KEEPING COMPANY
Years of introspection and reading may never produce the result you long for. You can learn all sorts of things about yourself, but beyond an occasional bit of relief you’re left with exhaustion and futility.
You might be trying to perform a two-person operation by yourself. There are aspects of ourselves that become available only in relation to another. I meet myself—what is genuinely my own—in being with another person.
The role of the therapist is to be that other person. People may come to therapy to solve different problems, but always there’s a wish for another person to do it with, someone familiar with the territory. Basically we are picking up where introspection and information leave off.