Music. Welcome to Mr. and Mrs. Therapy, the podcast that empowers you to transform life's challenges into opportunities for personal growth and healthier relationships. We're your hosts, Tim and Ruth Olson, licensed marriage and family therapists and trauma experts. As experienced therapists with backgrounds in addressing trauma and mental health disorders, we believe there is hope and there certainly is healing.
We've spent our lives supporting people through the ups and downs, and we want to share these insights with you. Together, we'll unravel the layers of personal growth, healing from trauma, and building healthy relationships. Each week, we'll bring you engaging conversations, expert insights, and practical strategies to help you heal from the past, foster healthy communication, and develop enduring love.
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So what we're going to be discussing today are things that could possibly cause therapy to fail. Now, before we get started, if you're struggling emotionally or if you're struggling with your relationship. Ruth and I started a coaching business called Coaching with Truth. If you'd like to work with Ruth or I on your individual emotional struggles or on your relationship difficulties, you can find a link in the description below.
Just click on that and you can set up a consultation with us or also you could just set up a session if you just like to hit the ground running. So let's jump right in and talk a little bit about what can cause therapy to fail. So as a therapist, one of the things that we do is we look at the picture overall, the biopsychosocial picture of everything. But you want to first rule out, is there a physiological reason that some of these things are happening?
So when we look at individual therapy and somebody coming in, that there might be other issues on why they're feeling some of the symptoms that they're having. Maybe it's a thyroid issue, because some of that could be disguised as mental health issues, right? Or you could be having some symptoms that we see that maybe looks like ADHD, But that could be hyperthyroidism. And then the inverse, you could have hypothyroidism, which looks like depression.
And so an important thing to understand is you might be going in thinking you have a mental health problem, but really you have a biological problem. And so you're trying to get a resolution to the wrong problem. So it's always important to rule that out. Another thing that could impact the success of therapy is the therapist-client relationship. And sometimes there are compatibility issues. The therapeutic alliance is crucial for successful therapy or even the coaching connection.
Because if there's a lack of trust, rapport, or connection between the therapist and the client, it can certainly hinder progress. And you're not going to be your therapist's best friend or feel like, oh my gosh, I connect with them on every single level. But we do want to look at are there some classes or different value systems where you feel like, gosh, I just cannot work with this person. Because sometimes that truly can impact the effectiveness of therapy.
And I'm not saying that you have to have the same value system as your therapist and you need to match up on every level and have the same personality traits or really like your therapist. There can be such effective work done with different personalities and different values and all of that. But if it's something where there is not a good therapeutic alliance, then that can hinder therapy. And just like you're saying, I don't think it's somebody who you would necessarily be best friends with.
But I do think it is somebody that you should enjoy spending your time with them, where it's not like, oh, gosh, I'm so miserable to go there, where it's like, OK, I can actually enjoy this experience. And even though maybe we're working on tough things, our personalities aren't clashing. I'm not struggling to be in the same room with my therapist. Although I will say there might be some insight there.
If you are clashing with your therapist, maybe because it's triggering you or it's reminding you of someone in your own life where you just have a hard time with and it might be beneficial to look into. Well, actually, that's a really good point. I have had some people who have had trauma with men and then they have specifically chosen me as a therapist to try to work through that struggle that they have.
And I think one of the things that can contribute to that poor therapist-client relationship is just feeling like you're not being heard or that lack of empathy. Because if a client feels like the therapist lacks that understanding or empathy toward their situation, then they might feel less inclined to open up and engage in that therapeutic process. And so that therapeutic alliance early on is such a high determining factor of the success of therapy.
And so I can look back at even therapists that during the process of us getting our hours and me seeking therapy, going into session and really not remembering the tools or techniques of what we did right now as a therapist, in my mind, I'm like, oh, man, I wish I could look back and remember the tools and techniques that we did, because then I could, you know, benefit from that and use it. But in reality, when I look back, the therapeutic alliance that I had with my therapist was so beneficial.
And so I don't remember the tools and techniques that were used, but I remember feeling heard and understood. And in that season, that's exactly what I needed. There are some times and some seasons where you need specific tools to really help you get through things. But overall, it is a therapeutic alliance that really can enhance your therapy experience and allow you to open up and process through things or totally shut you out and make you feel like, okay, this might not work for me.
And another thing that can really hamper your ability to be successful in therapy is waiting too long. Now, most of the time, this comes up with relationship counseling. So when we're doing marriage counseling, people wait until their kitchen's on fire and has almost burnt to a cinder before they kind of come in. And I hear this more often than I would like where people say, hey, you're our last stop before we get divorced.
And if that's the case, you've definitely waited way too long to come in because the longer you wait to come in, the further down that divorce line you get before you come into counseling, the less successful counseling is going to be. Not because the therapist isn't able to give you the helpful tools and techniques and things like that, but because basically one or both parties has one foot out the door. And so what they're going to run into is, hey,
what we have to do is difficult. These shifts we have to do are difficult. And it's going to feel like it's much easier to just call it quits than put in all this effort and work versus if you come in earlier, your foot's not out the door. And so you're more willing to put in all that effort and all that work. And so if you wait too long to come in, it can make it much more difficult for you to reconcile your relationship.
Oh, for sure. And I think that's one of the reasons why we love not just premarital counseling, but but even pre-engagement counseling. Because you're there early on, and granted they are excited and they wanna be there, you know, they're excited to get married and they're going into a different season than when you're kind of at the end of the road and this is a last ditch effort.
Not that therapy is gonna absolutely fail at that stage, but the earlier that you can come in, the higher the success rate. And also the less time you're generally going to have to spend working on it. Because when you're at the very end and you're about to get a divorce, don't get me wrong, we can help you through that and you can make it through to the other side. But it generally takes a lot longer and it's a lot more of an uncomfortable process.
And so it goes back to that old saying, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And so if you go in and you do some preventative maintenance in your relationship, like, hey, let's learn some tools and let's learn how to communicate and let's learn how to fight fair and you have all that stuff under your belt, when your relationship is young, you're much more likely to implement that stuff and be able to do that.
But when you're getting close to the end, again, you start to have very little motivation and a little hope that things can be different. Even though the mechanics of what you have to do isn't any different than that couple who's in that pre-engagement counseling, there's not any different mechanically things that you have to do to make it better.
But you have all these negative built up resentment emotions that are then weighing it down and then steal your motivation from doing the things that you need to do in order to have a healthy dynamic relationship. And I know that in this specific one about waiting too long, we were talking mostly about couples therapy and marriage therapy. But in reality, there's also benefits to early intervention as an individual.
It certainly can help prevent the escalation of symptoms because addressing issues at their onset can help manage those symptoms before they develop into more severe or chronic conditions. Or even early intervention in PTSD cases can prevent the development of becoming chronic PTSD or complex PTSD. And then speaking of waiting too long, when we look at the timing of things, it really is another important factor in the success of therapy.
Sometimes there is insufficient session frequency or duration, meaning that maybe you You schedule an appointment and you have every intention of being consistent with it, but then maybe you go in for a couple of sessions and then life happens and you stop going in as frequently. And so then it becomes every month or every three months you're going in.
So really, if you're trying to work on something specific and you're going in quarterly, that's It's difficult in a 50-minute or 60-minute session to work through issues and really come to a solution because say these issues are things that really have been built up over time and over the course of years, you're not going to fix it in four 60-minute sessions throughout the year.
And so that frequency, especially early on, I think in therapy is really important because Because when you're first coming into therapy, there's a lot of work that needs to be done early on to set it up and to help you with managing and coping skills and strategies, whether it's for individuals or as a couple. And so I always really encourage clients early on as they're setting up to have consistency, especially in the beginning.
But then over time, certainly you can spread sessions out to be less frequent or as needed. Well, for sure. I've definitely had couples or individuals who came in and they were in the middle of a crisis and we got them kind of patched up, but we really didn't fully fix the issue that they came in there for. And then they come back in six months later, the hair's on fire again and the same issues reoccurring. But it's because they didn't really fully resolve or we didn't solidify their gains.
We didn't have enough time to help them set up, hey, this is our new pattern of behavior and our new pattern of interactions in order for us to commit this as a long-term now benefit that we're getting.
And so that's also part of the issue too is one of the things I tell my clients a lot is like, hey, a big part of counseling is accountability and accountability towards you continuing to do the things that are going to help you to do well or for tweaking tools that you implemented, but maybe you weren't quite fully getting them on board right. Or maybe there's an extenuating circumstance that, hey, we should shift it this way in order to make it work better for you.
And so we haven't been able to fully solidify that. And then all of a sudden those gains disappear, and then you're right back where you started. Well, for sure. I can totally relate to that. And I've seen that multiple times in therapy, both in individual and in couples therapy, or even in family therapy, where you get it under underwraps for a little bit and they're like, oh, I'm good.
And then they stop for a while and then they come back and they're in even an uglier place than they were before. And that's hard and frustrating for them as clients because they feel like, oh man, we just got to a good spot. But then oftentimes that pattern continues where that doesn't just happen once, but when they get to that relief, it stops again. And then they come back with more problems.
And the problem with at that as a therapist is then you're spending the time in therapy kind of catching up and going over what's happened in the past couple months, whether as an individual or as a couple. And much of the time in therapy is then spent recapping so that we can work on the issue. Whereas when we have that consistent frequency of session, we're kind of caught up on things in a sense.
And so when we we get into session, we can immediately jump into EMDR or immediately jump into really helping you work through the issue. Another thing is expectation. So when you go into therapy, what are you expecting to get out of it? And one of the things is that you can have a lot of different and varied expectations for therapy because there's kind of a lot of different types of therapy.
I always like to tell people who have no idea what EMDR is, I'm like, hey, listen, I just want to let you know the type of therapy I'm going to be doing with you is going to be very different than what you've experienced before, or maybe what you've seen on TV.
And so I just want to let you know right out of the gate that what we're going to be doing here's why we're doing it but it can be very odd or different to help people manage those expectations of what they think they're going to be getting when they get into therapy with me but also if you go in and you think like okay they're going to be able to tell me a b and c and then I'm going to do that and then I'm going to be all better unfortunately
it's not really that simple the reason why you're struggling emotionally or the reason why your relationship is struggling is something that didn't happen overnight and so it's not something that you can just get, hey, three tips, and then everything will be fine. It's a, hey, we'll give you three tips now. We'll start implementing that. That's going to start you down the path. And then you're going to come back. You're going to tell me how you implemented those three tips.
We're going to then either adjust those, or I'm going to give you some more advice or advisement on how you can manage this relationship. Or in the case of EMDR, hey, This trauma wasn't created yesterday. It's not going to go away in a single day. We got to take time. We got to dig in and we got to work through it. And EMDR is a relatively fast working process, but it's relatively fast compared to other types of therapy.
It's not fast as in like, hey, I'm just going to go in and get a quick tune up and I'll be fine. It's like, hey, I got to go in and I got to put in the effort and I got to put in this work. But then at the end, relatively quickly, then I will be in a much better emotional state at the end. Oh, for sure.
I think those are two really good points that those unrealistic expectations in the area of kind of expecting that quick fix can cause clients, I think, to be disillusioned if progress is slower, if they hit a road bump, rather than understanding that therapy really is often a gradual process. And like you said, EMDR is relatively quick compared to some other therapeutic approaches, but it still does take time and it still is certainly a process.
And then the second thing you mentioned, I think, is that misunderstanding or unrealistic expectations of therapy and what to expect from a therapist, where you come in and you expect the therapist to just offer that advice or say, okay, this is a recipe, this is a cure. But really understanding that each person is different, but also it takes your active involvement. And sometimes as therapists, we're not there to just say, okay, just do these steps and that's it.
But oftentimes we're there to act as a mirror for you to kind of reflect back what we're seeing and help you through the process of figuring out, okay, what are my next steps? Or understanding that overall picture of what's really going on and having that insight and looking deeper into things. But I think when you do come into therapy thinking, okay, they're going to tell me what to do and they're going to give me all the tools and resources.
A lot of times that can lead to disappointment and disengagement in therapy. All right, guys, that's about all the time that we have for today. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And remember, your mind is a powerful thing. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. We hope that you enjoyed today's episode and found it helpful. If so, would you take 30 seconds and share it with a friend? Also, we'd love for you to leave us a review on Apple Podcast.
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Thank you again for joining us on Mr. and Mrs. Therapy. Remember, there's always hope and there's always help. Music.