A clip has been making its way around Instagram lately, Kerry Washington and Tracee Ellis Ross talking candidly about therapy, and one line from Kerry stopped me mid scroll: therapy isn't a moment, it is a practice. As a therapist, I don't think I've heard someone put it more simply or more accurately.
So much of the cultural conversation around therapy still treats it like a fire extinguisher. Something you reach for when things are burning. You go when the marriage is falling apart, when the anxiety gets too loud to ignore, when a crisis forces the appointment. And then, once the smoke clears, you stop. Therapy did its job, back to normal life. I understand why people think about it this way. It's how a lot of us were introduced to the idea of getting help in the first place, as damage control.
But that's not what therapy actually is, and it's not what keeps people coming back to it year after year. Kerry's word choice matters here. A practice is something you return to on purpose, not because something is wrong, but because the returning itself is the point. Think about anything else we call a practice. A yoga practice. A meditation practice. A creative practice. Nobody asks a longtime yoga practitioner why they're still doing yoga if their back doesn't hurt anymore. The practice isn't there to fix a single problem. It's there to build a relationship with yourself that deepens over time.
That's exactly what I watch happen in the room with my own clients. The work in month one looks nothing like the work in year three. Early sessions are often about stabilizing, naming what hurts, building enough safety to actually say the hard thing out loud. But if someone stays with it, the work shifts. It becomes less about putting out fires and more about noticing patterns before they ignite. Understanding why you keep choosing the same kind of partner, or the same kind of job, or the same kind of silence. That kind of insight doesn't show up in a single session. It shows up in the practice of consistency.
Tracee Ellis Ross's part of that same conversation gets at this from another angle, and I think it's just as important. She talked about how quickly she manifests what she wants, and how she uses therapy to get clear on what that actually is before she goes chasing it. She's also stayed with the same therapist for ten years, which flies in the face of something I hear constantly from clients and strangers alike: don't you need to switch therapists every few years? Won't you outgrow them?
I want to gently push back on that idea, because it isn't true, and it keeps people from experiencing one of the most valuable parts of this work. Continuity is not stagnation. When a therapist has walked with you through a decade of your life, they hold context you can't rebuild with someone new. They remember the version of you from three years ago and can reflect back the distance you've traveled, sometimes long before you can see it yourself. They know your shorthand. They know which questions actually open you up and which ones you'll deflect. That kind of trust takes years to build, and starting over with someone new every eighteen months means you're perpetually back at square one, re-explaining your childhood instead of doing the deeper work that context makes possible.
Now, to be clear, there are real reasons to change therapists. Life stage shifts, a therapist who isn't the right fit for a new challenge you're facing, a need for a different specialty or approach. That's valid. But switching shouldn't be the default assumption just because time has passed. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do for your growth is stay.
This is also where I want to widen the lens a little, because both Kerry and Tracee's comments point to something people outside of active crisis rarely associate with therapy: clarity work. So much of what actually happens in my office isn't crisis response. It's someone trying to figure out what they actually want, separate from what they were taught to want. It's a client in the middle of a career pivot who needs a sounding board that isn't their partner or their mother. It's someone processing a creative block, working through the fear underneath why they haven't finished the book or launched the business. It's parents wanting to break a generational pattern before it reaches their kids. It's people doing what Tracee described, using the room to sharpen their intention so that when they do manifest something, they're manifesting the right thing, not just the loudest impulse in them that week.
Therapy also shows up in quieter, preventive ways that rarely make it into public conversation. Maintenance sessions for people who are doing fine but want to stay that way. Support through ordinary life transitions like a move, a new baby, an aging parent, a friendship ending. Space to explore identity, spirituality, or the bigger existential questions that don't fit neatly into a diagnosis. None of that requires something to be broken first.
If there's one thing I hope you take from Kerry and Tracee's conversation, and from this, it's permission to think about therapy differently. Not as an emergency room, but as a practice you build a life around. Not something you graduate from once you feel better, but something that keeps evolving alongside you, the same way any relationship worth keeping does.
You don't need a crisis to start. And if you've already found someone who gets it, you don't need a reason to stay.