Psychotherapy

“The purpose of psychotherapy is to set people free.”

— Rollo May

As a psychotherapist myself, I may be biased - but psychotherapy is one of the most profound and worthwhile healing pursuits available to us. It provides the containing space within which we are able to explore the deepest and darkest parts of ourselves, in the presence of a trained and (hopefully) wise and compassionate individual, who listens to understand not just to respond. Deep within our innately social neurobiology exists several mechanisms of healing that occur within the therapeutic relationship. In the short-term, we are able to ‘co-regulate’ each other and our emotions. If we are talking through something distressing in therapy and begin to become overwhelmed with emotion, when we see that the therapist is remaining calm and curious instead of panicked and fearful, we slowly begin to introject this into our way of being. We ‘unlearn’ ways of responding to and experiencing ourselves and our emotions through the patient, consistent, and compassionate ‘attending to’ that a therapist offers us during our sessions. 

Longer-term, as we begin to process and uncover deeper parts of ourselves that we’ve long locked away, we discover that shame - the emotion that “corrodes the very part of us that believes we are capable of change” according to Brené Brown - “cannot survive being spoken. It cannot tolerate having words wrapped around it.” Shame can only exist in the shadows. When it is displayed openly against the healing light of psychotherapy, it loses its power over us, and slowly begins to fade away. “The act of revealing oneself fully to another and still being accepted,” says existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, “may be the major vehicle of therapeutic help.” There’s much talk and debate around different schools of psychotherapeutic training. CBT, DBT, psychodynamic, client-centered, somatic, Gestalt, IFS - but tying them all together is the depth of human connection that elicits such powerful means for change within us. “My professional rosary”, says Irvin Yalom again - “It’s the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals, the relationship that heals.”

Loneliness isn’t a measure of how many people surround us, it’s a metric of how well we feel understood.  This is why we can feel lonely at a crowded party, or even within a relationship. And so much of modern human communication isn’t about understanding what’s being said by the other, it is simply waiting for our turn to start talking. This leaves us feeling isolated and misunderstood - wading around in the relational shallows for much of our lives. Psychotherapy, however, provides the antithetical experience to this modern lack of relational and conversational depth, listening not just in order to respond, but truly listening to understand. “We think we listen,” says Carl Rogers, “but very rarely do we listen with real understanding, true empathy. Yet listening, of this very special kind, is one of the most potent forces for change that I know.” Everyone wants to feel understood. Underneath most of the melodrama within a relationship, if you follow it all the way down, lies the nugget of truth - ‘I feel like you don’t understand me’. It is a painful and isolating reality to go toe to toe with, so we often project that feeling into external grievances that are seemingly easier to digest. There’s an old cliché in couples therapy - if a couple keeps arguing about the dishes, it’s not about the dishes. A good psychotherapist remains always in the curious and open relational position, the ‘not knowing’ stance. This allows the therapist to actively listen, and truly seek understanding, free from the twin burdens of assumption and judgement. This is where we begin to open up, allow ourselves to be seen, and enter into a new level of relational depth. 

Psychotherapy isn’t just about listening and never responding, however. It is also not about getting answers either, troubling as that may be. I like to see it as the “discipline of asking beautiful questions” as poet David Whyte puts it. “A beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind,” he says, “and so the ability to ask beautiful questions, often in very un-beautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life.” It’s natural to go into therapy hoping for answers. ‘Why do I feel this way?’, ‘what’s wrong with me?’, ‘how do I start to feel better?’ - we may rightly ask. But rather than getting the answers to these questions, we learn in therapy simply to ask better questions. “A beautiful question,” says David Whyte again, “starts to shape your identity as much as by asking, as it does by having it answered.” Sure, ‘coping strategies’ are useful, but therapy based around giving the client answers, giving the client ‘tips and tricks’ for dealing with their mental afflictions, remains limited in scope and limited in potential. I believe this dichotomy is best summed up in two words. Therapy that gives you answers may indeed be ‘helpful’, but the right question, at the right time, said in the right way, can be deeply, deeply ‘healing’, even if it might not feel that way initially.  

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke calls this ‘living the question’, it applies to more than just therapy, of course, but psychotherapy gives us the perfect microcosm to begin exploring these beautiful questions, and letting the pursuit of better questions replace the goal of finding definitive answers. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart,” says Rilke, “and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”