Sometimes I get a call from someone who wants to come to therapy and, after telling me about their problem, they ask me how much psychotherapy would take for that. It used to irritate me more than it does now, even though then, as now, I understand why someone would ask that.

The short answer is that you wouldn’t know. Psychotherapy can last from a few sessions to many years.

The duration is given by many elements:

• The problem you are starting from: some situations can be solved by a simple one-session intervention, others are complex, interrelated problems that take a long time to solve.
• It’s difficult to say at the outset how serious or complex a problem is: it’s no use if the person tells you briefly what’s going on, you only find out what’s really going on when you go deeper into the subject, and that takes time.
• Duration should not be an element of decision: i.e. you should not decide whether or not to start therapy based on how long it takes. It should be more important to solve the problem than to get rid of it quickly, to cross it off the list.

But, of course, people also ask this question, usually because of time and money constraints. They think that if they find out it’s going to take three years and they don’t know if they can pay for that long for the sessions, they might as well not even start.

Only that’s not quite the case.

Even if you start and stop at some point for various reasons, there is still a payoff, the wheels are still in motion and there may be results or positive changes in your life. You don’t have to finish the whole journey within a certain time limit.

I’m on some investment groups on Facebook and there, every few days at least, a newbie comes along asking how to get them to start investing too. He invariably gets pretty much the same answers, either to take some course or to read some books, the idea being to study before he starts doing anything. As advice goes, study before you start something. But you know what the quickest way is? Just start. Take $100 and invest it in something. If you lose it, that’s it, you’ve learned something.

When you can afford it, you invest $100 again. Until you start not losing.

Of course it’s not that simple, and some preliminary research is required, otherwise your “investment” is really just a bet in disguise.

But, you can’t even spend 10 years educating yourself and only then start.

Same with making babies. You can’t wait until all the stars align in the perfect position, until you get your career in order, until you have the money for I don’t know what huge mansion, because if you wait to sort all that out, you’ll end up in your 50s and you won’t be itching to have kids at that age. And you might not even be able to, medically speaking.

Same with psychotherapy. If you wait until all the right conditions are met, you don’t start at all. Or you start much later and have less time to enjoy the results.

If in your case psychotherapy will take 10 years, say, isn’t it better to start now than in 10 years?

Don’t worry, most of the time it doesn’t take 10 years.

What I mean is that I can’t give you a precise answer to the question of how long psychotherapy will last in your case.

But I can tell you that it’s worth starting if you feel it would help.

I remember a formulation I liked, which I read in the dissertation guide when I was writing my master’s dissertation. It said there that the number of pages of the dissertation is not a grading criterion, and that the dissertation will have as many pages as needed to treat the topic fully.

So it is with psychotherapy.

How long will it take? As long as it takes to get the results you want.