Therapy is about healing yourself, not changing the world or avoiding pain
There is a well-known Buddhist teaching called the Parable of the Two Arrows.
The first arrow represents the unavoidable pain of being human—loss, illness, disappointment, aging, and misfortune. No one escapes it.
The second arrow is optional: it is the suffering we add through our reactions to pain— excessive worry, resentment, rumination, avoidance of grief, emotional shutdown, addictive numbing behaviors, reactive conflict, self-criticism, or attempts to control what cannot be controlled. They are also known as outdated psychological defenses. While we cannot always prevent the first arrow, the second arrow is where most long-term suffering comes from; these strategies may bring short-term relief, but they reliably create more suffering over time, both internally and in relationships.
In my view, therapy is not about removing the first arrow. It is about learning to stop shooting ourselves with the second one.
This matters because people sometimes seek therapy hoping for relief without real change—hoping a feeling will disappear, a partner will change, or life will become easier without requiring deeper internal work. But what happens to us, and what other people choose to do, largely falls outside our control. Therapists can offer compassion in the face of these realities, but we cannot change them.
What therapy can change is how you respond.
This is especially clear in intimate relationships. Your reactivity is a second arrow to yourself and a first arrow to your partner; their reactivity is a second arrow to them and a first arrow to you. Therapy focuses on the only place real leverage exists: your own awareness, regulation, and patterns of response.
It’s important to identify the situations in your life that feel difficult—a relationship conflict, a work challenge, an unexpected setback—but not simply to vent for relief. I will ask you to talk about your emotional pain, not as something to get rid of, but as something to be heard. Only when its message about what needs to change has been received, can it subside in a lasting way. The pain might be trying to tell you ways to relate differently to a situation, to respond more skillfully, to shift your perspective, or even to simply soften and stop struggling against what is.
Therapy is fundamentally an inward process. The work begins by distinguishing what is within your control from what is not, and then deciding whether you are willing to invest energy in changing yourself rather than waiting for circumstances or other people to change. An overfocus on external conditions is itself a second arrow—often easier than the slow work of building a better life over time.
We do not need an absence of first arrows to live well. We can bear life’s unavoidable pain. What doesn’t work in the long run is resistance—the refusal to feel, accept, and respond skillfully to what is already here. Therapy is largely about reducing this resistance. As resistance decreases, peace, clarity, and vitality increase, even in the presence of difficulty.
Therapy is not merely symptom management. It is a transformative—and often spiritual—endeavor.
Some paradoxical and good news is that, when we focus on changing ourselves in how we respond and being okay on the inside even when things aren’t great externally, that is when, over time, outside circumstances tend to improve.
Much of our outside conditions are a cumulative result of how we behave, which is downstream from how we think and feel. Relationships, careers, health, and other areas of life usually improve as we focus on changing ourselves for the better. But those improvements and external stability are byproducts of inner work, and are not guarantees. There can sometimes be a delay of months or years between a significant change we make on the inside, and significant improvements on the outside, because life circumstances generally shift from consistent new behavior over time. Pursuing those outcomes directly, while avoiding inner change, is frequently the very pattern that brings people to therapy in the first place.
Not everyone is ready for this work. Some people need more time discovering that trying to eliminate life’s pain only creates more suffering. When that insight lands, therapy can be a powerful catalyst for change.
I provide a balance of expertise and epistemological humility
I try to approach my work with what in Zen is called a “beginner’s mind”: a stance of curiosity, openness, and ongoing reassessment, even as I come to know a client well over time. People are complex and continually discovering themselves, and new information often emerges months or years into the work as experiences are re-understood, memories reorganized, or previously unseen patterns come into view.
At the same time, I do not approach therapy as a blank slate. I bring years of training, clinical experience, and pattern recognition to the work, and I use that expertise to offer direction, perspective, and hypotheses about what may be happening and what might be helpful. Maintaining a beginner’s mind does not mean withholding important feedback or guidance; it means holding both humility and confidence at once—using experience to orient the work while remaining open to being revised by what actually unfolds.
As relationships deepen, it can be tempting for therapists and clients alike to become attached to particular explanations, diagnoses, frameworks, or narratives. These models can be useful for a time, but none fully captures the complexity of a living person, and all eventually become incomplete. When we hold any single framework too tightly, we risk seeing less rather than more, and relating primarily through concepts rather than the infinite texture of experience.
My aim is to thoroughly understand the problems that bring clients to therapy and create helpful solutions, while recognizing that most meaningful struggles are layered and not reducible to simple formulations. Good therapy requires an ongoing balance between clear, experience-based guidance and deeper, open-ended understanding—between using what is known and staying receptive to what has not yet been discovered.
Growth requires a willingness to engage discomfort and emotional depth
“Life is ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows—neither can be refused without losing the other.”
– Zen Buddhist teaching
One of my core assumptions about therapy (and about life) is that meaningful change requires a willingness to turn toward emotional pain rather than move away from it. Most people seek therapy because something hurts—internally, relationally, or both—and the work necessarily involves making contact with that pain in a more conscious, courageous way.
Avoiding, suppressing, or filtering out difficult emotions may feel stabilizing in the short term, but over time it tends to limit growth, intimacy, and vitality. Emotional pain is not a sign that something is going wrong in therapy; more often, it is a sign that something important is being touched.
A common underlying root-cause of all kinds of therapy-related problems is “emotional numbing”, or turning away from painful experience. This causes issues for all kinds of reasons. For one thing, if we numb our painful emotions, we also cut ourselves off from our positive feelings, including our joy and happiness. But contact with our challenging emotions is also vital for a variety of functions. Awareness of our full spectrum of emotion provides us with intuition, guides decision-making, supports communication and boundaries, deepens relationships, and allows people to engage life with greater clarity, flexibility, and meaning. So a key underlying goal with my clients is to practice turning toward their emotional experience, including uncomfortable emotions. This doesn’t mean becoming overwhelmed or swept away by feeling, but rather learning to be with or “hold” feelings non-reactively while they run their course and then pass. This is a skill that takes practice to develop, and it’s a central goal of the work I do, because it remedies so much suffering.
This does not mean you must express emotions in any particular way, or that feeling your emotions should be easy (for many people it is not). You do not need to cry, be dramatic, or feel what someone else feels. What is essential is openness: a willingness to identify what you do feel (even if it is subtle, confusing, or unfamiliar), to talk about it honestly, and to remain engaged in the midst of challenging feelings.
When someone feels reluctant, guarded, or hesitant, my first response is curiosity: slowing down, understanding what feels threatening or overwhelming, and exploring what the resistance may be protecting. Resistance makes sense, especially when emotional openness has not felt safe in the past. At the same time, therapy cannot be organized around ongoing avoidance. If the work repeatedly stops at the edge of emotional contact and stays there, progress is limited. A key aspect of my role is to notice when there is emotional avoidance, and to steer us toward your deeper and more authentic experience.
I bring experience and direction to therapy, and I will sometimes guide clients toward areas that are difficult precisely because I believe they matter. While sometimes pragmatic techniques and surface-level solutions are useful, the core of my therapy revolves around deeper engagement and exploring root causes of problems, including core wounds, limiting beliefs, emotional patterns, and protective strategies that once helped but now interfere with growth and connection.
When willingness to do that is present, therapy can be meaningful, and transformative. When it isn’t, a different approach—or a different time—may be a better fit.
Healing and change take time and effort
People usually understand that healing a physical illness takes time. Some conditions like a cold resolve quickly with a little rest. But others require months or years of sustained lifestyle changes before the body gradually returns to balance.
Psychological healing tends to work the same way.
A therapist can understand your experience, offer possible explanations and new perspectives, and make recommendations for behavior change. But changing longstanding habits and patterns also takes dedicated practice of trying new things over time.
By adulthood, we’ve been unconsciously practicing certain ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating for many years—often since early childhood, when we were most impressionable and least able to question what we absorbed automatically. Recognizing that a defense or protective strategy no longer serves us is an important step, but it is generally a gradual process of trial and error to move that understanding from insight in our head to solid awareness in our whole being. You have to go from the therapy session back into your life and implement the new insight, and it takes time and many attempts for the deeper, emotional, and unconscious parts of you to master the change you desire.
This short poem, “Autobiography in Five Short Chapters” captures it well. Even after we know what we are doing unskillfully, we still usually “fall in the same hole” at least a few more times before walking around it. And with smaller, micro-habits, such as excessive worry or overly negative thinking, it might take practicing every day for years to gradually change your mind on a fundamental level. The good news is that those changes are well worth the effort, because they will significantly improve your life increasingly over time, and that momentum will grow. What is important to realize, however, is that no one can do this work for you, including me. I can walk with you and remind you of what you need to do, and offer corrective feedback as you return to session and tell me how it went. I can celebrate with you when you have success, and I can empathize with your discouragement when it doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped. But only you can put in the work and make it happen.
There are times when therapy can be brief. Occasionally a small, well-defined issue can be resolved in just a few sessions, especially with younger adults who haven’t practiced outdated habits for as long (I used to work with exclusively with university students). But even those clients often eventually find themselves returning to therapy or some other path of healing later—wanting to go deeper, understand long-standing patterns that took form very early before they can remember, and address emotional reactions that feel automatic and out of proportion to the present moment.
Movies sometimes portray healing as a single breakthrough moment—one emotional release that permanently changes everything. I’m thinking of the therapist Sean in the movie Good Will Hunting, softly telling Will, “it’s not your fault”, and Will suddenly bursting into tears on the other side of a wall of anger. While those moments can be real, powerful, and meaningful, they are rarely the end of the story. I imagine that Will and his girlfriend Skylar had plenty of bumps along the road later, but hopefully those gradually smoothed out over time as they brought awareness, patience, and courage to their feelings, needs, and vulnerabilities. Of course, Hollywood never made that sequel!
The most lasting results don’t come from quick fixes. They come from consistent attention and dedication to break old habits rather than unconsciously take the easy path of automatic practiced behavior and thinking. My role as your therapist would be to give you whatever guidance and encouragement that I can as you do that work, to help you stay on track.
It’s important to spend some time examining and learning from your past
Part of the work I do with nearly every client involves spending some time looking at the past, including childhood and adolescent conditioning, as well as important formative experiences in adulthood.
Our “family of origin” is where much of our personality, including our ingrained emotional and relational patterns, are developed.
Those patterns, which operate unconsciously to a high degree, are a big part of what people need and want to change in therapy. In order to change them, an important first step is to identify them and make them conscious. It’s difficult to change a behavior or emotional pattern to the extent that we can’t see it, don’t understand it, or believe on an unconscious level that we still need it.
There are levels to that awareness. You might begin our work already knowing about certain tendencies that you have, but it might be less clear why and how they formed, what ways they have served you, and when they are most active. Each of these questions can be explored at different levels of depth, and they often unfold gradually.
Understanding our histories as adults, particularly emotional and meaningful events, is important as well. In both individual and couples work, this can include looking at unresolved conflicts with loved ones, betrayals and other painful relational ruptures, periods of addiction, major losses or grief, prolonged periods of high stress, or crises of identity.
We’re more impressionable the younger we are, but significant events as adults can also shape us in lasting ways. They can affect how we protect ourselves, express needs, manage emotions, and seek connection and set boundaries in relationships.
Wounds and defenses
All of us carry some combination of wounds and defenses.
Defenses—sometimes called survival skills or adaptive strategies—developed for good reasons. They helped you cope with circumstances that were too overwhelming, unpredictable, or emotionally unsupported at the time. The difficulty is that many of these strategies continue operating long after they are needed, shaping adult relationships in ways that no longer serve you.
To loosen, update, or modify defenses, it is often necessary to understand the wounds they originally formed around.
Early relational wounds might include abandonment or inconsistent care, emotional invalidation, conditional or performance-based love, parentification, boundary violations, chronic criticism or shame, growing up in volatile or unpredictable environments, lack of emotional attunement, suppression of the authentic self, or significant loss or change without adequate emotional support.
Common defenses that develop in response include people-pleasing, perfectionism, emotional numbing or dissociation, intellectualizing feelings, avoidance or withdrawal, hyper-independence, control or micromanaging, humor or sarcasm as deflection, self-criticism, projection or blame-shifting, and overfunctioning or caretaking.
Why your past matters
Understanding how our past shapes us doesn’t typically immediately shift our behavior, but it does help open our minds to the possibility that we can leave behind the status quo and start living differently, which takes courage, since the status quo has helped us survive so far.
For couples, seeing a partner’s most challenging behaviors as protective strategies, rather than personal attacks or neglect, can reduce reactivity and increase empathy as well as accountability on both sides.
Looking back into the past is not always comfortable. At times it can feel unsettling or emotionally tiring in the short term. But my belief is that, over the long run, the cumulative strain of carrying unexplored wounds and outdated defenses over long periods of time is far more erosive and damaging to our success, relationships, and happiness. Unhealed wounds and their accompanying defenses continue to influence us in persistent ways.
An analogy is having the correct medical procedure or surgery. It is painful and a setback in the short term, but it leads to the removal of some toxic hindrance that, once gone, allows you to live with more freedom and health.
Part of the work
I consider examining the past an important tool—one of many. How frequently I use that tool varies from client to client, but it’s important if you choose to work with me, that it isn’t off limits. My belief is that avoiding our meaningful history preserves confusion, reduces self-awareness, and leads to discontentment and less emotional safety in close relationships.
You don’t need to be eager to do this work. But some openness to it matters. When fewer tools are off the table, therapy has more room to be effective.
My style is interactional and involves mutual openness to feedback
I believe effective therapy depends on an ongoing, honest exchange of feedback in both directions. That includes talking about what feels helpful, what doesn’t, and monitoring that we stay aligned toward the same goals.
Validation and support are important. Understanding you and your experience helps build trust and safety, which is part of the foundation for deeper work.
At the same time, validation alone is rarely sufficient for meaningful change. Growth also requires challenge, new perspectives, and a willingness to look at patterns that may feel familiar or justified but aren’t serving you well.
I take time to understand your experience not so I can remain neutral or passive, but so that my responses are relevant, accurate, and useful.
A central part of what I offer as a therapist is my perspective on patterns and dynamics that often need changing: what I notice in your thinking, emotional responses, communication style, and behavior.
If therapy becomes primarily a place to vent or tell the story of the week without receiving meaningful feedback from me, then it becomes mostly a rehearsal of the status quo rather than introducing something new or driving real change.
For you to get the most out of our time, I need to be able to engage with you as a real person—not just a listener, but someone who will reflect, question, and interrupt when necessary, ideally at moments when doing so can help shift a pattern. If that kind of feedback is experienced too frequently as criticism rather than help, then I can’t be fully honest and the benefit of the time together becomes limited.
This doesn’t mean that I expect automatic agreement with everything I say. I don’t expect blind acceptance, and thoughtful disagreement is welcome. What matters is mutual openness: a willingness to genuinely consider each other’s perspectives and explore them together.
In couples work especially, I tend to be more active and direct, particularly when old patterns can lead partners to hurt each other in real time. My aim is not to take sides or assign blame, but to interrupt unproductive cycles and help create safer, more constructive interactions.
My approach isn’t for everyone. Some people prefer a style of therapy that is basically listening and validating — a place to just “get it out” to an attentive ear. That can be a good fit for certain goals or stages of life. My style is more relational, engaged, authentic, and direct. I do my best work with clients who want a genuine back-and-forth with me and who are open to feedback as a well-intentioned attempt to help them grow, change, and improve their relationships.
Therapy is a restoration of authenticity
Authenticity has been defined as living in alignment with our values and identity across time and contexts. It is making choices that reflect our gut feelings and who we are, even in the face of societal pressures to conform.
Genuineness is being sincere and honest in how we show up in relationship, without pretense or hidden agendas.
And finally, congruence means that our internal thoughts and feelings match our outward words and nonverbal behavior. Congruence puts us at ease, and incongruence elicits mistrust.
These three overlapping and interrelated concepts all point to the condition of being in touch with ourselves, our feelings, and our bodies, and carrying that awareness into our lives and relationships. This ability is directly related to the quality of our lives and well-being, and so it’s a central focus of therapy for most clients.
The attachment-authenticity trade-off
Humans and other mammals have the innate survival need of attachment: to belong and be cared for by family or a society. No mammal can survive infancy without this, and humans are especially dependent on one another for survival, not only in childhood but throughout our lives.
But we also have the need to be in touch with ourselves and our own experience — to be authentic. Authenticity informs us about the reality of the world around us. Authenticity is our vital, inner guidance. This need is also essential for our survival.
What happens in childhood is that we all face a conflict, or trade-off, between these two needs — attachment and authenticity. Sometimes that conflict is slight and sometimes it’s extreme. No family or culture is going to perfectly support our authenticity, and sometimes we sense as children that we need to dramatically suppress our true selves in order to maintain our attachment to our parents and other caregivers.
So we learn, implicitly and innately, how to ignore our gut feelings, to numb our emotions, and deny our needs. We mold our behavior and our experience around our parents or other survival figures.
We give up our connection with ourselves in order to preserve our connection with others. We become afraid to be ourselves because we associate being ourselves with rejection.
Rather than authenticity, we practice inauthenticity, in order to survive childhood. Then, we continue inauthenticity into adulthood.
Inauthenticity is a core, root cause of all kinds of physical and mental illness, emotional and social isolation, and relationship disconnection.
A key reason that brings adults to therapy is to reverse their childhood prioritization of attachment and authenticity. They have come to find that it has become more painful to be disconnected from themselves than it is to be disconnected with others, and so they want to place being in touch with themselves first, above all else.
Therapy reconnects you with yourself
The original wound of rejection that creates our inauthenticity happens in relationship — relationships in which it was not possible to be authentic and also be connected.
The good news is that healthy relationships, in which we can be connected with ourselves and the other person, contain the medicine that can heal the disconnection with ourselves.
There are several essential ways that good therapy can be one such relationship.
Firstly there is the relationship between you and I. You can take more risk being authentic — sharing your actual, edgy, controversial thoughts and feelings — than you can be with most other people. What you share is legally protected by confidentiality, and my outsider position with respect to your social and family life situations helps me be objective and more accepting. I also have extensive personal and professional experience practicing acceptance of challenging emotions and thoughts. The ability to “allow what is” to be spoken and felt, without turning away from it, is both a lifelong practice and crucial attribute of a good therapist.
Being authentic is also incentivized in therapy because I can only help with a problem to the degree that you are willing to open up and talk to me about it.
Therapy sessions are also a place where I can model authenticity myself by “being real”, sharing my genuine feedback with you — feedback that can be exceedingly rare in everyday life. I aim to be real, engaged, and appropriately transparent with clients, rather than adopting an artificial or overly neutral or professional persona.
Much of what happens in therapy is processing relationships that are currently important to you in your life. By discussing those situations in session, you get more in touch with what you truly feel about them on a deeper level. You can then decide to what extent you want to share those authentic feelings and thoughts with those significant people. Generally, going to therapy helps people bring greater authenticity, and thus deeper connection, into their relationships. But even simply knowing yourself more intimately is healing.
Because of this, I see authenticity, genuineness, and congruence as therapy goals always operating at least in the background.