What's the Point of Therapy? | Counselling in Berkhamsted
What’s the Point of Therapy?
Therapy helps you negotiate your selfhood with as much intelligence, awareness and skill as possible, so that your life becomes richer, steadier, and more your own.
Summary of the Main Points:
- Therapy begins with whatever is troubling you and deepens into a wider exploration of the patterns that shape your experience.
- The work involves making the unconscious more conscious so that you gain new flexibility and capacity where you previously felt stuck.
- Therapy increases self-awareness, which in turn expands your sense of choice and helps you live with more understanding and skill in the difficult business of being human.
Why This Question Matters
Many people considering therapy aren’t entirely sure what it’s for.
Is it to fix a problem?
To feel better?
To understand yourself?
The reality is that therapy rarely has one single purpose. It helps different people in different ways. Some imagine that being a person is a kind of disease and that therapy is the cure; others hope therapy will remove anything painful.
Therapy doesn’t eliminate your human condition. What it can do is help you become more fully and comfortably yourself. That might sound broad when what you want right now is relief from something specific, but the two are more connected than they appear.
Earlier in my career I’d have answered this question differently. In another twenty years I’ll likely answer it differently again. There isn’t a single, definitive point of therapy. But here’s the one that feels truest to me:
Therapy helps you navigate your selfhood with greater intelligence, awareness and skill, so that your life becomes as rich and workable as possible.
It is, at heart, a conversation, sometimes a long one, often a deep one that changes how you understand yourself and how you meet your life.
The Three Fundamental Challenges of Being Human
In Why Do I Do That? psychotherapist Joseph Burgo offers a lens that I find genuinely useful. He describes three universal challenges that shape human life:
We need other people, and that need makes us vulnerable to disappointment, frustration and helplessness.
We must deal with difficult emotions fear, anger, anxiety, envy, grief, whether we want to or not. They're unavoidable
We struggle to feel good about ourselves, and our sense of worth is easily shaken.
If you sit with these areas honestly, you’ll almost certainly recognise yourself in them. Whatever you’re struggling with will usually fall into one or more of these categories.
We can reflect on these challenges using what we consciously know about ourselves. But much of what drives us sits in the larger, unseen territory of the unconscious. Therapy is the place where what you do know becomes the doorway into what you don’t, and that’s where real openings occur.
Some therapies focus almost entirely on symptom reduction. Others, like mine, see the symptom as part of a wider pattern that needs to be understood for real change to occur.
How Does This Help With My Specific Problem?
A fair question. You may be coming because:
- You’re having panic attacks
- You can’t sleep
- You’re overwhelmed
- Your relationship is struggling
These are real, urgent difficulties. So how does looking at patterns, the past, or the unconscious help?
Let’s take an imaginary client:
Sarah, Panic Attacks at Work
Sarah is 38 and has started having panic attacks at work, especially around meetings with her demanding boss. She feels terrified and out of control.
Over time, therapy helps her see that these feelings are not new. She grew up with an older brother who was volatile, critical and hard to predict. She didn’t realise how anxious she felt as a child because those feelings were repressed.
Around her boss, she slips into a kind of trance, an emotional time machine that returns her to the same powerless state she felt with her brother.
This understanding doesn’t magically fix anything, but it makes the experience less mysterious, less overwhelming, more human. As Sarah becomes more able to feel her emotions without panic, she becomes less dominated by them. She learns to ground herself, to stay present, and to communicate differently.
The panic attacks reduce. Her options expand. Her life shifts.
Therapy begins with the symptom, but it becomes transformative when we understand the pattern that sustains it.
The wider conversations we have aren’t a detour. They’re the work.
How Therapy Helps With the Three Human Challenges
1) Relationships: Navigating Need, Disappointment and Dependency
We are relational creatures. We need others, and that need exposes us to vulnerability.
In therapy, you explore:
- how you attach
- how you pull away
- how you cope when connection fails
- how your history colours your expectations
- how you lose or protect yourself in relationships
The therapeutic relationship becomes a laboratory, a place where needs can be expressed, disappointment can be spoken about rather than avoided, and dependency doesn’t mean losing yourself.
Over time, this changes not only how you relate to others, but how you experience yourself within relationships.
2) Emotions: Becoming Capable of Feeling What You Feel
Difficult feelings are non-negotiable parts of being alive. Most of us, without realising it, fear our own emotional states.
Therapy helps you:
- build capacity to tolerate feelings rather than flee them
- understand what your feelings are signalling
- stay open and curious rather than collapsing into fear or defensiveness
- develop emotional regulation and resilience
The more you can remain present with yourself during difficult moments, the more flexible and adaptable you become. This is one of the deep gifts of therapy: a growing comfort in being emotionally alive.
3) Self-Worth: Understanding the Hidden Story You Carry About Yourself
How you feel about yourself shapes your whole life.
Much of our self-worth is influenced by early experiences: how we were seen, valued, or dismissed. These old patterns continue to be activated in present-day situations, often without our awareness.
Therapy offers:
- a place to examine these inherited self-stories
- a relationship where you are taken seriously
- a chance to question what feels “true” but may only be familiar
- an opportunity to create a new internal experience
- Therapy doesn’t instantly “fix” self-worth, but it creates the conditions in which a more grounded sense of self can grow.
What Actually Happens in the Room
We meet usually once a week, for hour long sessions and I often suggest that somebody start with 6 sessions to get a sense of what the conversation and the experience is like. We can then reassess and go from there.
Some people come weekly for years, doing deep exploratory work. Others come for a focused period around a particular issue. There's no single right way to do it. What matters is that the work feels useful and helpful to you, that something is shifting, that you're discovering things about yourself that make a difference in your experience of your life.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does therapy take?
There’s no set timeline. Some people find what they need in a few months; others work for a year or two; some continue for deeper exploration. We talk openly about this as we go.
Do I need to be in crisis?
No. Many people come to understand themselves better, improve relationships, or develop greater resilience before things reach crisis point.
How do I know if you’re the right therapist for me?
The relationship is central. An initial session helps you sense whether the conversation feels helpful, grounded and attuned. You’ll know quickly.
So what is the point of therapy?
To understand yourself more fully — both the conscious and the hidden parts — so you can navigate life’s challenges with more skill, more flexibility and less unnecessary suffering.
References
Burgo, J. (2012). Why Do I Do That? New Rise Press.
About Sean
Sean Heneghan is a BACP-registered counsellor practising in Berkhamsted. He integrates Gestalt therapy, existential approaches and traditional acupuncture to work with both psychological and somatic experience. His work is influenced by psychoanalytic theory, depth psychology and contemplative traditions such as Zen and mindfulness.
He works with adults facing challenges around anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties and questions of meaning and identity.
Phone: 07717 515 013
Email: sean@seanheneghan.com
Address: Berkhamsted Chiropractic Clinic, 69 High St, HP4 2DE
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