Am I with the wrong therapist?

Why can’t I tell whether it is the therapist or me?

From the inside, a therapist who is not reaching you and a therapist who has reached the exact thing you came to avoid feel almost the same. Both produce flatness. Both produce that small reluctance on the way to the session, and the sense afterwards that you performed the hour rather than used it.

What differs is not the discomfort. It is what sits around it. Where the work has arrived somewhere that matters, there is usually something specific you can point to: a subject you steer the conversation away from, a week you nearly cancelled, a question that irritated you more than a question should. Where the fit is genuinely wrong, the hour tends to be smooth and you leave with nothing to turn over. Nothing was touched, so nothing aches.

That distinction is worth making before you decide anything, because the two situations ask for opposite responses. One asks you to stay and say more. The other asks you to stop.

What is fit actually made of?

Fit has less to do with personality than with whether you and your therapist are working on the same thing, in a way you both understand. People arrive expecting to judge warmth, and warmth is easy to supply. The harder question is whether the hour is organised around what actually keeps you awake.

A review that gathered the measures used to assess the working relationship and sorted roughly 1,000 of their items found the same themes recurring: trust, agreement on goals and on how the work is done, your own active part in it, and the sense of being attended to¹. The same review is blunt about how loosely the field defines this relationship, so I would not hand you those themes as a checklist. I would use them as four questions.

• Trust. Whether you can say something unflattering about yourself and watch your therapist stay ordinary.
• What you are here for. Whether the thing you lie awake about is the thing the sessions are about.
• How the work is done. Whether the way of working makes sense to you, including when it is uncomfortable. Mine is set out on my psychotherapy in Copenhagen page.
• Being followed. Whether you have the sense that your therapist is following you, rather than their own map of where you ought to be.

Is being comfortable the same as being helped?

Comfort is a good sign at the start and a question worth asking once the work has settled. Some people stay for years with a therapist they like and nothing in their life changes, because the hour has quietly become a place where they are received rather than moved.

Being understood is a real relief, and relief is worth something. It is not the same as movement, and from inside a warm room the two can look alike for a long time. I am not making an argument for discomfort. Work that only hurts is as suspect as work that only soothes. The question is whether anything outside the room is different: what you say to your partner, what you do at 9 o’clock on a Sunday evening, what you no longer brace for.

What if I am the one holding it still?

Sometimes what is not moving is not the therapy but the part of you that decided, before the first session, what would not be discussed. I am not saying that is what is happening with you. It is one possibility among two or three, and it is worth separating from the others before you change anyone.

I see people change therapist at the point the work gets close, and arrive somewhere new with the same material completely intact, ready to be set out again from the beginning. That is not failure and it is not dishonesty. It is usually protective, and it has often been protective since long before therapy was involved. It is also expensive in time.

The test I would offer is not a test of motive, because you cannot read your own motive from the inside any more reliably than you can read your therapist’s. It is simpler than that. Is there a subject you have been carefully not raising? If there is, the fit cannot be judged until it has been raised, because your therapist has not yet been given the thing you came with.

How do I raise it, and when is leaving the right answer?

The most useful thing you can do with the doubt is put it in the session rather than settle it alone on the way home. It feels like an accusation. In practice it is information, and a competent therapist has been waiting for it.

• Say it plainly. “I am not sure this is working” is a complete and legitimate sentence. You do not need a case prepared.
• Name one specific. “We keep returning to my work and I think the thing is at home” gives your therapist something usable.
• Ask what they think is happening. A therapist who can say where they think the two of you are, and where they think you are stuck, is telling you a great deal about the fit.
• Then give it a session or two. The conversation itself changes the work often enough that it is worth seeing what it changes.

Those steps assume the difficulty is between the two of you and can be talked about. They are not the right response everywhere. If you are dismissed when you raise something, if your concerns are routinely turned back on you as resistance, if the way of working was never explained and still is not, or if you leave consistently worse and have said so and nothing has altered, then the fit is not a puzzle to be solved together. Changing therapist is a reasonable decision, you do not owe anyone an explanation for it, and what you learned about choosing a therapist in the first place this time will make the next choice sharper.

There is also a version of this that stays genuinely unresolved. Some people cannot tell, even after raising it, whether the flatness belongs to the fit or to themselves. That uncertainty is not a sign you are bad at therapy. It usually means the two possibilities are tangled, and untangling them is itself the work worth paying for.

Questions people ask

How long should I give a new therapist?

Long enough for the first-session nerves to pass and for you to have brought one thing you did not want to bring. If that has happened and you still feel unmet, the information is reliable.

Is it rude to say the sessions are not working?

No, and it is usually the most useful thing you can bring. A therapist who cannot hear it has answered your question for you.

Do I have to start from the beginning with someone new?

No. You arrive with a clearer sense of what you want and of what does not work for you. That tends to make the early sessions quicker rather than slower.

Does the method matter more than the person?

The relationship carries more of the work than most people expect, and the method decides what that relationship is used for. Both matter, and neither rescues the other.

What if I like my therapist but dread the hour?

Bring the dread into the room before you use it as a reason to stop. It points at something, and what it points at is often the subject you have been circling for weeks.

Sources

1. Saxler, F., Schindler, S., Philipsen, A., Schulze, L. and Lux, S. (2024). Therapeutic alliance in individual adult psychotherapy: a systematic review of conceptualizations and measures for face-to-face- and online-psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 15.

How this article was written: I choose the subject and the angle. An AI assistant researches and drafts. I read the draft, correct and improve it and stand behind every clinical statement. The professional and clinical judgement is mine.