If your therapy is still helping you improve your life and relationships, this post is not for you.

Gains from therapy reach a plateau, with diminishing returns thereafter. If continued beyond the plateau level, it risks building dependency while increasing self-obsession.

Some authors point out that therapists have at least an unconscious interest in keeping clients in therapy. Certainly, there is a financial gain for therapists who continue treatment with diminishing returns. Less experienced clinicians may resist termination because it feels like failure or rejection.

My personal view is that most want what is best for their clients and recognize that at some point what is best includes termination. I believe getting stuck in therapy is an inadvertent result of therapists’ best efforts.

People can get stuck when therapy:

Therapy must validate your experience while empowering you to improve it. Validation alone can make you feel better for a while, but it won't lead to lasting improvement. You’re likely to feel stuck in therapy when there is a continual emphasis on validating your experience and blaming the lack of improvement on other people or circumstances.

A common symptom of therapy that validates at the cost of empowerment occurs when therapists diagnose people, such as significant others, they’ve never seen, based on reports of their clients: “Sounds like he’s a narcissist. She’s a borderline personality.”

Therapy then becomes how to deal with a disordered partner and why you might want to, rather than how to act on your values and in your best interests. Diagnoses of unseen........

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