On the Obsession with Progress
I’ve often had patients say to me:
“I know we keep talking about the same thing week after week.”
Or, “You must be frustrated with me since we’re still stuck on the same issue.”
And when I ask what they mean, they often reply, “Well, I imagine you think I should be doing better by now. That I should be changing faster, given how many sessions we’ve had.”
There it is again—the fixation on progress.
Francis Weller often speaks about how Western culture is obsessed with progress, with “getting better,” with climbing, advancing, becoming more, doing more, fixing what’s “broken.” Our cultural mythology says that life is a ladder, and therapy is a tool for climbing it. But as Weller reminds us, this is a distortion. Human beings are not linear creatures. Our souls do not work in straight lines.
When I hear patients apologizing for not “changing fast enough,” I feel confused. I don’t feel annoyed or frustrated. I don’t think to myself, “Wow, this person still isn’t different.” Because I don’t believe evolving works in that neat, forward-moving way.
We tend to imagine growth as an arrow pointing upward, a graph of steady improvement. But human beings don’t follow graphs. We are far messier than that. Sometimes we stumble backwards into old habits we thought we’d outgrown. Sometimes we circle the same ground again and again, wearing a groove in it. Sometimes we stand still for long stretches, and it feels like nothing is happening at all.
And yet—beneath the surface—something is happening. The psyche works in mysterious, often invisible ways. What looks like stasis is often incubation. What feels like regression is sometimes integration. The “setback” you feel may be the exact moment something deeper in you is reorganizing itself.
I often talk about the importance of repetition. Repetition is not failure; it is how we metabolize our experience.
Let me say that again.
Repetition is how the soul rehearses itself into understanding.
Think of the countless times you’ve retold the story of a breakup to a friend. And then told it again, to another friend. And again, weeks later. It isn’t just venting—it’s sense-making. It’s trying the story on from different angles until it lands in the body in a way that feels true. Repetition is how we turn raw experience into meaning.
So when my patients circle back again and again to the same themes, I see it not as stagnation but as necessary ritual. Each telling, each re-examining, each session is part of a subtle, cumulative movement. Change doesn’t always look like a bold leap forward—it often looks like sitting in the same place until the ground beneath you quietly transforms.
My focus in therapy is not “progress” in the way culture defines it. Yes, if there are areas you want to shift, that matters. But more than that, my focus is on the time we spend together—the weaving of your narrative, the way each exchange deepens my understanding of you, and perhaps your understanding of yourself. It’s a kind of relational excavation, like a game of existential ping-pong: each back-and-forth unearthing a little more, a little deeper, a little closer to what was hidden.
What if therapy is not about racing toward some new version of yourself, but about allowing the story of who you are to ripen through time, through repetition, through presence?
