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Therapists may rely on interpretive frameworks that do not fully capture a client's experience.

A good therapeutic process helps clarify experience rather than override it.

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You?

In the first post in this series, I described an experience from early therapy that left me questioning not just what I felt, but whether what I felt was real at all.

More than a decade later, having worked in this field—and more importantly, having met people with whom I genuinely resonate—I can now see that the experience I had at the time was not imagined. The difference I felt then wasn’t an illusion, and it wasn’t simply in my mind. It felt real, and so did the mismatch.

I can now also see more clearly why that therapist might have understood me. It wasn’t that the experience itself was inaccurate, but how it was taken up and interpreted in the session.

When discomfort is read as defence

First, therapists can rely, unconsciously, on familiar interpretive patterns.

Experiences of feeling different, not fitting in, and........

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