I came to psychotherapy because—like everyone who becomes a psychotherapist—I needed it myself.
For years I struggled with significant difficulties that undermined my quality of life. Like many people, I tried to address them on my own—self-help books, meditation, various techniques I picked up along the way. Some of these efforts helped a little. Others made things worse. Mostly I just powered through, which is sustainable until it isn't.
Eventually I found my way to psychoanalysis. I've now been in analysis myself for many years, as part of my training to become a psychoanalyst.
I should clarify that a training analysis is a real analysis. People don't undertake analysis out of academic curiosity. They enter analysis because they have problems they don't think they can resolve any other way.
The process has been genuinely transformative, though it took time. What I gained wasn't a set of techniques or coping strategies. It was a deeper understanding of my own mind—why I did what I did, why certain things affected me the way they did, what I actually wanted beneath the surface noise. That kind of understanding changes you from the inside. It doesn't wear off.
But I also know what the hard parts feel like. I know what it's like to dread a session because of what might come up. To feel ashamed of something you haven't told anyone. To sit with feelings of helplessness, or despair, or worse. To wonder, sometimes for years, if it's worth it, or if anything will ever change. When clients go through those moments, I'm not observing from a distance. I've been in that chair.
Along the way, I've worked with nine therapists. Two were actually helpful. The rest ranged from ineffective to actively harmful. Those aren't reassuring odds, and they're part of why I wrote what I wrote recently about choosing a therapist. I know firsthand how much damage a bad therapeutic relationship can do, and how hard it can be to recognize one when you're in it.
I also know what genuine help feels like—the experience of finally being understood, of making sense of things that never made sense before, of gradually becoming more yourself.
That's what I try to offer the people I work with. Not because I read about it in a book, but because I've lived it.
Richard Sembera is a Registered Psychotherapist and Training Candidate of the Canadian Institute of Psychoanalysis. He practises in Ottawa and virtually across Ontario. If this resonates, you're welcome to get in touch.