These 5 Red Flags Mean It’s Time To Dump Your Therapist
by Libby Thompson
During my most recent therapy session, I spent the first fifteen minutes of our (pricey) hour together nodding and mm-hmming, while my therapist long-windedly described how I could handle a conflict I brought up...weeks ago.
She wouldn’t drop it. This tiny occurrence suddenly consumed my therapist’s entire focus, no matter how many times I told her that it wasn’t important. Having been lucky enough to work with exclusively wonderful therapists up until this point, her ineffectiveness threw me off. Therapy entails vulnerability, communication, and trust, and I just couldn’t establish any of these with her.
Finding a therapist who checks all the boxes and simply appears to be a good fit is already an insurmountable challenge, then with scheduling, billing, and ugh, dealing with insurance, the process becomes nightmarish. After putting ourselves through the ringer to find someone, anyone, that’s half-way decent, we might not even recognize the signs that it’s not working out.
So, how do we know when it’s time to “break up” with a therapist? Sometimes, you don’t get blaring alarm bells or immediate “bad vibes.” Instead, there are 5 simple-but-often-missed signs that it’s time to find a new therapist.
1. They do more talking than listening.
The whole point of therapy is to process life events and points of tension or pain with an objective listener. At the core of any productive therapy session lies a whole lot of talking.
Which is why it’s a red flag that I could write a small book about my therapist’s sister-in-law. I’m confident I know more about her than my therapist does about me. That’s obviously a big problem.
When we talk about our problems or worries, we are exploring the way our thoughts and feelings impact our behavior and moods from a safe, calm vantage point. We can notice our own patterns and, if necessary, change them.
So, when we come across a therapist who seems more concerned about sharing their learnings from the latest conference they attended, or finds it necessary to give a long history of the theorist who named some behavioral phenomenon, or worse, spends precious time (that we’re paying for) talking about her own family issues, we lose out on time to do the work we came to therapy for. It’s also just rude and inappropriate.
2. They don’t ask questions.
Another sign of a subpar therapist is that they dive deeply into the first thing you mention, without digging for context or more information. Taking your comments at face value will lead your therapist down rabbit hole after rabbit hole without any real direction or purpose.
Just as we need to do the work of identifying our patterns and analyzing our feelings and thoughts, part of the task of a therapist is to figure out how our triggers, trauma and past experiences all play into the way we understand and experience our lives.
The best therapist I’ve worked with would often ask, “is that true?” It wasn’t an expression of doubt in me, but rather a gentle push for me to think back and analyze the evidence for my conclusion. This usually came up if I said something like, “she doesn’t like me,” or, “well, if I had done that, they would have thought I’m lazy.”
By asking a simple question, she was not only gathering information so that she could understand me better, but also taught me to take a step back and notice where these conclusions where stemming from in my own mind.
3. You’re not learning anything.
Regardless of what we need help with — from depression and grief to anxiety and OCD — understanding what we’re dealing with is half the task. Therapy has taught me about why our brains default to the worst-case scenario, how neural pathways work, and how to interrupt thought cycles that aren’t helpful.
For some, understanding our brains helps free us from harmful patterns. For others, what we need to learn is more experience-specific; we have to talk through a past trauma in order to understand it, or get a second perspective about a conflict to see it more clearly.
So coming away from a therapy session without being challenged to think differently and reevaluate our perspective is not a good sign.
4. You have different values.
Especially when we need help with relationships — friendships, family dynamics, or romantic relationships — our values and guiding principles become increasingly important. If our therapist holds very different values, and refuses to see things from our point of view, the relationship becomes futile, because we’ll just never see eye to eye.
And if their feedback is based on their own personal values, it’s not going to feel applicable to our lives. It might even feel judgmental, making it difficult to open up and share honestly.
Once there’s this rift with a therapist, it’s hard to see past it.
5. They add fuel to the fire, instead of diffusing.
Sometimes, the last thing we need to hear from our therapist is that we’re right. Anxiety and depression are characterized by the tendency to catastrophize. Good counselors know this, and so they will engage in the kind of necessary questioning to show us that our thought patterns are, well, wrong.
Therapists bear the responsibility of being the voice of reason. I need to hear, from someone objective and rational, that things will be okay, and be reminded of strategies for coping with those feelings of worry.
So it was definitely a red flag when I expressed to my therapist that I thought one of my acquaintances didn’t like me, and within ten minutes my therapist was warning me that this person might try to physically harm me — even though, not once, did I fear for my safety. No matter how many times I tried to make that clear, my therapist kept coming back to them, flinging assumptions and gossip that had no place in reality.
If you find yourself having to reel your therapist back down to Earth, then it’s time for a new therapist.
HOW TO MOVE ON.
We’ve gone through the trouble of finding a therapist (and filled out their paperwork, and the insurance paperwork, and and and…), so now we owe it to ourselves to hold high standards. Therapy is too important (and expensive) to settle for an unhelpful partnership.
Regardless of the warning signs and reasons, breaking up with a therapist is awkward. We need to be clear on what we’ll say and what our boundaries are beforehand. If we feel safe enough to give feedback, then we should — we could be helping one of their patients down the line.
And once it’s done, we absolutely shouldn’t give up on therapy for good. We just have to keep looking.
The right therapist is out there. Promise.
