Here’s a piece I first presented in this blog well over a decade ago. I recently came upon it once again. Perhaps it will provide you with some food for thought….
 
There are two reasons why psychotherapy doesn’t work. One is the patient. Two is the psychotherapist.
 
The science of psychotherapy is based around the concept of the patient telling the psychotherapist what they are feeling. Then, the psychotherapist asks various questions in order to peer deeply into the person, hopefully finding the causation factors that have led the patient to presetting a state of mental imbalance and/or acting out in an inappropriate manner due to the emotions that they are feeling.
 
The first big problem in this equitation is the fact that the psychologist, no matter how well trained they are, only knows the facts about the patient as they are presented to them. The fact of the matter is, the asking and the uncovering of facts about a specific person may involve the person lying. From this, a completely altered reality may be presented to the psychotherapist. And, some people are very pathological about their lying. They lie to the degree that they may even believe their own lies.
 
Even if the patient does not intentionally lie, at best, they present all of their life stories from their own point of view. From this, the whole story is never truly understood by the psychotherapist. Thus, whatever diagnosis they make is based upon a limited set of defining elements.
 
The second problem with psychotherapy is the psychotherapist himself or herself. More than simply a mental health professional, a psychotherapist is also a businessperson. They make their living by guiding people’s mental health. If they told all of their clients the truth about what they felt about them and what they thought the patient should or should not be doing, they would quickly have no clients. As such, they must guide their patients with kid gloves; hoping to help them but not lose them as a client.
 
Of course, both the patient and the psychotherapist will deny these facts or, at least, minimalize them with all kinds of rhetoric. But, these are the facts: the patient presents only the truth about himself or herself that they want to be heard by the psychotherapist. The psychotherapist must have clients to financially survive so they sugar coat the truth to their patients. Thus, psychotherapy is a very limited science; defined entirely by the people who practice it and the people who partake of it.
 
I could go into a lot of stories and examples about both the patients and the psychotherapist I have interacted with over the years. But, I will leave that for another time. I will say that it is the participants themselves who make psychotherapy unreliable. This is why so many people need to go for so long and yet continue to exhibit the same emotional turmoil.