What is therapy for?

People often ask what I actually do as a psychotherapist. The honest answer is: I help people think and feel more deeply about their lives. Not to hand out advice or offer quick fixes, but to create a space where you can begin to hear yourself more clearly.

That might sound simple, but in a world that’s constantly speeding up — full of noise, pressure, and expectations to “be better” — it can be surprisingly difficult to pause and really notice what’s going on inside. Therapy offers that pause. It’s a place to reflect, feel, and begin to untangle the threads of your inner life.

A friend messaged me recently after a casual chat: Thanks for the chat today, it felt reassuring (How much do I owe you?!) — and it made me smile, because it’s not uncommon. At dinners, parties, or just standing in the kitchen at a gathering, I often find myself, sometimes against my better judgment, stepping into therapist mode. People open up. They share things they haven’t said out loud before. Not because I’m offering solutions, but because they feel safe enough to speak freely.

In therapy, we take that same instinct — the wish to feel seen and understood — and work with it intentionally, over time. It’s not about having a diagnosis or being “in crisis.” Many of the people I work with are thoughtful, intelligent, and outwardly functioning. But they carry a quiet heaviness, a sense that something doesn’t quite fit, or that they’re always working hard just to hold things together. Sometimes they say, “I should be fine… but I’m not.”

What therapy offers isn’t a set of tools or life hacks. It’s a relationship — one that helps you feel more connected to yourself. That might mean exploring early experiences or patterns in how you relate to others. It might mean looking at parts of yourself you'd rather see, or finding the words for feelings that have never quite made sense. There’s no fixed way to do therapy. Some sessions will feel important,  others will feel muddled or frustrating, but it's all part of the process.

My training is in psychodynamic psychotherapy, which means I pay close attention to how the past shows up in the present. But I don’t use theory in a heavy-handed way. What matters is the emotional experience. That said, there are ideas I return to often, like the work of Donald Winnicott — a paediatrician and psychoanalyst who wrote about the “good enough” mother. He famously said that getting it right 30% of the time is enough. Perfection isn’t possible or even desirable. That’s something I hold in mind in therapy and in life.

Sessions are typically weekly, at the same time each week. That regular rhythm matters. It creates a space for your mind that’s consistent, private, and contained — a place where you don’t have to perform, impress, or have it all figured out. You bring whatever’s on your mind, and we see where it goes. It might start with something small — an offhand comment, a dream, or a feeling you can’t quite name — and gradually lead to deeper shifts in how you experience yourself and your relationships.

If you’re reading this and wondering whether therapy is for you, that’s already the beginning of something. You don’t need a clear why or a tidy reason for starting therapy, just a sense that it might be time to stop pushing it all down and start getting curious.