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The Slow Reality of Change

By Tyler White, MA, LPCC on Sunday, February 16th, 2025 in Christian Counseling Blog Archives. No Comments

One of the most common grievances I hear from clients is something to the effect of “this is taking too long to heal.” Often, my response to this qualm is “well how long have you been dealing with it?” The response here is often “years,” “longer than I can remember,” or, in some cases, “my whole life.” If we are trying to heal unhealthy patterns that have existed for the majority of our lives, why would we ever have the expectation that a few sessions of therapy can clear things right up? This feels like a wildly unfair expectation and burden to put on ourselves.

The term McDonaldization refers to our society adopting the values of the fast-food restaurant. Namely, that we want things immediately and on demand. Unfortunately, that is not the norm for our mental health. Sure, I can think of a few specific clients and situations where the work we did to turn their life around happened so quickly that even I was left with whiplash, but that is an exception, not the rule. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I believe it’s important to expect growth in therapy. However, I believe the expectation that growth can occur quickly and seamlessly without the process of unlearning is leaving many people feeling like they aren’t progressing fast enough, changing in an appropriate amount of time, or growing in the right ways.

As a therapist, I spend most of my days sitting. Last year, in order to spend not as much time sitting, I started spending some of my free time refurbishing old furniture I would buy off of Facebook Marketplace. There was something I loved about taking something that was old, beat up, and ugly, and bringing some of its beauty back. When restoring a piece of furniture, the most important step is not the finishing touches of completion, but it is the prep work that goes into preparing a piece to be beautiful. It is stripping of old paint and stain, the hours of sanding to remove scuffs, and the preparation that goes into making sure a piece can handle new stain and paint. If you do not spend enough time preparing an old piece of furniture, it doesn’t matter if you buy the most beautiful paint or nicest stain, it will still look like trash. The unfortunate thing about prep work is that it is the far more time-consuming process. It is the same with therapy. If the prep work or removing and addressing the old is not done, eventually the new perspectives and ways of thinking will start to peel away and the old layers will begin to show.

When I first started refinishing old furniture, I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing. However, as I started doing it a bit more, one of the things I started to see was potential. I wouldn’t see a piece for what it was in the moment, I would start to see a piece for what it could be. I started to be able to see that if I would put hours of preparation into a dresser, then it would be ready and able to take on new paint and stain and once again be beautiful. This feels similar to my work as a therapist. As I sit with clients, I don’t see them for who only who they are in that moment, but I start to envision what transformation for them could look like. Without a doubt, this is hard work, but it is also work that lasts.

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Tyler White, MA, LPCC

As a therapist, I operate from a number of different modalities, including person centered, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), internal family systems (IFS), and attachment theory.

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