3 Things Your Therapist Is Wrong About

3 things your therapist is wrong about wignall

When I worked as a therapist, one of the first things I asked my clients was:

Have you been in therapy before? And if so, what was it like?

Most of them who had been in therapy described it like this:

I guess it was nice to have someone to talk to, but we didn’t really get much done.

While incredibly well-intentioned, many therapists aren’t very effective because they don’t have a good understanding of what actually causes emotional struggles and how best to work through them.

In the rest of this article, I’m going to share three things most therapists believe that are not only wrong, but actively get in the way of their clients improving.

My hope is that this helps folks to make more informed decisions about their emotional health, especially if they choose to use therapy.

1. You Need to Explore the Pain of Your Past to Free Yourself from the Problems of Your Present.

For over a century, psychology has been obsessed with the Freudian idea that emotional struggles in the present are universally caused by traumas in the past. And that to free yourself from those struggles, you need to spend an ungodly amount of time and energy (and money) exploring, questioning, and processing everything bad that ever happened to you in the past.

Thankfully, we have 100+ years of research and clinical experiences showing that this is simply not true.

I won’t burden you with a long scientific literature review, but let me make just a few observations which hopefully illustrate and reinforce my point.

1. Just because exploring your past is sometimes helpful, doesn’t mean it’s always helpful or that it’s required for emotional growth and wellbeing.

There’s obviously a time and place for reflecting on your past. And when done intentionally, and in the service of your larger goals and aspirations for the future, it can be quite helpful.

But if you find that you’re spending most of your time and energy wallowing in the past with little to show for it in the present, you might need to rethink your approach to emotional health, including finding a therapist who is willing and able to help present you actually do things different rather than constantly co-ruminating with past you.

The past matters. But what you do in the present matters far more.

2. Intensive revisiting of the past has risks.

There are two main risks that most clients and therapists ignore or don’t even realize exist when it comes to spending substantial time focused on the past:

  • Rumination and Overthinking. When you spend an hour every week ruminating on bad things in the past—and being encouraged and rewarded for doing so by your therapist—it becomes much easier to fall into unhelpful rumination throughout the rest of your days, which exacerbates nearly every emotional struggle you can think of from anxiety and depression to insomnia and procrastination.
  • Dependency and Loss of Agency. When therapy is exclusively framed in terms of your present struggles being the result of bad things that happened to you in the past—and that the only way to free yourself is to revisit them week after week, year after year, under the guidance of a professional—people tend to lose agency and become helpless. Remember: A good therapist’s goal should be for you to not need them any more (as quickly as possible).

How to fix anxiety in weeks or months, not decades

When I was a therapist, I specialized in helping people with anxiety disorders: panic, OCD, phobias, social anxiety, etc.

And I was pretty good at it.

Most of my clients saw dramatic improvements pretty quickly…

  • A 54-year-old business woman who suffered from weekly panic attacks since college was panic free after a month.
  • A young father with chronic insomnia and sleep anxiety for the past five years who started sleeping well after just two weeks of work.
  • An elderly woman with generalized anxiety who reported feeling calmer and less worried than I can ever remember after 6 weeks.

Now, I’m not saying this not to brag, because really it wasn’t about me. I was not an especially talented therapist because of my skill set or personal qualities or innate therapeutic talents.

Instead, I was (mostly) successful at helping my clients because I was willing to stay focused on A) What I knew the research showed to be most effective, and B) Doing therapy in the present, not the past.

For my woman with panic, I spent a little time taking a history and trying to understand when her panic attacks started and what the trigger was. But the vast majority of our time was spent doing interoceptive exposure therapy (a fancy term for training people to be confident in the face of anxiety) because I knew from both research and clinical practice that it works phenomenally well for panic if you’re willing to focus and do it correctly.

For my guy with sleep anxiety and insomnia, I learned in the first 5 minutes talking to him that his problems started with the birth of his first child. But we spent 95% of our time together implementing a few core practices from Cognitive Behavioral Theory for Insomnia, a wildly effective approach to insomnia and sleep anxiety that somehow almost no one—clients, therapists, or doctors—knows about.

And for my elderly woman with generalized anxiety, I gently redirected her away from her instinct to rehash all the problems of her childhood that were ostensibly “causing” her anxiety, and instead, focused on changing her relationship to anxiety in the present, primarily through a consistent Scheduled Worry practice.

Of course there are some cases when a more in-depth exploration of the past is important. And there aren’t wildly effective techniques or approaches to every emotional health issue under the sun.

But the bigger point is this:

Good therapy should be squarely focused on what you are doing (or not doing) in the present, not what happened to you in the past.

So if you do choose to work with a therapist on your emotional health, try to find someone who is willing and able to help you do things differently in the here and now and will structure your time together accordingly.

Learn More: How to Find a Great Therapist →

2. Your Relationship Problems Are Communication Problems.

It’s a truism among mental health professionals, especially couples counselors, that most if not all relationship problems stem from poor communication. As a result, a lot of time in couples counseling gets spent trying to help people communicate better.

The funny thing is that most people with serious relationship problems aren’t generally bad communicators. If you talk to their coworkers, friends, extended family, etc, you’ll probably hear that they’re at least average as a communicator in every other area of their life. It’s just that they don’t communicate well right now with their partner.

Poor communication in a relationship is a symptom, not the underlying cause.

So, what’s really at the root of people’s relationship problems?

In my experience, two things:

  1. Values misalignment
  2. Poor emotion management

1. Values Misalignment

Values misalignment means that two people in a relationship have significant disagreements about what is right in an important area.

For example:

  • On the topic of money, one partner thinks debt is always bad and should be avoided at all costs and the other partner thinks debt is fine as long as it’s not out of control.
  • On the topic of sex, one spouse thinks frequent sex is essential for the quality of their relationships and should be a regular part of their lives and the other spouse thinks it’s not that important and is fine if it only happens occasionally.
  • On the topic of politics, one person is strongly pro-choice and the other strongly anti-abortion.

When two people fundamentally disagree about what is right or wrong in matters of high significance, there’s simply going to be a lot of conflict, tension, and stress in the relationship.

Of course, many couples “find themselves” in this situation because one or both people were not especially honest (with their partner or themselves) about what they really believed early on in the relationship.

After all, in the early days, it’s natural to emphasize our points of commonality and de-emphasize our points of difference because we want to avoid stress and discomfort and the fear that the relationship might not work out.

And just like couples want to avoid major disagreements or points of misalignment in the early days of a relationship, they also want to avoid acknowledging that possibility in the later stages of a relationship because A) It would mean the relationship is not what they thought it was (or wanted it to be), and B) It means there’s a strong possibility that the relationship never will be what they thought it was or want it to be.

This is why so many people (and their therapists) end up scapegoating communication as the core problem in relationships…

They don’t want to confront the much deeper and more painful reality that two people are just fundamentally misaligned on their values about the most important things.

And when this is true, it’s difficult to have a satisfying long-term relationship with someone.

2. Poor Emotion Management

The second major cause of relationship problems I see is what I call poor emotion management.

The ability to manage your own emotions well is obviously at the heart of emotional health and resilience. But it’s also essential for a healthy and satisfying relationship.

Think about it…

How happy and healthy is your relationship going to be if:

  • You get defensive and hypercritical anytime your partner gives you feedback because you don’t know how to manage your anxiety and insecurities?
  • You avoid talking about anything that makes you feel sad or disappointed because you’re afraid to be vulnerable?
  • You use alcohol or overeating as a way to cope with your stress but aren’t willing to admit this to your spouse (or even yourself)?

I could go on and on, but the gist of it is this…

It’s hard to have a healthy relationship if both people aren’t willing and able to manage their difficult emotions well.

In fact, in almost every instance of poor communication with a couple, the reason they’re not communicating well isn’t that they don’t know how to communicate, it’s that they’re upset and struggling with difficult emotions, and their inability (or unwillingness) to deal with those emotions in a mature way is resulting in unhealthy or unhelpful communication.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that poor communication is not a problem for many couples; I’m saying it’s not the core problem.

And almost always, it’s a function of two much more fundamental issues: Values misalignment and emotion management.

Learn More:

3. If You’re Anxious, You Need More Coping Skills.

Seems like everyone from therapists and teachers to parents and HR professionals, just can’t get enough of coping skills.

In fact, most people’s entire idea of emotional health—including most mental health professionals—basically looks like this:

  • Feel bad ↓
  • Open up “mental health tool belt” and apply a coping skill ↓
  • Feel better

If only the human mind actually worked that way!

But it doesn’t. And in fact, this approach—what I call The Coping Mindset—actually makes you more anxious and emotionally fragile in the long-run.

Here’s what actually happens when you rely on coping skills to manage your anxiety (or any other difficult emotion for that matter):

  • Feel anxious ↓
  • Immediately try to lessen or get rid of the anxiety with a coping skill (deep breathing, manifesting positivity, prayer, mindfulness, etc.) ↓
  • Feel some temporary relief from your anxiety ↓
  • Your brain sees you trying to avoid or get rid of your anxiety and learns that you think anxiety is bad or dangerous ↓
  • The next time you feel anxious, you get anxious about being anxious (i.e. compound anxiety), which makes you much more anxious long-term.

This process is called emotional fear learning.

Basically, when you either run away from or try to get rid of a difficult emotion like anxiety, you teach your brain to fear it and treat it as a threat, which only makes it more common and intense in the long-run.

This is why the coping skills never really work to address anxiety: You’re trading short-term relief for long-term intensification.

The alternative is what I call The Confidence Mindset which means cultivating the belief that while uncomfortable anxiety is not bad and you don’t have to do anything about it.

This is the basis for every single effective treatment or approach to anxiety:

Stop trying to get rid of anxiety and learn to accept it instead.

Unfortunately, learning to accept anxiety rather than coping with it is difficult and uncomfortable in the short term, which is why most therapists don’t do it with their clients. They’re basically afraid of their clients feeling bad. Sadly, this only exacerbates peoples anxiety issues.

A good therapist will help you to confront and tolerate your anxiety rather than colliding with your natural instinct to avoid or eliminate it with coping skills.

Learn More:

All You Need to Know

Most therapists are kind, supportive, well-intentioned people. But that doesn’t mean they’re effective.

If you choose to work on your emotional health in therapy, it’s your responsibility to find a therapist who is able and willing to do the frequently uncomfortable work of addressing your issues productively.

Three of the most common red flags I see in therapists include:

  1. Overemphasizing the past
  2. Mistaking poor communication for a cause, rather than a symptom, of relationship problems
  3. Using coping skills to address anxiety

Learn More

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