Therapy can be helpful with a great many things, but sometimes we come to it with expectations that simply can’t be met. It’s not about the therapist’s competence, nor about bad faith on anyone’s part. Some things are just outside what therapy can offer at all – or it does offer them, but in a different way. Three such expectations below.

Absolution. A therapist doesn’t grant absolution. Whatever we bring to a session – even when it’s the thing we most need – therapy has no such authority. Forgiving oneself, or someone else, is a personal process that no one from the outside can close on our behalf. What therapy can do is work with the need for absolution itself – look at it, see where it comes from and what it’s about. Recognising that one needs it is often already a first step towards giving it to oneself.

Undoing what was done. Therapeutic work doesn’t pass judgement on feelings or inner experience – inside, one can feel anything at all, and it’s not up for assessment (this is, in fact, one of the main strengths of psychotherapy). Actions are a different category. If we’ve hurt someone, therapy can be a place to take responsibility for that and to work on not repeating it. It won’t be a place where the act itself is undone or set aside as unimportant.

A guaranteed outcome. Therapy comes with no strict timetable and no guarantees. No honest therapist will say: “after ten sessions you’ll feel such and such”. Human processes don’t yield to that kind of arithmetic – they depend on too many variables: life circumstances, other people, the moment in life one happens to be in. One can say which conditions tend to favour change. One can’t say they guarantee it. An ethical therapist will check in with the client about where the client is in the process, and whether it’s moving at the right pace and in the right direction. That reflection is itself part of the therapeutic work.