Are We Ever Truly “Fixed” in Therapy?
A lot of people in therapy wonder how long it will be until they are “fixed.”
The question may suggest a misunderstanding of what therapy (and life) is all about.
The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell was bemused by an interaction with a young University student after he had given a lecture about facing the challenges of life. She said to him, “Oh Mr Campbell, you just don’t know about the modern generation. We just go straight from infancy to wisdom!” Campbell replied wryly, “That is great. All you’ve missed is life!”1
Life is inherently difficult. Many a poet and philosopher has recognised that we can never really understand hope without despair, love without hate, or joy without sorry. Campbell’s point is that living a full life is not about arriving at easy perfection. No matter how well-adjusted you are in life, you will still have bad days. Suffering is part of the deal.
Living fully is about facing and growing through the challenges of life, of looking for moments of transcendence amidst the inevitable difficulties that everyone has to face, throughout their entire lives.
What I see every day in therapy is that we never arrive at perfection because our circumstances keep changing – meaning our calling in life keeps evolving too. Being truly alive is about being fully present where we are now, and looking forward to what might come next.
The biggest risk to leading a full life is getting stuck, and that is really where the value of therapy comes in. There are moments in our lives – for all of us – where we need a boost to get back on our feet. We lose our way – perhaps because of a set-back in life, an unhelpful behavioural pattern, loss of energy for life, or perhaps trauma has knocked us off course. We know that something has to change, but we don’t know to make that happen. A good therapist will help us to find our path again. They will help us to make peace with the present and start to move forwards to new opportunities and challenges, daring again to embrace change without fear.
The truth is that therapists have messy lives too. The things that come up in session with clients can stir up the therapist’s own unhelpful patterns. In our training we are warned about the risk of countertransference, which is where we become triggered, and project our own issues onto our client’s situation. This is why therapists usually have a supervisor behind the scenes, helping them in their professional work, offering guidance and support. You see, we are all in this together. No one is immune from the messiness of life.
What makes for a full and meaningful life will be different for each of us. No therapist can tell a client how they should live, and what will make them happy. There is no definitive guidebook. Each of us is on our own unique journey. We learn through trial and error, and as we travel through life, we (hopefully) gain a clearer sense of who we are, and of our place in the world.
Your therapist’s job is not to fix you. It’s to help clear the blockages that are preventing you from fully engaging with your life. You may find that you want to come back into therapy at different times as circumstances change, and new challenges arise. If so, the goal will remain the same – to find the clarity and confidence to get back out there, embracing this wonderful, complicated, exhausting, and yet utterly beautiful thing we call life.
Copyright 2026, Rod Berry
Joseph Campbell, “Pathways to Bliss -Mythology and Personal Transformation” (2004), Joseph Campbell Foundation.