What is and isn’t Psychotherapy?

Psychotherapy is not an intellectual game of looking for reasons and collecting information from the past, but a process where you experience your unique inner life. A few years ago, a patient asked me, "Why can't I use self-help books instead of psychotherapy?" A colleague who came to me for supervision not long ago asked me worriedly, "My patients can use ChatGPT to find more comprehensive answers than I can provide; why do they come to me for psychotherapy?" Psychotherapy is not an information-gathering process that only takes place in the head or a deduction game of looking for clues from the past for current behavior, just like a patient is not cured because they know what caused the pain in their foot, or a traveler will not look at the map, learn the geography, and say that they have completed the journey. Psychotherapy is not about acquiring and accumulating knowledge; it is a process where you and I walk one step after another to help you explore, experience, and make sense of your unique internal, emotional life.

Psychotherapy is not about me providing you with solutions to your problems but about me helping you understand and work on your emotional patterns that make your life more difficult and helping you develop the ability to self-reflect. A patient recently told me in a heated moment, "If you don't tell me what to do, then what are you, an emotional trash can?" The patient felt I needed to tell them what they should do to solve their problem, or I was completely passive and worthless. I answered, "No, I am a guide to your psyche. After having navigated many complex psychological landscapes, I can help you explore your inner world, invisible and intangible, and find a way out of your inner struggles and seemingly uncontrollable emotions. You will gradually take in my ability as yours and learn to find the way out yourself." It is better to teach a person how to fish than to give them a fish. Although telling you what to do can satisfy you in the short term, this is limited. I want to help you develop a curiosity about your emotional experience and cultivate the capacity to understand your emotions. Even after our treatment ends, you can use this capacity to see the nature of your emotional ups and downs and understand ​​how to respond to yourself and solve the problems in your life effectively.

Psychotherapy is about change, which comes from understanding, respecting, and caring for oneself rather than criticizing or feeling bad about oneself. I sometimes hear patients say, "If I don't criticize myself or tell myself what I did was wrong or I'm terrible, how can I change?" Being criticized and blamed by parents, being told, or feeling we're terrible is a common childhood experience for many of us. It creates a strong belief that we can only motivate ourselves through lecturing, contempt, and harsh treatment. Still, we only feel worse after being criticized and blamed. This attitude cannot help us change in the long run but will reinforce the sense of inferiority, insecurity about ourselves, and inability to trust others— this is precisely what we want to change in many cases. You may have never had the experience of being understood, respected, and cared for, so it's difficult for you to imagine a positive attitude towards yourself. Yet, a therapeutic relationship is based on understanding, acceptance, warmth, respect, care, and compassion. Just like a hungry person can only stop feeling famished after a full meal, you can gradually cultivate a positive attitude toward yourself by experiencing yourself differently and positively in a therapeutic relationship.