Why I'm Glad I Quit Therapy
Self, May 2000

After twenty years of just about every kind of therapy there is (and I live in California, so we’re talking everything from Autogenics to Zen) last year I quit. Not because I was "all better," but because I wasn’t–and I realized I might never be.

I went to therapy, initially and ever after, to become a better, happier person. Approximately 1,040 sessions (that’s $78,000 later) I am one. Not perfect; not perfectly happy. Not all better, but better. And no longer chasing the high-priced delusion of a miracle cure. I’m a self-cleaning oven now. I’ve let the help (the paid help, anyway) go.

Certainly my therapist had a hand in shaping the new, improved me. Miranda helped me see the other side of the story: not just what I’d done wrong but the wrongs that had been visited upon me. Not just who I was but why, and what was good about that person. Miranda saw me through two difficult marriages and divorces, the delightful and difficult job of raising two sons, a career path that makes a roller coaster look level. She was there when I needed her (at seventy-five dollars an hour, on weekdays only, excluding the month of August).

And boy, did I need her. During the decades of my discontent, I was one of those clients for whom therapy is like a candy bar: you want it to last forever, even if it gives you cavities. Although I’d resigned myself to being a therapeutic ‘lifer,’ I felt the cavities keenly and consistently–the three hundred dollar hole therapy left in my checking account each month; the vacant slots below Miranda’s number on my speed-dial, where friends’ names should have been; the emptiness in my soul that only a sense of self-sufficiency–of being grown up already!– could fill.

Ever the ambivalent client, I considered quitting regularly; mentioned it to Miranda frequently. But then I’d try to visualize getting through a week, let alone my life, without the solace of those fifty-minute ‘hours’ in the welcoming womb of Miranda’s sound-proofed suite, and I’d go weak in the needs. Imagining myself "cured" was like imagining myself blonde: I might be able to fake it for a while, but eventually, I thought, my dark, neurotic roots would show through. Marriages, governments, dot-coms might come and go, but for me, therapy seemed as inevitable as death and taxes.

Then two life circumstances conspired to change my definition of "cured," and my concept of how to get there. First–you guessed it–I fell in love. Deeply, passionately, permanently. And even after the initial surge of pheromones wore off, I noticed a strange (to me) phenomenon: I was happy. Instead of moaning and groaning on Miranda’s couch, now, I was grinning and glowing. Instead of revealing myself only to Miranda, now, my confidence was sufficiently boosted by my lover’s adoration that I started sharing my inner self with real friends: people who talked as well as listened, who said "Tell me more" instead of "We have to stop now." At the end of our time together, I’d split the check for dinner, not write a check for the ‘hour.’

The second life-changing event? My sons left home and went to college. The former made therapy less urgent for me; the latter made it financially impossible.

Still, it was with equal parts trepidation and relief that I bid Miranda adieu. "You can always come back," she offered (or threatened). I won’t lie: occasionally I have been tempted. But then I think about all the other, more pressing outlets that I (and my sons) have found for my money. I think about how good not being in therapy feels; how reinforcing of the notion that, like a still-beaming light bulb, I don’t need to be changed. And then I put my checkbook away.

Nowadays when I’m overwhelmed by a high-anxiety day or a UCO (Unidentified Crying Object), I do for myself what I once believed only Miranda could do for me. I hush the voices that would hold me responsible not only for my own problems but the world’s; remind myself that I’ve found the strength to deal with things this bad, or worse, before; put the situation–as everyone’s mother used to say–in perspective.

If that fails to calm me I call on my lover, or a friend. Or I turn to the other no- or low-cost sanity savers in my life: the meditation center near my house; the library full of novels by my favorite writers and the garden outside my door, full of basil and chard and thyme. And time–let’s not forget time, aptly called ‘the great healer.’ I often wonder: even if I hadn’t spent those hours, that small fortune, on therapy, how much self-awareness might the passage of twenty years alone have offered up? How much more of it might the next few therapy-free decades bring?

Don’t get me wrong: je ne regrette rien. I regret nothing. Being able to trust someone, being listened to attentively and appreciated unconditionally, taught me to seek out (and convinced me that I deserve) trustworthy, attentive, appreciative loved ones in my life. Being guided and accompanied to the innermost reaches of my heart gave me the skills and the courage I needed to travel there myself.

Thanks to my years with Miranda I know how to close my eyes, reach inside and feel what’s there. Thanks to my year without her I know that I can handle whatever I find. And this–my hard-earned self-sufficiency–is the most therapeutic experience of all.