Despite a long history, psychotherapy research has been mired by sundry conflicts, the most vexing of which involves establishing the profession as an evidence-based practice. Beginning in the mid-1990s, and continuing today, psychotherapy has struggled to reach consensus regarding the meaning, methods, and implementation of evidence-based practice. Much of this struggle has centered on the overreliance on, and conflation of, random controlled trial research as the cynosure of evidence-based practice. This, in tandem with the proliferation of psychotherapy models and their manifold interventive doppelgangers (differently named interventions that are functionally equivalent), has led the profession to an evidentiary impasse. It is suggested that shifting the target of evidence-based practice to mechanisms of change serves as an antidote to random controlled trials' shortcomings while also redressing the proliferation problem. Advancing this approach, however, will require a spirit of inclusive collaboration fostered, in part, by a shift from persuasion to translation as a means to untether scholars from their intellectual anchors.