breaking up with my therapist

hi friend,

this week i broke up with my therapist.

during our previous session, they had… not the best response to something i said re: reconnecting with my mother (a pitter patter for another day), and yesterday, i felt like i wasn’t able to open up to them in the same way.

i felt like they were often taking the position of the people in my life i talked about vs. bringing things back to me and what’s in my control.

when i brought this up with my therapist, they responded well and were open to the feedback. but i still felt an internal wall, and definitely didn’t want to share more with them in that moment.

they asked if i thought we could repair this in the future, and i thought about how my perspective has changed over the past few years around cutting people off and wanting to put in effort to have the hard conversations in the important relationships in my life.

unfortunately, therapy isn’t exactly like the other relationships in my life. it’s fairly transactional. i pay $200 a session, there’s a cancellation fee, it’s inherently an exchange of listening and guidance for money.

in a utopian world where therapy was free, i would love to explore what happened more with my therapist. but ultimately, i came to the conclusion that the kind of reflection we were doing in our sessions was something i was already doing myself, and i didn’t want to pay $200 a session to figure out if i could get comfortable sharing with my therapist again.

(mini disclaimer: if i hadn’t already been in therapy for five years on and off with three other therapists, this might be something i felt i should invest in. i’ve had the privilege of having a lot of therapy, which let me come to this realization. all that said, it’s worth reflecting on if you’re getting what you want out of therapy)

the way i wasn’t able to figure things out with my therapist because of capitalism got me thinking more about how, societally, we’re starting to use therapy as a catch all.

this isn’t a new thought, activists have been talking about having a more holistic approach to mental health as a society forever (read: accessible housing, community support, more spaces for safe communal connection, the list goes on).

dumping all of our life size issues on one individual isn’t sustainable.

with this therapist, i was pretty attentive to their mood (they often seemed tired at the beginning of our sessions), that our therapeutic exchange is literally part of their livelihood and how they support themselves, that they were a queer person in the U.S. and dealing with a lot of devastation on the regular.

if societally, we don’t hold space or have built-in repairs for mental health support, community, and connection, how can i expect my therapist to fully hold space for me?

i think this was particularly salient with this therapist because they were a millennial too. maybe i feel more comfortable trauma dumping to a boomer because they, statistically, have more financial security? and in some ways, more mental security?

i don’t really have the answers here. if you like your therapist and are getting a lot out of therapy at the moment, please keep it up.

i don’t think my therapist is a bad person or a bad therapist. i actually think they’re pretty great. but the way the system is set up doesn’t give therapists much room to make mistakes or much room to repair them.

sidenote: i just realized my therapist didn’t charge me for our short breakup session yesterday. i feel like they must somewhat feel the weight of all this too.

xoxo
m