Why I quit therapy

I've spent $97,600 on therapy over the years. Are we addicted to healing?

We’ve reached peak therapy.

For many of my friends, it’s now a requirement that a guy be in therapy before they’ll even consider a first date. One friend has it as her Hinge prompt: “Do not go out with me if… you’re not actively working on yourself.”

Scroll TikTok or Instagram for five minutes and you’ll find a hundred reasons to cut off your family or leave your spouse, cloaked in buzzy terms like “narcissist,” “emotional labor,” and “self-abandonment”.

Even Reddit is a minefield of therapy-speak—people asking if they’re being gaslit because their boyfriend didn’t get them a thermometer while they were sick.

We are living in a golden era of therapeutic language:

• “Toxic masculinity/femininity”

• “Trauma bonding”

• “I’m being love bombed”

• “I’m doing shadow work”

• “Inner child work”

I can’t go for a walk down a godforsaken block in Brooklyn without hearing these words. I get it, I used to be like this too. It made me feel in control! Healing was my identity! We millennials—the wounded children of boomers—are the first generation to take mental health seriously.

But has it gone too far?

Are we helping ourselves… or just dissecting ourselves to death?

Are we becoming unbearable?

Are we too coddled?

Yes, we are.

I’m going to hold your hand as I say this: not everything in life needs to be a clinical diagnosis!!!!

And it took me stepping away from therapy last year to see that.

I’ve been in therapy, on and off, for 18 years. I’ve done talk therapy, CBT, DBT, EMDR, nutritional counseling, residential treatment, even outpatient programs with group therapy, ecotherapy, movement therapy, art therapy—the full sampler platter.

The last six years were the most intensive: twice-weekly sessions, in person or on Zoom, always with a therapist I trusted. I loved the structure, the feedback, the safety of it all.

But mostly? I loved the validation.

There’s nothing quite as affirming as talking about yourself for an hour and having someone in your corner really listen—someone trained to say, “Yes, that makes sense,” even when you’ve just admitted to doing something kind of shitty.

It felt so good to have someone look in my eyes and validate every one of my thoughts, feelings, and actions. But eventually, I started to wonder: Is this actually helping me?

The more “work” I did on myself, the more things there were to fix. It felt endless. But I didn’t quit right away. I was terrified. If I left therapy, would I fall apart? Would I relapse? Would I lose everything I worked so hard to build?

Here’s what actually made me walk:

1. Therapy started to feel like school.

When my therapist suggested a joint session with a family member, I was thrilled. Progress! A next step! But then she said that person would need to do a full year of therapy on their own first—because I was “so far ahead.”

That crushed me. It made healing feel like an elite club with prerequisites. I was “advanced,” sure, but totally alone in it. That family member was never going to do a year of therapy just so we could start group. Total wishful thinking.

2. Creating problems just to have something to solve

I started to notice a cycle: I’d show up with no real issue, bring up something that felt slightly off (‘cause hey, I was paying and afraid to cancel), turn it into a full-blown “thing,” feel a rush of relief, and do it all over again the next week.

And BTW: when you dissect something for an hour each week in the therapist’s office, you start to cook with it. You let it marinate. You turn it into a dish, and you ingest it. It affects the narrative, and it affects your life. That little non-problem suddenly becomes a big issue in your mind (when it really doesn’t need to be).

3. The hottest EMDR therapist in NYC felt like a farce

Feeling stagnant in talk therapy, I listened to a few of my friends who’d sternly referred to EMDR as a life-changing, core-shaking experience.

I did my research and found one of the most highly-regarded (and expensive) EMDR therapists in Manhattan, her office high up in an art deco building near Grand Central. She was older, and it was clear she didn’t need the money, but that didn’t stop her from not taking insurance and charging $245 per session.

This woman had studied under Bessel van der Kolk, the man who wrote The Body Keeps The Score. I was pumped to get to work with such a legend.

With EMDR, you don’t just dive in—you first spend several sessions building safety, identifying memories, and learning regulation tools. The actual processing phase (with eye movements) can take anywhere from a few sessions to many months, depending on the trauma.

But during the actual EMDR processing? She couldn’t even get her light bar to work.

“Is it working?” she’d ask, fumbling with the remote.

Every breath I took in her office cost me around $32 and she was fumbling with tech, asking me if I felt anything.

After months of working on one memory, I asked, “So… we’re done, right?”

She said, “Well, now we can start on the next one.”

And that’s when it hit me:

This is a business model.

Therapists don’t benefit when you get better. They benefit when you stay just unwell enough to come back.