The Depth of Psychotherapy: Why It Takes Time
In a culture that prizes speed and solutions, psychotherapy can seem strangely out of step. People often ask, “How long will it take?”, usually before they begin.
The truthful answer is: as long as it needs to.
Change in psychotherapy doesn’t happen through advice or technique. It unfolds gradually, through speaking, analysis and working through. A slow discovery of what lies beneath our symptoms.
A symptom isn’t just a problem to instantly eliminate. It has a purpose. However painful it feels, it’s been constructed for a reason – a compromise between what we desire, what we fear, and what we’ve learned to repress. In a peculiar way, symptoms protect us. They hold our psychic world together, guarding against something even more distressing or unknown.
These formations don’t appear overnight. They’re shaped over a lifetime. By family, language, love, and loss. To work through them we must unpick not only what hurts, but what that hurt defends.
That takes time, because each symptom carries multiple threads. What appears as anxiety might also contain guilt, longing, or unacknowledged grief. Pull one thread too quickly, and the whole fabric tightens.
Psychotherapy provides a space to explore these layers slowly and safely. To understand and dismantle how one feeling, thought, or behaviour connects to another. Sometimes progress feels invisible, as though nothing is happening. Yet beneath the surface, something tends to shift. Words replace silence, meaning replaces confusion, and a different relationship to suffering begins to form.
Interconnected symptoms take patience. When one starts to loosen, others can emerge. Not as setbacks, but as deeper layers revealing themselves. As a result, therapy doesn’t move in straight lines; it spirals. Returning to what needs to be re-examined from new angles until it no longer holds the same power.
The symptom doesn’t yield just because we wish it to; it yields when its logic is heard and worked through. That’s what takes time. The deeper work of psychotherapy is to bring that hidden logic to light, so what once bound us can finally be used otherwise.
More on Psychotherapy Book an AppointmentRecommended Reading:
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Éric Laurent, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event”
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Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis
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