On the myth of being healed, the limits of self-awareness, and the inconvenient business of remaining human.
There seems to be an expectation that after enough therapy, we should emerge as psychologically upgraded versions of ourselves. Calm under pressure, secure in our relationships and entirely comfortable with criticism. We will communicate our needs with impeccable clarity, recognise our triggers before they have the audacity to trigger us and remain emotionally regulated even when confronted with somebody who is being spectacularly unreasonable.
Ideally, we will also have excellent boundaries, a secure attachment style and a nervous system that behaves itself.
It sounds wonderful. It also sounds suspiciously unlike being human.
Somewhere along the way, therapy has acquired a rather ambitious promise: that if we do enough of it, we will eventually be fixed. We won’t repeat old patterns, take things personally or find ourselves having the same argument for the fifteenth time. We will understand ourselves so thoroughly that our emotions will finally start behaving in accordance with everything we know about them.
That hasn’t been my experience of therapy, either personally or professionally.
I have triggers. Some are connected to experiences I’ve had and relationships that have shaped me. Therapy has helped me understand where those reactions come from, recognise them earlier and become more thoughtful about what I do with them. It has changed the way I understand myself and, in many respects, the way I live. But it hasn’t made me immune to having an emotional reaction I would rather not have.
You can understand your attachment patterns and still feel anxious when somebody pulls away. You can recognise that criticism touches an old wound and still become defensive when you hear it. You can know precisely why something upsets you and find yourself upset anyway. Unfortunately, the human mind has never been particularly impressed by what we think it ought to do.
Insight doesn’t make us immune to being human.
Yet the way we talk about therapy increasingly suggests that self-awareness should lead to a kind of emotional perfection. We are encouraged to become healed, regulated, secure and emotionally available, as though these were qualifications we could acquire and then display indefinitely. Online, therapeutic language has become especially fond of dividing behaviour into what healthy people supposedly do and what they don’t. Secure people don’t chase. Healed people don’t react. Emotionally intelligent people always communicate calmly.
Real people are considerably less consistent.
Knowing why you fear rejection doesn’t make rejection pleasant. Understanding the origins of your insecurity doesn’t guarantee that you will never feel insecure again. And when we assume that insight should eliminate every difficult reaction, we can begin treating ordinary moments of vulnerability as evidence that therapy hasn’t worked.
Why am I still like this? I thought I’d dealt with this.
I think this is where the idea of therapy fixing people becomes particularly unhelpful. The word fix suggests that we arrive in therapy as damaged goods and, provided we work hard enough, eventually emerge as fully repaired individuals who will no longer inconvenience ourselves or anybody else with difficult feelings.
But therapy isn’t a repair shop where we hand over the damaged parts of ourselves and collect a psychologically perfected version a few months later.
That doesn’t mean therapy cannot change us profoundly. It can help us process painful experiences, challenge beliefs we’ve carried for years and develop ways of responding that once seemed impossible. People can experience substantial relief from anxiety, depression and other difficulties. Relationships can improve, patterns can change and experiences that once dominated our lives can gradually lose their power. Sometimes the difference is enormous.
What interests me, though, is how often meaningful change is much less dramatic than we expect.
It might be recognising that your reaction to something feels bigger than the situation warrants, or noticing that an argument has stirred up a familiar fear. You may still feel angry, rejected or frightened, but you begin to understand why the feeling has arrived with such force. And occasionally, that understanding creates a little space between what you feel and what you do next.
Sometimes progress is reacting and realising ten minutes later rather than three days later. It might be catching yourself halfway through an argument, acknowledging that you’ve been defensive or apologising without spending the next twenty minutes explaining why you were technically justified. It might mean feeling exactly the same jealousy or insecurity you would have felt years ago, but no longer allowing it to make every decision for you.
Nobody is likely to congratulate you for spending an evening feeling rejected and managing not to send the message you would once have sent without a second thought. Yet that quiet difference may represent an enormous amount of work.
There is another distinction that I think gets lost in our enthusiasm for emotional regulation. Not every uncomfortable feeling is a problem to be solved, and not every strong reaction is evidence that something unresolved has been activated.
Sometimes anger is entirely understandable. Sometimes sadness is an appropriate response to loss. Sometimes anxiety reflects a situation that genuinely is uncertain. Therapy can help us recognise when an old experience is influencing our response to the present, but it can also help us recognise when the present itself deserves our attention.
Otherwise, we risk becoming so preoccupied with managing our reactions that we stop asking whether there might be a good reason for having them.
This is one of the more interesting things about self-awareness. It doesn’t simply mean learning to calm ourselves down. It means becoming more curious about our emotional lives, including the parts we find embarrassing, inconvenient or difficult to explain. We begin to notice the assumptions we make, the stories we tell ourselves and the ways we protect ourselves when something feels threatening. Sometimes we discover that a reaction belongs more to the past than the present. At other times, we realise we’ve been dismissing a perfectly reasonable feeling because we think a healthier person wouldn’t have it.
Neither discovery makes us flawless. Both can make us more honest with ourselves.
And perhaps that is why I find the idea of being completely healed so peculiar. It suggests there is a final version of ourselves waiting somewhere beyond enough insight and emotional work, a person who will no longer experience insecurity, jealousy, defensiveness or the occasional spectacular lapse in judgement.
I have yet to meet that person, professionally or otherwise.
I have met people who understand themselves better than they once did. People who have changed longstanding patterns, developed more satisfying relationships and found ways to live with experiences that previously overwhelmed them. I’ve also met people who have done a great deal of psychological work and still occasionally say the wrong thing, take something personally or struggle to follow their own excellent advice.
You can be a therapist and still have your own emotional reactions.
Knowing better doesn’t mean performing perfectly.
There is acceptance in this, although not the kind that asks us to excuse harmful behaviour or stop trying to change. It is simply the recognition that having vulnerabilities does not mean we have failed at understanding ourselves. We can take responsibility for our behaviour without treating every imperfect moment as proof that we need to start all over again.
Some things that once affected us deeply may eventually lose their power. Others may return unexpectedly, years after we thought we’d made peace with them. Life will continue to present us with situations for which no amount of preparation guarantees a graceful response.
Therapy didn’t fix me. It helped me understand myself, recognise patterns I might otherwise have repeated and make choices I didn’t always know I had.
I still get things wrong. I suspect I always will.
But I no longer think that means the therapy didn’t work.