What It Tells Me When You Say “I Should Be Over This By Now”
Lianne Perry, MA, MSc., RCC
There are certain sentences I hear in therapy again and again, and “I should be over this by now” is one of them. People say it after breakups, losses, traumatic experiences, difficult childhoods, betrayals, and relationships that left them questioning themselves. Sometimes they say it with frustration, sometimes with embarrassment, and sometimes almost apologetically, as though they are worried I might also be wondering why this is still bothering them.
I’m not.
When I hear “I should be over this by now,” I’m usually much more interested in the word should than I am in how much time has passed. Somewhere along the way, you have developed an idea about how long this was supposed to take, and now you’re measuring yourself against that timeline. What I want to understand is where that timeline came from, what you believe your continued feelings say about you, and whether you’re giving yourself credit for the healing that has already happened.
I Hear the Judgment Underneath It
“I should be over this by now” rarely means only that you wish you felt better. There is usually a layer of judgment underneath it. You may believe that still being affected means you’re weak, stuck, overly sensitive, dwelling on the past, or somehow doing healing incorrectly.
Often, people are far more compassionate toward someone else than they are toward themselves. If a friend described the same experience and admitted they were still struggling, you might completely understand why. Yet when it’s your own pain, suddenly there is an imaginary deadline you were supposed to have met.
Part of what I’m listening for is the way you are talking to yourself about what happened. The pain itself may be difficult, but sometimes the judgment you have added to it creates an entirely separate layer of suffering. Now you’re not only hurt. You’re upset with yourself for still being hurt.
I Wonder Who Decided How Long This Was Supposed to Take
There is no universal timeline for recovering from something painful. Six months may be plenty of time for one experience and nowhere near enough for another. The length of the relationship or the amount of time since an event happened also doesn’t necessarily tell us how deeply it affected you.
Sometimes people become frustrated because the timeline doesn’t seem to make logical sense. You may have dated someone for a relatively short period and still be struggling a year later. You may be upset about something that happened decades ago. You may have left a relationship you knew was unhealthy and wonder why you still miss the person.
From my perspective, those aren’t signs that you’re failing to move on. They’re clues. Instead of asking, “Why am I not over this yet?” we can start asking, “What about this experience is still unfinished for me?”
That is a very different question.
Sometimes You Understand It Before You Feel It
One of the most frustrating parts of therapy can be realizing that insight does not automatically make a feeling disappear. You can understand exactly why something happened, recognize the pattern, know that a relationship was unhealthy, and still have an emotional reaction to it.
I often hear some version of, “I know all of this already, so why does it still bother me?” The assumption is that once you understand something intellectually, your emotional response should fall neatly into line. Unfortunately, brains are not quite that efficient.
This is particularly true with trauma and attachment. Experiences can become connected to beliefs about safety, worth, trust, rejection, abandonment, or responsibility. Those connections are not necessarily undone simply because another part of your brain understands that the experience is over.
That gap between knowing and feeling is often where some of the most important therapy work happens.
I’m Looking for What Has Changed, Not Whether It Has Disappeared
People sometimes overlook their progress because they are using one particular measure of healing: Does this still bother me? If the answer is yes, they conclude that they haven’t healed.
I tend to look at it differently. Maybe the memory still hurts, but it no longer consumes your entire day. Maybe you still think about the person, but you don’t contact them anymore. Perhaps you still feel anxious in certain situations, but now you recognize what is happening and know how to ground yourself. You might still get triggered, but instead of taking three days to recover, it takes an hour.
Those changes matter.
Healing does not always look like something disappearing completely. Sometimes it looks like the same thing having less power over you. Sometimes it means recovering more quickly, understanding yourself sooner, setting a boundary you couldn’t set before, or responding differently even though the old feeling still showed up.
If you are waiting until you never think about it, never feel sad about it, or never get triggered by it again before you consider yourself healed, you may miss an enormous amount of evidence that healing is already happening.
Sometimes “I Should Be Over It” Means “I’m Tired”
There is another thing I often hear underneath this sentence, and it has very little to do with impatience.
Sometimes you are simply exhausted.
You’re tired of thinking about it. Tired of having the same reaction. Tired of talking about it. Tired of being reminded of it when you thought you were having a perfectly good day. You want your energy back, and you are frustrated that something you never asked for is still taking up space in your life.
That makes sense to me.
When I hear that exhaustion, I don’t want to convince you that you should be more patient or grateful for how far you’ve come. I want to acknowledge that healing can be tiring. You can recognize your progress and still wish you didn’t have to do any of this in the first place.
Both things can be true.
Sometimes the Pressure Comes From Other People
Not everyone around you will understand why something continues to affect you. Friends and family may be supportive initially and then, over time, start asking questions like, “Are you still thinking about that?” or telling you that you need to move on.
Sometimes those comments are well-intentioned. People who care about you may genuinely want to see you feeling better, and they may not know what else to say. Unfortunately, their discomfort with your pain can easily become pressure for you to stop having it.
This is particularly difficult after emotionally abusive or manipulative relationships because people outside the relationship often see only the obvious facts. They may see that you left, that the relationship is over, or that the person is no longer part of your life. They may not understand the confusion, self-doubt, attachment, grief, or loss of trust in yourself that can remain long after contact ends.
You may begin borrowing their impatience and turning it against yourself.
Healing Isn’t the Same as Forgetting
Sometimes people imagine that being “over it” means reaching a point where the experience no longer carries any emotion at all. For many experiences, that isn’t a realistic or even necessary goal.
Something significant can become part of your story without continuing to control your life. You can remember what happened and still feel sadness about it while also knowing that you are okay now. You can grieve what you lost without wanting it back. You can understand why someone behaved the way they did without excusing what they did to you.
The goal is not necessarily to erase the emotional meaning of an experience. Often, it is to help your brain understand that the experience belongs to the past so that it does not keep responding as though it is happening in the present.
That distinction is especially important in trauma work.
This Is Where EMDR Can Sometimes Help
When someone tells me, “I know I’m safe now, but I don’t feel safe,” or “I know it wasn’t my fault, but part of me still feels like it was,” I pay attention to that discrepancy. It can tell us that the experience has been understood intellectually but may not yet feel fully processed.
This is one of the places where EMDR can be helpful. Rather than repeatedly explaining to yourself why you shouldn’t feel the way you do, EMDR works with the way distressing experiences and the beliefs connected to them have been stored. The goal is not to forget what happened or convince yourself that it didn’t matter. It is to help the memory become something you can remember without your nervous system reacting as though you are still there.
For some people, that shift can feel like finally getting their emotional brain caught up with something their logical brain has known for a long time.
I Also Want to Know What “Over It” Would Look Like to You
If you told me in session that you should be over something by now, I might ask you a question that sounds deceptively simple: How would you know if you were?
Would you never think about it again? Would you be able to think about it without crying? Would you stop missing the person? Would you trust someone new? Would you stop feeling angry? Would you be able to talk about what happened without feeling it in your body?
Sometimes when we define what “over it” actually means, we discover that the standard is impossibly high. You may be expecting yourself to reach a point where an experience that mattered deeply to you has absolutely no emotional impact whatsoever.
Other times, the answer tells us something useful about what still needs attention. Maybe you don’t actually need to forget what happened. Maybe what you really want is to stop blaming yourself for it.
Now we have somewhere meaningful to go.
There Is No Prize for Healing Quickly
Healing is not a race, and doing it faster does not mean you have done it better. Taking longer than you expected does not mean you are stuck, and having a difficult day after several good ones does not mean you have gone backwards.
Progress is rarely that tidy.
What I care about much more is whether your world is gradually getting bigger again. Are you spending less time organizing your life around what happened? Are you beginning to trust yourself more? Are you making choices based on what you want now rather than what you are afraid might happen again? Are there moments when you realize you haven’t thought about it for a while?
Those are the things I notice.
So when you sit across from me and say, “I should be over this by now,” I’m not secretly thinking that you should be.
I’m wondering what still hurts, what has already changed, and whether we can help you stop using an imaginary deadline as evidence that you’re doing something wrong.
Joey’s Take 🐾
Apparently healing doesn’t have a schedule. This is why I prefer naps. You know exactly when you’re finished.
About Lianne
I’m Lianne Perry, a Registered Clinical Counsellor in BC who works online with clients across Canada. I specialize in trauma, anxiety, life transitions, and helping people recover from emotionally abusive and manipulative relationships. I’m certified in EMDR, a powerful approach that helps people heal without having to relive every detail of the past, and I’m also a Certified Narcissistic Abuse Treatment Clinician, having completed extensive training and certification with Dr. Ramani Durvasula. My sessions are grounded, collaborative, and combine evidence-based approaches with practical tools tailored to each person’s unique experiences. When I’m not in session, you’ll probably find me hiking with my Aussie, Joey, or sitting by the ocean, my favourite co-therapist.
