27/08/2026
It can feel frustrating when a therapist refuses to answer a question that seems so important.
“Should I leave?”
“Should I stay?”
“What would you do?”
Many therapeutic approaches encourage clients to find their own answers. Yalom’s reasoning in this chapter is different.
In The Gift of Therapy, he describes a patient choosing between two relationships. From the information available, one option seemed clearly preferable. But as the patient’s life unfolded, new complexities emerged that neither therapist nor patient could have anticipated.
Yalom’s conclusion is not simply that therapists should avoid giving advice. It is that therapists work with necessarily incomplete knowledge. They hear one person’s account at one moment in time. They cannot know how another person’s life will unfold.
This is why he titles the chapter, “Never (Almost Never) Make Decisions for the Patient.”
The point is not that therapists have nothing to offer. Rather, it is an expression of therapeutic humility: recognising the limits of what can be known, even after listening carefully and understanding deeply.
That humility may be one of the most valuable things a therapist can bring to the room.
