Why You Can't Make Someone Go to Therapy | from Sean Heneghan, Counselling in Berkhamsted
How do you get your loved one to have therapy?
It’s a question I get asked a lot. Many of the enquiries I receive come not from the prospective client themselves, but from someone close to them who really wants them to have therapy. That’s understandable. It’s hard to be close to someone who’s suffering and stuck, and it’s normal to want things to change.
There’s something important to notice straight away though. The person you’re asking about isn’t the one taking the first step. Often, the person making the enquiry is more ready for change than the person they’re asking about.
The bad news is you can’t make a loved one have therapy. The good news is that honouring their autonomy might be more productive than you realise.
Therapy depends on the person in the room wanting to be there. If someone comes because they’ve been pushed, what’s missing isn’t just motivation, it’s ownership. And without ownership, and a good dose of active choosing, therapy rarely goes anywhere that’s deep or transformative.
Therapy is a conversation between two willing, curious people. It isn’t something that can be done to or done on someone.
The client has to bring something to it, their attention, their willingness to look, to understand, and gradually to feel, in manageable doses. Wanting a loved one to have therapy often comes from a very good place. It comes from love, care, and concern. It comes from watching someone struggle, and feeling at a loss about what to do. But wanting to know how to get someone into therapy assumes that somehow their autonomy can be bypassed “for their own good”. And sometimes, if we’re honest, it’s also a way of not having to face the fact that we can’t change them.
Therapy tends to work best when the motivation is internal. It begins with something being felt inside the person themselves.
Arriving at the decision to have therapy
Before someone books an appointment, they’ve often done quite a lot of battling.
They’ve tried to do what they usually do to feel better, that hasn’t worked.
They’ve tried ignoring the problem and hoping it passes, that hasn’t worked.
They may have read books, listened to podcasts, tried to think their way out of it, that hasn’t worked either.
There are usually many attempts at solving the problem. And although it can seem strange, these are important steps. The growing dissatisfaction with suffering, the repeated failure of familiar solutions, that’s often where something begins to shift. It can be the beginning of real energy building toward something new.
In lots of ways, growing dissatisfaction is the seed of something creative. It’s energy building, a sign that something in the person wants things to be different and is wanting, trying and finding a way toward a creative solution.That energy is often what eventually brings someone to therapy. Not to try something out, but to deeply engage with what’s going on.
This is just one example and there are of course many variations of the internal process that leads someone to therapy. But the point is this:
When someone is pushed into therapy, that internal movement hasn’t happened. The decision hasn’t come from them. So what turns up in the room isn’t readiness, it’s compliance. And compliance, however reasonable it looks, doesn’t tend to change much.
So if you can’t force it, what can you actually do?
The most honest answer is that you can offer, and then you can do the hard job of letting go of a fixed idea about what the person should do.
Honouring someone’s autonomy is a strange, mixed experience. On the one hand, it’s deeply respectful of their right to their own life. On the other, it’s difficult. It brings you up against the fact that you can’t make someone do what you believe would help them, even when it feels obvious to you. When you stay connected to someone while also respecting that it’s their choice how they deal with things, you create space for them to find their own way forward, and that may or may not involve therapy.
What you can do is make your care visible without attaching conditions to it.
You can say, clearly and without pressure, that you’ve noticed they seem to be struggling, that it matters to you, and that therapy is something that exists if they ever want it. Said once, perhaps, and warmly without an agenda or the threat of consequences.
That often lands very differently from repeated suggestions that carry the quieter message: you need fixing, or something bad will happen if you don’t do what I want
One of the most useful questions in this situation is a simple one:
What kind of support do you need from me?
It sounds almost too simple, but it does something important. It hands the agency back. It says: I’m here, I care, and I’m interested in what you actually need, not just what I think you need.
FAQs
Is it wrong to encourage someone to try therapy?
Not at all. The difficulty is that encouragement can gradually turn into pressure, often without being fully intended. If someone is only there to satisfy someone else, it rarely goes very far.
What if my partner refuses therapy but our relationship is really struggling?
This is a hard place to be. Sometimes it helps to recognise that the only person you can work on for now is yourself, and that might begin with your own therapy.
Do I need to be in crisis to come to therapy?
No. Feeling stuck or needing support is enough.
About Sean Heneghan
Sean Heneghan is a BACP registered counsellor and traditional acupuncturist and has been running his practice in Berkhamsted for 20 years. Combining gestalt therapy, cognitive hypnotherapy, and traditional acupuncture, Sean offers an integrative approach to relationships, emotional wellbeing, and mental health.
Services include:
Gestalt counselling
Cognitive hypnotherapy
Traditional acupuncture
Integrative therapy for a range of physical and emotional issues
Location: Berkhamsted Chiropractic Clinic, 69 High Street, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire HP4 2DE
Contact for Appointments: 07717 515 013 | email: sean@seanheneghan.com
Serving Berkhamsted, Tring, Hemel Hempstead, St Albans, and the wider Hertfordshire area.
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