What happens in relational psychotherapy?

Nov 9

TL;DR - Relational psychotherapy is less about giving advice or finding the fastest explanation, and more about slowing down enough to understand your experience while it is alive in the room, with your therapist. We pay attention to what you think, feel, notice in your body, expect from other people, struggle to say, and sometimes lose touch with altogether. Over time, knowing something about yourself can start to become understanding yourself.

What does relational therapy feel like, IRL?

If you’ve never experienced relationally focused psychotherapy before, my intention is to invite you a frame that you can picture and imagine. It will never match the experience of sitting with a relational therapist but it’s my best effort.

So, first things first: there’s no manual, no homework, and no set number of sessions.

You don't need to arrive knowing what the right thing to talk about is either - that’s what discovery sessions or consultations are for.

We figure out what the problems are together – and we do that by starting with what’s happening in your life right now.

Over the first few sessions, more layers of your experience expand these because the discovery process isn’t linear. It circles and swirls back and forth.

You might start telling me about something that happened during the week. An argument with your partner. A message that irked you. A message you didn't get that irked you even more. A conversation at work you keep replaying.

You've probably already thought about it a lot. You may have analysed it from every conceivable angle with Claude or ChatGPT.

You might explain you understand what happened, you just don't understand why you still feel so awful about it.

That’s where talk therapy is different to ordinary day-to-day talking. We question and reflect in a dialogue that helps more of your experience come into view.

Does just talking to a therapist really help?

Yes, when we slow things down enough to hear what’s being said and notice more of what's already being revealed. We might reflect on things like this:

What you felt as the situation unfolded.
What did you want to say?
What stopped you?
What did you assume the other person was thinking?
What did you sense in your body?
Where did your attention go?
Did you become angry? Frightened? Embarrassed? Royally pissed off? Desperate to explain yourself?
Did your mind suddenly go blank?
Did you start concentrating so hard on the other person's reaction that you lost track of what you were trying to say?
Or, did you zone our altogether and can’t remember much at all?

There isn't a correct answer we're trying to uncover. We're gathering more information about your experience.

As we do this, something that looked like one simple event can begin to reveal more about where it sits in the bigger context of your life.

This is where we start connecting dots. There’s an example of how we connect the dots on my About Page.

Connecting the dots in psychotherapy

Sometimes a pattern becomes clear quite quickly.

Sometimes we think we've understood something and later realise there was more to it.

That's not therapy going wrong. It’s how understanding ourselves tends to look.

Understanding unfolds and often unfolds in a jumbled, blurry, bit-of-this, bit-of-that way. That isn't a problem.

Psychotherapy - well, psychotherapy for me, I should say - is a process of bringing more of your experience into view and staying curious long enough for something you couldn't previously see, feel, or put into words to become a little clearer.

A bit like a mist lifting.

Now, this part’s important: when something is not becoming clear, we're curious about that too. We allow it to be unclear. Opaque. We don’t race to tidy up.

I found this incredibly reassuring when I experienced it in my own psychotherapy because, until then, I had absorbed almost the opposite message without ever realising it was something I could question.

If you remember one thing then I hope it’s this: there is simply no right and wrong version of you in therapy. There is just you and me working things through together.

If I understand the pattern, why am I still doing it?

I reckon this could be the most frequently asked question in therapy - so know that you are not alone!

Some of the patterns you may be aware of:

You know you people-please.
You know you pull away when someone gets close.
You know your partner isn't your parent.
You know you're allowed to say no.
You know the relationship has ended.
You may even understand exactly where some of these patterns began. But knowing all this doesn't necessarily change how you feel or what you do next.

Why does this happen?

One reason is because our ways of relating are lived not thought. They’re alive in our emotions. Our bodies. Our default reactions.

Relational dynamics are whole person patterns that form in what we've learnt to notice. What we've learnt to avoid. What feels safe to express. What feels far too risky. What we hope will happen. And what we quietly expect will happen instead.

Effective psychotherapy moves beyond insight and into a type of knowing that comes deep from within - often emerging across time.

Why we’re curious about the parts that don't seem to fit

“If we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us - we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don't understand.” - The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz

For example ...

You know you're safe, but a part of you doesn't feel safe, and you get triggered.
You know someone loves you, but you're still half waiting for them to stop, and so call it off first.
You know you want intimacy, but when someone gets close you feel it’s too much and want to bolt.
You know what you want to say, but when the moment comes you can't find the words.
Or the words come out that far from what you intended to say (the one that gets most of us very cross)

Rather than deciding one side of this is sensible and the other is irrational, in psychotherapy, become curious about both. It invites us to pause and hold this tension rather than rush to find premature explanations.

Patterns that are unconscious don't generally announce themselves. They often lay in contradictions. In what's there, but not there. Known, but not through thought.

What’s unconscious can show up in what catches us off guard. What repeats. What feels disproportionate. What we can't quite explain. What we avoid for no reason other than we just know we always have - through the gap between what we know and what we simply experience.

Why does slowing down matter?

Because speed can make us skip over the very thing we want to do: understand.

If I immediately tell you what I think is happening, we might end up replacing your experience with my interpretation. If we focus on calming down, we may not hear what your body’s communicating.

Sometimes what feels uncomfortable is where something important could be trying to become known.

And if we decide too quickly that a reaction is irrational, we stop being curious about why it makes sense. Slowing down invites us to resist assuming that discomfort itself is the problem.

Here, allowing silence or pausing can let something land for us and be taken in. It's a space where we can notice and think in our own way, but together.

How does change happen?

Well, we don't know. It's rarely through one dramatic revelation.

More often, understanding accumulates.

You begin noticing something earlier.
You recognise what is happening while you're in it happening.
You find words where previously there were blanks or splutters.
You notice when you're disappearing into somebody else's reaction.
You realise that what felt like 'the truth' about yourself may be more an expectation, fear, adaptation, or familiar way of making sense of something.

None of that means life becomes tidy. Nor does understanding guarantee that something difficult in your relationships immediately stops hurting.

Putting words to feelings with someone else offers relief. There's something reassuring about a half mumbled, "I don't know if that makes sense?" and seeing our therapist is curious in why we ask that, and what sense we are making for ourselves.

Over time, understanding becomes less about having an explanation for why you are the way you are and more a process of opening to yourself through your lived experiences as they arise - with yourself, quietly and alone - and with other people.

This is where knowing something about yourself starts to become understanding yourself. And understanding what’s involved gives you more choice in what we do with what you find.