Insights from my journey on both sides of the couch—and why the right relationship still matters most.
For 25 years, I fixed things in a factory while quietly falling apart myself. On the surface, I was mostly steady. My childhood had been “normal enough,” I thought I’d turned out fine, and counseling? That was for people who really needed help. Not me. But underneath, my story was unraveling—failed relationships, and finally a marriage I swore would last forever ending in pieces. Still, I kept repeating the same lie to myself: I’ve got this. I don’t need help.
But then life turned up the volume. Divorce has a way of making you listen differently. Now I wasn’t just dealing with my own wreckage; I was looking at two kids—a daughter and a son—who deserved more than a dad stumbling through his blind spots. I didn’t want my ignorance or my stubborn independence to leave scars on them. That was the moment when my denial started to crack.
Walking into counseling was not easy. I had no idea what to expect, no roadmap for how it worked, just the shaky conviction that something had to change. And like many people, I got it wrong at first. I stuck with a counselor who wasn’t the right fit far longer than I should have because I believed he was the expert, and if something felt off, it must have been me. Only later did I learn the truth: the relationship is everything. Without connection, you’re just two people sitting in a room chatting.
When I finally found the right counselor—Bill—things began to shift. I started to see how much I’d been carrying, how many unexamined assumptions were running my life. As my graduate school professor Dr. Rob used to say, “Humans are terrible self-assessors—every single one of us.” And I have seen over the years just how much he was right. Left to my own devices, I was blind to my own patterns and counseling gave me the mirror I needed.
Now I sit on the other side of the couch as a licensed professional counselor, and it’s given me a strange kind of double vision. I see the client walking in—exhausted, unsure, hoping for a lifeline. I also see the provider, tangled in a system of red tape and outdated models. The gap between those two worlds can feel impossibly wide. But here’s what I know: when the relationship is right, healing can happen—even in a broken system.
And that’s where these confessions come in. What follows isn’t the polished version of counseling you find in brochures—it’s the honest truth about how the system works, why people give up, and why I still believe the right relationship can change everything.
The System Nobody Explains to You
The first thing nobody tells you: there aren’t enough good counselors to go around. At Illume Wellness Group, where I co-own a practice with 17 amazing providers, our waitlist has grown to well over 100 people at different times. Think about that: 100 people actively asking for help, and we simply don’t have enough hands to meet the demand. Multiply that across the country, and you start to see why so many people give up before they’ve even started.
But the shortage of providers is only one piece of the problem. The deeper issue is the model itself. Mental health services in the U.S. run on what’s called the “medical model.” If you want your sessions covered by insurance, you don’t just get to show up and talk. You have to be diagnosed. You need a code, a label, something that justifies your existence in the system.
But here’s the problem: those diagnostic codes come from manuals created by committees that are deeply bureaucratic, political, and outdated. Each new version isn’t a fresh start—it’s a patchwork of compromises layered on top of compromises, a bad model built on a bad model. As a result, good providers often step outside the model entirely because it simply doesn’t reflect the lived reality of human beings.
Who decides what’s “bad enough” to warrant care? Research shows trauma isn’t about the act itself—it’s about what happens inside your body in response to what you’ve been through. Yet most people still think trauma only “counts” if it’s dramatic, like military combat or abuse. The truth is, working under a toxic boss in a 9–5 office can be just as devastating to the nervous system as being deployed to the front lines. One person might adjust and eventually move on, another might carry invisible scars for years, and another might never seek help, leaving their loved ones to carry the fallout.
The ripple effects of trauma are astounding. And what bureaucratic system do you know that can actually capture and honor the complexity of a single human life?
The Insurance Side of Things
If the diagnostic manuals are the blueprint for a shaky house, the insurance companies are the landlords who keep charging rent.
Insurance doesn’t exist to make your healing easier; it exists to protect their bottom line. As a provider, I’ve learned this the hard way. We submit claims, wait weeks, sometimes months, only to have them denied for no apparent reason. Our billing department spends 99% of its time fighting these denials, combing through technicalities to argue why yes, this person’s session really should be covered.
And even when insurance does pay, they slash the rate. A $165 session might get reimbursed at $55. Imagine going to work every day knowing you’ll only get one-third of your paycheck. This is why many counselors eventually leave the insurance model altogether.
Private pay does tend to move faster—there’s no middleman approval, or no weeks-long delays for reimbursement. But it doesn’t guarantee better care. Good and bad counselors exist on both sides of the equation. And who can realistically afford to pay hundreds of dollars per session for a mental health issue you’ve been struggling with for years? That’s tough to unpack in five or ten neat little sessions, no matter how skilled the provider.
Then there’s the kicker: deductibles. Some are as high as $8,000 a year. That means your insurance doesn’t pay a dime until you’ve spent thousands of your own money first. It makes insurance feel like an expensive coupon book you can’t redeem until you’re already broke.
And heaven help you if your provider gets audited. Insurance companies are notorious for clawing back money years after a session happened. They scour notes for any inconsistency—did you forget to dot an “i” or phrase something in exactly the way they wanted? Congratulations, they’ll take back thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, clients are never told this happens.
This is the background stress most providers live under.
But here’s something you might not expect: at Illume, we also made the decision to accept Medicare and Medicaid. Why? Because we live in a rural community, and if we didn’t, a huge percentage of our friends and neighbors would have no access to high-quality services at all. We knew going in that Medicare and Medicaid would reimburse us far less than even the stingiest private insurance plan. But we opened our doors to genuinely help people, and part of that commitment means serving the people who need it most—even when the system undervalues the work. That’s a decision we will never regret.
Why People Give Up
Given all that, it’s no wonder people give up on counseling altogether. But the discouragement often begins long before an insurance denial or a deductible bill.
It begins in the counseling room, when you’re sitting across from someone you don’t connect with. Most people don’t realize that the relationship with your counselor—not the techniques, not the diagnosis—is the single strongest predictor of healing. But because of how many of us were raised—don’t question authority, don’t rock the boat—we stay stuck with counselors who don’t fit.
I did this myself. For over a year, I sat with a counselor I had zero connection with, telling myself he was the expert and I must be the problem. Only when I finally had the courage to switch did I begin to understand what good counseling actually feels like. That’s when I met Bill, who’s still my counselor decades later.
And yet, I can’t tell you how many clients I’ve met who’ve had bad experiences: one told me their counselor fell asleep while they were sharing a trauma. Another described a counselor who dismissed their pain as “just stress” and released them from counseling altogether without getting to the root of their issue. When that happens, people don’t just leave that counselor—they leave counseling altogether. Sometimes for years.
Meanwhile, outside the counseling room, people struggle for years with their pain before they ever ask for help. And to cope, they build a toolbox of unhealthy strategies: smoking, drinking, THC, energy drinks, unfaithfulness, porn, gambling—the list is endless. It makes sense; people are trying to soothe something unbearable inside them. As one wise saying goes, patients don’t come into our offices with their problems, they come in with their solutions to their problems that stopped working. The trouble is those “solutions” often add more trauma, shame, and difficulty.
And then there’s the cultural narrative of the “chemical imbalance.” Pharmaceutical companies have done a masterful job convincing people that their brains are broken, and the only way back to “normal” is a daily cocktail of pills. Every commercial reinforces the idea: something’s wrong with you, but don’t worry, we can fix you in 30 seconds or less. Primary care doctors, pressured and overbooked, hand out screeners—only a handful of questions—and stamp people with diagnoses of bipolar, ADHD, PTSD, or major depression. For the record: a screener is not a thorough diagnostic tool. But it’s accepted by insurance because, after all, “doctors are the experts.”
I’m not here to demonize medication. The best outcomes often come when people use medication in combination with ongoing counseling. But skipping the work of addressing the causes of suffering while just managing symptoms with pills? That leaves people half-healed, if healed at all.
Pulling Back the Curtain
So here’s me, pulling back the curtain. As a former skeptical counseling client, I know how hard it is to push through denial, admit you need help, and risk sitting in that chair. As a counselor, I see how messy, bureaucratic, and flawed the system is from the inside.
But none of that erases the power of counseling. It is still one of the most transformative tools a human being can encounter. It changed me. It changes my clients. And I believe it can change our culture—if more people are willing to step into it and not give up until they have the right fit.
The magic isn’t in a billing code or a session note. It’s in the relationship—when you finally feel safe enough to say the thing you’ve never said out loud, and someone doesn’t flinch. It’s in realizing you don’t have to carry it all alone. It’s in letting yourself be truly known, without judgment, and discovering that your story—messy, complicated, painful as it is—isn’t too much for another human to hold.
That’s why I tell every client: if I’m not the right fit, I’ll help you find someone who is. Because this work isn’t about me—it’s about you. It’s about giving yourself permission to question the expert, to walk away if it’s not working, and to keep searching until you find the counselor who feels like home base.
So here’s the final word: don’t give up on yourself. Don’t let a bad counselor, a confusing insurance system, or years of self-medicating convince you that healing isn’t possible. The process is messy. The system is broken. But the right relationship is still worth it. That’s where healing begins—and why these confessions matter. Because if a stubborn, skeptical client like me can find hope on both sides of the couch, so can you.
Peace my friends,
~Travis
