HOW PROGRESS IN THERAPY ISN'T LINEAR

A part of me always thought therapy would make me feel lighter and lighter the further we went. I assumed that once I started healing, I would automatically feel more clear headed, decisive, confident, assertive. I thought progress would look like me finally doing and feeling better in all the areas of my life that had been affected by my emotional condition.

Instead, therapy initially made me feel even heavier than I did when I started.

What surprised me most was the sheer amount of unresolved negative feelings I had apparently suppressed over the years that I didn’t even know existed. The first thing therapy changed wasn’t necessarily my maladaptive patterns, but my understanding of what was maladaptive and what wasn’t. A lot of those behaviours made complete sense in my head. Suddenly becoming aware of them almost felt like I was doing everything wrong.

People often underestimate how much conscious work goes into the therapy process. There’s this quiet assumption that once someone starts therapy, things in their life should slowly start sorting themselves out automatically. But therapy is not just about “realising” things. Awareness is only one part of the process.

When you get to organizing your space, you don’t do it by stuffing everything away exactly where it already is. You start by pulling everything out first, which initially makes the space look even messier than before. Therapy can feel very similar. It can temporarily make you more aware of emotions, behaviours, and patterns that were already there, but had gone unnoticed for years.

Once I started therapy, I realised how much of my behaviour was being driven by anxiety. The overexplaining. The people pleasing. The avoidance of confrontation. Social isolation whenever things got overwhelming. Anticipating every possible problem I might face in a situation and overpreparing, even for something as mundane as packing luggage. Constantly reevaluating conversations and actions. All day. Every day. For years.

The hardest part was realising that many of these tendencies weren’t simply parts of my personality. They were patterns that developed to protect me from hurt, disappointment, rejection, uncertainty. And while those patterns may have helped me survive at one point, they were also exhausting me in ways I hadn’t fully realised before. I started noticing how much energy those coping mechanisms were taking from me every single day.

Over time, my understanding of progress started changing too.

Now, progress in therapy comes in much smaller moments. Realising I spilled a drink while sitting with a group and instead of apologising profusely, I just calmly pick up a napkin and clean it. Instead of overexplaining why I need a boundary in place, I just assert that boundary.

The urge to respond anxiously is still there. But over time, it gets easier to ignore that urge. To push through it. To allow myself to prove that these situations are not actually threats that require anxiety to manage them.

Now, every small instance where I am able to respond differently feels like a win. Proof that I’m getting better. Not because anxiety has completely disappeared, but because I no longer feel controlled by it in the same way I once did.

Healing, at least for me, has not looked like a straight line towards becoming a completely “fixed” version of myself. A lot of it has looked like slowly unlearning behaviours I developed to protect myself before learning healthier ways to respond instead.

~Aayushi Agarwalla-Panda

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