Therapy isn't just a therapist teaching you a bunch of useful techniques to deal with anxiety or depression or whatever concerns brought you to therapy in the first place. It's a living, breathing process that happens when two people sit down and relate to each other in a way that doesn't often happen in our day to day lives.
When you're a therapy client, you enter a therapeutic relationship with your therapist - one where your therapist accepts you fully, as is, as a human being worthy of acceptance and respect and caring. When you work through the worries that brought you into therapy, you do so in the context of this particular kind of relationship. You do so while experiencing being truly accepted - no judgment, no shaming, simply a warm and genuine effort to understand where you're coming from and how we can work together to make things better.
My colleagues over at Zencare.co have published my latest piece exploring this phenomenon. Click through to read more about how I see this therapeutic relationship and the work that happens within it as a spiritual practice. And as always feel free to send me questions or comments!