Red Flags: When Your Therapist Isn't Working Out

If you're reading this, you may be sitting with a quiet doubt. You're in therapy, you've invested time, money and hope, and something doesn't feel right. Maybe you can't even name what. And the very thing that makes therapy powerful, the relationship, is what makes this so hard to think about clearly. It can feel disloyal to even ask the question.

So let me say first: asking the question is healthy. I regularly see clients who've come to me after therapy elsewhere didn't work out, and almost all of them stayed too long in something that wasn't working, partly because nobody had ever told them what to look for. This post is what I'd want them to have read.

Why people actually leave

When people arrive after a previous therapy, a few stories come up again and again.

Some felt they were going around in circles. They talked about the same things over and over, but the conversation never went any deeper than talking about the issue.

Some never felt listened to or understood by their therapist. Not once, dramatically, but steadily, in small ways, week after week.

Some felt they were being told what to do. The therapist hadn't really listened to what they needed or wanted, and sessions started to feel less like being understood and more like being told off.

Some were overwhelmed by the therapy itself. The work took them into panic states, or back into traumatic material, and left them worse than it found them.

And some describe therapy that was competent but cold. Everything stayed in the head. There was no relational warmth, and no help learning to stabilise and regulate their emotions.

Each of these is worth understanding properly, because each looks different from the inside.

Going in circles, or going slowly?

Deep change is slow, and some repetition in therapy is completely normal. So how do you tell the natural slowness of depth work from genuine stuckness?

Here's the difference. Circling is cerebral. You keep talking about things, telling and retelling the story, analysing it, but you never drop beneath the story into the felt experience: what's happening in your body as you speak, what emotions are moving, how you're relating to what arises inside you. Depth work keeps making contact with that living process underneath the words. It might revisit the same territory many times, but each time it touches something, and something shifts.

If months have passed and the work has never once left the level of talking about, that's not slowness. That's staying on the surface.

When therapy overwhelms you

This one matters most, because it's where poor therapy becomes dangerous rather than merely unhelpful.

When previous therapy has tipped someone into panic or back into reliving traumatic material, it's nearly always because the therapist wasn't genuinely trauma informed. Trauma work has stages, and the first stage is stabilisation: building safety in the relationship and in your body, learning to steady your emotions and physical sensations, coming to recognise your triggers. Only once that foundation exists is it safe to approach the content of what happened.

A therapist who goes into the traumatic material too quickly, without that foundation, can leave you reliving the trauma again and again rather than healing it.

And it's not just trauma work that needs to be paced. If you haven't yet learned good emotional regulation skills, moving into deep emotion too fast is overwhelming in itself, whatever brought you to therapy. Touching painful material will feel intense; that's ordinary. But if sessions regularly leave you feeling run over, again and again, in panic or flooded, and it takes days to recover each time, and your therapist doesn't listen when you say so or pace the work in a way that builds your resilience, that's a red flag. Good therapy stretches you at the edge of what you can manage. It doesn't repeatedly take you past it. That's the therapist's responsibility to notice and change, not yours to endure. I'll be writing more fully about unsafe trauma work in a future post, because it deserves one of its own.

Are you actually being met?

The relational warning signs are quieter, but they add up. Watch for a therapist who talks over you or doesn't let you finish. Who steers you towards their perspective, or their worldview, rather than supporting you to understand your own. Who tells you what to do, or leaves you feeling scolded, rather than listening for what you actually need and want. Who stays distant, week after week. Who never attends to what's happening between the two of you in the room, as if the relationship itself were not part of the work.

Every therapist has off days, and one flat session means very little. What matters is the pattern, and one marker above all: accountability.

The clearest test: what happens when things go wrong

Things go wrong in every therapy relationship. A misattunement, a clumsy comment, a session that lands badly. This isn't failure. In fact, rupture and repair, done well, is some of the most healing work therapy offers. Which is why how your therapist responds when you name a problem tells you almost everything.

A poor therapist takes no responsibility. Everything you raise gets turned back into your process, your sensitivity, your pattern, and the therapist never reflects on what was going on for them or why they reacted as they did. A good therapist self reflects, owns their part, apologises, checks in with you afterwards, and genuinely repairs.

And here's a simple test you can hold onto. If you've raised something twice and nothing has changed, that is itself the answer. You're not being listened to, and it's reasonable to question whether this therapy is right for you.

Dependency isn't the red flag you think it is

People sometimes worry that relying on their therapist means something has gone wrong. Actually, dependency is a healthy stage of therapy. Much like infancy, we depend in order to become independent. When the therapeutic space is safe and stable, you internalise the therapist in a positive way, and it's from that secure dependency that real independence grows.

The red flag isn't needing your therapist. It's directionlessness. You've said the work feels like it's going nowhere, and it isn't acknowledged. You're not clear where the work is heading, and neither, it seems, is your therapist, who can't articulate where you're at or what direction you're travelling in. That's the sign to take seriously.

A good therapist holds the bigger context of where you're travelling together, even while each session stays free to move in different directions and take different pathways. And at various points, you explicitly revisit it together: where you've got to, what's changed, whether the direction still fits.

What about the money?

Let's name the awkward thought directly: your therapist has a financial interest in you staying. It's completely understandable that clients sometimes wonder about this.

What I'd say is this. Therapists can genuinely hold both things at once: the financial arrangement and real care for you. Speaking for myself, there's a steady flow of people making enquiries, and no shortage of people needing therapy, so keeping a client who'd be better served elsewhere makes no sense. And if money were the point, I'd do a different job. This work is a vocation, and the relationships in it are genuine. But you don't have to take any therapist's word for that, because the proof is behavioural. A therapist who cares will raise the ending themselves when they sense you're ready. They'll support you to move on, or refer you to someone else, if another therapist would serve you better. And around fees, ethical practice is clear: proper warning, a real conversation about how a change affects you, not a line on an invoice.

A therapist who resists every ending, adds sessions without clear reason, or handles money without transparency is showing you something.

How to leave well

If you've concluded the therapy isn't working, in most circumstances it's good to have an ending session. Endings are part of the work, and even a therapy that failed can close with something useful.

But not always. If you don't feel comfortable with the therapist and the space doesn't feel safe, it's entirely appropriate to end by message or email. You don't owe the therapist anything. It's a relationship, though, and it's a kindness to say something rather than simply vanishing, because a client who disappears leaves the therapist wondering whether they're okay and safe. A brief, honest note is enough.

Starting again, without carrying the failure with you

One bad therapy can leave people concluding that therapy doesn't work for them. Usually what didn't work was that therapy, with that person, in that way.

When you look for someone new, be honest about what happened last time. A good therapist will unpack it with you: what didn't work, what you'd want to be different, so you feel reassured they can approach things differently. It's often worth looking for someone who works in a genuinely different way too. If the last therapy was all talk and analysis, someone who works somatically, with the body, may reach what the talking couldn't.

And remember what I wrote in my guide to finding a good therapist: use the introductory call, treat the first session as your chance to assess them, and hold on to the fact that you are choosing. You're not committed. You get to decide whether this relationship is right for you, and you can walk away. That knowledge changes everything about starting again.

If you're currently sitting with doubts about your therapy, I hope this has given you a clearer way to think them through. And if you conclude it's time for someone new, you're welcome to get in touch and find out whether we might be a good fit.