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It takes time to discern whether distress comes from within, from context, or both.

You don’t have to give up your experience to make sense of it.

Trust what feels true enough to register—not just what is being framed.

This post is the final in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You? and Part 2 here: When Therapy Explains Before It Understands

When difference is treated as a problem to fix

There also seemed to be an implicit assumption about what therapy was meant to do in that context.

Implicit in what the therapist said is a model suggesting that, “If you stop seeing yourself as different, you’ll suffer less.”

If the environment is taken as given—if the social world is assumed to be broadly fine—then therapy easily becomes about self-adjustment: trying to feel more at ease, to fit more smoothly, to reduce friction. Within that frame, discomfort is likely to be located within the individual.

But if the difficulty is, at least in part, about a real mismatch between the person and their environment, the question starts to shift. It becomes less about how to adjust, and more about recognising what does not fit—and what it might mean to respond to that differently.

When the environment is the thing........

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