Luke Row is a BACP registered psychodynamic therapist in South London, UK. He works with people who've tried managing their symptoms and are ready to understand what's underneath. Book a session →
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You've been asking yourself "why isn't therapy working for me?" for months now. You show up every week. You've tried CBT, had some EMDR, maybe even found a therapist who "gets" you. But here you are at 11pm, googling variations of this same question because something still isn't shifting.
Here's what nobody tells you: you might be doing everything right and still getting nowhere. Not because therapy doesn't work, but because you're having therapy about your life rather than having therapy in your life.
You know what you need to do. Set boundaries. Communicate needs. Challenge negative thoughts. Practise self-compassion. Your therapist has given you the tools, you've done the homework, you understand the theory.
So why are you still having the same fight with your partner? Why does Sunday night still fill you with dread? Why are you still scrolling your ex's Instagram at 1am knowing it makes everything worse?
The gap between knowing and doing isn't information. If information fixed people, every therapist would be perfectly mentally healthy. They're not.
Before we go further, let's name what you're experiencing:
You understand your patterns perfectly but can't stop repeating them. You can explain exactly why you're anxious-avoidant or people-pleasing or self-sabotaging. You just can't do anything different.
Therapy feels productive in the moment but nothing changes between sessions. You leave feeling clearer, but by Tuesday you're back in the same patterns. The insights don't translate.
You're performing 'good client' instead of being a real person. You arrive prepared, do the homework, have the right insights. Your therapist seems pleased. But you're more aware of how you're coming across than what you're actually feeling.
You can talk about your trauma like a case study. Childhood neglect? Covered it. Attachment wounds? Analysed them. Core beliefs? Identified and challenged. But none of it feels connected to the person sitting in the room.
You're starting to wonder if you're just broken. Maybe you're the exception. Maybe therapy works for other people but not you. Maybe you're too damaged, too defended, too something.
If this describes your experience, you're not broken. You're just having the wrong kind of therapy - or more likely, you're having therapy in a way that reinforces exactly what needs to change.
After years of practice, I've noticed people avoid their actual feelings through two seemingly opposite strategies:
Reaching for more - the next workshop, healing modality, self-improvement system
Recoiling from everything - numbing, dissociating, endless scrolling
Both look different on the surface. One looks like growth, the other like stagnation. But they're the same movement: evacuation. Getting rid of feelings rather than having them.
Some people learned early that feeling good is safer than feeling real. They're in therapy, yes, but also doing breathwork, microdosing, cold plunging, manifesting. They've turned healing into a full-time job.
They can't just be sad - they have to transform it into growth. Can't just rest - it has to be "radical self-care." Can't just eat lunch - it needs to optimise their gut microbiome.
Every feeling gets immediately processed into content, every experience metabolised into wisdom. They're not living their life; they're optimising it. And optimisation is just another word for control.
The therapy room becomes another place to perform wellness. They arrive with insights from their week, breakthroughs from their journaling, connections they've made. Good client. Gold star.
But when did they last just cry without narrating it?
Then there are those who show up to therapy but never really arrive. They're in the room but not present. They tell stories about their week like they're reporting someone else's life.
They learned that feeling anything fully means annihilation. So they've become ghosts in their own life. Present but not really. Going through motions without being moved.
In therapy, they're polite, compliant, even insightful. They'll tell you about their trauma with the same tone they'd use to order coffee. They understand why they're depressed. They just can't feel anything about it.
Every session ends the same way: "That was helpful, thank you." But nothing shifts. Because they're having conversations about feelings, not having feelings.
Perhaps you recognise this one. You arrive at therapy pre-diagnosed, pre-analysed, pre-packaged. You've read the literature, you know the terminology, you might even be a therapist yourself.
You explain your patterns eloquently. You can tell your therapist exactly which childhood experience created which defence mechanism. You're psychologically sophisticated. You get it.
But getting it and feeling it are different continents.
You've turned your pain into a PhD thesis. Every feeling comes with footnotes, every memory has been peer-reviewed. You're not in therapy; you're giving a presentation about why you should be in therapy.
Your therapist nods, takes notes, might even be impressed. But meanwhile, your actual life - the messy, feeling, breathing life - remains exactly the same.
Here's what's controversial: the therapy that's easiest to access might be reinforcing your avoidance.
Those thought records? They can become sophisticated ways to think about feelings instead of feeling them. The behavioural activation schedules? They might be helping you perform recovery without recovering.
The client with the perfectly completed CBT worksheets, the one who does all the homework, identifies every cognitive distortion - they're often the furthest from actual change. They've just found a more sophisticated way to stay in their head.
I see this often in my Croydon practice. Clients arrive after years of CBT, fluent in the language of therapy but unchanged. They can spot a catastrophising thought at fifty paces. They just can't stop having them.
Because the catastrophising isn't the problem. It's the solution to a problem they haven't been allowed to feel yet.
Clean pain is just pain. Your partner leaves, you grieve. Someone dies, you mourn. You fail, you feel the failure. It moves through you like weather - intense, sometimes terrible, but temporary.
But when you avoid feeling it - through achievement, distraction, or analysis - you create something else. The exhaustion of constantly running. The anxiety about being anxious. The shame about feeling angry. The loneliness of never letting anyone see you break.
This isn't weather anymore - it's climate. A permanent atmosphere of not-quite-feeling, not-quite-living. You're not feeling your feelings; you're feeling feelings about your feelings. And that's endless. That's the spiral that therapy homework can't touch.
Real therapy - the kind that changes you - doesn't feel like progress. Not at first.
It feels like regression. Like you're getting worse. Because you're finally feeling things you've spent decades avoiding. The competent adult suddenly feels like a needy child. The helper discovers rage. The good one finds their selfishness.
Your therapist isn't impressed by your insights. They're interested in your silences. Not what you know but what you can't say. Not your formulations but your fumbling.
You start saying things that surprise you. Feeling things that don't make sense. You cry about something 'stupid'. You rage about something 'tiny'. You need things you can't justify.
This is what change looks like: messier before it's clearer.
The solution isn't better therapy techniques or more sophisticated understanding. It's simpler and more terrifying: letting yourself be affected.
Affected by your therapist's presence. By their words landing differently than expected. By feeling seen in a way that's uncomfortable. By not being able to manage their perception of you.
This capacity - to be moved, changed, touched by another person - isn't built through worksheets. It's built through relationship. Through showing up week after week, same time, same place, especially when you don't want to.
Through bringing your 'boring' problems, your 'shameful' wants, your 'stupid' concerns. Not your interesting trauma or philosophical insights. The ordinary mess of being human.
In psychodynamic therapy, we're not trying to fix your thoughts or change your behaviour directly. We're interested in why the changes don't stick. Why insight doesn't lead to freedom. Why you can't use what you know.
We pay attention to what happens between us, in the room, in real time. How you become entertaining when you're scared. How you intellectualise when you're about to cry. How you make everything my fault when you're disappointed.
The patterns that trip you up out there show up in here, where we can actually look at them. Not through analysis but through experience. Through gradually discovering that feelings won't kill you, needs won't destroy others, and being ordinary won't erase you.
If you're still reading, you're probably caught between two truths:
That's exactly where you need to be. Not comfortable, not confident, not even hopeful. Just finally honest about the cost of staying the same.
The question isn't whether you need different help. It's whether you're ready for help that asks more of you than performance. That values your confusion over your clarity. That's more interested in your life than your insights about your life.
You already know whether this describes your therapy experience. You know whether you're tired of explaining yourself without changing, of understanding everything and shifting nothing.
The question isn't whether you need help - you're already in therapy. The question is whether you're ready for therapy that:
This kind of work is uncomfortable. Not because it's harsh, but because comfort is what you've been choosing for years, disguised as progress.
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