Author’s note: I first published this essay 11 months ago, shortly after launching this Substack. Many newer readers have not seen it, so I’m republishing it this week. New essay next week.
“Give sorrow words”
—psychoanalyst William Shakespeare, Macbeth
How will just talking in therapy help me get better?
Words are powerful containers of emotion. The act of putting thoughts and feelings into words transforms them and makes them more manageable.
When we put experience into words, we bring it into the light of day.
Putting words to experience allows it to be processed differently. It can be integrated with other memories and with the whole of who we are.
Words bring our responses increasingly under conscious and voluntary control. This expands freedom and choice when responses were previously automatic or experienced as obligatory.
Words bring our responses increasingly under conscious and voluntary control.
Newfound clarity opens the door to solutions that were previously invisible.
Communicating our pain creates an essential relational connection with another human being—connection around experiences previously carried in isolation and fear.
Connection activates the emotion-regulating functions of secure attachment. Emotional regulation begins as a process for two. Another person’s accurate recognition of our emotional states gives them form and makes them bearable. Repeated experiences of recognition become the building blocks of our capacity to self-regulate.
Emotional regulation begins as a process for two.
Being understood in this way also builds our capacity for authentic empathy and intimacy—making life more meaningful and its inevitable blows more bearable.
This is why talking with a psychotherapist is different from talking to yourself, a chatbot, or a journal. A journal does not look back with recognition. A chatbot cannot speak or respond from shared emotional experience.
To be understood and responded to by another human being is the earliest form of emotion regulation, beginning in infancy and continuing throughout life.
So what begins as the simple act of giving words to pain becomes something larger: a new way of relating to ourselves, others, and the world.
This is why psychotherapy was originally described as “the talking cure.”
“Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
—William Shakespeare
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)
Therapists Say the Relationship Heals. Few Know What It Means. (September 30, 2025)
How Skilled Psychotherapists Really Listen (July 20, 2026)
For Paid Subscribers
This Is Talk Therapy: What Psychotherapy Is and How It Works (July 13, 2026)
Eavesdropping on a Psychotherapy Session (May 11, 2026)
That Was Then, This Is Now: An Introduction to Contemporary Psychodynamic Psychotherapy (March 30, 2026)
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