How does therapy work?

Many people first come to therapy when they feel overwhelmed—trapped by painful thoughts, emotions, or repetitive patterns that seem beyond their control. In these moments, it can feel as though something within is working against us, keeping us stuck despite all our efforts to move forward.

You may find yourself asking: Why can’t I change this part of my life, even though it causes me so much pain? How do I keep ending up in this same situation—precisely the one I want to avoid?

Our instinct in these moments is often to seek some distance from our discomfort—to fix it, quiet it, or escape it. But the real work of therapy begins not with escape, but with turning toward the discomfort, and asking what it’s trying to tell us.

Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes, or linger over such painful feelings, or ruminate on the most painful memories? What is at work in our hidden, unconscious selves that compels us to return to what hurts?

These are not rhetorical questions. They mark the beginning of a serious inquiry.

Therapy provides the conditions to stay with these questions long enough for something unexpected to emerge—opening the door to a different kind of knowledge about yourself, and, over time, a different way of encountering the world.

Treating the Symptom as a Clue

The kind of therapy I practice—psychoanalytic psychotherapy—isn’t focused primarily on reducing or managing symptoms. Instead of aiming to suppress your symptoms, we’ll work together to ask better questions about them—uncovering their underlying sources, exploring their hidden logic, and discovering something new about the meaning they have in your life.

Therapy provides a place where you can speak, without reservations, to a unique kind of listener who is attuned to what you’re really trying to say. As you start to speak freely, you’ll find that you almost always end up saying a little more than you intended or realized. Our work will proceed by paying close attention to this something more that keeps showing up in your speech, tracing the patterns and connections that emerge there.

The possibilities for change and growth that this process opens up go far beyond simply “fixing” our symptoms or eliminating something we don’t like about ourselves. Real relief and transformation come not from erasing parts of ourselves, but from learning to listen to ourselves differently—finally agreeing to take all of ourselves, even our symptoms, seriously.