Feeling Stuck in Therapy
You may have been seeing your therapist for a few weeks, months, or years and you don’t feel like you are getting anywhere. This could be for a variety of reasons. Check in with yourself to see if any of these resonate with you:
Are you feeling safe with your therapist?
If you don’t feel safe with your therapist, you will not get as far as you would like. Part of therapy is allowing yourself to be vulnerable (whatever that looks like for you) so you can make the changes that you need to feel better. If you don’t feel safe with your therapist, you’re not going to open up. If you don’t feel safe, is it because they have done things to make you feel unsafe or are you judging yourself which makes it unsafe? If it is something they are doing, is it safe to talk about it with them? Or is it more of a sign that you two might not be a good fit?
Are you feeling safe within yourself?
As with your therapist, you need to feel safe within you. That means, you need to be able to feel what you’re feeling without judging yourself too harshly or engaging in self-destructive behaviors. If you feel you are unable to keep yourself safe, you may have other things that need to be worked on first such as, but not limited to, distress tolerance, building coping skills, crisis management skills, etc.
Are you feeling safe within your environment?
It doesn’t matter how much you want to change, if you’re not feeling safe at home, at work, in your relationship, in society, it is going to make it so much more difficult to feel better. Of course, there are things in society that is not going to change overnight to create safety (such as oppression), which makes it even more important to trust your therapist and yourself. You are capable of making progress in therapy, but remember to have compassion towards yourself when things outside of your control make it difficult to process and heal in therapy. I just might look different than how you hoped.
Have there been times where you felt stuck? What did you do to get unstuck in therapy?