A teenager, caught on the babysitting camera he forgot existed, glances over his shoulder and swaps the ten in his hand for the hundred in your wallet. A small child who can’t yet read the numbers on the bills reaches into the same wallet and takes the hundred, after you told him to take ten. The money is gone either way. Do you feel the same about the two of them?
Of course not. Yet, some therapy currents today will tell you that digging through the origins of your situation doesn’t matter; the “solutions” are the same no matter where the issues that bring you to therapy came from. I know, because I was trained in these approaches. And short, present-focused, problem-oriented therapies have their place, and can help some people, with some goals, sometimes. But in my experience, many people coming to therapy are interested in why or how they themselves think, feel, act in certain ways, or in how or why some patterns keep strangely repeating themselves in our lives — echoes of a song that’s long stopped playing. That’s because just as we feel differently about the teenager and the small child, it matters why we do what we do — what we meant, what we knew, what we could see from where we stood. And if that’s true of a missing hundred dollars, it is true a thousand times over of the patterns we live inside of. In the way I work, we are not hunting solutions first. We are looking for the root — where a pattern began, and why it is still running.
The form is almost embarrassingly simple. You talk — about anything and everything that comes to mind, in whatever order, whatever form. I listen — with a mind trained to understand you rather than to judge you — for what is said, for how it is said, and for what is not. Not the way a good friend listens, kind as that is, but for the pattern under the story. That’s all, and that’s everything. The most subversive idea in the history of my field was not a theory. It was a practice: listening — the wager that a person’s suffering makes sense, and that two people, attending closely enough, will find the sense in it.
Together we learn what needs to be worked through, and we work through it; what deserves to be honored, and what could stand to be challenged — at a pace you set, and in a way that fits how you think and what you can hold at a given moment. Over time we become a team, and build a space where you are deeply understood, and come to understand yourself better — which is what frees you to make new choices, and to grow.
We have somehow forgotten that psychotherapy began as an unhurried process of deep self-exploration. And the culture that shortened novels to posts and documentaries to reels has been shortening therapy too — the way it shortened music itself, from symphonies all the way down to the 34 seconds of Jack Black’s “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” the shortest track ever to chart on the Billboard Hot 100. An amusing, delightful song. Right for its moment. And not a symphony. Surveys keep finding that we still expect real change to take time. As a culture, we still have a felt memory of what therapy can be, even if we’ve forgotten where that memory comes from. Well, some songs really are 34 seconds long, and some of them even belong on the charts. But the experience of “Lava Chicken” can hardly be compared with an evening at the symphony — and it shouldn’t be. The nature is different; the purpose is different.
Why two people? Because much of what moves us is not visible from where we ourselves stand. The tradition I train in calls this the unconscious — which is, unlike what popular media may portray, not a cellar full of intentionally hidden objects. Rather, it’s just everything in us that operates out of view: the assumption formed before we could question it, the feeling sorted before we noticed it arriving, the old answer still running long after the question changed. No medical instrument has ever been able to image it. Scans catch only its traces. And yet, every life runs on it. Even your body, in its own way, runs a lot that’s out of sight: regulating its temperature, its digestion, your sleep cycle — until it’s time to send you a conscious signal to act on: “go to bed”; “feed me”; “where is your jacket?” The mind works with deeper things out of awareness, too. And our unconscious is precisely what we cannot inspect alone — the way we cannot see our own back without a second mirror, held by someone else. That is why I listen not just with my ears, but with a long-established tradition guiding what we notice, and how we notice it.
Not everything out of view is heavy, by the way. Ask anyone who has finally gone through the back of a messy drawer: sometimes what turns up is the thing you stopped looking for years ago — grandma’s beloved necklace, that book of poems that meant so much, the photograph you never imagined you’d see again. People leave sessions carrying treasure more often than you might think.
Change, when it comes, rarely announces itself. Sometimes understanding alone does it: see a pattern clearly enough and the motivation rises on its own — nobody has to assign it, convince you to do anything, nothing to white-knuckle. But more often it comes quietly, so quietly it’s almost comical. One day you notice you simply did the thing a little differently, or a lot differently — and it feels like a fluke, like magic — until you remember the months of self-exploration, of focused attention and intention that built up to this moment. And other days the discovery is that there is nothing to change: your response may fit an impossible situation better than you’d realized. That deserves honoring, not fixing.
Let me be fair to the other kind of help. Brief, single-aim work is real, and sometimes exactly right — I offer a version of it myself, in a separate clinical hypnosis practice, for people who need one specific thing handled soon. Depth work is not better. It is different. Many people come to it after another kind of therapy — often a good one — with the sense that there was more to understand. It is for what survives the quick fixes: the question that outlived its answers, the ache that never quite gave its name, the life that fits like a coat cut one size away from you. It is the long-established practice of looking for — and finding — the psyche in your own psychology.
What people bring
Anxiety, and what lives under it. Low mood that is becoming a way of life. Relationships that keep tangling, or ending the same way. Work that succeeds and does not satisfy. Transitions — a new role, a loss, a beginning that unsettled more than it should have. Grief. And, often, no single complaint at all: a wish to understand oneself more fully.
Depth work also has the research behind it. Psychodynamic therapy has been tested in randomized trials across depression, anxiety, and other common conditions: it works, and it works as well as cognitive-behavioral therapy and the other treatments it is usually compared with (Leichsenring et al., 2023, World Psychiatry). And its benefits tend to last — and even to grow — with time (Shedler, 2010, American Psychologist).
And depth work asks things of you. Time. A real fee. And a harder currency: staying curious about yourself on the days when curiosity comes hard. It is not for everyone, and there is no fault in that. It serves best the people who are less afraid of what they will find when they look inside than of what they will miss out on if they never do — people who suspect they would love to meet the person they were born to become — who have a nagging feeling they could feel more whole, more at peace with themselves, the people around them, and the world if they look deeper, and who intend to keep going until they get there.
All this happens inside a relationship, and the relationship is not the container of the treatment. It is the treatment: the experience, week after week, of being taken seriously by someone whose whole attention is on you. I have spent years learning — and continue to study — what to listen for, and how to put myself in another person’s shoes, so that I come to understand your worries and your triumphs not just in concept, but in my gut. Only another person can give you that: the experience of being witnessed, understood, accepted. It is what makes it possible to understand your own life differently — and then to experience it differently, and, rarer still, to experience yourself differently. I stake real hours of my one life on our work. So do you. That is the cost, and that is the gift.
We go at your pace, and we work on what you bring. Some people arrive with a goal they can name; some with a goal they can only feel, like the haze at the edge of a photo. Both are fine. Both are the work. We travel together until the words get clearer — and then, if you want, beyond.