by Chris Harris
Let me get this out of the way first: counselling can be enormously helpful. The headline reflects my own experience, not a universal truth. For many people it’s transformative, even lifesaving. I’m not anti-therapy, anti-counselling, or anti-people trying to sort their heads out. For a lot of people, it works exactly as intended.
But sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes, which we’re far less willing to say out loud. it can actually start to make things worse.
I saw a counsellor for three years. Weekly at first, then fortnightly. In total, around £3,500. Looking back now, I feel helped by the experience, but I also feel like I narrowly escaped being gently filed down into someone I didn’t recognise.
At the start, it was genuinely useful. I learned how my brain works, why I process things the way I do, and how to bring order to what had previously been a hectic, scattergun approach to living. I learned about structuring time, prioritising tasks, and thinking more coherently. That part worked. It worked well.
But it didn’t need three years.
Eight weeks would have done it. Ten at most. Quarterly catch-ups.
Instead, the sessions drifted. They became familiar. Comfortable. The first ten minutes were always friendly banter, catching up, easing into things. That’s something people should be wary of. Once therapy becomes cosy, it becomes harder to ask the awkward question: am I still getting anything out of this?
Slowly, the focus narrowed. If I was stressed, driving, for example, I might shout. Like most people do. And so month after month we revisited the same territory: breathing, grounding, calming techniques, Daily Calm and other wellbeing strategies designed to make me quieter, less reactive, more contained.
On paper, it all sounded reasonable. Be calmer. Slow down. Let things go. Respond, don’t react, where do you draw the line?
Yes, no doubt, it worked, up to a point.
But something else happened alongside it. I started to feel oddly hollow. Flat. As if the very things that made me me, energy, restlessness, ambition, creative overdrive, were being treated as faults to be corrected rather than strengths to be harnessed. He was missing the point.
I was fifty-seven at the time, and I remember thinking this didn’t feel like therapy anymore. It felt like training for old age. My parents are thirty years older than me and very much alive. Old age can wait.
This is where modern mindfulness and wellbeing culture has a serious blind spot. It assumes that calm is always the goal. That intensity is inherently unhealthy. That wanting to do many things, to push, to build, to create, is something that needs soothing away.
But for some people, that energy isn’t the problem. It’s the engine.
The issue wasn’t doing too much. It was doing too much badly.
Mindfulness, when applied without discrimination, can become a kind of personality erasure. A soft, polite sanding down of the edges. A preference for tranquillity over agency. For reduction rather than redirection.
I didn’t want a smaller life. I wanted a better organised one.
The cracks eventually became obvious. Fees went up. Sessions moved to video calls. Then those calls were conducted from Thailand. At that point, it stopped feeling like a thoughtful therapeutic relationship and started to feel like a transaction on autopilot. There was no meaningful reassessment of what I wanted or whether this was still serving any purpose.
So I walked away.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: my life improved. Dramatically.
Since stopping counselling, my business has taken off. My blogging has flourished. I’ve started writing a book I’m genuinely proud of. I feel more focused, more productive, more myself. I still get angry occasionally. I still shout at drivers now and then. But I also feel alive, engaged, and driven in a way I didn’t before.
I walk twice a day. That used to be the time when I beat myself up for not being able to concentrate on breathing exercises. Now I dictate my book, articles, and blogs, and when I’m not doing that, I’m thinking them through. My blood pressure and weight have gone down, and I’ve halved my drinking.
These were all things I spent years chewing over in counselling, unable quite to get a grip on them. They fell into place when the sessions stopped and my life began to move again.
Counselling certainly gave me the platform to help transform my life. But there is a huge difference between helping someone realise their potential and quietly numbing it. In all honesty, I find the latter quite a cruel outcome.
Doing everything at once in a chaotic way isn’t healthy. But the answer wasn’t to stop doing things. It was to do them properly, deliberately, and in order.
Counselling fails when the practitioner stops being curious about your personality and defaults to a generic model of “calm”. Mindfulness isn’t bollocks — but sometimes, applied blindly, endlessly, and without respect for who someone actually is, it absolutely is.
Knowing when to walk away can be the most mentally healthy decision you make. I still recommend counselling to friends, but with a caveat: get out of it what you need, not simply what the counsellor thinks you need. They should be there to assist you and work with you, not to recreate you.
#Mindfulness #Wellbeing #Counselling #Therapy #Therapist
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