Issue #74: Why I quit therapy (and then started again)

Plus, should therapists intervene if clients can't afford their sessions?

By the time I started therapy, I had already received quite a lot of therapy, in the same way anyone born before the mid-2000s inhaled quite a lot of passive smoke. Therapy has, for the past decade or so, become mainstream: the ‘new six pack’ of the mid to late 2010s, and certainly of the 2020s. My social media feed was full of it, as was my working life. I interviewed the industry’s thought leaders – TikTok psychologist Dr Julie Smith, the School of Life’s Alain de Botton, clinical psychologist/illustrator Dr Emma Hepburn – and I nodded along while absorbing more than enough gems of wisdom for my own life, thank you very much. Friends sent links on a quasi-daily basis; publishers posted me proofs of books with titles like, Become Your Own Psychologist, How To Heal.

And yet, it took me up until last year to officially – how shall I put this – become a therapee? Begin my healing journey? Drink the Kool-Aid? Delete as applicable, it’s the 21st century and your truth is your truth. Anyway, I started therapy last year, for the long-term, after a couple of ill-advised one session stands with BetterHelp practitioners. Shout out to the Floridian woman who told me to ‘Just get a dog’, I think of you often.

Finding The One was as simple as receiving a recommendation from a trusted friend. I started with Penelope – which is very much a pseudonym but I’ve always liked that name – last May. I began with fortnightly sessions, then monthly, before declaring myself graduated in January this year. Which is, by the way, exactly what I’d expected to happen, recalling a conversation with the psychologist Guy Winch back in 2020, who told me that, quite frankly, his clients leaving him was a sign of progress.

I began for a specific reason (look away now, eligible gents): debilitating anxiety around romantic relationships. It was something I’d struggled with for more or less a couple of decades; 12-year-old me took her crushes very seriously indeed. A close friend, the one who had recommended not-her-real-name-Penelope, had suggested that therapy might help me to feel differently. The sessions, chronicled in an ongoing, many-worded entry in my Notes app, gave me a clearer focus in this not-insignificant area of my life.

Personally, I found it very helpful to target a specific issue, in a specific context, rather than the questionably-relevant stuff I absorbed on social media all day everyday, when I was busy trying to work or eat a cheese toastie. Lo and behold, six months later I found myself still single, but a hell of a lot less anxious around dating. Come January, Penelope and I consciously uncoupled in a way that would strike envy in most celebrity divorcees.

Which is why it came as a surprise last week when, almost exactly a calendar year from my first session, I started therapy again. It was, it transpires, a weird time to resume – as therapy appears to have fallen out of fashion.