Goal of Therapy — Layers of Pain, Layers of Healing

The Goal of Therapy Is to Graduate

What is the goal of therapy? What do you hope will change through it? When starting therapy, I often remind my clients that the ultimate goal is to graduate. While everyone’s personal objectives may differ, therapy isn’t meant to be a lifelong arrangement. Eventually, you’ll leave the therapy room and continue living your life without your therapist’s guidance.

Therapy is an expensive service. In California, where I hold my therapist license, the statewide average cost per session exceeds $170 without insurance. In Downtown Los Angeles, the cost is often over $200. If you see a therapist weekly at $200 per session, that’s $800 per month and $5,600 per year. It’s a significant amount of money, especially with today’s inflation and rising living costs.

Cost is just one reason therapy can feel difficult. There are many other layers—emotional energy, time commitment, and personal readiness—that I haven’t gone into here, but they matter just as much.

When seeking reimbursement through private insurance, the insurance companies often want to know how long the treatment is expected to last. On one of the forms I used to fill out, there was a checkbox for anticipated treatment length. The options looked like this: 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, or longer. It gave me the impression that I was expected to help clients conclude therapy within six months — or even sooner.

Healing Can’t Be Rushed

I wish all my clients were able to heal themselves within 6 months or less, happily walk out of my therapy room, and become their best selves. If you are seeking quick and simple answers for your problems, yes, you just might need one or two sessions that offer a quick fix, like seeing a psychic or a shaman like a Korean mudang. (That’s a more familiar path for some people in Korea, where cultural stigma or cost keeps them from therapy.)

Then why does it take so long to feel really healed? In many cases, the layers of the pain are often not that simple. Because you are a layered and unique individual — not a machine that can be reset.

Deep therapy may take a long time — sometimes even years. I often notice clients need to go deeper to truly experience internal transformation. The journey of healing includes not only practicing tips and solutions but exploring the long history of the symptoms and working on the root of the pain. This kind of exploration and practice should happen in a safe and trustworthy relationship. Consequently, it also takes time to fully build that crucial bond between client and therapist before the deep healing process can truly begin.

What Makes Therapy Slow (and Worthwhile)

According to DSM-5, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is diagnosed in individuals who have experienced a traumatic event and continue to have symptoms afterward. PTSD is a clinical condition characterized by symptoms such as flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing, and hyperarousal.

But not all trauma results in a formal diagnosis like PTSD — even when the event is objectively severe. In fact, people respond very differently to trauma depending on a range of internal and external factors. Many people who go through deeply distressing experiences — such as witnessing a sudden death, surviving a car accident, or overwhelming social experience — may not develop PTSD at all. They recover without meeting diagnostic criteria.

This is because trauma doesn’t just live in the event itself — it lives in the body, in meaning, in family history, and in culture and society. That’s why healing often requires us to go far beyond “what happened” and explore the deeper emotional and relational layers beneath the surface. This inherent complexity is why deep therapy can indeed take time.

The Story Beneath the Story

We humans are complex beings. We live in a society, in a historical moment, within a culture, and within unique family dynamics and relationships. Each person carries biological traits that influence everything from your appearance to your nervous system. Not only that, as we grow older, we accumulate unique personal histories that are never identical to anyone else’s. The mind is not a glowing spiritual orb floating in the brain. It is a layered system — spanning from biology to broader society — that continuously evolves and reshapes itself.

Because of this complex nature of human beings, sometimes we need to explore all possible layers which may impact your mental health symptoms to figure out what the real root of the pain is. After you talk about the incident that caused the pain initially, you might need to go through the family that you grew up in, or the church you went to for 20 years, or the societal culture that pressured you to be perfect or constantly achieve.

You may also need to consider other aspects of your life, such as your sleep patterns, eating habits, and the food culture that has shaped you. This includes not just meals, but also the social, economic, and cultural meanings attached to how you eat. Nutrient deficiencies or imbalances that heighten your nervous system’s reactivity, or a daily routine that drains your energy, may also play a role.

Your Pain Deserves More Than a Shortcut

When your pain feels severe and acute, it’s understandable to want a quick fix or a magic pill. When you're already struggling and low on energy, even the process of finding the right therapist can feel overwhelming. Searching online, reaching out, asking about waitlists, checking fees, and wondering whether this person will truly understand you — all of that takes emotional energy you barely have. And after completing all those steps for your first session, the wait itself can feel endless.

Unlike other professionals, a therapist isn’t someone you see just once for a quick solution. Choosing the wrong therapist can feel like losing precious time and hope, which makes the decision feel even more risky. Still, despite all these hurdles in finding the right healing path, I don’t know of any faster or more effective way to address the root of the pain.

Unfortunately, the temptation of a quick fix often leads to deeper problems — such as difficulty forming stable relationships, addiction to drugs or alcohol, or fixation on something that cannot resolve the root of your pain.

Healing Happens — But Not on a Schedule

I’m not here to tell you, “I’m sorry, but you’ll be stuck in therapy for at least five years.” Not every therapy journey takes that long. I’ve worked with clients who demonstrated remarkable insight, made sustained efforts to change their behavioral patterns, and reached their goals in far less time than I could have imagined. Miracles do happen — just as they do in other areas of life — but the most meaningful change still requires us to show up consistently.

Buddha said that life is suffering. Life wasn’t easy for anyone, even a thousand years ago. When you feel a deep, gut-level sense that there’s a chronic and complex issue you need to work through — or when you sense that the best you can do is to learn how to live with it as part of your life — don’t turn away just because it’s hard. You are strong and brave. You’ll figure out how to carry it, even if it takes longer than you hoped.