I’m Wayne and I have been learning and practicing psychotherapy since 2008. I believe psychotherapy maybe works best when it is a collaboration between you and I where we could speak honestly about what we are experiencing together while talking about the most important things for you that might also be very difficult, if not seemingly impossible, to talk about. In other words, maybe therapy could try to offer a safer opportunity to talk about unsafe things. But I don’t think a therapist can, nor should, determine when or if this happens at all. It should be up to you, and maybe over our time together, you’ll be able to better make that determination.

A client very honestly asked how he would know if therapy is right for him or if I will be the right fit? Those are great questions, and I really don’t know. But my best guess is maybe this. If therapy isn’t going well and I’m not a good fit for you, you’ll probably not want to continue. But sometimes, if therapy seems like it has the potential to help and I may be a good fit, you’ll probably also not want to continue…but for different reasons.

The American/British poet and essayist, T. S. Eliot, said “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” If so, maybe truth is challenging, if not downright terrifying, to face for all of us. I think we can be healed, and left feeling annihilated, by it all at once. 20^th century psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion, suggested that mental health is the ability to face truth, and in particular, emotional truth.

Even so, I don’t think therapy always has to be this heavy either. It can remain light, playful, gentle, and supportive. I think it should be your choice. Maybe good psychotherapy, no matter the approach or theoretical underpinning, all have at least one thing in common – you’re free! I have learned, time and again, to not over-direct the degree/depth to which we go. Again, it has to be your choice and yours alone! Given that idea, this is also why it’s difficult to even estimate how long therapy should take.

Some clients have therefore wondered, “if you and I don’t know how long therapy will take, that means it could potentially go on forever. Is there another way to tell if therapy could be working?” I also don’t know all the indicators, but maybe one such heuristic is this. I don’t think it comes down to merely whether you like your therapist or if you leave sessions feeling good/better. While those are very important aspects, no doubt, I think maybe the best measure for which to gauge the course and potential of a psychotherapy is whether the problem you came for is moving and changing. Should this be the case, you could still like your therapist, but you could very well leave some sessions feeling less than good. While this is not intentional, sometimes a problem can get a little worse before it gets better. Maybe just like how physical therapy can put us through a painful rehabilitation period for our bodies to recover, psychotherapy could require us to strengthen our courage before our psyches can heal and grow.

In my experience, as people find a sufficiently safe and supportive relationship for their personal growth to occur, they could begin to talk about what otherwise may remain impossible to express. In doing so, there is sometimes a kind of fundamental shift within the person speaking. From my observations, a person might begin to think about their mental health challenges more in terms of “What happened to me?” And less as “What’s wrong with me?” If this organically happens, one may become more able to access greater self-compassion, self-understanding, and perhaps even arrive at their own solutions for their difficulties. I think, and hope, that is one of the potential benefits of effective psychotherapy. As my mentor and close friend, Jeff, puts it: “I think psychotherapy is what helps you believe in yourself…”