Why Therapy Gets Uncomfortable Just as It Starts to Work
Band Aids vs deep healing. There is a predictable point in therapy where it stops being about your circumstances and starts being about you. It usually arrives somewhere after the first few sessions, once the immediate crisis has been described and the relief of being heard has worn off. It is uncomfortable, it often produces a sudden urge to stop, and it is almost always the moment the work actually begins.
If you have ever quit therapy around session four or five while telling yourself you were too busy, this blog should resonate / help understand.
What changes midway?
Early sessions are largely about the situation. What happened, who did what, how it has left you feeling. That stage matters and it is genuinely useful — much of the relief people feel early on comes from finally laying the whole thing out in front of someone who isn't going to take a side.
Then the question shifts. Not what did they do, but what keeps happening here, and what is your part in it?
That question is not an accusation, though it can land like one. Our problems are never entirely someone else's fault. In couples work the rule of thumb I use, drawing on Gottman, is that each person is at least thirty per cent responsible for the difficulty between them — which also means nobody is a hundred per cent responsible, including you.
For most people that is both a relief and a threat. A relief because it means you are not solely to blame. A threat because thirty per cent is still a share, and looking at it requires something.
The four ways people avoid the mirror
Being scared of looking at yourself is not unusual. Almost everyone is, to some degree, and it tends to come out in four recognisable forms.
Avoidance — steering the conversation elsewhere, filling the session with events and logistics, arriving with a new crisis each week.
Defensiveness — explaining, justifying, producing context for everything, so that nothing can quite be examined.
Blaming — keeping the focus firmly on what the other person did, which is often entirely accurate and still not the thing that will change anything.
Resistance — the quiet version: agreeing with everything and doing none of it.
These are not failures of character. They are instinctive and protective, and they were useful once. But in therapy they do a specific and unhelpful thing: they block progress and keep people stuck in exactly the position they came in to change.
Naming them is usually the turning point. Not as a criticism — as information about what is happening in the room.
Why people leave midway
Once it becomes clear that personal change is required, anxiety follows almost immediately. That is a reasonable response: you are being asked to give up something that has been protecting you, without any guarantee about what replaces it.
Some people drop out at this point. Others come back the following week despite being afraid, and say so.
The uncomfortable truth is that no progress happens without change. The encouraging one is that everyone can change, if they want to — and wanting to is genuinely the main requirement. Not talent, not insight, not having had a good childhood.
What it actually takes to heal
Less than people imagine, and more consistently than they expect.
A therapist's job here is to hold a mirror steady enough that you can look at your own contribution without the experience feeling like an attack. That means a space that is safe and genuinely non-judgemental — not because judgement is impolite, but because nobody examines themselves honestly while braced for criticism.
Then it is a matter of trying things. New responses, new ways of saying something, small experiments in the gap between sessions. It feels awkward and slightly artificial at the start, in the way that anything does before it becomes yours. With practice it gets easier, and then it stops feeling like a technique at all.
This is also why doing it alone is harder than it needs to be. Self-examination without company tends to collapse into either self-criticism or self-justification, and neither moves anything. Why walk this stretch alone when you can take a trained companion along?
If you are at the point where therapy has started to feel uncomfortable, it is worth knowing that this is not a sign that it isn't working. It is very often the first sign that it is.
Frequently asked questions
Is it normal to feel worse after starting therapy? It is common, particularly around the point where attention turns from your circumstances to your own patterns. It usually reflects work happening rather than harm being done — though if it persists or deepens, say so to your therapist directly. That conversation is part of the work.
Why do I want to quit therapy just as things get difficult? Because being asked to change is genuinely threatening. The urge to stop most often arrives precisely when something is about to shift.
How do I know if therapy is working? Usually not by feeling better every week. More reliable signs are noticing a pattern while you are in it rather than afterwards, recovering faster from setbacks, and catching yourself before an old reaction rather than after.
What if I don't feel comfortable with my therapist? Say so. A good therapist would rather hear it than lose you, and it can often be worked with. If it cannot, changing therapist is a reasonable thing to do and not a failure. Read more about individual counselling or couples counselling in these links. Click here for our overall services/fees and you can contact us too.
Geetika Malhotra is Director and Principal Psychotherapist at Balanced Life Psychotherapy & Counselling in Singapore. She holds an MA in Advanced Counselling and a postgraduate certificate in psychotherapy, and is certified in the Gottman Method and EMDR. She has practised for over eleven years with individuals, couples and families in Singapore and internationally.
