Is Therapy Worth It? An Honest Review: Benefits, Tips, and More

Does therapy actually help and do you need it? I’m answering your most asked questions in this review.

I’ll never forget the first time that I stepped into a therapist’s office.

I’ll admit, I… wasn’t really in the best headspace. I came to therapy with a shaking voice, a mountain of mistrust and skepticism, and a backup plan. If this doesn’t work out for me, I thought, I’m done trying.

And being at my wit’s end, I essentially told this new-to-me-therapist exactly that.

Instead of lecturing me about how much I had to live for, or ringing the hospital, she said to me exactly what I needed to hear: “I’m glad you’re here. You deserve to feel better.”

I really hope that if you’re reading this, you’re not quite on the brink the way that I was. But if you are? I’m genuinely glad you’re here, too.

No matter what led you to contemplate seeing a therapist, I’m celebrating the part of you that feels even the faintest glimmer of hope that life has more to offer.

Because my therapist was right. I deserved to feel better, and you do, too.

In short, that’s what my therapy experience (of over a decade now!) has taught me: Life can be so much better, when you put down your protective armor and let someone truly see you and support you.

As I’ll also share, I haven’t had a perfect therapy experience, either.

But my many years as a client — and also as a mental health journalist, whose career has largely focused on writing about the mental health care system and its impacts, good and bad — has taught me that we have more power than we think to shape our therapy experience.

And when we take that power and invest in our growth, with the support of a therapist that really gets us? The experience can be absolutely transformative.

So this article will be a two-parter, highlighting what I see as some of the key benefits of therapy, and my tips for having a positive experience as well.

Does Therapy Actually Help?

When people ask if therapy helps, what they often want to know is if therapy is effective.

Depending on your source, you’ll find psychotherapy is generally accepted as being very effective for most people, and anecdotally, you’ll find plenty of folks who endorse it as a crucial part of their support system.

What is still fiercely debated is exactly why it works and to what extent, especially because comparative studies have shown that very different modalities (or types of therapy) all seem to be more or less equally effective (a phenomenon sometimes called the “Dodo Bird Effect”), calling into question what “ingredients” are responsible for its relative success.

At the end of the day, though, you are a unique individual!

These studies can’t and won’t represent your exact circumstances, and as we’ll discuss later, finding a therapist you feel connected with, and being vocal about your needs and expectations, will go a long way to ensuring you have a positive experience.

If you’re curious about how therapy helps, we’ll unpack that below.

5 Benefits of Therapy to Consider

1. Education: Because no one taught us this stuff.

Apart from a lucky few, many of us did not grow up being taught how to do this whole “being a person” thing.

Think back for a moment: Who sat you down and explained how to feel your emotions, or how to cope with stress? Who explained healing from traumatic events, moving through grief?

What about embracing your authentic self, building your confidence, handling rejection? And, importantly, how to cultivate close, supportive relationships — without running the other way or freaking out when things get intimate?

Most of us aren’t given a whole lot to make sense of ourselves and the world with. And what little we are given is often inherited from our parents, our cultures, our communities — which can sometimes feel supportive, but other times clashes with who we are deep down and what we value as individuals.

Therapy is a nonjudgmental, supportive space to learn another way.

It’s not prescriptive, though. Therapy isn’t here to instruct us on how to do this whole “life” thing, as if there’s only one correct way. Instead, therapy gives us many ways of looking at life’s ups and downs, so we can identify what tools, perspectives, and approaches feel true for us.

This is why a good therapist isn’t just giving you advice or opinions. Instead, they get to know you, and help you learn how to navigate life in ways that are both helpful and authentic for you.

A therapist isn’t giving you The Answer, like a book might do; rather, a therapist is more like a mapmaker, helping you chart your own unique path while offering insights, empathy, and observations along the way.

2. Self-Awareness: Because you don’t know what you don’t know.

I’ve never forgotten what my first therapist told me when I admitted to her that, for most of my (very sheltered) life, I hadn’t even considered that the role I was assigned in life didn’t have to be the one I chose in adulthood.

“The fish in the bowl doesn’t see the water,” she replied.

Even for those of us who have read all the self-help books or watched every TikTok on a therapist’s trauma playlist, it can be hard to see where old beliefs and unchallenged self-criticism — rooted in our upbringing, culture, and communities — are hiding.

It reminds me of when a physical therapist was able to point out when I was favoring my left side over my right, and helped me make safe adjustments that I wouldn’t have known to make on my own.

With their expertise and outside perspective, they helped ensure that the exercises were effective in meeting my strength goals, and done in a sustainable and supportive way, while taking into account my unique body and the injuries I was recovering from.

Similarly, having a mental health therapist — who’s trained to connect the dots between who you were told to be, who you really are, and who you aspire to be (and why you want those things!) — can be deeply impactful in helping us build the futures that feel most authentic for us.

Depending on the type of therapy, you might also come to “know” yourself in a whole new way.

With somatic therapy, you may become more aware in a felt sense. You may find that, after years of being highly intellectual and analytical, you can finally drop in, connecting with your emotional landscape, your bodily sensations, and your intuition.

With Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), you might connect with your true moral compass, the values that matter to you most, and untangle them from the values you inherited from your environment, while releasing the critical voice that judges your thoughts and feelings.

With exposure therapy, you could become more acquainted with your uncertainty and doubt, like slowly making your way to the deep end of the pool, learning you can float even in the midst of confronting your deepest fears.

With Internal Family Systems (IFS), you could meet different parts of your past, and better understand how the younger versions of you are still with you, looking for safety and steadfastly determined to protect you.

In case you were wondering, I’ve tried all of these therapies and more over the years.

And each one had its own unique gifts and lessons that I still carry with me — even the types of therapy that I wasn’t especially fond of — that have helped me find inner harmony, in ways I didn’t know were possible for me.

3. Receiving Care: Because receiving instead of giving all the time is powerful.

Maybe you’re a giver, and you haven’t really allowed yourself the sort of relationship where you simply receive.

Or maybe you’re isolated or you’ve experienced neglect, and you’ve never really let people get to know you in a deep way.

Or worse, the people that you’re drawn to never seem to reciprocate your energy, making you feel more invisible and unwanted than ever.

A lot of folks, especially here in the States, really pride themselves on being independent and not needing anyone.

But the truth is, we are social creatures. We crave and need human connection — not just physical touch, but the kind of affirmation where we feel seen, heard, and understood.

A therapist’s role, of course, isn’t to “love” you the way a friend or family member would. But they are there to offer you care and support, and to create a sandbox of sorts, where you can practice the relational skills you’ll need to build the affirming relationships you need and deserve.

Therapy is a great place to “play” with the building blocks of supportive, warm, honest, trusting, boundaried, and authentic relationships, with the therapy relationship as a model and a guide.

There’s also something very healing in itself about sharing the parts of yourself that you’re too ashamed to say to anyone else, just to be met with consistent compassion, thoughtfulness, and understanding.

This isn’t to say your therapist unquestionably supports you in harming yourself or other people — but your therapist is someone who knows better than most what it means to be human, to suffer, and to struggle (they witness this every day), and has the wisdom and experience to help you meet those parts of yourself with care and gentleness.

4. Hope: Because when we’re struggling, we need someone to ‘hold the hope.’

During one of the darkest times of my eating disorder — an ED I didn’t even know I had until my then-therapist clocked it — I remember arriving to session in a totally exasperated state.

“I can’t do this recovery thing anymore,” I said, exhaling a big sigh and sinking further into my seat. “I’m so tired of trying. And I just don’t have hope for me anymore.”

Instead of trying to change my mind, he nodded and reminded me of something he and my dietitian had said to me when I’d hit a similar low point a couple years before.

“That’s okay,” he told me. “That’s why you have a care team supporting you right now. You don’t have to be hopeful right now. We’re here to hold the hope for you.”

I think there’s this misconception that a therapist, if you were struggling, might pressure you to make big changes, exercise “tough love,” and push you to keep going.

This used to scare me away from therapy, because to me, this meant my therapist would become yet another person in my life to disappoint when I didn’t meet expectations.

But some of the best therapists I’ve had, in recognizing my exhaustion and empathizing with it, didn’t try to change me in the ways that I thought they would.

Instead, they were able to climb down into the bottom of the well where I was lying in a heap, and offer me grace. They knew when to gently push, and when to simply validate how hard I was already trying. They knew when to be encouraging, and when to simply “sit in the suck” with me.

And by consistently meeting me with compassion, I (slowly but surely) learned how to offer that same grace to myself.

To discern between the moments where I needed to push, and the moments that I needed to rest and try again tomorrow — and to never shame myself when the choices I made didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.

I had no idea how much it would change my life to have someone on my side, and with time, to learn how to be on my own side.

5. Integration: Because knowing things and applying what you know are, well, different.

If changing your life were as easy as reading the right books and articles, my life would’ve been totally transformed twenty different ways in this last decade or so.

But as you might already suspect, knowing something and actually integrating and applying what you know… those are very, very different things.

And this can be why therapy doesn’t always work the first time, by the way.

Contrary to popular belief, therapy isn’t just about analyzing "why" you are the way that you are (though that can certainly be part of it!).

It’s not always about digging through the root causes, or spinning theories about why your parents are the reason for your present day suffering (though these can be valid threads to untangle, to be sure).

Instead, ideally, therapy would help you process — or put another way, emotionally digest and make sense of your experiences — as well as finding ways to apply what you’ve learned, so that your quality of life is enhanced in a meaningful way. And there are many paths to getting there!

For example, after many years of cognitive therapy, I felt stuck; I had intellectually dissected most of my life and “knew” what was going on, but my emotional reality felt very much the same (still depressed, still anxious).

But I saw massive changes after trying the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP), a nervous system intervention which helped me integrate on a deeper level everything I’d learned but struggled to feel and embody.

There are similar stories of clients seeing integration benefits with trauma-informed interventions like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, just to name a couple.

Some clients will also benefit from support around applying and practicing what you’ve learned, with your therapist offering some loving accountability. When you say you’ll set boundaries with your parents, for example, your therapist can give you guidance on how to do so, and feedback when you share how it went.

Maybe all you need is a few more self-help books and passion planners! But, if you find that your mind and your heart aren’t aligning — that what you know, what you do, and how you feel aren’t lining up — it might be worth exploring how a therapist could help bring those into balance.

Quick Tips: What to Know Before Starting Therapy

These are some rapid fire tips to consider when starting therapy. If you’d like to go deeper into this topic, please check out my guide on navigating your first therapy experience! For now, these are the bite-sized tips that I think you’ll want to know.

You may feel worse before you feel better.

Have you ever gotten a burst of motivation to do some spring cleaning, so you start pulling every worldly possession you have out from the closets and spaces and nooks where they hide, just to reach a point where you’ve lost steam… now surrounded by a giant mess of your own making?

The beginning of therapy can be a lot like that. Except, in this case, your therapist is there to help you put things back together again, too.

When you start overturning all the stones, you might discover some of those less flattering things about yourself and maybe even the people you trusted.

Or, when finally handing a microphone to the hurting parts of you that were just waiting to be given some airtime, you could be bowled over by the sudden emotional intensity of those long forgotten grievances.

What I can assure you, though, is that this is both normal and it can be a sign of your potential. Which is to say, so much of therapy is working with pain and neglect, and transforming them into personal power and insight.

Remember that everything you uncover — all the stuff that makes the beginning of this process so hard — is often foreshadowing how empowered you could feel later on. The growing pains of right now are the “gains” you’ll enjoy later.

Which brings me to my next point…

The relationship you have with your therapist is crucial.

Most experts agree that one of the most crucial predictors for how therapy will turn out is reflected in how connected clients feel to their therapist, otherwise known as the therapeutic alliance.

Sometimes it comes down to more intangible things, like the “vibes,” but it can also be helpful to better understand how to tell if therapy is working, so you can more quickly identify if you need to switch therapists, or if you just need to switch approaches.

You might also consider, if you have a marginalized identity, looking into what culturally competent therapy might look like for someone in your identity group. For example, assuming you haven’t done so already, if you’re a person of color, you might get familiar with minority stress and seek out a therapist of color; if you are neurodivergent, you might look for neuro-affirming care.

You can and should advocate for yourself.

Knowing what to do when therapy isn’t helping can help you get the most out of your experience, while practicing the necessary but awkward skill of assertiveness.

If it’s not working right now, that doesn’t mean it can’t ever work.

There are so many reasons why therapy might not work at one point or another, or may take additional time to work. Don’t be discouraged! If you’re not able to find a way forward, it’s also very normal to let go of your therapist and seek out additional support that is more aligned with what you need.

You could do therapy forever, but you don’t have to.

Some people choose to stay in therapy for the long haul, while others come and go through different seasons of their life. It’s totally up to you! If you’re unsure of when to end a therapeutic relationship, we also have a guide for that, too.

Closing Thoughts: The #1 Reason to Try Therapy

There’s a quote — I believe it’s by Jenny Holzer — that represents what I think is the best reason to try therapy, which is: “You are a victim of the rules you live by.”

And that, my friends, is the number one reason why I think therapy is worth it: We don’t always know what rules we’re operating by, and how the expectations we’ve absorbed throughout our lives have limited our imagination of what’s possible for our futures.

Therapy is a space where we are free to identify the rules so we can finally break the ones that no longer serve us, make up our own, and build a life for ourselves that is uniquely our own.

If you’ve got a sneaking suspicion that there must be more to life, I’m here to tell you that the “dry blue pill” — where life stays more or less the same as it is, uninterrupted — can’t hold a candle to the aliveness, authenticity, connection, and novelty that the “red pill” of therapy has to offer.

A lot of folks mistakenly believe that therapy is just a place for sorting out pain. While that is true some of the time, it’s also a place where discovery, humor, hope, honesty, joy, and resilience can all thrive.

I believe you deserve a fuller, more vibrant life. And while I can’t promise you that it’s sitting and waiting for you after eight weeks of therapy, what I can say is that therapy can be a positive step toward uncovering that life for yourself.

And I can’t wait to see what you’ll do with it.