, and shut you down for wanting to work out. Similarly, you shouldn’t share your deeper emotions with someone who shuts down, spirals, shames, or gaslights you when emotions come up.

But chances are there are some people in your life who can accept and handle your emotions. There are people who are mentally strong, or at least working on getting mentally stronger, with whom you can continue the work of building mental strength through emotional conversations.

One of the hardest parts of this outside work is learning how to open up that emotional space with someone. Therapy makes that part very easy, your therapist usually opens up that space for you right at the beginning of a session with that quintessential therapist question: “How does that make you feel?” And bam, the door is open. It’s unfortunately much harder in real life, as people have all sorts of defenses to emotional realness. This is actually a great thing to bring up and work on in therapy. A good therapist will not only open up that emotional space for you each week, but educate you in those skills and empower you to open up that space with others in your outside life.

As you begin to open up that space with people in your life, you’ll see that sometimes it goes well and sometimes it does not go well. Absorb it all as data and begin to dial in on the people who can truly support you. It might only be one or two people. That is enough.

A New Approach

So instead of saving all your emotions for therapy and then unloading, try focusing your energy on building your net of people who you can help you to maintain and build your mental strength. You should have at least a couple emotional workouts each week outside of therapy. As you deepen your emotional connections and continue to get reps in, your mind will start to gain strength and capacity, and you will start to feel more supported in the world.

Therapy then becomes a place where you continue the momentum of building mental strength and hone your skills of emotional regulation and vulnerability. As you continue to gain mental strength and feel your support net expand, your emotions become more and more manageable. You begin to feel like you can handle life’s ups and downs because you have more capacity inside your body and more support outside your body. You start to develop a deep sense of okayness.

All this is another way of saying that your mental health improves.

Ultimately you may need your therapist less and less as you get mentally stronger and feel more supported in your outside life, which can actually be the goal of therapy, as it is with personal training. This is not to say that you should feel pressure to leave therapy at any point if it’s a space that feels good and supportive to you, especially if you are in any sort of crisis or unsupportive environment. This is simply to say that the pressure and dependency that you put on that space should decrease over time as your mental strength improves and your heart connections expand outside of therapy.