I'm at 9 years, and I have no plans to stop. Mostly because therapy is a form of self care for me, sort of like getting a massage or doing body work or regular exercise, something that helps me reduce my stress and take better care of myself. Some of this is that I work in a very high stakes, high stress legal arena where my clients have suffered a great deal of trauma, usually exacerbated by the system's response. So I also have some vicarious trauma that I need to deal with on a regular basis. In those 9 years, there were a couple of years focusing more deeply on trauma work I thought I was done with in my last round of therapy that had ended 15 years earlier. It turns out that it was prompted by my child turning the same age where I began to be abused. Then I had a health crisis, it wasn't life threatening but it involved chronic pain that took almost a year to resolve to manageable levels; that was also a trigger for more trauma. Then my spouse was diagnosed with a terminal cancer, and then he died, and I struggled for awhile with what I was going to do with my life, then I retired from a regular part time job I'd had for decades and focused on the other part time work I'd also done for years. So lots of life events taxed my coping skills and I needed to learn better ones.