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Therapists may rely on interpretive frameworks that do not fully capture a client's experience.

A good therapeutic process helps clarify experience rather than override it.

This post is the second in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You?

In the first post in this series, I described an experience from early therapy that left me questioning not just what I felt, but whether what I felt was real at all.

More than a decade later, having worked in this field—and more importantly, having met people with whom I genuinely resonate—I can now see that the experience I had at the time was not imagined. The difference I felt then wasn’t an illusion, and it wasn’t simply in my mind. It felt real, and so did the mismatch.

I can now also see more clearly why that therapist might have understood me. It wasn’t that the experience itself was inaccurate, but how it was taken up and interpreted in the session.

When discomfort is read as defence

First, therapists can rely, unconsciously, on familiar interpretive patterns.

Experiences of feeling different, not fitting in, and valuing depth over surface interaction, within psychodynamic models, can be mapped onto what is sometimes described as “defensive superiority” or narcissistic positioning. From that perspective, the therapist may have understood my experience as a way of protecting self-esteem by positioning myself as special or superior.

The difficulty, however, is that this can happen too quickly. What I was describing seemed to be taken up quite quickly as a predefined meaning, before the experience itself had really been explored.

In that process, something important can be missed: whether what is being described reflects a genuine difference, a mismatch in values, or a defensive position. Those possibilities are not the same, but they can easily be collapsed into one.

When meaning replaces experience

Second, there was a shift from exploring what the experience felt like to assigning meaning to it.

In my experience, good therapy often begins with a simple question: What is this experience like for you?

What I brought into the room was an experience—of conversations feeling empty, of not finding engagement, of a persistent sense of dislocation. What I received in response was a meaning assigned to that experience. That shift matters.

Saying that something doesn’t feel meaningful is not the same as saying that you are above it. One is a description of how something registers internally. The other is a claim about how you position yourself in relation to others.

When that distinction is lost, the original experience can become obscured, or even replaced.

How you are perceived—and what that evokes

Third, it is possible that the way I spoke shaped how I was understood—and how I was responded to.

My way of describing things—even then—was quite structured, fairly precise and analytical, and perhaps a bit detached. In therapeutic settings, that kind of style can sometimes be read as intellectualisation, emotional distance, or even a subtle form of judgment toward others.

What may, from the inside, be an attempt to articulate something difficult can, from the outside, be perceived as a stance. From there, it was not a large step to an interpretation that I was positioning myself above others. And once seen that way, the interpretation often follows that direction, rather than staying neutral.

Take our Do I Need Therapy?

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Therapy is not a one-directional process; clients affect therapists, often in ways that aren’t immediately recognised.

A position that does not easily align with shared social rhythms or values, or that questions what others take for granted, can sometimes be experienced as distancing or challenging. In those moments, a therapist's interpretations may come not only from theory, but also from how a cleint's way of being affected them in the interaction.

My description included rejecting low-depth interaction, valuing what feels real, and not engaging in what felt superficial. And that kind of stance can evoke something in a therapist, often outside of their awareness—they might feel judged, or not enough, or dismissed.

At that point, the interpretation is no longer only about the client. It is also shaped by what the client's way of being has evoked in the therapist.

This doesn’t make the interpretation “wrong” in a simple sense. But it does mean it may partly reflect what is happening between therapist and client, rather than only the individual's own experience.

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