Why doesn’t my therapist tell me what to do?

“Your therapist, they just listen”, says actor Jonah Hill at the beginning of his documentary about his therapist Phil Stutz. “And your friends, who are idiots, give you advice…you want your friends just to listen, and you want your therapist to give you advice!”

It’s a desire we all feel at times: to hand over the difficult process of decision-making about all the big stuff (and sometimes the small stuff too) to a benevolent, wise source who has our best interests at heart. A desire to escape the existential dilemmas of being alive, of agonising over our life choices, taking the wrong turns, failing at things that matter deeply–and sometimes, just plain fucking it all up.

With this existential cloud hanging constantly over our existence, why wouldn’t we want to outsource our autonomy to another person? To let them take responsibility for what we can’t bear to get wrong?

Unfortunately for us all, this is precisely why we shouldn’t outsource our decision-making. It’s through the process of taking responsibility, finding our autonomy and reconnecting with our inner wisdom that we become strong, confident human beings.

So why do we want to be told what to do?

Like most people, when I commenced therapy many years ago, I was wracked with anxiety. I had lost my way and was no longer in touch with my inner wisdom–that voice that nudges us in the right direction and tells us when we feel a ‘hard NO’ to certain people and situations.

As such, I had no self-trust. Without self-trust, decision-making becomes incredibly difficult. In combination with anxiety, it’s nearly impossible.

The vulnerability, shame, instability and conflict that life sometimes evokes in us can lead to a desperate desire for someone bigger, more confident–someone who surely must have it all figured out–to step in and take over.

Freudians may see this as a desire to return to infancy, to a time in our lives when we were wholly dependent on another to make decisions on our behalf. A time when someone else held the emotions that our fragile minds and bodies were unable to hold. A desire for the ease of compliance and abdication of autonomous thought.

There is some truth in this, but I wonder if there is something more unconscious going on here, too?

To be an adult means making hard choices: taking ultimate responsibility for oneself and the effect we have on others. It means choosing when and how to begin and end relationships, choosing our careers, and deciding whether or not to have children. It means taking responsibility for hurting the people we love and for how we show up in our everyday lives.

At times, we want to escape this treadmill of responsibility and choice. Consciously or unconsciously, we’d prefer to hand over this power to another to negate our own culpability–if we fail or get it wrong, it’s because we were misled or badly advised by someone else.

There is a social and cultural component to this, too: we move from the dependency of childhood into adulthood in a capitalistic, patriarchal world where we are told how to be and how to live. For many of us, this further chips away at true autonomy, strips us of our agency, and negates the ability to listen to the wise counsel of our intuitive inner knowing.

So why doesn’t my therapist tell me what to do?

Whilst writing this article, an old friend gave me a shocking example of precisely why your therapist doesn’t–and shouldn’t–tell you how to live your life.

During a difficult few years, my friend had found herself in several problematic relationships, with friends, family members, and work contacts. These relationships shared several qualities, including enmeshment, blurred boundaries and a feeling of being unjustly ‘put upon’.

My friend’s therapist encouraged her to cut all contact with these people, at great personal and (in the case of a work relationship) financial cost to my friend.

Like many women, she had grown up with a sense of compliance, fostered and encouraged from a young age by family and the world at large. Women are often taught to placate, to acquiesce, to be pliable and malleable. This often starts early in life and is replicated through social power structures. By telling you what to do, a therapist will only be repeating this pattern of enforced compliance.

A good therapist will recognise patterns of compliance in a client—in their posture, the dynamics of their relationships, and even in the way they relate to the therapist themselves. But recognising it is only the beginning. Therapy can then become a space to gently notice these patterns together, and to move beyond automatic pleasing or adaptation by helping the client reconnect with their own deeper sense of self and inner truth.

Instead of doing this, my friend’s therapist repeated the same dynamics of compliance and control that my friend had internalised throughout her life. Instead of complying with the wishes and demands of others, my friend acquiesced to the demands of the therapist. She made decisions based on the therapist’s worldview, rather than her own, and was left feeling she made the wrong call.

I was shocked and dismayed by my friend’s story, not just by the blatant directive and authoritarian stance of the therapist, but also by the missed opportunity for the therapist to help my friend explore these relational issues and gain greater insight.

For example, the therapist could have worked with my friend to explore the origin of these relational patterns - to identify the triggers for these types of relationships and the behaviours that emerge in certain dynamics. Through identifying when these patterns start to emerge, new and different ways of responding could have been investigated.

She could have taken a deep dive into how boundaries could look and feel relationally for my friend, and practised working with those boundaries in the therapy relationship itself. The therapist could have encouraged an exploration of what my friend desires her relationships to look like and to feel like, as well as ways to embody this new way of relating.

Furthermore, she could have helped my friend to tap into her own internal wisdom, to feel into her body’s sense of what feels right and wrong relationally, and to notice these feelings moving forward.

What should a therapist do instead of telling me what to do?

Good therapy should not replicate patriarchal structures of power or control. This is especially true for women who may have had their autonomy, confidence and intuition slowly eroded by family, partners and society over the course of their lives.

While there is a time during the therapy process where you may feel some dependency on your therapist (in a replication of the dependency of infancy), this time should precede a feeling of renewed autonomy that your therapist helps you instil in yourself.

Therapy should be about guiding you back to a place of self-trust. A good therapist does not need to tell you what to do or how to think, because they trust in your ability to do this for yourself.

Your therapist should certainly be insightful and, if they are well trained, they will be able to see and point out the patterns, behaviours and unconscious beliefs that hold you back or keep you trapped and unhappy. But this process is ultimately about helping you to stop outsourcing your own wisdom and to find your own voice.

In this way, the therapy process becomes about giving you space to hear your thoughts, recognise your true needs and desires, and to find a more authentic way to live.

As an integrative therapist, I work in several ways to do this:

Working psychodynamically, we work together to untangle the conditioned responses and learned behaviours developed over a lifetime of outsourcing your autonomy.

Therapy is ultimately an attachment relationship. Through exploring your early life and present-day attachments, as well as how you relate to me as your therapist, we can investigate the ways you show up in relationships. We look at the barriers and defences that stand in the way of you loving and being loved, and find more helpful and nourishing ways for you to relate to others.

We also look at how you can live a life with more confidence and authenticity through exploring your true self. Sometimes this process involves excavating the masks you may have come to wear through the process of socialisation. It’s my job to hold my clients safely and without judgment whilst we do this difficult work together.

As a somatically trained therapist, I also work with my clients to tap into what their bodies are telling them. We work with the wisdom of the body to find that intuitive inner voice–the wise and benevolent guide that we all carry around inside of us. This process is tricky at first, especially for women–we have spent our whole lives having our intuition denied, laughed at, hushed up and shut down. So getting back in touch with it can feel awkward at first. And yet, most of my clients find that this is some of the most rewarding work they do in the therapy process. It enables them to recognise their true hopes, needs and authentic desires and to act from this place of self-knowledge.

There is nothing more powerful than making informed, cognisant and cogent life choices that are aligned with your inner life and soul desires. Good therapy should foster your ability to do this. It should also lead you away from a place of compliance and into an authentic and confident way of living, feeling and decision-making.

When we can boldly, courageously and with conviction lead our own way and make our own decisions, we truly begin to live.

References:

Hill, J. (dir.) (2022) Stutz. [Film documentary] USA: Netflix.