Many women believe that they’re the ‘designated patient’ in their relationship. So they go to therapy, thinking that if they just work on themselves hard enough, they’ll learn how to not be fucked up. You’ve read all the self-help books, keep all the appointments and turn themselves inside out. You’ve worked on your communication, codependency, boundaries, inner child, self-confidence. and on…infinitum. And you’ve journaled so much that you should nominate yourself for a Pulitzer Prize. And after all this work — feel worse than when you started — but even more confused, and more broken. There’s no hope in sight, and you’re exhausted. Sound familiar? Here’s why being in therapy hasn’t fixed your relationship.
Simone Biles – Mental Health Advocate
First of all, what exactly is mental health? And what does that mean when you’re in a relationship? Because being in a relationship can both make things easier and at the same time, vastly more complicated. Let’s start by looking at someone whose focus on therapy is working exactly the way it’s supposed to. Simone Biles. Biles is two years out from the 2028 Olympics, and she’s put her chances of competing at fifty-fifty. The deciding factor isn’t her body — it’s her mental health. In a recent CNN Sports interview, Biles explained that her coaches can get her ready physically, but her mental health will be the gating factor in her decision. She’s been in therapy since she withdrew from the 2021 Olympic Games after experiencing “the twisties,” a dangerous psychological phenomenon where gymnasts lose spatial awareness in the air. She was concerned that competing in this state could result in serious physical injury. And as the result, bravely brought mental health to the forefront of sports.
What’s worth noting about Biles isn’t just that she’s in therapy. It’s that she chose it herself. No one had to convince her. No one had to tell her to go. She took a look at her situation, saw what she needed, and walked herself into the room.
But some women are going to therapy, for perhaps the wrong reason – to fix her relationship.
When You’re Diagnosed as the Problem
Many women arrive at the therapist’s couch believing that they are flawed — almost irrevocably so. They’ve already diagnosed themselves. Or so they think.
They tell the therapist that they’re too sensitive. Too needy and anxious. Always too much and never enough — not loving enough, patient enough, understanding enough. They tell their therapist that if they could just learn to communicate better, manage their emotions better, be more compassionate, the relationship would improve.
But this particular type of person doesn’t realize that every word in that diagnosis came from someone who may not have her best interests at heart – their partner. Ouch.
Her partner’s been telling her — sometimes loudly, often more subtly (or snarkily) — what’s wrong with her. He’s (it could be anyone, but most often ‘he‘) been criticizing the things she’s the most sensitive about. Correcting her decisions. And telling her that she’s the reason the relationship is difficult. And she’s been listening. Not because she’s weak. But because she’s a normal human being responding to a calculated, sustained campaign of psychological pressure that she didn’t know was being run on her.
Then someone suggests that she should go to therapy. The suggestion can be framed gently. It sounds like someone who cares about her, and most often, it is. But by the time she walks into the therapist’s office, his diagnosis has become her diagnosis. His language has become her language. His version of her has become her version of herself.
A well-meaning therapist, trained to honor what the client brings into the room, accepts that diagnosis and helps her work on it.
…But YOU Aren’t the Problem
This is the part that, once you see it, you can’t unsee.
A woman in this situation is being told to work on herself — but the self she’s working on isn’t actually hers. It’s the version of her that her abuser constructed. So every hour she spends in therapy improving her communication, examining her codependency, processing her childhood, building her self-esteem, she is — without anyone in the room intending it — confirming his story about who she is and what’s wrong.
She works harder and tries more. She becomes a better, more thoughtful, more emotionally articulate version of the woman he told her she was. But the relationship still doesn’t get better.
…Because the relationship itself was never the problem.
What Don Hennessy Decoded
Don Hennessy is an Irish researcher who has done something almost no one else in the field has done. He spent more than thirty years interviewing both sides of the couples in abusive relationships. The abuse survivors…and the abusers themselves. Don found is a pattern most therapists, advocates, and law enforcement professionals have never been trained to see — because the field, for the last 50 or 60 years, has built its understanding of abuse by talking almost exclusively to women, and looking at the trauma…not the cause of the trauma.
When a woman is an abusive relationship.
When a woman in an abusive relationship is told to go to therapy and work on herself, the therapist treats the symptoms — her anxiety, her depression, her low self-esteem, her difficulty trusting, her hyper-vigilance, her exhaustion. Every one of those symptoms is real. They deserve treatment. They deserve compassion.
But they are symptoms.
The real issue is in the next room. And in too many cases, nobody is examining it.
This is Not Anti-Therapy
To be clear, this is not an article against therapy. Therapy is, in most cases, exactly the right call. We all need help from time to time, and a good therapist is one of the most useful relationships a person can have. The problem here isn’t therapy. The problem is that in this particular situation, the therapy is pointed at the wrong person in the relationship.
This is also not an article against the people who told her to go to therapy. Most of them are loving her the best way they know how. Most of them genuinely believe they are helping. In almost every other context, they would be right.
But if you have been told for years to go to therapy and work on yourself, and you’ve done it faithfully, and the relationship has not improved — if anything, you feel smaller, more confused, more certain that you are the broken one — that is not a sign you need to work harder.
It may be a sign that you and your therapist have been examining the wrong person.
A note for therapists
If a client arrives with a self-diagnosis that sounds like it was written by someone else — too sensitive, too needy, hard to live with — it’s worth asking, gently and over time, who first taught her those words. Most clients you see won’t fit this pattern; the instincts that serve them serve them well. For the ones who do, Don Hennessy’s How He Gets Into Her Head is the place to start.
Lesson from Simone Biles
Biles has said something else worth holding onto. When she looks back at the moment in Tokyo that forced her to step away, she now sees it as courage rather than weakness.
That reframe was the turning point.
For her, the courage was naming what was happening to her own body and mind in the middle of the highest-pressure moment of her career. For women in abusive relationships, this courage looks slightly different. It is the courage to ask a question the people around her — including the ones telling her to go to therapy — may never have asked her to consider: What if the problem isn’t me?
That question is not betrayal. Nor selfishness. You’re not giving up on the relationship. You’re being rigorously honest. Something you may have needed for a long, long time.