Esther Perel Thinks All This Amateur Therapy-Speak Is Just Making Us Lonelier

What counts, though, isn’t that the therapist has developed an accurate diagnosis but that the patient is allowed to recognize it for themselves, by a process of carefully designed prompts, in a way that they can absorb without fear, in their own time. That is why therapists tend to proceed via gentle questions—“I wonder how it felt when Mom went a

Even without this social signaling, the lessons we learn inside of therapy favor a sort of hyperindividualistic self-sufficiency that encourages clients to prioritize personal growth over communal welfare or institutional change

We are back to an all-too-familiar theme: that most psychological problems arise because people have not been empathetically cherished and reliably loved when it really mattered, and that if one could be granted one wish to improve the internal well-being of humanity, then it would be, with a wave of a magic wand, to do away with shame.

The therapist Terry Real described our well-worn behaviors as “our internalized family of origin. It’s our repertoire of relational themes.” People don’t have to tell you their stories with words because they always act them out for you. Often they project negative expectations onto the therapist, but if the therapist doesn’t meet those negative ex

We would at such points be advised to lean on a technique pioneered and much favored by psychotherapy known as “reflective listening.” The theory behind it is that an important share of our most serious problems have no solutions in any practical sense. There are simply no “answers” to losing lots of money, being excluded from a social circle, or f

The essence of psychotherapy lies in a willingness to get systematically interested in why we constantly respond in the bizarre and uncalled-for ways we exhibit. It asks by what sequence of formative experiences an otherwise perfectly decent and intelligent person could be led to sob on the floor or threaten to jump out of the window after an argum