We’ve done a good job, culturally, of normalising therapy. We talk about it openly now. We encourage people to seek help. We no longer whisper about medication.
Alongside that, we’ve quietly normalised something else:
the idea that meaningful change is supposed to take a long time.
Months.
Years.
“Give it time.”
This belief is so embedded that it rarely gets questioned. Duration has become evidence of depth. Slowness has become a proxy for seriousness. And speed – when it appears at all – is treated with suspicion, as if something important must have been skipped.
I don’t think that assumption holds up.
A practical mistake, disguised as wisdom
Years ago, when we lived in the UK, we had a very small garden and nowhere to store a lawnmower so we didn’t have on. Instead, to cut the grass, we used a strimmer – which isn’t really designed for lawns. Once, in a moment of optimism bordering on stupidity, my au pair and I even tried cutting the lawn with scissors.
It worked. Being so close to the blades of grass meant that the finish was neat. It looked great. But it also took forever.
Now imagine running a study on lawn-cutting efficiency using only people equipped with scissors and strimmers. The data would be impeccable. You’d conclude that cutting an average lawn typically takes several weekends and a great deal of effort.
What you wouldn’t conclude – because you never looked – is that a lawnmower exists, and lawns could actually be cut in an hour.
This, in essence, is what much therapy research is doing.
What the data actually shows (and what it doesn’t)
When studies tell us that it takes 20 sessions for 50% of people to experience “notable improvement,” or a year of weekly therapy for that number to rise to 75%, they are often presented as evidence that change takes time.
But that’s not what the data is showing.
What it’s showing is how long these methods take to produce these outcomes, as defined by these measurement tools.
Most therapy research measures:
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symptom reduction
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distress tolerance
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improved functioning
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coping capacity
These are not trivial outcomes. But they are not the same as resolution.
They reflect adaptation – learning to live more comfortably with the problem – not necessarily removing the driver that created it.
If you only study scissors, you’ll get very accurate data about scissors. You won’t learn anything about lawnmowers.
Much of the confidence behind the idea that therapy “takes time” comes from large-scale outcome studies, such as the Consumer Reports research discussed in Psychotherapy Networker, which found a clear dose–response relationship: more sessions correlated with greater reported improvement over six months to two years .
This finding is often interpreted as evidence that change itself is inherently slow. But that conclusion doesn’t actually follow. What these studies measure is how long indirect, insight- and coping-based methods take to produce symptom improvement as defined by the study.
They do not compare categories of tools, nor do they ask whether change could occur faster if the driver itself were resolved. In other words, the data tells us how long these approaches take. Not how long change must take.
Why therapy is often slow (and why that’s not a moral virtue)
Therapy typically works through:
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narration
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insight
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emotional articulation
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relational processing
This work happens very close to the problem. It feels sophisticated. It often is. But it is also indirect.
Indirect methods aren’t wrong. They’re just slow.
Slowness, however, has been quietly reframed as depth. And that reframing has consequences. It teaches people to expect endurance rather than change. It trains both clients and clinicians to interpret speed as superficiality rather than precision.
But speed and depth are not opposites. Superficiality is the enemy of depth, not efficiency.
Change happens faster than we’ve been taught to expect
When something genuinely shifts at the level where behaviour, emotion, and perception are generated – when a value conflict resolves, when emotional charge collapses, when the nervous system updates – the change is often surprisingly fast.
Not always instant.
But rarely geological.
The idea that change must take months or years is not a law of human psychology. It is a reflection of the tools we’ve privileged and the levels we’ve chosen to work at.
The question we avoid asking
Here’s the uncomfortable question beneath all of this:
What if we believe change takes a long time because we’ve trained ourselves to only recognise it when it arrives slowly?
What if duration has become a comfort – a way to make indirect methods feel inevitable rather than limited?
And what if “give it time” is sometimes an honest description of a method’s constraints, not a truth about change itself?
Time is not the mechanism. It’s the cost of working sideways.
That’s not an attack on therapy.
It’s an invitation to think more precisely about what we’re actually doing – and what might be possible if we stopped mistaking tool-limitations for universal truths.