What Is a Therapist Actually For?

People sometimes come to therapy hoping that the therapist will know what to do. I understand that.

When we are lost, frightened, stuck or overwhelmed, there is something very appealing about finding somebody who understands the territory and asking them to show us the way out.

And therapists do know things. We have theories, training, experience and skills. We may recognise patterns. We may notice things that are difficult to notice from inside an experience.

But I don’t believe my job is to know somebody else’s life better than they do.

Increasingly, I think a large part of my job is helping people to hear themselves.

That sounds simple.

It isn’t.

Many of us have spent years learning not to hear ourselves.

We have learned to override discomfort because other people need something from us. We have learned that anger is unacceptable, sadness is inconvenient, excitement is embarrassing, uncertainty means weakness.

We have learned to explain ourselves away.

Something inside says no, while another part immediately supplies seventeen excellent reasons why we should say yes.

Something hurts, and we tell ourselves we’re being ridiculous.

We want something, and before we’ve even properly felt the wanting, we’re explaining why we can’t have it.

Sometimes a client will tell me something important and then immediately argue against themselves.

I might find myself saying, “Can we stay with the thing you said just before that?”

Because sometimes that small, tentative thing is where the life is.

Sometimes I am a shepherd

I sometimes think of my work as a little like shepherding.

A shepherd doesn’t create the sheep.

They don’t decide what a sheep ought to become.

Shamelessly AI image of me as a shepherd!

They pay attention. They notice where something is wandering. They help something get unstuck. They protect. They guide. They know something about the landscape.

But the life being lived isn’t theirs.

That matters enormously to me in therapy.

I don’t want to create people who become increasingly skilled at asking themselves what their therapist would think.

I want the opposite.

Over time, I hope a client becomes increasingly able to recognise:

• Something doesn’t feel right here.

• I need more time.

• I’m angry.

• I’m frightened.

• I actually do know what I want.

• There is something here that I don’t understand yet.

The aim isn’t dependence upon my knowing.

It is a deepening relationship with their own.

Sometimes I am a plumber

This is a considerably less poetic metaphor, but sometimes I think I’m a plumber.

Something isn’t flowing.

We don’t stand at one end of a blocked pipe shouting at the water to try harder! We trust that the water knows how to flow.

Instead we become curious about the blockage.

Perhaps somebody knows perfectly well what they “should” do but cannot actually do it.

Perhaps they understand intellectually that they deserve kindness but experience they maybe kindness as dangerous.

Perhaps every time they approach something that they want, they find themselves mysteriously retreating and they don’t know why.

Perhaps they desperately want intimacy but find they become irritated whenever somebody gets close to them.

These apparent contradictions interest me.

Rather than deciding which side is the “healthy” one and trying to eliminate the other, we can become curious about the whole system.

• What happens inside when we get close to the stuck place?

• What does the body do?

• What thoughts arrive?

• What feels dangerous?

• What is being protected?

Sometimes what looks like resistance begins to make enormous sense when we stop trying to defeat it.

Therapy isn’t always about changing what we find

This is one of the things I value about experiential and embodied approaches such as Focusing and Hakomi.

We can become curious instead of getting corrective.

Instead of immediately asking, “How do I stop doing this?”, we might first ask:

“What is this like?”

Or:

“What happens inside me when I imagine not doing that?”

A tiny change like this can open an entirely different conversation.

Sometimes people have spent their whole lives trying to fix themselves without ever having had the experience of being listened to … including by themselves.

There is something powerful about creating enough space for experience to become clearer before deciding what needs to happen next.

Perhaps good therapy gradually makes the therapist less necessary

I don’t mean that relationships don’t matter. They matter enormously.

Sometimes we need another person to lend us their steadiness while we find ours.

Sometimes another person’s curiosity makes it possible to approach something we have always avoided.

Sometimes being accompanied changes what is possible.

But I hope that something of that gets internalised.

The compassionate curiosity that once came primarily from the therapist begins to arise within the client.

The therapist might once have said:

“There’s something happening in you just now. Shall we give it a moment?”

And eventually the person notices for themselves:

“Hang on. Something just happened in me.”

That moment absolutely delights me!!

Because perhaps that is what I am actually for.

It’s never my job to become the authority on somebody else’s inner world.

My job is to accompany them for a while as they become increasingly able to inhabit it themselves.