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It takes time to discern whether distress comes from within, from context, or both.

You don’t have to give up your experience to make sense of it.

Trust what feels true enough to register—not just what is being framed.

This post is the final in a three-part series. You can read Part 1 here: What If Your Therapist Is Wrong About You? and Part 2 here: When Therapy Explains Before It Understands

When difference is treated as a problem to fix

There also seemed to be an implicit assumption about what therapy was meant to do in that context.

Implicit in what the therapist said is a model suggesting that, “If you stop seeing yourself as different, you’ll suffer less.”

If the environment is taken as given—if the social world is assumed to be broadly fine—then therapy easily becomes about self-adjustment: trying to feel more at ease, to fit more smoothly, to reduce friction. Within that frame, discomfort is likely to be located within the individual.

But if the difficulty is, at least in part, about a real mismatch between the person and their environment, the question starts to shift. It becomes less about how to adjust, and more about recognising what does not fit—and what it might mean to respond to that differently.

When the environment is the thing that is "wrong"

Looking back, I can see this more clearly: For me, the issue was not internal. It was a real mismatch shaped by a collectivist orientation, in which alignment with the group was clearly expected—how one thinks, how one behaves, how one lives. There were limits on how far you could go in defining your own direction without it being seen as deviation.

My decisions, my direction, my way of thinking and being—these did not feel like things to be absorbed into a group structure. They felt like something I had to construct for myself.

But at that point in my life, I did not yet have the position—or perhaps the permission—to locate the problem anywhere other than myself. So I turned it inward. I questioned myself. I assumed I was the one not fitting properly, the one needing correction.

And the therapist’s interpretation seemed to confirm exactly that.

So I stayed in that loop—ruminating, doubting myself, trying to adjust to something that did not, in fact, fit.

But you cannot resolve a mismatch by erasing yourself to fit it.

Holding on to what feels true (or not?)

Therapy, at its best, should help you move closer to your own experience—not further away from it. There are moments when interpretation moves too quickly—when difference is taken as defence, when the therapist’s own reactions shape the meaning, and when discomfort is treated as a problem before it is really understood.

Good therapy tends to do the opposite.

It does not make you smaller or more doubtful of your own experience; it creates space. It allows something to become clearer and more recognisable. At its best, therapy should help you see what belongs to you and what belongs to the context, rather than folding everything back into an internal problem.

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Change in therapy does not come from being told what is true, but from experiencing something that feels true enough to register. And when that does not happen—when something feels off—it may be worth pausing and noticing it. Not to reject the therapist, but to ask, carefully: Does this understanding actually fit me?

So the question may be less about whether a therapist is right or wrong, and more about what happens inside you when an interpretation makes you feel less real.

If you have ever found yourself in that position—questioning whether the problem is you, or the way you are being understood—you are not alone. The answer is not always immediate. And to be fair, sometimes it really is partly in our mind. Sometimes the mind magnifies discomfort, amplifies uncertainty, and turns tension into something much bigger. Sometimes what feels unbearable is not only about the environment, but also about what our own history, fears, or defences are doing to the experience.

That possibility should not be ignored. But neither should your experience be dismissed too quickly.

You may not know yet which it is. Sometimes it takes time to understand whether what hurt was mainly your own internal conflict, a poor fit with the environment, a problem in the therapy, or some combination of all three.

But you can begin here: By not giving up your experience too quickly.

Note: This piece draws on the author’s own experience and her later reflections on it. It was further inspired by discussions at the 38th Annual March Workshop “When Good Therapists Do Bad Therapy and How To Fix It” hosted by the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group and the Personalized Psychotherapy Institute, where she was part of the panel. The author would like to thank colleagues there whose ongoing work and dialogue continue to inform and inspire her thinking and development.

For related pieces on how beliefs are updated in therapy, see my posts Why We Don’t Change—Even When We Know What’s Wrong and its follow-up, People Don’t Just Update Beliefs, They Test Them.

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