Resolve Your Trauma in Three Sessions? On Therapy in the Era of Quick Fixes

I recently saw an email with a subject line that read: “Resolve your trauma in just three sessions!”, and it really got me thinking about how we think about therapy in the era of quick fixes.

Psychotherapy, as I understand it, is an attempt to understand, resolve, and change core parts of yourself that may be operating outside of your conscious awareness and causing trouble or pain in your life. By taking the time to examine yourself and expand the awareness of your inner life, you can discover parts of yourself that are running on old information - often laid down in childhood - that are no longer serving you. The work of listening deeply to yourself and identifying inner unconscious processes that shape who you are and how you exist in the world can be incredibly liberating, and I have seen this process help to resolve traumas, grieve losses, face fears, and ease symptoms like anxiety, depression, and addiction. It is not, however, fast, easy, or convenient.

So how long does change like that actually take? And how does it fit into the faced-paced culture we live in?

More and more we seem to value the fastest, cheapest, and most convenient solution to any given problem. This gives rise to a whole genre of promises that claim to be easy, straightforward, and convenient: “the 10 steps to building self confidence”, “resolve your depression in one session”, “proven to help with your anxiety today”. Headlines like these suggest that the solution to your problems is found in simply applying the best method available to your problem. It implies that someone out there has the solution to your problems, and the key to everlasting peace and contentment can be yours in three easy installments of $99.99.

I find this approach to selling mental health misleading, and I’d like to share a bit about what I have found actually leads to the resolution of trauma, and healing of deep symptoms.

When my clients ask me how long they will be in treatment, I like to say that it took decades for your personality to form the way that it is, and that while it won’t take decades to change, it could take years. What I mean by this is that the process of genuinely changing the way you think and look at the world can be a slow and sometimes uncomfortable process. Truly taking the time to sit with and explore deeply the core parts of who you are does not happen on a set timeline, and is not always easy, convenient, and quick.

Part of what makes psychotherapy a slower and less comfortable process is that healing isn’t always about just feeling good. Sometimes the work is about learning to sit with the bad feelings we have been protecting ourselves from. I think about psychotherapy less as a balm for pain, and more often as an arena within which we can learn to be with the existing pain in our lives. So many psychological problems come from avoiding or defending ourselves from psychological pain that was once unbearable. Psychotherapy offers a way to sit more deeply with that pain, and make the unbearable more bearable.

When someone suggests that they can remove your pain for you, quickly and efficiently, I often find they are missing the point of true transformation. In my experience it is by sitting with pain, rather than getting rid of it, where true transformation can happen.

“Sitting with your pain in a deeper and more honest way” does not sell very well in an environment of venture capital money, and solutions-oriented marketing. Mental health start ups are popping up everywhere, attempting to capture some of the market share of the mental health “industry”. When VC firms come into the space, I believe they fundamentally misunderstand the core of what psychotherapy is, and it can result in the types of flashy advertisements highlighting how easy, convenient, and quick the process can be. Easy, convenient, and quick are fine for symptom relief, but when it comes to deeper, more fundamental change, these are exactly the wrong words to describe the process.

Deeper change works differently than quick fixes. It happens when we earnestly engage the stuck, confused, and seemingly irrelevant parts of ourselves - exactly those parts that the advertisements want to help you get rid of.

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Connor Moss, LMFT is a psychodynamic psychotherapist practicing in Santa Cruz, CA. He offers couples therapy and individual therapy for anxiety, depression, addiction, trauma, and more. He welcomes inquiries from new clients and can be reached at (831) 204-0131 or online.