Epiphany Therapy

""By the honor of pep talks!""

- The Nostalgia Chick, on She Ra Princess of Power

Writers sometimes try to add depth to their characters by giving them some sort of psychological problem. Maybe they hate men due to a previous abusive relationship. Maybe the memory of their Dead Little Sister keeps getting them down. Or perhaps constantly having their girlfriend locked in a refrigerator causes them to drive potential lovers away due to fear for their safety.

After a while, it may be felt that the character has to lose this flaw. In Real Life, deep-seated psychological traumas take years to deal with and cure even in the best case scenario, and most require a lifetime of treatment. In fictionland, however, There Are No Therapists; fortunately, Freudian Excuse, My Greatest Failure, the Heroic BSOD, In the Blood, and Dysfunction Junction, no matter how extreme, can be cured with a simple Whoopi Epiphany Speech, growing Bored with Insanity, a friend telling them to cop on, confiding in someone about your Bad Dreams, the strength or redemption offered by love, or a Sickeningly Sweet Sidekick showing them that The Power of Friendship cures all wounds. The writers thus resolve the issue over the course of a single episode (or movie) and call it Character Development, often at a cost of Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

Frequently administered by a Warrior Therapist or Psychologist Teacher. Might be heading into Discredited Trope territory.

See also Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere, Compressed Vice, Not Himself, Reset Button, Snap Back, and We Want Our Jerk Back.

Failed attempts of giving this kind of therapy might come across as Activist Fundamentalist Antics.

Anime and Manga

 * In Genkaku Picasso the general result is that once Picasso has helped with a person's mental trauma, they get a burst of confidence and understanding and are shown a few days later taking steps to finish overcoming it.
 * In Shugo Chara,
 * Parodied on Oruchuban Ebichu. Ebichu's alter ego, Ebichuman, is a combination superhero and marital counselor whose superpower is the ability to sense people's sexual hangups.
 * This is pretty much what the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion are about, but the otherwise straightforward dialogue is accompanied by such abstract visuals that people tend to classify it as a Mind Screw.
 * In the Tona Gura anime, a turning point is reached when Kazuki
 * In Naruto for most of his life Gaara has been hated by everyone around him for being a jinchuuriki and has had numerous assassination attempts upon him by his father and was forced to kill his uncle, the only person to show him sympathy (which was just an act). The Ichibi prevented him from being able to sleep, boosting his psychological trauma. He was very possibly the most Axe Crazy, psychotic character in the series, certainly in Part I. But once he gets his ass kicked by Naruto and he has a few dozen episodes/chapters to let this sink in, though, he's just one of the guys.
 * Similar to Darth Vader below, this is what happened to Darth Yomi from Ga-Rei Zero. Basically, she experienced a barrage of trauma and this led her to slaughtering lots and lots of people. But she did realize how much she loves her little sister Kagura, allowing her to die as herself.
 * Hinagiku of Hayate the Combat Butler is fearful of loving someone because of her parents abandoning her, and her older sister, when she was younger. When she falls in love with Hayate, he breaks her of the fear, but it's still presented as a strong influence in her life.

Comic Books

 * In the Marvel Universe, Doc Samson uses this with Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk to merge his different personalities into one. This was later retconned away with Therapy Does Not Work That Way to establish that Samson had really just created a new, if more stable, alternate.

Film

 * In Inception,.
 * In the movie Airplane!, ex-pilot Ted Striker was unable to fly as a result of having led a disastrous air raid in the war. He's cured, and able to save the day, when he's told that one of the pilots who died on the raid, in his last words, approved of Striker's decision to continue the attack.
 * In Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the villain uses Epiphany Therapy as a psychic power to gain control of people.
 * Darth Vader in Star Wars is probably the ultimate example of this. Vader murdered thousands of Jedi and probably millions of other people over twenty years, stood by while the billions of inhabitants of Alderaan were killed, force-choked many of his own subordinates, tortured Han, and generally helped maintain a reign of terror over the entire galaxy, yet when he saw his son being electrocuted, he quickly decides he's been wrong all along and kills the emperor. Then he's shown to have been completely redeemed. It kind of works in context, but it seems like Vader got off easy by dying, as he didn't have to make amends for his actions over the long-term.
 * The end of The Machinist, where  and at the very end is seen sleeping peacefully for the first time in a year.
 * In Nell, the title character's fear of male sexuality can be cured instantly by going skinnydipping with Liam Neeson. It makes a bit more sense in context, but not much.
 * The Estrogen Brigade Bait jokes just write themselves, don't they?
 * This is the entire plot of Good Will Hunting. Emotional trauma stemming from years of abuse can be cured by repeating the phrase, "It's not your fault" over and over until the other person starts crying.
 * Well, that *was* the climax of a long series of therapy sessions, not just a single event.
 * Hilariously played with in What About Bob, where the title character, while tied up with explosives strapped to him, manages to turn the situation into a metaphor that gets him over his mental issues, while using a literal application of the metaphor to escape his situation. The "played with" part is that he never realizes he's actually in danger, and believes the whole thing's a constructed roleplaying scenario designed to cause this sort of epiphany.

Literature

 * In The Dark Tower series' second book, The Dark Tower, Odetta / Detta seems to recover from Dissociative Identity Disorder (incorrectly called schizophrenia in the book) when her two personalities merge; this merged personality calls herself Susannah. Several books later, when Susannah is possessed by a demon, Detta comes back to help Susannah deal with it.
 * Done painfully straight in the last book of Piers Anthony's Mode series, in which a single telepathy-assisted Epiphany Therapy session in which Colene confronts a few specific traumatic experiences completely cures her major depression and other psychological problems.
 * The Trapeze series generally plays this straight, although the fact that it's much less Anvilicious about it than other series makes it easier to swallow.
 * Dandra's magically-induced split personality disorder takes a few moments of internal conflict to resolve in the second Dragon Below book.
 * Flinx, star of Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth universe, gets over his Wangst in record time in Flinx Transcendent, the Grand Finale of the series. This after spending the last... oh, six novels moping about how humanity doesn't deserved to be saved, he doesn't want to save it, and how his life sucks because he's a manufactured human rather than a natural one.
 * In The Wheel of Time, Rand al'Thor spent 12 books gradually going mad due to the taint of the Dark One on the male half of the True Source and also the influence of Lews Therin, the man of whom he is the reincarnation and who exists as a voice in his head, that man having been driven completely insane by the taint before his death. Then, when he begins to feel desolate and hopeless about the state of the world and, he retreats to the top of the mountain that was created by Lews Therin's death throes and considers destroying the world with his awesome powers.  The greatest epiphany he has during this moment is that
 * In Warrior Cats, when Firestar fears that Scourge will crush the clans, he laments that there were always four clans in the forest, but Scourge is trying to change that. Then StarClan tell him

Live Action Television

 * Charmed loved this trope. However the issues didn't tend to stay cured whether they were fears of losing each other, the desire for a normal life or realising that relationships require compromise to make them work.
 * Alex P Keaton from Family Ties, when Greg died in a car crash.
 * There was an episode of a talk show (Maury, possibly) that featured a girl with a fear of pickles, which affected her job performance as a waitress to the point of her refusing to serve any dish with said garnish in it to any of her customers. The host's proposed treatment was to have nearly a dozen stagehands emerge from the audience onto the stage and from each of the stage entrances, each one holding a plate with a sandwich topped in pickles and wearing the most evil shit-eating grins you've ever seen. The guest screamed hysterically and tried to escape in several different directions before she was surrounded. By pickles. To the audience's mocking laughter.
 * Wiseguy. Frank McPike and Roger Loccoco decide to snap local kingpin Mark Volchek out of his phobia of death by recreating the final scene of his favourite horror movie so it has a happy ending. Mark Volchek refuses to accept this and storms out the door, only to run into someone who he thought had been killed in an earlier episode. Not surprisingly, Volchek faints. He does get better though. Somewhat.
 * Buffy has a number of Epiphany Therapy moments, such as when she immediately overcomes some issues simply because she confesses that the spell to re-ensoul Angel had actually worked and she sacrificed him anyway.
 * When Monk realized the source of his pathological hatred of nudists, he pretty much got over it. It's made less grating by the fact that up until that point, he hadn't been able to permanently fix any of his many psychiatric problems.
 * Of course 'getting over it' just means he doesn't impulsively and immediately accuse them of any and all crimes. He still is visibly disgusted and goes out of his way to avoid them.
 * A better example would be the last episode, where Monk's issues are all severely diminished after he solves Trudy's murder.
 * MASH relied rather heavily on this trope at times. In Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?, Captain Chandler was in serious need of an epiphany. He doesn't get it, but another victim who was unable to save his younger brother in battle, literally went into amnesiatic shock and couldn't remember a thing. His memory only returned after Dr. Freedman, Hawkeye and B.J. hypnotise him and stage a battlefield scene. And then, of course, how could we forget
 * Lt. Barclay on Star Trek: The Next Generation had a paralyzing fear of transporters, as revealed in the episode "Realm of Fear". Of course during that episode his fear is compounded when he discovers a living organism within the transporter field. The same story had O'Brien reveal that he once had a fear of spiders, but now kept a pet tarantula (which I suspect Keiko insisted he ditch before they moved to Deep Space Nine).
 * In the Doctor Who episode "Amy's Choice", an artificially induced dream shared by the Doctor, Amy and Rory helps Amy realize just how much she loves Rory. Aww...
 * In Kamen Rider Double,  after being driven insane with fear by the Terror Dopant, causing him to scream his head off at even the slightest noise,
 * Myth Busters host Adam Savage has struggled for years with a well-known fear of bees, much to his annoyance as it made him the guinea pig for multiple phobia myth experiments. Until they tested a myth of bees glued to a laptop flapping their collective wings to make it fly. Working with a single bee in their lab, he learned to admire their individual strength and by the final test, he admitted being completely over his fear.

Video Games

 * Trauma Center: Under the Knife 2. After

Western Animation

 * The CGI animated series Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles had Dizzy being claustrophobic. With their survival on the line, the team's resident psychic "removed" her claustrophobia and made her a Badass again. It's a pretty dangerous procedure (as they point out to her before she consents to it) and they wouldn't dare try it if their lives weren't on the line. So instant psychic therapy isn't exactly an easy way out, just a fast one.

Anime and Manga

 * In Fruits Basket, pretty much all of the Sohma family have deep-seated emotional problems, and while Tohru helps a number of them quite a lot, progress is realistically slow. For example, in the manga,
 * In Hayate the Combat Butler, Hinagiku is able to withstand heights when she has a strong reason to after Hayate takes her out onto the balcony of the student council office and shows her the cityscape.
 * Less detailed, but still implied is her fear of anyone she admits to loving disappearing also seems to be with her.
 * Implied with both of these is that if Hayate were to vanish from her life, they would return stronger than ever and are nowhere near cured yet.
 * Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has Louise, who has some deep-seated revenge issues, as well as having to overcome forced evolution into a telepathic Innovator and being partially mind-controlled by the Big Bad. The Movie, set two years later, shows that she's still in the hospital getting treatment for PTSD, among other things, and while she's definitely getting better, she's far from cured.
 * Across the entirety of Bitter Virgin, Hinako, who has suffered repeated rape at the hands of her stepfather, makes a few baby steps towards recovery, while acknowledging that she may never be free of her pain. Still, she considers the steps she has made, such as, "miracles", which she never would have thought herself capable of.

Comics

 * The Martian Manhunter had a deep seated fear of fire as his Achilles' Heel, which made the second most powerful being in DC Comics Earth vulnerable to matches. Thanks to some epiphany therapy with a flame powered hottie, he managed to remove the fear... only to discover it was a mental block placed by non-Neglectful Precursors to avoid his species becoming psychotic fire demons drunk on power. That ended well.
 * An issue of X-Factor had the team going to therapeutic with Doc Samson (the Marvel Universe's resident superhero psychiatrist). It helps some of them a little, and makes no difference to others. Then, more recently, much of the original team goes back to him...and it's noted by Samson that they're significantly more messed up.

Film

 * The entire second half of Vertigo.
 * Hitchcock does it again in Marnie. The film ends with the title character confronting the source of her myriad psychological issues, but it's clear that she still has a long, hard recovery ahead of her.
 * Jamie in Shortbus claims to have had a sudden epiphany during his first therapy session with Sophia, who tells him that that kind of thing doesn't just happen and therapists don't hand out epiphanies like candy - most progress won't happen in a blinding flash of insight, and even when it does it typically only occurs after a lot of work.

Literature

 * Averted in 1984,  recalls a traumatic experience and bemoans that recording it has done nothing to avert the pain he feels about it.
 * The hilarious short story "Ailurophobe" by Anthony Boucher had the main character go through this therapy to cure his morbid fear of cats (he couldn't even stand to hear words including the syllable "cat"). Under hypnosis, he realized it derived from an early childhood incident when he nearly died because of an abusive nanny named "Kitty." He was cured of fearing cats; now he had a phobia of women. Ironic, since it was his fiancee who'd wanted him to get over the original phobia.
 * Averted in the In Death series. Eve Dallas, the main character, begins the series plagued by nightmares, repressed memories, and other baggage you'd expect from a Dark and Troubled Past. Subsequent books see her slowly get better with the help of her True Companions, especially Mira and Roarke, but to date she still struggles with the lingering emotional damage.

Live Action Television

 * Angel of Angel had a lot of issues. All of them stemming from him being a vampire with a soul with centuries worth of memories of debauchery and carnage his bad half caused. The solution? Losing his soul thanks to a gypsy curse against him ever being happy! ... what? Angelus always was the happier of the two!
 * This is turned on its head in an episode where we see how agonizing it is for the evil Angelus to be trapped inside the brooding but heroic Angel - he screams in horror when forced to relive a night when Angel saved a puppy. He quickly gets over this problem when he remembers that he can still torment Angel, no matter what happens in the outside world.
 * In another vein (ahem), Angel also had an epiphany that was a subversion of Epiphany Therapy. He realized that the fight against evil doesn't end, because there's no big win--so you just keep fighting every day. The number of psychological issues, foibles, addictions, and phobias this could be applied to...
 * Supernatural averts this so much it gets annoying after a while. In All Hell Breaks Loose, Dean seems to be crawling out of his self-loathing pit of despair and having a bit of hope but when it comes to the next episode? He's telling Sam how the prospect of being dragged down to hell is like a light at the end of the tunnel. And in Dream A Little Dream Of Me, he makes a beautiful revelation about how his Dad was an absolute arsehole but fast-forward to four episodes later and he's back to being the devoted, scared-out-of-his-mind soldier. As of late season 4 he appears to finally be thinking about making some progress, being outright told that for all his problems he doesn't have license to whine quite so much, and gently mocked for taking such a depressed mindset. It is partially valid, but the writers seem to have realized that no matter how much it is he can't keep whinging, and the multiple Epiphany Therapies may be having an effect.
 * Buffy's character arc in Season 6 is one big fat aversion of this trope. It takes her the entire season to get over the traumas of dying, being yanked out of Paradise, and then having to claw her way out of her own grave.

Video Games

 * In Tales of the Abyss, Guy has an intense phobia of being touched by women. He eventually recalls the suppressed memory of the incident leading to his phobia and gets a little better, but he's by no means cured.
 * In The Suffering, it takes Torque the length of the entire game to come to terms with his psychological issues as he slowly figures out what sort of person he is and his fragmented past. Oh, and fights a giant monster representing his psychological trauma, because it's just that kind of game. Even then, when the sequel rolls around, it turns out he's not actually cured, and facing the demons of his past causes a relapse. It still doesn't take years, but it's hardly an instant "have an epiphany and you're better" cure.

Web Comics
"Grace: Kissing boy-me was a very loving gesture, but identifying the issue doesn't instantly free you of it..."
 * Refreshingly averted in El Goonish Shive. Resident Mad Scientist Tedd has some severe psychological hangups as a result of being teased and bullied for most of his life for being a 'girly-man', not to mention allegations that he's gay for his Heterosexual Life Partner, Elliot. Thus, despite the fact that he often goes on a Gender Bender just for kicks, and the fact that he should be bisexual when in female form, being intimate with boy-Grace causes him to panic even when he's transformed into a girl. However, when Grace figures out the source of his hangup — which he hadn't even realized himself — she reminds him that this realization in itself does not solve the problem:

"Faye:Therapy helped, but it's the equivalent of breaking your leg- you can walk when you get out of physical therapy, but you can't run a marathon right away. I can function as a human being right now, and even have friends, but I can't handle a relationship. Marten: Couldn't we just make out now and worry about everything else later? Faye: Sure, if you want to trade one night of fun for me freaking out, running away, and never coming back. Marten: Well shit. I was almost letting myself hope that you'd be all "Man, it sure feels good to get all that off my chest! Let's go have sex!" Faye: If trauma were that easily dealt with, psychologists would work pro bono."
 * It was kinda played straight with Susan. Her years of hating men were pretty much permanently erased by spending one evening Gender Swapped. Though, to be fair, her experiences spending time with Elliot and Tedd had been slowly eroding her misconceptions about men for a while leading up to that.
 * She'd also been working under the theory that all men were afflicted with raging, barely-controllable hormones. Learning first-hand that the male libido wasn't as overwhelming as she'd believed switched her from believing in male inferiority to redirecting her hatred to more... specific targets.
 * Not really "redirecting to", more like "homing in on". She already hated her father, and her hatred of men in general stemmed from that. But after Grace's party, she seems content to hate only her father and not let it taint her opinion of men in general.
 * In Questionable Content, they make mention of this trope when Faye finally explains why she gets so defensive. It's a very good example of deconstruction, so I think I'll just quote it:

Western Animation

 * It looked like things were going this way at the end of "Thrill of the Hunt" in Transformers Animated, when Shell-Shocked Veteran Ratchet sits down for a long talk with Optimus, and the subject was never raised again. Then Transwarped rolls around, more traumatic Flashback Stares ensue, and it is abruptly revealed that everything is not okay.
 * At the end of the Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "The Beach", the villains have vented their individual examples of Freudian Excuse and are now feeling much better. So good in fact, that they gleefully trash the house and attack the guests of the cool teens who snubbed them.
 * Interestingly enough, the only one in the group who never actually gets over the problem that gets brought up in the episode is Azula, who seemed to be completely at terms with it.
 * Zuko, on the other hand, didn't get over his issues with that situation at the beach either. Uncle Iroh had been working on him for the entire 2 seasons, but he froze before taking the step that would've taken him completely through his Heel Face Turn. He finally completes it a few episodes later.
 * More absurd than this is "The Guru." Aang, in order to master the Avatar state, has to unlock a series of chakras by letting go of various Earthly, negative emotions, such as his grief over being The Last of His Kind, and the fear of failure against the Fire Lord. Every one of these takes about twenty seconds apiece to utterly conquer. Maybe subverted in that he refuses to get rid of the last emotion, love for Katara, and his problems and emotions persist into the rest of the series.
 * Defied on The Simpsons, with Lisa explaining that her body image issues are a long-standing problem that can't be solved overnight. Of course, from the next episode we never hear of them again...
 * Also parodied in the episode where Marge is cured of her fear of flying.

Comics

 * Subverted in the Incredible Hulk comic. The Hulk is being given therapy by Doc Samson with the help of a hypnotist to merge his multiple personalities. It seems to work, but it later turns out the "merged" Hulk is just another personality, and Doc had to take shortcuts because there really wasn't the time for a complete cure. Of course, for the Hulk the psychological problem is part of the premise, so it's never going away.
 * A cartoon from The Far Side features a therapist's technique for dealing with the fears of heights, snakes, and the dark...trapping a man in a darkened elevator suspended off a skyscraper roof and full of snakes.

Film

 * Parodied in the film Analyze This: Mobster Paul Vitti has been seeing a psychologist, and makes a breakthrough that leaves him in tears. Unfortunately, it comes at the worst possible time -- he's in a gunfight with rival gangsters, and unable to fight back, causing his psychologist to say, "Paul, you have to channel all this nice grief into a murderous rage." At the end of the film, they both agree he still needs therapy.
 * Also parodied several times throughout the movie, where Vitti repeatedly thinks he's cured after minor epiphanies (some of which don't necessarily apply), and leaves treatment despite his psychologist insisting that there's much more buried beneath. Of course, he ends up still screwed up.
 * Averted, then subverted in The Woodsman. Walter does have an epiphany, but that epiphany seems to be that Epiphany Therapy just doesn't happen, and he will take time to change, but can overcome his demons as long as he doesn't give into them.

Literature

 * Subverted in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers. They pass off "shaking" (a condition caused when a person is under combat stress for quite a while) as normal, but they often use hypnosis for a quick cure (it appears to be mixed with efficient counselors, too.)
 * Played with in the X Wing Series. Kell Tainer starts out both stiff with terror at the man who killed his father (who, of course, is part of the squadron he joins) and with the nasty tendency to freeze up in panic when outnumbered in combat with teammates relying on him. He gets his epiphanies, finding that one, Janson is a Reasonable Authority Figure rather than prone to You Have Failed Me moments, and two, he'd met the love of his life in the squadron and he knows what would happen if he ran in a fight. They're no longer major issues. Still, he's always going to be uncomfortable around Janson, and he still gets the shakes and anxiety when he goes into missions.
 * Seemingly played straight with the team's approach to snapping Myn Donos out of his Heroic BSOD, but he still has severe issues that he only really overcomes after two more books' worth of trauma.

Live Action TV

 * The Sopranos: Tony frequently experiences epiphanies in therapy, but they never "take". He always reverts back to form, sooner or later.
 * How I Met Your Mother: When Marshall's very-much-loved fiance just up and left him one night to go to San Francisco, he spent a long time crying, sitting in his apartment in his underwear, and trying to contact her. The rest of the gang supports him and does various things to try and help him get over her, but to no avail. During a talk about the matter with Ted, Marshall has an epiphany and decides that he's going to stop being so pathetic and start living again. Ted narrates that then it didn't happen, because "that's not how life works." Next morning, something reminds Marshall is reminded of Lily and he's right back to pathetic. But a couple of weeks later, he takes the first step towards moving on, and Ted narrates that the only thing that can fix a broken heart is time.
 * In the Doctor Who episode "Vincent and the Doctor",
 * Parodied on Malcolm in the Middle; when Hal thanks a psychiatrist for curing his sons, the guy starts spluttering that they've turned up many problems that need to be discussed - but they're out the door already.

Theater

 * In Next to Normal, Diana, who suffers from bipolar disorder and severe depression due to a long-ago traumatic incident, goes through two therapists, countless meds, a suicide attempt, and ECT before having her epiphany - the trauma she suffered couldn't be totally cured by treating her mentally; she needed to let her soul heal. This is not a straight example because Di's solution to this is to leave her family and go live with her parents for a while, to try to stand without the crutch of her husband (who has also been suppressing the same trauma), the bitterness of her daughter (who feels jaded and unloved, and scared of ending up like Di), and the constant reminder of the event that scarred her. She's clearly scared of leaving, but is convinced it's the only way she can distance herself and let go.
 * In another twist of the trope, she had the epiphany all on her own, and acted against her therapists' pleas to continue treatment.
 * Basically, Diana has the epiphany but is not cured. She just found the strength to try. We don't know whether it ends up working or not.
 * "The one thing that's sure is that there is no cure, but that doesn't mean we don't fight."

Video Games

 * Subverted repeatedly in Mass Effect; Commander Shepard can encounter quite a number of traumatized and emotionally disturbed individuals, and has the opportunity to talk almost all of them into getting professional therapy... or committing suicide.
 * Shepard him/her self can be played this way, depending on the player. "I did what I had to."