Why Is Therapy So Expensive? Understanding Mental Health Costs
My first answer when someone asks me, “Why is therapy so expensive?” is probably not the answer they expect.
It’s not.
That is genuinely my first thought. It’s not. We just see the cost differently because of the way mental health care is treated in our medical system. A lot of the time, you are seeing the actual cost of the service in a way you do not see the actual cost of other kinds of medical care. You go to a doctor, have a procedure, get surgery, have imaging done, take medication for years, and the total cost over the course of your lifetime can be astronomical. But because insurance is sitting in the middle of that process, we do not always emotionally register it the same way.
Therapy is different because you are often looking right at the number.
And suddenly the reaction is, “I’m paying how much to talk to somebody?”
But that is not what you are paying for.
You Are Not Paying for an Hour
You are paying for somebody’s years, sometimes decades, of education, training, clinical experience, continuing education, pattern recognition, legal responsibility, ethical responsibility, documentation, privacy requirements, insurance, office overhead, and the enormous amount of context it takes to sit across from another human being and help them make sense of their mind.
They are taking care of your mind. What exactly do we think should be more valuable than that?
Where I do agree with the criticism is that therapy can become incredibly expensive over time, especially when someone stays in it for years and years without gaining enough tools to move differently through their life. And when I say therapy in that sentence, I am specifically talking about traditional talk therapy. There are many forms of psychotherapy, and many excellent therapists do work that is highly active, behavioral, trauma-informed, somatic, skills-based, or specifically designed to create change.
I am not anti-therapy. I am wildly pro-therapy.
I just do not believe therapy is the only tool, and I do not believe understanding your story is the same thing as changing your life.
That distinction matters a lot to me.
Understanding Yourself Is Not the Same as Changing Yourself
I have a friend who has spent somewhere around $100,000 and about a decade in therapy. I love her to pieces. She is also hysterical about it. We will be sitting around with a big group of friends talking about relationships, people, behavior, or emotional patterns, and she will joke, “You guys are playing down here. I’m playing up here with $100,000 worth of therapy.”
And honestly, she does have incredible insight. She understands human behavior. She can see patterns. She can name things. She has language for emotional experiences that a lot of people do not have. That absolutely has value.
But the funny part is that her kids have referred to me as their emotionally regulated friend, or the one who has a handle on the mind-body-spirit side of things, and I have literally said to her, “You have spent $100,000 on therapy and somehow I am still the emotionally regulated friend?”
We laugh because we are friends, but underneath the joke is something I think is really important.
You can understand your story beautifully and still be trapped inside it when you get triggered.
You can know exactly why you behave a certain way and still behave that way.
You can understand your childhood, your patterns, your attachment style, your trauma responses, your family system, and every single reason you are doing what you are doing, and still keep doing it.
One of my favorite reminders is: do not let the why distract you from what is.
The why matters. It matters so much. Understanding yourself matters. Having someone reflect your stories back to you matters. Having someone help you see rooms in your mind that you have kept locked since childhood matters.
But eventually we also have to ask: what is happening now?
What are you still choosing? What are you still repeating? What are you still tolerating? What story are you still telling in exactly the same way because it is familiar?
That is where a lot of the work we do at Healing Thyme comes in.
Healing Work Is Not Just “One Session”
People sometimes look at healing work, energy work, bodywork, sound work, coaching, or any kind of complementary wellness practice and think, “Why does this cost so much?”
Again, my answer is: you are not paying for an hour.
You are paying for my time, yes, and my time matters. I have a child I adore. There is not some magical dollar amount that makes time away from him meaningless. But the ability to charge appropriately for my work allows me to create a life where I can provide for my family, pay for a home, pay for hot running water, take care of the people I love, and also have more freedom with them.
You are also paying for the tens of thousands of hours I have spent training, studying, reading, practicing, digesting, experimenting, working with clients, and learning how different systems connect.
You are paying for every person who came before you and taught me something I now know how to recognize.
You are paying for the building, the renovations, the insurance, the printer ink, the marketing, the equipment, the travel, the supplies, the training, and all of the ridiculously unsexy things that go into actually keeping a wellness practice open.
You are paying for access to tools you do not have to own yourself. I own around sixty sound bowls made from multiple materials. You absolutely could go buy your own sound bowls. You probably do not need sixty of them sitting in your house.
More than anything, though, you are paying for context.
You are paying for someone who has spent years looking at the intersections between different healing systems, body-based work, spiritual practices, nervous-system regulation, energy medicine, coaching, movement, meditation, and human behavior, and who can help you figure out what might actually be useful for you.
The Exchange Matters Too
There is also something I would call energetic exchange.
I believe exchange matters. I cannot endlessly pour into someone else with nothing coming back. That is not sustainable for me, and honestly I do not think it is healthy for the client either. There is something important about choosing to invest your time, your effort, your attention, and yes, your money into your own growth.
Because people spend so much on coping.
And when I say spend, I do not just mean money.
People spend their peace.
They spend their time. They spend their energy. They spend their attention. They spend their joy. They spend years of their lives trying to get through things instead of deciding they are ready to change them.
We Spend a Fortune on Coping
We say, “I just need to get through this week.” Then it is this month. Then busy season. Then the holidays. Then the kids are little. Then the kids are older. Then work calms down. Then after the trip. Then after the move. Then after this project. Then next year.
There is always another “this.”
Meanwhile, we are drinking coffee to get through the morning, alcohol to come down at night, shopping because it gives us a hit, scrolling because it numbs us out, throwing ourselves into work because productivity feels safer than stillness, pouring everything into our kids, our homes, our careers, our trips, our routines, and telling ourselves that eventually life will give us a moment to stop.
Sometimes life is not going to give you that moment.
Sometimes you have to take it.
“I Can’t Afford Therapy” — Sometimes That’s True. Sometimes It’s a Story.
That is why I get a little prickly around the phrase, “I cannot afford therapy.”
Sometimes that is absolutely true. There are people with very real access barriers, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise. There are people without insurance, people living paycheck to paycheck, people without childcare, people in areas with provider shortages, people in crisis, people carrying responsibilities that are genuinely enormous.
That is real.
But for a lot of people, “I cannot afford it” has never actually been investigated.
Have you checked your insurance? Have you asked about out-of-network benefits? Have you asked whether your therapist will provide a superbill? Have you looked at an HSA or FSA? Have you checked your Employee Assistance Program? Have you asked about sliding scales, payment plans, community clinics, training clinics, nonprofit programs, scholarships, group therapy, support groups, virtual options, lower-cost practitioners, massage schools, student clinics, barter, trade, or people who are building their practice and willing to work creatively?
Have you actually explored your options?
And if the answer is no, then the most honest sentence may not be, “I cannot afford it.”
It may be, “I am not choosing to prioritize it right now.”
That is allowed.
Truly.
You are allowed to say, “I do not want to spend the money.” You are allowed to say, “I do not have the capacity.” You are allowed to say, “I am not ready to deal with this.” You are allowed to say, “I would rather spend my money somewhere else right now.”
There is no shame in that.
But there is power in telling yourself the truth.
Because when you keep saying, “I cannot,” when what you really mean is, “I am not choosing this right now,” you hand away your agency.
And at some point, healing is about getting your agency back.
Good Healing Work Should Not Make You Dependent
This is also why I do not believe the goal of healing work should be dependency.
I do not want clients to need me forever.
Our average client at Healing Thyme may spend a few thousand dollars with us over time, depending on what they are doing, and then a lot of them leave. They learned something. They gathered tools. They practiced. They got what they came for, and then they went and lived their life.
I love that.
Some people stay because they want deeper training, certifications, community, or more advanced tools. Beautiful. That is a different choice.
But the goal should never be to keep someone dependent on you because their pain is profitable.
The goal should be to help people become more capable of meeting their own life.
The Right Practitioner Might Not Always Make You Comfortable
That is also why I think fit matters so much.
I do not believe there is one universally perfect therapist, coach, healer, or practitioner. Everybody has something different they are offering, and not everybody is the right fit for everybody else.
I am definitely not the right practitioner for everyone.
One of the biggest reasons is that our work is built around accountability. We are going to look at your stories. We are going to look at your patterns. We are going to look at where you keep choosing something and then telling yourself you have no choice.
Some people do not want that. Some people are not ready for that. Some people need something softer first.
That does not make them wrong.
But I do think growth is uncomfortable.
Not unsafe. Not humiliating. Not coercive. Not shaming.
Uncomfortable.
Those are very different things.
If every time you leave a session you simply feel validated, soothed, and completely comfortable in the exact same worldview you walked in with, I think it is worth asking whether you are actually growing or whether you are just being comforted.
Sometimes comfort is exactly what you need.
But eventually, growth asks something of you.
It asks you to stay in the uncomfortable place long enough to notice that you are not going to die there.
It asks you to try something new long enough for it to stop feeling new.
It asks you to stop calling every familiar pattern “just who I am.”
That is healing to me.
There Is No Final, Perfectly Healed Version of You
I also think we have completely misunderstood what healing is supposed to look like.
People imagine there is a final version of themselves waiting somewhere out there. The healed version. The person who never gets triggered, never gets angry, never spirals, never repeats a pattern, never has a bad day, and somehow floats through life in total emotional perfection.
That person does not exist.
If you woke up today, you are not done.
I am not done either.
Healing is cyclical. You learn something, you grow, life hands you another opportunity to practice it, you find another layer, and you grow again.
To me, healing and evolution are basically the same word.
There is no final healed version of you.
There is only a version of you with more awareness, more tools, more agency, and a greater ability to recognize what is happening while it is happening.
So, Why Does Therapy Feel So Expensive?
When someone asks me why therapy, coaching, energy work, healing work, or wellness can feel so expensive, my answer comes back to this:
This type of work can feel expensive because investing in yourself is not something you were ever taught to do.
You were taught to work hard. Be productive. Take care of everybody else. Keep going. Push through. Buy things that make you feel better. Reward yourself for surviving.
But deliberately investing your money, time, energy, and attention into becoming healthier, more aware, and more capable? For a lot of us, that feels almost selfish.
I do not think it is.
Ask what the session costs. Ask about insurance. Ask about credentials. Ask what the practitioner is trained to do. Ask what their scope is. Ask how you will know whether the work is helping. Ask about lower-cost options. Ask what the plan is.
Ask all of those questions.
But eventually, there is one more question you have to ask yourself:
What Is Stopping You From Making a Change Today?
Because eventually the conversation stops being only about what happened to you.
It becomes about what you are choosing to do next.
And that part belongs to you.
Healing Thyme provides complementary wellness and educational services and is not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, psychotherapy, psychiatric treatment, or emergency mental-health services. When appropriate, wellness services can be used alongside care from licensed healthcare and mental-health professionals.
