Will My Therapist Tell Me What to Do?

You might come to therapy to make a decision. Fair enough. Lots of people do. 

This is a warning that it may not go the way you think.

A lot of folks think that therapists are experts that help advise people on what they should do, perhaps because they’re experts in living (and unfortunately I think some therapists believe this about themselves). However, there are good reasons why good therapists usually don’t give advice.

First, it’s much better for you to take responsibility for your own decisions. This is a primary task of therapy and of maturity generally–to take responsibility for your own life. If you ask your therapist to tell you what to do, you relinquish the effort of figuring out what to do and give yourself someone else to blame if it goes poorly or you decide not to take action at all.

Second and perhaps most obviously: therapists aren’t omniscient. There are too many variables and we can’t know everything, especially what might follow a personal decision in someone else’s life. We can only really advise from (1) our own lives and (2) clinical training, which is (1) not your life and (2) much too broad to cover every detail of your wonderfully particular life. You are the expert on you. So our advice may be helpful, but it may not be.

Third, giving advice is rarely effective. Take it from an experienced psychologist: telling someone what to do rarely works. If your therapist tells you what to do, your sense of agency or free will may be diminished. This leaves you feeling incapable, which might align with your conscious feelings and reason for asking for advice, or it may make you feel angry that some authority on their high horse (the therapist) thinks they know best–even if you’re the one who asked for the advice!

Last, clarifying your feelings often makes the advice unnecessary. An analogy that I use often with patients is that our personal decisions are often more like choosing a favorite ice cream flavor than solving a math problem. A class of 30 students should all get the same answer on their math homework. But no one else can correctly decide if you like chocolate or vanilla or strawberry ice cream the best. Similarly, no one can tell you that continuing your relationship feels worse to you than a breakup–you have to decide how it feels now and imagine how it will feel later (we psychologists can help with that). There is no objective best answer, though there is likely a subjective best answer. The work of therapy is often to clarify what you’re actually feeling about that relationship, that job, that living situation, that mother-in-law.

Importantly, clarifying what you’re feeling often also means clarifying why you won’t take the action you believe to be the best option. Why you either haven’t committed to your current situation or haven’t committed to changing it. You may know exactly how you feel about your relationship–but you are stuck because you also feel fear, guilt, doubt, anger, grief, or something else! Often what you think is a “reason” for delaying a decision is an opposite feeling that you are trying to avoid. Shining the proverbial light on these feelings in therapy is likely to make you more effective at navigating them. Notably, this is also why giving advice is rarely effective. You might agree with the advice your therapist gives you, but then when you go to take action (e.g., leave a job you hate), you run up against your inability to do it, and be right where you were before. Mainly, stuck and unsure.

Often we know what to do but struggle to do it so much we doubt our decision. Put another way: “indecision” is often just inaction disguised.

So, if you have a relationship or job or family member or whatever, and expect a therapist to help you decide what to do–you may be right, but it may look different than you expect. If you have a good therapist, they likely won’t tell you what to do–they will help you understand what you think you should do, and understand why you haven’t yet done it. That way, you can commit to the decision that you made, predict the challenges that have stopped you before, and to do it anyway.