Can You Have Too Much Therapy?

This may sound strange coming from a therapist, but you can have too much therapy.

I say this knowing full well the benefits of having someone who helps you understand your story. This is work I’ve loved. There are many upsides to an experience that can shape your soul in new ways. In a chaotic age where isolation has become the norm, a good counselor can help us find our moorings.

Yet therapy is changing as the culture shifts. For example, it’s much harder now to shed light on the human longing for a mother or a father, since any family structure is deemed as good as the next. Good therapy has also taken a beating because of the growing taboos and confusion around gender. A therapist can pay with her license for challenging a girl’s desire to be a boy. How do you talk about the responsibilities of a man if a man is no different from a woman?

For these and other reasons, contemporary therapy can devolve into simple prescriptions for better self-care: Just establish good boundaries. Take better care of yourself. As Christians, our understanding of the human condition is far more complex—and far richer.

How, then, can you tell if your therapy experience is helpful? When do you know you’ve had enough, at least for now? Let me offer two barometers.

1. Good therapy should help you grow in gratitude and hope, pointing you to new possibilities.

Good therapy helps you see old fears and insecurities as bumps in the road to where you’re going.

If you’re repeating the same stories and keeping the focus on what you lacked or how you were wronged, you might be stuck. Maybe it’s time for a break. Yes, a relationship with Christ provides the space to consider how you’ve been hurt or wronged. But that’s only half the story.

The real miracle is that Christ’s grace enables me to face where I’ve hurt others or been hurt, and how I can repair. The gospel has power to change our deepest motivations, our most intractable habits. God created us to be remarkably resilient, with incredible aptitude to heal and recover.

Good therapy helps you to see old fears and insecurities as bumps in the road to where you’re going.

A major turning point in my life was realizing that my mother’s inability to speak encouraging words didn’t have to hold me back. God had 100 ways to bring the words I needed to hear. Psalm 27 (KJV) puts it like this: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.” This is true of every primary relationship in our lives. God isn’t limited by our failures or the failures of others.

Good therapy isn’t afraid of gratitude and naming the blessings you’ve been given, even amid hardship. Gratitude is a powerful engine for moving us forward with hope. It puts situations in perspective and allows me to recognize that the hardship or loss I’d never have chosen isn’t the end of my story. “A thousand things are happening in this one thing,” Christa Wells sings. Gratitude helps us see some of those, which often leads to the next right step and a new possibility.

2. Good therapy right-sizes the disappointments of a fallen world.

Our instincts are right. The world isn’t as it should be or was meant to be. A lot can go wrong in life, and we don’t have any assurances we’ll escape pain. But we do have the promise that God will take what’s genuinely awful and bring good from it.

I sat on the back porch with my son one warm summer afternoon as we mourned together the saga of infertility that would likely keep him and his wife from having biological children. He was only 28. How could this happen? Friends were having children left and right.

“Every cell in your body, every relationship—it’s all marked by the fall,” I remember offering quietly. “Your friends just haven’t hit the wall, the big ‘no’ that comes to everyone at some point.”

None of us gets out of this life alive. Yet a deeper understanding of gospel reality allows us to weather disappointments without concluding we were given a raw deal.

A deeper understanding of gospel reality allows us to weather disappointments without concluding we were given a raw deal.

“Trauma” is an overused word. It was once reserved for an extreme event that racked the mind and body and left a sort of psychological paralysis in its wake. But in recent years it has become common to label normal life experiences—the death of a spouse, a broken engagement, the loss of a job we loved, a hard conversation—as “trauma.”

Life, then, looks like a series of inevitable mishaps and losses. We live in fear and defensiveness, braced for the worst, assuming nefarious intentions in others, and sabotaging our resilience. When therapy is making you more fragile and defensive, and you define yourself by past pain and live in perpetual fear of future “trauma,” it might be a good idea to take a break.

Therapy at Its Best

Rather than being a constant fixture in your life, the best therapy often happens in shorter bursts spaced months or years apart, where some new phase of your life is integrated with the story that came before. Through good counselors, God can weave a tapestry where discordant threads come together slowly over time, giving you a better sense of yourself—not just as a personal coping mechanism but to fuel future growth and relational flourishing.

Good therapy helps us see that life is knocking on doors and walking through the ones God opens, but not being defined by or resentful about the ones he doesn’t. Good therapy doesn’t excuse behavior that God doesn’t excuse. Good therapy helps God’s Word become more alive to us as we understand our story and see it in the context of God’s bigger story. Good therapy imparts courage to take new steps of faith, without having to see how it’ll work out.

This is the sanctifying process good therapy is meant to serve.