Why Is Therapy So Hard? (Am I Doing Something Wrong?)
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The beginning of therapy usually feels pretty good. The first few sessions might feel a little awkward, but then something clicks. You’re connecting to your therapist. You’re opening up to them. You feel seen and known. Therapy starts to become your favorite part of the week.
You can’t wait to get to your session and start talking to your therapist. As good as it feels just to get it all out every week, and to be heard by someone who is fully present, the insights might just be the best part. You’re learning so much about yourself. You’re already making changes and life is already getting better.
Then something happens. You hit a wall. The well of insight seems to dry up. You feel like you’re talking about the same things over and over. You feel irritated after therapy instead of good. You even start to dislike your therapist a little. You start finding reasons to skip or cancel sessions.
What happened? It might be a sign you need to take a break from therapy or that you need to work in a different way with your therapist. There may be an issue in your relationship with your therapist you need to address. But many times, it’s a natural part of the process that actually shows you’re making progress in therapy.
Read on to learn more about why therapy can get tough, how it can actually be a good sign when it does, how to keep going when you don’t want to go, and what makes it all worth it in the end.
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Why Is the Middle of Therapy Harder Than the Beginning?
The reason the middle of therapy can sometimes be difficult is the same reason it’s hard to be your own therapist.
Even if you’re totally dedicated in your quest for self-knowledge, your brain does its best to hide certain things from you. The process of finding your deepest self is more like navigating a labyrinth than looking in a mirror.
Therapists have many theories about how and why this happens. The gist of all of them is that there are things we don’t want to think about, feel, or remember, so our minds protect us from them.
Our brains are so efficient at taking care of this for us they do it completely outside of our awareness. We don’t even have a chance to say, “Wait, let me feel, think about, or remember that.” Most of the time, it doesn’t even come up for us to review.
DEEP DIVE
What Is Your Mind Protecting You From?
To the deep, protective part of the brain, unwanted memories, thoughts, and feelings are a threat. Why? Because:
- Revisiting traumatic memories can put you back in the same fight-or-flight mode as the event you’re remembering.
- You may have learned growing up that feeling or expressing certain feelings—or any feelings at all—is dangerous. The stress response can be triggered by any emotions you believe you’re not supposed to have.
- On a subconscious level, you sense that following certain thoughts to their natural conclusion could turn your entire life upside down.
So, your brain does its best to keep you from thinking, remembering, or feeling these things. Therapists call the techniques our brains use to do this our defenses.
In some ways, this is good. If our minds didn’t protect us in this way, it would be hard to function.
We’d have to endure a near-constant state of stress. We wouldn’t have any room to be present in our daily lives. We’d have to spend most of our time and energy processing traumatic or painful memories and feelings. Everything that reminded us of the past would pull us right back into it emotionally and energetically. This would wear down our bodies as well as our minds.
The reason therapy can become difficult is that it puts you in a literal battle with yourself. Part of you pushes to learn the truth or change your behavior while another part tries to stop you. The fortress of your defenses can be hard to break through.
The good news is that this inner conflict isn’t impossible to overcome. In fact, good therapists know exactly what to do to help you get through your defenses so you can experience the healing that lies on the other side of them.
What Are Defenses and How Do They Work?
Defenses are automatic, habitual reactions that keep painful feelings or threatening truths outside of your conscious awareness.
We all have a different set of characteristic defenses based on what we find the most threatening or difficult to face. What you defend against the hardest depends on what you’ve personally been through.
For example, if it’s threatening to your brain for you to express anger toward someone else, your defenses will do their best to keep that from happening. Instead, you may turn your anger inward, toward yourself, which can fuel depression. Or you may interact with others in a way that encourages their anger while stifling your own. This allows you to confront anger without having to be the one to show it.
If anger isn’t threatening to your psyche, but other emotions—such as grief or sadness—are, you probably get angry often. You may even think of yourself as an angry person. Because your brain believes anger is the safest emotion for you to feel, it has become your default response to any emotional provocation.
If anger is the only emotion you feel safe expressing in front of others, it’s probably hard for you to be vulnerable, which makes it hard to maintain intimate relationships. It’s exhausting to be angry all of the time, so you might use substances, food, work, or screens to numb out and get a break from your anger.
DEEP DIVE
Defense Mechanisms You Might Use
There is no exhaustive master list of defense mechanisms. Your mind is creative and responsive to your life and environment, so the way it builds a wall around your most tender feelings and painful memories may be completely unique to you.
That said, therapists and psychologists have noticed certain defenses are more common than others, and that many people use them. These include:
...There is no exhaustive master list of defense mechanisms. Your mind is creative and responsive to your life and environment, so the way it builds a wall around your most tender feelings and painful memories may be completely unique to you.
That said, therapists and psychologists have noticed certain defenses are more common than others, and that many people use them. These include:
- Denial: Not accepting that something is true (or not accepting that you think, feel, or believe something). For example, you might not be able to believe that someone you were close to has died. Denial is the most common defense and is the foundation of all other defenses.
- Splitting: Idealizing some people and situations while devaluing others, or alternating between seeing someone as all good and seeing them as all bad. For example, you might think your new partner is perfect when you meet them, then think they’re completely awful later (even if they never mistreated you). Splitting allows the psyche to simplify reality and locate the source of bad feelings outside of yourself.
- Self-Attack: Turning negative emotions or beliefs away from the person who inspired them and onto yourself. For example, instead of being angry at a partner for letting you down, you might blame yourself for their actions by telling yourself you’re not a good enough partner. This protects you from the guilt and anxiety of being angry at someone you need or want to be close to. (Some children use self-attack to defend against rage toward their parents.)
- Projection: Thinking someone else is thinking or feeling what you’re actually thinking or feeling. For example, you might perceive someone else as angry when you’re actually the one who’s angry. This goes hand in hand with denial—your brain denies that you feel something, then you believe someone else is the one feeling it.
- Repression: Keeping something—often a feeling or memory—so far out of your awareness you’re not even aware of its existence. This is done by a part of your mind you don’t have conscious access to or control over. For example, you might not be able to remember something traumatic that happened to you when you were young because your brain has blocked access to that memory.
- Regression: Coping with stress and uncomfortable feelings by returning to an earlier state of development. For example, children may regress to wetting the bed in response to stress. Adults may regress by refusing to attend to their usual responsibilities.
- Dissociation: Mentally disconnecting from your immediate experience or from your emotions, memories, and thoughts. For example, you might start daydreaming, going blank, or “zoning out” when an unpleasant feeling starts to come up.
- Sublimation: Transforming an unwanted reaction into something more constructive. For example, you might channel rage that you feel toward a particular person over a personal injustice into a passionate mission to fight against a greater social injustice.
- Suppression: Pushing something out of your conscious awareness. Suppression differs from repression in that you consciously choose to keep something out of awareness instead of your brain doing this for you automatically. For example, you might start to think about a stressful event, then tell yourself, “I’m not going to think about this right now.”
- Identification: Dealing with painful or complex negative feelings toward someone—often a parent—by identifying with that person and creating a false self in which you think, feel, and react like them. For example, if your father was highly critical of you, you might continue to be critical of yourself or become critical of others in a similar way as he was of you.
- Displacement: Taking a thought, feeling, or reaction you have in response to a particular person or situation and directing it toward someone or something else (usually someone you feel “safer” being angry or sad in front of). For example, you might lash out at a partner when the person you’re really angry at is your boss.
- Externalization: Blaming people or things outside of yourself for how you feel when it isn’t actually their fault, then directing negative emotions toward them. For example, you might blame a partner for causing the angry outburst in which you destroyed a prized possession.
- Rationalization: Coming up with an explanation or justification that neutralizes or minimizes painful emotions. For example, you might say that the reason you lost a job was because it wasn’t the right job for you and that you never really liked it that much anyway.
- Intellectualization: Defending against emotions by thinking about events in your life in an impersonal way. This differs from rationalization in that you’re not necessarily trying to justify anything; you’re just choosing thought over emotion. For example, you might study the science behind an illness you’ve been diagnosed with while avoiding thinking about or reacting to how it’s affecting you personally.
- Isolation of Affect: Disconnecting thoughts and memories from emotions. For example, you might talk about a traumatic event in your life in an emotionless way. This is rarely something you choose to do consciously, but instead is something your brain does automatically when you’ve developed a habit of avoiding emotion.
- Reaction Formation: Outwardly reacting in a way that’s the opposite of how you really feel. This usually happens outside of your awareness; you believe your expressed reaction is genuine. For example, you might resent a coworker getting a promotion, but tell yourself that you’re happy for them. Or, you might express a lot of affection toward someone you really don’t like.
- Projective Identification: A complex defense in which you act in a way that causes someone else to express an emotion you feel so you can observe it from a distance or experience it vicariously. (You are not aware you are doing this.) For example, you might subconsciously feel anger, then act in a way that upsets the person you’re angry at until they get so angry they explode at you. Then, you blame them for being “the angry one.”
While defenses serve an important purpose, they can end up doing more harm than good. Sometimes, defenses that were effective in the past stop being as effective. Or they start taking a toll on your adult life that they didn’t take on you when you were young.
Some of your defenses may have been harmful from the very beginning, but they allowed you to survive your childhood. Now you’re an adult who wants more from your life.
The ways you learned to survive and feel safe may now be holding you back from living a happy, fulfilled, authentic life. You may have developed a mental health condition or you may just feel like you’re not fully alive or fully yourself. When you get to this point, it’s a great time to reach out to a therapist to help you tear down the wall you’ve built.
Why Do Defenses Make Therapy Difficult?
Defenses don’t give way easily. So, when the journey of therapy brings you to the wall they’ve built inside your mind, you may feel like you can’t go any further. How do you get to the other side? The first step is to recognize that you don’t want that wall there.
Your deepest, most entrenched defenses are probably the ones you’re least aware of—if you’re aware of them at all. In fact, your deepest defenses may feel like you. Until you recognize that your defenses aren’t you, any challenge to them can feel like a personal attack.
So, when your therapist challenges your defenses, even very gently, it can feel like they’re judging or rejecting you. You might feel like they’re trying to take away something important—something that keeps you safe, keeps your life from completely falling apart, or that keeps you you. So, you might start to push back against your therapist and resist going any further in your sessions.
PRO TIP
What Are Signs Your Defenses Are Up?
There’s a little gremlin in the control room of your brain that starts sending you warnings when you try to change—or even examine a little too closely—your approach to life.
It believes if you take down the old, strong walls of your defenses, you’ll be completely vulnerable. It believes that keeping them up is the only way to make sure you continue to survive.
When this part of your brain gets inflamed and starts trying to protect you, it can change how your therapy sessions feel and how you respond to them.
When your defenses start coming up in therapy, you may:
- Come to therapy sessions late or miss them altogether.
- Try to change the subject or take your sessions in another direction.
- Stay on the surface of things and make more small talk with your therapist.
- Think about quitting therapy even though you haven’t achieved your therapy goals.
These are all ways to avoid letting your defenses down. All of them can completely stall progress in therapy and make therapy feel like a waste of time.
Of course, there are other reasons you might “resist” what’s happening in therapy besides your internal resistance to dismantling your defenses. You might have a therapist who’s not attuned to you, who’s not a good match for you, or who’s simply not a good therapist. Your intuition might be correctly telling you that something isn’t right and that you need to walk away from this therapist and find another one.
So, how do you tell whether your discomfort is a sign that something is going wrong in the therapy room or a sign that you’re about to have a breakthrough? And what can you do if your defenses are up—but you want to tear them down?
What Can You Do to Get Back on Track in Therapy?
The answer to most problems in therapy is to talk to your therapist about them. If you’re worried about something that’s happening in therapy—or something that’s not happening—tell your therapist.
PRO TIP
A good therapist won’t feel threatened or offended if you express concern about how therapy is going. They won’t get upset if you criticize them, and they won’t take it personally even if you get angry with them. Instead, they’ll tell you what they think is going on or agree to work with you to figure it out together.
If you’ve come up against your deepest defenses, your therapist will usually have ways to bring them out into the open and identify them. Once you both confirm that something deep inside you is trying to keep you from feeling, remembering, or sharing something, you can work together to confront it and access those hidden emotions and memories.
This doesn’t necessarily mean your therapist will confront you or that you’ll have to push really hard in therapy. In fact, this process can be quite gentle. It can be more like brushing away layers of dust than blowing a hole through the wall. It depends on your therapist’s approach and what you’re comfortable with.
DEEP DIVE
Does Method Matter?
Some therapy methods, like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP), push you into confronting traumatic memories or defenses earlier in the therapy process.
Other methods, like traditional long-term psychodynamic therapy and humanistic therapy, will take things more slowly and gently (but will still usually end up bringing you to the same place).
Which is better for you will depend on your specific needs, preferences, and personality.
What gets you through the hard part of therapy is the therapeutic alliance—how much you trust your therapist and feel safe opening up to them. Having a strong alliance means you feel like you’re on the same team as your therapist. The stronger your alliance, the bigger the challenges you can overcome together in therapy.
One of the most important moments in therapy is when you recognize that the tension you’re feeling isn’t because your therapist is antagonizing you, but because you’re pushing up against your defenses. When you turn in the same direction as your therapist and face the fortress of your defenses together, you can combine your efforts and energy instead of pushing in opposite directions.
And once you and your therapist both start putting your energy into getting on the other side of your defenses—into figuring out how you really feel and who you really are—you can have some incredible breakthroughs in therapy.
What Happens After You Get Through the Hard Part of Therapy?
Breaking through the wall of your defenses can blow life wide open. It can make things possible for you that felt impossible before.
Working through blocks in therapy can give you more options. You can consciously choose for yourself where automatic, unconscious defensive processes chose for you before.
These expanded choices can change your life in small or big ways. You may decide to change jobs or careers or you may simply pick up some fun new hobbies.
Unearthing your true self in therapy can make life feel more vibrant. You might find yourself having more fun, taking more risks, and being less worried about how others judge you.
One of the things that making progress in therapy is most likely to change is your relationships. You may walk away from relationships you’ve realized are toxic or you may simply establish better boundaries with the difficult people in your life.
Either way, you’ll probably make new friends. Your new comfort with being who you really are will make you more radiant. Chances are good this will not only draw more people to you in general, but it will also attract people who are more like you—people to whom you can connect more deeply.
One thing progress in therapy doesn’t mean is that you’ll be defenseless. We will always have some defenses—which is good, because we need them. What therapy does is help us swap the defenses that limit us and close us down with defenses that are more adaptive and conscious. It helps us find ways to function well in the world that don’t come at the expense of joy and authenticity.
The greatest gift of therapy is that it helps us learn how to fully be ourselves and how to fully inhabit our lives.
Conclusion
Therapy isn’t always hard, but sometimes, it can be. After you’ve been going for a while, your sessions may start to feel more challenging. The middle of therapy is usually harder than the beginning.
In the beginning, it usually feels really good to spend time with your therapist. It’s easy to go to a place where a warm, caring person who’s invested in you listens to you attentively and accepts you fully.
Therapy starts to become more difficult when you start to come up against some of your psychological defenses. These are the ways that your mind keeps feelings, memories, and thoughts that are painful or threatening out of your awareness.
Therapy invites you to let down your defenses and see who you really are underneath. The result of doing this is beautiful and affirming, but the process of doing it can be painful and awkward.
Most defenses happen outside of your conscious awareness and may even feel like part of your identity. When you explore your defenses in therapy, it can feel like your therapist is criticizing or attacking you.
Trying to get through your defenses in therapy can complicate your relationship with your therapist and make sessions feel stressful. So, you may start looking for reasons to skip sessions or to quit therapy altogether. You may even start to dislike your therapist.
But if you stick with it, and get through the hard part of therapy, you’ll be rewarded—often with profound insights and major breakthroughs. We all need to have some defenses, but learning about ourselves in therapy allows us to leave behind the ones that limit and hurt us. Then, we can replace them with ways of coping and navigating life that are much more authentic.
The result is a new level of inner freedom. Working through your defenses in therapy can help you discover your true self. It can help you choose more consciously and experience more joy in life. So, if therapy is starting to feel a little uncomfortable, don’t give up. Sticking with it might just change your life.