What Change Actually Disturbs

We come to therapy expecting less anxiety, fewer intrusive thoughts, more confidence, better relationships. Sometimes we want clarity. Sometimes peace. Sometimes we simply want things to stop feeling the way they do.

What often comes as a surprise is that change does not only remove what hurts, but it can also disturb what has been holding things together. Even when symptoms are painful, they are rarely random because they organize experience and give shape to time, relationships, and identity. They create a story, even if a harsh one, about who we are and what we can expect from the world.

When therapy begins to loosen that story, it is not always experienced as relief. It can very well be felt as disorientation, a sense of not knowing who we are without the symptom. There can be a strange nostalgia for something that was exhausting but familiar, something that, despite its cost, provided a certain coherence.

People are usually unprepared for this. There is an expectation that letting go of suffering should feel like freedom, period. In fact, change disturbs identifications and roles that may have been occupied for a long time, sometimes since childhood, and interrupts ways of relating that were painful but predictable, limiting but known.

When a symptom begins to loosen, it leaves a gap that is not immediately filled with something better. There is often no replacement, no clear alternative right away, and people may begin to question therapy itself. They may say, “I thought I’d be happier by this point,” or “It feels like something is missing.” And what is missing is often not happiness, but structure.

Old patterns, even painful ones, offer a kind of internal organization. Who am I in my relationships. What I expect from others. What I want. What I fear. When those patterns begin to shift, the answers stop arriving automatically, and this can feel like loss, lack of scripts, like life as we knew before no longer fits.

This is not failure, but a sign that something real is being touched. Internal change does not simply add new capacities. What change actually disturbs is that it often subtracts old solutions, and subtraction is rarely experienced as triumph. More often, it is felt as uncertainty, grief, resistance. People may miss their symptoms not because they were good, but because they were known. This can feel destabilizing and, at times, lonely.

And yet, this is also the point at which something new becomes possible. Not immediately, and not without tension, but quietly. It may appear as a greater tolerance for not knowing, a shift in how one listens to oneself, a different relationship to repetition, or a subtle refusal to occupy the same place in an old dynamic. These changes are easy to dismiss because they may not look like improvement, and they come without clear metrics or dramatic relief.

But they matter because they alter the structure of how a person relates to themselves and to others. That is unsettling, but that's also brave work: learning to remain present when old answers no longer serve and new ones have not yet formed.

Read More About Us