Q: Existential anxiety and depression is main focus of my therapy for 3 years. I feel better for a while but always plummet. My therapist says it’s common but I’m fed up feeling miserable. Help?

A: You’re asking why relief never lasts, and that’s an important question.

Three years of therapy with temporary improvement followed by a familiar plummet points to something very specific: the surface distress is being managed, but the underlying structure that produces it hasn’t been questioned with radical honesty. Therapy is doing what it’s designed to do, which is help you cope, regulate, and function. But the part of you that’s driving the existential anxiety hasn’t been addressed directly.

Your therapist is right: this is common. But common doesn’t mean inevitable.

I don’t know what kind of therapy you’re doing, but the pattern you’re describing of feeling better, then crashing often appears when the work is aimed at relief rather than exposure. The system calms down, the symptoms soften, and then something deeper resurfaces because it hasn’t been seen. The false self can be soothed, but it can’t be satisfied.

Existential anxiety and depression don’t usually come from what’s wrong with you. They come from what’s untrue in the way you’re living. When the life you’re inhabiting no longer aligns with what you know at some level to be real, your system protests. Anxiety agitates, depression withdraws. Both are signals, not malfunctions.

The part of you that’s fed up isn’t asking for better coping skills. It’s asking for radical honesty, which is something most people aren’t prepared to bring.

Here’s the question beneath your question: “Why am I still dealing with this if I’ve done everything I was told to do?”

As long as the work is focused on returning you to a version of yourself that already feels unbearable, the cycle will continue. You’ll feel relief when the pressure drops, and despair when it returns, because nothing fundamental has changed.

This doesn’t mean therapy has failed or that you should abandon it. It means therapy may have taken you as far as it can without touching identity. Becoming real requires a different approach. Not fixing, or healing, or managing, but seeing.

That seeing isn’t comfortable. It doesn’t feel like progress, it feels like the floor dropping out beneath the strategies you’ve been using to stay intact. You’re not broken for plummeting, you’re bumping up against the limits of a very entrenched pattern.

What’s called for is to ask a question that doesn’t aim at relief; one that threatens the version of you that needs relief. That’s where the pattern breaks. Not because the anxiety disappears, but because the one who’s been trapped inside it finally comes into view.

This question most clearly reflects Phase One: Discontent, (and edging toward Phase Two: Disruption.) The hallmark of this phase isn’t misery, it’s recurrence. That ache keeps returning because it’s not asking to be cured; it’s asking to be heard. You’re misreading that summons as a symptom. The false self wants comfort, reassurance, and a plan. But reality wants radical honesty. Period.

Forward moving questions to consider: If nothing is working, what exactly am I trying to return to? And who would I be if I stopped trying to get back to feeling okay?

You’re not failing at therapy. You’re standing at the edge of a different kind of work. And the fact that you’re fed up may be the most honest thing you’ve admitted yet.