“The goal of psychotherapy, all turf-battles aside, is to rattle our patient’s certitude about his conclusions.”
—Mary Jo Peebles, When Psychotherapy Feels Stuck
As I described in my essay How Skilled Psychotherapists Really Listen, skilled psychotherapists help patients move from the general to the specific and from the abstract to the personal. We encounter resistance along the way, which itself becomes the focus of our attention and curiosity. The language of curiosity sounds like this:
Tell me what you mean
Can you give me an example
What more comes to mind
Say more
I notice you didn’t mention…
Something makes it hard to talk about this
Perhaps there’s a reason you left that out
I noticed you looked sad when you said…
Perhaps it’s easier to focus on this instead of…
Can you put words to those tears
I notice we quickly got away from the topic of…
Help me connect the dots
These comments are made in a spirit of non-judgmental curiosity, intended to invite the patient to be curious with us, without blame or shame.
They help create space for the patient to notice, attend to, and begin to put words to areas of experience that were previously unknown or unacknowledged.
This approach to psychotherapy takes account of unconscious mental life: we do not fully know our own hearts and minds, there are multiple layers of experience, and emotional life is complex and often contradictory.
We do not fully know our own hearts and minds, there are multiple layers of experience, and emotional life is complex and often contradictory.
As conscious awareness expands to encompass and integrate more layers of our experience, we become more self-aware and more whole.
The therapeutic stance of finding out together is very different from providing tips, tools, hacks, worksheets, advice, or solutions. The therapist’s job is not to have answers, but to help patients know themselves in ways that allow them to find their own.
The therapist’s job is not to have answers, but to help patients know themselves in ways that allow them to find their own.
It is also very different from reflexively affirming or validating what’s on the surface, before we could possibly understand what we’re validating. Premature validation can collude with defenses and short-circuit exploration of what lies beneath. Automatic validation is the stock in trade of “therapy culture,” which is not psychotherapy and is often at cross-purposes with it.
The starting point of in-depth psychotherapy is recognizing that there is more than meets the eye and working to develop a relationship in which patient and therapist can explore it together.
Related Essays
How to Choose a Psychotherapist: A Guide to Recognizing Competence (September 11, 2025)
Getting Started in Psychotherapy: A Guide for Patients (and Their Therapists (September 3, 2025)
Why Therapists Shouldn’t Ask “How Did That Feel?” (November 10, 2025)
How “Just Talking” Helps (September 8, 2025)
15 Therapist Green Flags (December 15, 2025)
For Paid Subscribers
Eavesdropping on a Psychotherapy Session (May 11, 2026)
That Was Then, This Is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (March 30, 2026)
More essays, interviews, clips, and reflections at my Linktree.
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