The Best Therapist I Ever Had Was My Tennis Pro

I’ve had therapists. I’ve had supervisors. I’ve had mentors who shaped my entire career. But the person who taught me the most about how people actually change was a tennis pro named Mike at a club in Greenwich.

Mike wasn’t a psychologist. He didn’t have a degree in human behavior. He probably couldn’t tell you the difference between psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral therapy. But he understood something about change that most mental health professionals miss entirely.

He saw the mistake as you made it. He pointed it out. You repeated the motion until you got it right. And he never — not once — lost his patience.

That’s therapy.

The Problem with Delayed Feedback

Here’s what happens in most traditional therapy: you describe something that happened last Tuesday. Your therapist listens carefully. You explore it together. You gain some insight about why you reacted the way you did. You leave feeling understood.

Then next Tuesday comes, and you do the exact same thing.

The insight was real. The understanding was genuine. But it was all happening in retrospect. By the time you’re analyzing the mistake, the moment is long gone. You’re reviewing game tape instead of playing the game.

A tennis pro sees the mistake as you make it. Points it out. You repeat it until you get it right. And he doesn’t lose his patience. That’s what good therapy should look like.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

Mike didn’t wait until after the match to tell me my backhand was dropping. He caught it in real time. “There. Right there. Your elbow. Do it again.” And I’d do it again. And again. Until my body learned the new pattern and the old one started to fade.

Real-Time Correction

The best therapy I do works the same way. Not by analyzing what happened last week, but by catching patterns as they unfold in the room.

A patient starts telling me about a fight with his wife. I notice that his voice goes flat — the same way it always goes flat when he’s about to minimize something that hurt him. I stop him. “Right there. What just happened? You were angry a second ago, and now you’re narrating it like a news report. Where did the feeling go?”

That’s the therapeutic equivalent of “Your elbow is dropping.”

It’s not comfortable. Most people don’t enjoy having their patterns pointed out in the moment. But it’s the only way to change them. You can’t fix a backhand by thinking about it. You fix it by feeling the wrong motion and replacing it with the right one, over and over, until the new way becomes automatic.

Patience Is the Whole Game

Here’s what made Mike exceptional. It wasn’t his technical knowledge — plenty of pros know the mechanics of a good serve. It was his patience.

He would tell me the same thing forty times without a trace of frustration. Not because he was pretending. Because he genuinely understood that this is how learning works. The body doesn’t learn in one try. The mind doesn’t either.

I’ve carried that lesson into every session I’ve ever conducted. When a patient falls back into an old pattern for the fifteenth time, I don’t sigh. I don’t think “We’ve been over this.” I point it out again, the same way Mike would reset my grip for the hundredth time, because that’s what change requires.

When a patient falls back into an old pattern for the fifteenth time, I don’t sigh. I point it out again. That’s not failure. That’s the process. Change is repetition, not revelation.

— Dr. John S. Tamerin

If your therapist seems frustrated by your lack of progress, that’s not your problem. That’s theirs.

The Myth of the Single Breakthrough

Our culture loves the idea of the one transformative moment. The breakthrough session. The night everything clicked. And those moments exist — I’ve witnessed hundreds of them. But they are not where change lives.

Change lives in the repetition. In the hundredth time you catch yourself doing the old thing and choose the new thing instead. In the slow, unglamorous process of retraining your nervous system to respond differently.

Mike never promised me a single lesson that would fix my serve. He promised consistency. He promised that if I kept showing up and kept practicing, my game would improve. Not because of any magic — because of mechanics and repetition.

Therapy works the same way. The patients who get better aren’t the ones who have the biggest breakthroughs. They’re the ones who keep showing up, keep practicing, and keep tolerating the discomfort of doing something differently.

What a Good Coach Knows

A good tennis pro knows something most therapists forget: the student doesn’t need a lecture. They need a correction. Brief, specific, and timed perfectly.

Not “Let me explain the biomechanics of a forehand.” Just “Drop your shoulder. Now try again.”

The best therapeutic interventions I make are short. Sometimes five words. Sometimes fewer. “What are you feeling right now?” “You’re doing it again.” “Stay with that.” These aren’t dramatic. But they land because they come at exactly the right moment — when the pattern is live, not when it’s a memory.

The Court and the Couch

I still play tennis. And every time I step on the court, I’m reminded of why I practice therapy the way I do.

You don’t learn by understanding. You learn by doing. You don’t change by analyzing your mistakes in hindsight. You change by catching them in real time and repeating the correction until it sticks.

If your therapy feels like an endless conversation about what happened last week — if you’re gaining insight but not changing behavior — something’s missing. The something that’s missing might be a coach who sees the mistake as you make it, points it out clearly, and stays patient while you learn.

That’s what I try to be. Every session, for every patient. A good coach with a lot of patience and a keen eye for the dropped elbow.