Opinion | Why Do People Think Going to Therapy Makes You a Good Person?

But I’ve started to wonder if there’s a flip side to this new openness, a new form of judgment that has broken down into a too-simple binary: In therapy, good; not in therapy, bad.

This summer, The Times ran an article headlined “Seeking Relationship, Therapy Required” about single people who insisted that their would-be partners be in therapy — who, seemingly, saw being in therapy as a signal for the kind of person they were looking for, the way someone might want a partner who votes in every election or buys organic. “The way u people use ‘therapy’ to telegraph ur feelings of moral superiority is corrupting our relationships and sucking the romance out of life,” a tweet in response to the story said. “Some of the best people have never, never been to therapy,” the user said in a follow-up.

In our conversations, therapists confirmed the idea that people are going to therapy without a goal broader than “working on themselves,” and sometimes to show others that they are working on themselves. This, they said, can sometimes make sessions slightly confusing, or rudderless.

“As a therapist, I often tend to feel stuck with clients who share this as a primary motivation, without any specific insight into why or how therapy might help them,” Madeleine Campbell, a therapist working in Brooklyn, told me via email. “A client’s experience with therapy is the result of what they put into it. If a client doesn’t have any specific goals or intentions for our time working together, it can be hard to know how to make progress.”

“Therapy should be productive,” Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik, who started her practice in New York City but moved to St. Louis, Mo., during the pandemic, told me over the phone. “You’re paying a lot of money, or you’re using health insurance that you work really hard for.” The point, she said, is “not just to be like, ‘OK, I’ve done something for the day.’”

More than a couple therapists said this phenomenon was most common with cis men. They are in therapy but don’t go with any particular issue they want to resolve or trauma they want to address. They go because their friends are in therapy, or their partner thinks they should be, or they have in some other way received the message that it’s what they should be doing. People in therapy want other people they are around to be in therapy, too. (Ms. Campbell said her Gen Z and millennial clients are the ones most likely to talk to her about “challenges in their own relationships — familial, romantic, friendships, etc. — with people in their lives who ‘aren’t in therapy.’”)

Is therapy-as-box-checking a problem? Not necessarily. Even among the people whose only reason for starting therapy is that they think they’re supposed to, there is something they could discuss, starting with why they feel that way in the first place. How do they respond to others’ expectations? How can they find the roots of their own desires? It’s also difficult to live in the modern world and not be carrying at least a little trauma.