You’ve tried therapy before, or you haven’t, but either way you’re skeptical. Maybe you sat through ten sessions of someone nodding and asking how things made you feel, and left wondering what you were paying for. Maybe you’ve read about EMDR or Brainspotting or some other branded technique and thought: this sounds like nonsense. Maybe the whole culture of therapy puts you off — the gentle voice, the tissue box, the inspirational quotes on the wall. You’re not wrong to be suspicious.
Most therapy, as it’s practised today, deserves your skepticism. The field is full of trademarked techniques with thin evidence, worksheets that could be replaced by a decent book, and practitioners whose primary skill is being warm. Warmth is nice. It’s not expertise. And if warmth were enough to solve serious psychological problems, you’d probably have been fine a long time ago.
What’s Actually Missing
Here is what I think is true, and what most therapists won’t say directly: every serious psychological difficulty comes down to one thing. You’ve had experiences you haven’t been able to fully understand, which means you haven’t been able to put them into words, which means you haven’t been able to put them into a form you could share with another person. That’s it. That’s the whole problem.
If you’re anxious, or depressed, or stuck in patterns you can see but can’t stop, then one of three things is true: you haven’t understood the experiences driving those patterns; or you’ve understood them but haven’t been able to feel what they actually meant to you; or both. There is no other possibility.
This is not a mystical claim. It’s a practical one. The mind processes experience by putting it into language. When it can’t — because the experience was too overwhelming, or too early, or too threatening to what you needed to believe about yourself or the people you depended on — it stays undigested. And undigested experience doesn’t sit quietly. It produces symptoms.
You Don’t Have to Believe in It
I’m not asking for faith. Open-minded skepticism is the best possible attitude to bring to this work. You don’t need to believe in the unconscious, or in psychoanalysis, or in me. You need to show up, say what comes to mind, when you’re ready to do so, and be willing to notice when something lands differently than you expected.
There are no techniques. No homework. No coping strategies. I’m not a coach, and I’m not a teacher. I won’t give you a diagnosis and a treatment plan and send you off with exercises to practise between sessions. What I will do is listen carefully enough to understand something about your experience that you haven’t yet been able to articulate yourself, and say it back to you in a way that makes something shift.
That’s not magic. It’s a skill, and it takes years to develop. But it doesn’t require your belief. It requires your honesty.
When People Say “Insight Isn’t Enough”
You may have heard this. It’s one of the therapy world’s favourite clichés: understanding your problems doesn’t fix them. You need to do something — change your behaviour, challenge your thoughts, retrain your nervous system.
This is wrong, but in an interesting way. It’s true that simply having a theory about yourself doesn’t change anything. Plenty of people can narrate their childhood trauma fluently and remain completely stuck. But that’s not insight. That’s a story you’ve told so many times it’s become another defence. Real insight — the moment when you understand something you couldn’t see before, and feel its full weight — is not a cognitive exercise. It’s an experience. And it changes things precisely because you couldn’t have had it alone.
If It Isn’t Working, I Will Tell You
This is the part no one says. Most therapists will let you come indefinitely, whether or not you’re making progress, because every session is revenue and confrontation is uncomfortable. I won’t do that. If the work isn’t moving, I’ll say so. If I think you’d be better served by someone else, I’ll say that too. I have no interest in collecting a fee and giving nothing in return, and you deserve a therapist who will be straight with you about that.
The goal is not to be in therapy forever. The goal is to digest the experiences that are keeping you stuck — to make them part of you, fully understood and fully felt — at which point they stop producing symptoms, because there’s nothing left to produce them. The problem doesn’t get managed. It disappears.
If This Sounds Different
It is different. Most therapy tries to help you cope with your problems, work around them, or manage them with strategies. This approach tries to dissolve them by understanding them completely. That takes longer than six sessions. It requires a real commitment.
But if you’re the kind of person who’s allergic to platitudes, suspicious of branded techniques, and frustrated by therapists who seem to offer nothing but sympathy, you might find that this is the thing you were actually looking for.
Related: Is Psychotherapy Worth It? · Why Coping Strategies Aren’t Enough · When Therapy Doesn’t Work
If this way of thinking resonates, I invite you to get in touch.