DISCLAIMER: The account that follows is a fictionalised vignette, written to realistically illustrate therapeutic themes. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

“I don’t know where I’m going wrong,” Zain told me in our first session. “I’m a decent guy, I’m employed, I don’t drink, I pray five times a day, I’m kind. I want something stable, someone to share life with. But somehow… nothing sticks. I’m beginning to think I’m broken.”

Zain was a thirty-one-year-old Muslim data analyst still living with his parents, and had been actively seeking to find a life partner within his Muslim community for six years. He had tried many first dates and the occasional second or third. Sometimes he got as far as to meet the parents before, without fail, his potential wife would slip away. Something inexplicable was going puzzlingly wrong, leaving Zain with the nagging sense that he was missing some crucial step everyone else seemed to know.

He arrived at therapy with obvious frustration, but also a tentative sense of shame that seemed to hum beneath his words.

At first glance, Zain was polished and polite. His clothes were crisp, his beard neatly trimmed, his sentences carefully constructed. He had a good salary, was well educated, owned a nice car, and came from a seemingly respectable family. He radiated composure. On paper, Zain was the kind of man any parent in his community might hope for their daughter to meet. And yet, something within him seemed to sabotage his chances.

A peculiar dynamic soon emerged between us. I began to notice his vigilance, as though he were constantly scanning for errors, in himself, in others, in me. Each time I attempted to reflect something, anything, back to him, he would correct me.

In an early session, he spoke of how all his closest friends were now married, their weekends filled with family gatherings, while he spent most of his own in solitude. He shrugged lightly, almost rehearsed, “But it’s whatever.”

I waited, giving space for elaboration, some hint of what “whatever” really meant. When none came, I offered, “That must be lonely.”

His eyes sharpened, and for a fleeting second, I thought the word had resonated, that it might open a door for me into his emotional world. But no.

He interrupted: “Not lonely. Isolating. There’s a difference. Loneliness suggests people are near but unreachable. Isolation is when no one is even present to be reached.”

He was right. I could see the nuance. His distinction was subtle but valid. Yet I felt a curious deflation, a small but noticeable retreat inside myself. My attempt to meet him was batted away in favour of greater precision.

Another week, he described a confrontation with a previous romantic interest after he found out she had been juggling conversations with a few men simultaneously with him. I asked, “How did you feel when you found out?“

He shrugged at my question, looking almost bored, “I’m not sure”, he said flatly. I believed him. He did not seem to be withholding; he seemed genuinely cut off from the feeling itself, unable to bring it back into the room. After a pause, he added, “Not good, I guess.” His words fell like placeholders.

I offered, “Perhaps it was disappointing.”

In that instant, he came alive. Once again, his eyes sharpened, his posture straightened, and he leaned forward with that familiar conviction. “It’s not disappointment. Disappointment suggests I had expected too much, or that I placed faith in her. It wasn’t that. It was more… disillusionment. She confirmed what I suspected, that people aren’t who they claim to be.”

Again, he was right. I saw the distinction. Genuine introspection seemed barren ground for him, but the moment he could refine, revise, or rescue a word from imprecision, he lit up. Correction, not intimacy, was his means of connecting.

I began to notice something inside myself shift. Each time I spoke, I braced for a correction. I found myself choosing words with painful care, editing as I went, and still, inevitably, he would find a flaw.

This was not trivial. My frustration was data, a clue. Perhaps what I was feeling (cautious, tense, eager not to get it wrong) might mirror what his dates felt.

In psychotherapy, we often speak of the here and now. The principle is simple: whatever difficulties the client encounters in their relationships outside the therapy room will, sooner or later, emerge in the relationship with the therapist as well. Therapy is not only a place to recount stories from life but a stage on which those same dramas are often re-enacted. Old patterns repeat themselves; the same strategies for protection, closeness, avoidance, or attack that shape their marriages and friendships will also shape their bond with me. This is not incidental; it is the essence of the work. When a client corrects me, withdraws from me, idealises or criticises me, it offers a living demonstration of the very blueprint that has governed their other relationships.

To work in the here and now means noticing these repetitions, bringing them into the light, and, often, naming them in the immediacy of the relationship itself. The particular power of this lies in the space the therapist provides: unlike with a wife/husband, parent or new date, here in therapy, we can pause the encounter, examine the moment, pick it apart, evaluate the origins, the risks, and the utility of the habits/impulses/attitudes at play. Therapy becomes not just the telling of a life but the re-living of it, in condensed form, with the possibility of rewriting the script.

Eventually, I decided to confront it.

“Zain,” I said one afternoon, “may I share something I’ve noticed happening between us?”

He nodded, a little warily.

“When I reflect on something you’ve said, you are often quick to correct me. And your corrections are accurate, interesting even, your words are more precise than mine. But I notice that when you do this, I feel… pushed away. I feel less connected. I hesitate to reach for you.”

He froze, then bristled. “So you’re saying I’m too pedantic?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not diagnosing you. I’m describing the effect. How your precision, however accurate, creates distance.”

He fell quiet. For the first time, his polished exterior cracked, just slightly. “That’s what women tell me,” he murmured. “That I dismiss them or make them feel… not enough.”

His eyes dropped to the carpet. Then, softly: “I don’t mean to push people away.”

“Of course,” I said. “But help me understand, what is it about being even slightly misunderstood, about someone’s picture of you being just off the mark, not exactly perfect, that feels so threatening?”

He grew quiet. I could see the muscles in his face soften. He was deep in thought, as though he were searching for something just out of reach. After a long pause, he said, almost apologetically, “I’m… not sure.” It felt like the honest admission of a man who had never stopped to ask himself that question before.

Zain’s gaze drifted between me and the floor, his face thoughtful. Then, he furrowed his brows and shook his head, as if to sweep something away.

“Perhaps we don’t need the answer right now. Perhaps we can stay with the not knowing. Sometimes the question itself is more important than the answer”, I said.

He replied, “But I need to figure it out. This is what they all say to me. That they just want to be heard.“

‘To be heard’, that felt meaningful.

“Can you recall ever just wanting to be heard, Zain?“

He chuckled, and, through a nostalgic smirk, answered: “Yes, I can.“ Here was the thread.

And I was going to pull it, “Tell me.“

“My mother was never really interested in me as a child. She kept busy, always occupied, always distracted, always in a room I wasn’t. If I wanted her attention, I had to work for it. Say something clever. Do something impressive. Even then, it was fleeting. If I stuttered, if I wasn’t exact, she walked away. I had to say something worth her listening.”

He fell silent. His eyes lowered to the carpet, and in that silence, something was clarified for both of us.

I said gently, “So precision became the rule. Precision was the prerequisite to her love.”

His eyes flicked up. He didn’t correct me.

“And with your father?” I asked.

A humourless laugh. “He worked all the time. Always gone. Even when he came home, he was tired, absent. So it was just me and… silence. You learn not to need too much.”

There it was: the blueprint. Correction as intimacy’s stand-in. Exactness as a substitute for closeness. Child Zain had learned to reach for connection without ever showing the hunger for it. A brilliant adaptation for a boy growing up with emotional distance on all sides, but a fatal flaw for a man hoping to build a marriage.

I leaned in. “Zain, what strikes me is this: when you correct me, you’re not just pushing me away. You’re also… reaching for me. It’s your way of saying, I’m here, do you see me? Stay with me.”

His breath caught. A flicker of something, grief, maybe recognition, passed over his face. He whispered, almost to himself, “That’s exactly it. It’s the only way I know to keep someone close.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

“Maybe,” I said at last, “part of the work here will be to experiment with another way. To let yourself risk being seen, even if not perfectly. To discover whether someone can stay, not because you are precise, efficient, but because you are you.”

For the first time since we met, Zain was not reaching for sharper words, did not polish my sentence into something neater. Instead, he nodded slowly.

And in that moment, I felt it: connection without correction. The very emotional intimacy he had been avoiding all along, quietly, finally, had arrived.

DISCLAIMER: The account that follows is a fictionalised vignette, written to realistically illustrate therapeutic themes. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental.

Layal arrived at our first session in a storm cloud of grievance. She was forty-one, a mother of three, and her days brimmed with obligations. She woke before dawn to pack lunches, shepherd the children to school, and then drove a sixty-minute commute to her job. Work consumed her hours, and when she returned home, she would clock in for another shift: laundry, cooking, booking GP appointments, organising birthday parties, football practice, religious classes, filling out school forms, tidying up toys, shoes, and the endless trail of mess.

She was depleted, carrying more than one life could reasonably hold. And yet, despite the sheer weight she carried, she entered my office not with fatigue but with fury.

“My husband is useless,” she spat once. “He’s another child, not a partner. I ask him to help with the simplest things, and he botches it. I can’t rely on him. Better to just do it myself.”

What started as many unexpressed passing frustrations with her spouse had become calcified, layer by layer, into a bitter rage. Over time, resentment had taken the reins. Layal’s frustration found its voice in sharp outbursts: shouting across the kitchen, speaking critically, sometimes cruelly, and resorting to names and insults that left those around her recoiling.

This contempt did not stop with her husband. Her sister was “jealous and pathetic,” her boss “an incompetent buffoon,” her colleagues “lazy freeloaders.” Even her closest friends were branded “leeches who only call when they need something.” She rarely allowed silence; instead, she catalogued, with righteous energy, the failures of those around her and the thankless work of holding everything together herself. Each session began with an account of fresh betrayals, of others’ inadequacies.

And yet, for fleeting moments between the rants, her face would momentarily collapse into something else. Something unmistakably sad, solemn, lonely. Layal was perpetually isolating herself and then becoming outraged and devastated at finding herself isolated. She was wounding the very people she longed to feel close to and supported by. It became clear that a blueprint was at play here. A historically relevant narrative was replaying itself. This felt old.

In the early months, I listened with only the occasional challenge. On one occasion, after describing a particularly heated conflict that also ended in her husband “overdramatically“ withdrawing from her, leaving her feeling familiarly isolated and abandoned, I asked: “Layal, do you think there’s a way, however small or subtle, you might have contributed to that distance between you?”

She tightened. “Are you saying this is my fault?”, eyes narrowed, body leaning back as though to guard against assault. The air thickened with her indignation. Perhaps I had crossed the invisible line too soon, punctured her narrative before the ground beneath us was solid enough.

However, a pattern was undoubtedly emerging. One where she sets up the closest individuals in her life to fail her, to let her down. There is a temptation, with such clients, to rush toward confrontation, to point out the obvious common denominator in her endless litany of conflicts. But to do so prematurely risks confirming her suspicion that yet another person has failed to understand her.

Therapy is a delicate dance between the client’s intimate perception of reality and the therapist’s challenge to expand, question, or reframe it. There is always a moment when the therapist must choose between collusion and confrontation. Collusion, here, meant listening sympathetically, validating, and maybe even agreeing that the world had indeed dealt her an unfair hand. Confrontation risked rupturing the alliance, but without it, there would be no therapy, only ritual compliance.

So I retreated and waited, circling gently, until the moment felt right.

As always, another opportunity presented itself later on in our therapy, after a particularly heated monologue about her “pathetic“ husband. I slightly leaned in and said, “Layal, what would it be like to consider a new possibility? Perhaps one where you are not only the victim of others’ failures, but simultaneously an active participant in shaping these patterns?”

Her head snapped towards me. “What do you mean? That it’s my fault?” Her tone was edged with defiance. I did not rush to fill the silence. “I’m not speaking of fault, ‘fault’ is never helpful. I’m speaking of contribution, participation. Of what role you might be playing in these dramas that repeat themselves.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That sounds like something my husband would say when he wants to avoid blame.” I let the protest stand and waited.

After a short, rather awkward, silence, she remarkably recounted an argument with her eldest daughter, fifteen years old, from two weeks prior that she had failed to mention then.

“She shouted at me,” Layal said, her voice soft. “She said, ‘Mum, everything is always about you.’” She paused, as though stunned by her daughter’s words. I repeated softly: “Everything is always about you.” Then silence. Long enough that Layal’s eyes welled.

“It’s not true,” she whispered, but she did not seem to believe herself. The certainty had drained from her voice.

Over the next sessions, the edifice began to crumble. She began remembering small, incriminating moments: cutting off a friend mid-story to talk about herself; manically getting to her husband’s chores before he had the chance to hold it against him; mocking him for forgetting to pay a bill; fabricating memories to paint him in a particularly negative light to her parents.

“This is ugly,” she said once, staring at the carpet. “It’s manipulative. Maybe even selfish.”

“Ugly, maybe,” I replied. “But perhaps they serve a purpose, perhaps to protect”. “If you didn’t lash out, if you didn’t stand above them in judgment, what might you feel underneath?”

She looked at me for a long moment before whispering, “Alone. Invisible.”

“Perhaps this was a defence, a way of protecting yourself from that. Fair enough. But it has calcified. What protected you as a girl now isolates you as a woman.”

I could see the words land. For Layal, accountability had long equated to annihilation: to admit fault was to accept that she was unlovable. To admit that she, too, could wound others meant relinquishing the protective shield of victimhood. She had adored and idolised a mother who only rewarded performance and who pitted siblings against one another. The young Layal discovered that to avoid punishment, she had to appear blameless, the wronged party rather than the wrongdoer. She found safety in casting herself as the victim: if she was the injured one, then she could not be at fault, and if she was not at fault, she might still be worthy of her care.

The past was replaying itself. What felt like righteous fury at her husband or sister was, in fact, a shadow of an old script: the overburdened, unseen girl who held everything together, terrified to be left alone.

But in the crucible of therapy, she began experimenting with a different possibility: that accountability could be liberating, a way of stepping out of the exhausting performance of victimhood. Layal began to consider a new way of being.

At first, understandably, accountability felt like annihilation. “If I apologise to him and admit I’m selfish and sometimes cruel,” she said, “he might leave me. I’ll be hated.”

“Or,” I offered, “you might discover that people can still love you, even when you’re flawed. Perhaps especially then.”

This was her existential challenge: the confrontation with responsibility. To continue living as the misunderstood victim was to cling to the intoxicating clarity of blame.

Our work did, by no means, transform her overnight. Habits of a lifetime rarely yield so quickly. But a shift had occurred. She was aware. She no longer narrated her life as the tragic play of innocent Layal, beset by villains who ultimately abandoned her. She began, hesitantly, to say: “I did this. I pushed them away. I wanted control.”

It is a small miracle, that first moment when a client stops pointing outward and dares to turn inward. Layal’s journey was not to discover that others had wronged her; they had, often in fact, but to recognise her own participation. And with that recognition came something more precious than self-justification: the possibility of change.

Related:

Before I describe what true psychotherapy is, I think it would be wise to describe what psychotherapy is not. Psychotherapy is not advice-giving, it is not emotion-validating, it is not gender-affirming, it is not decision-making. In this cultural climate where individual experience is paramount and individual pursuits of happiness are the goal, therapy has been defaced and disfigured into a tool for the self-indulgent. Unfortunately, much of modern ‘psychotherapy’ amounts to reassuring the client of the righteousness of their (usually problematic) behaviour. The principal goal seems to be to make the client feel better ("It's not you, it's them") about themselves and to learn to accept all aspects of themselves (adaptive or maladaptive) for what they are. Any semblance of guilt or shame is quickly banished from the room as if they are offensive and unnatural. Self-reproach in any form is not tolerated. Therapists will often try to repair self-devaluation attempts from the client or compensatory self-inflation attempts by commenting to clients on their ‘good’ qualities or giving the equivalent of pep talks. None of this is psychotherapy.

The word psychotherapy is derived from the Ancient Greek words: ψυχή - ‘psyche’ (meaning soul; spirit; breath), and θεραπεία - ‘therapeia’ (meaning care; healing; treatment). Thus, psychotherapy in its original form and conception refers to ‘the care of the soul’. So what does the ‘care of the soul’ entail? First and foremost psychotherapy is fundamentally a relationship. The driving force for growth and the actual agent of change in therapy is the relationship formed between the therapist and client. This is crucial because meaningful psychological growth can only occur in the context of relationships. This fact is why the self-care and self-love movement for mental health is a monumental failure. We do not even develop our sense of ‘self’ and a self-concept in isolation.

Our self-image and all the assumptions we hold about who we are, are first established in the context of our earliest relationships. How lovable I am, how interesting I am, how funny I am, how useful I am, how reliable I am - those are things I learn about myself based on the observable reactions of my parents, siblings, and peers to my behaviour in real time. If we were asked about our day at school and then not given a chance to answer we may learn we’re not interesting, if we’re not asked about our day at all we may learn we’re not important, if our tantrums are met with silence we may learn we are not worthy of love, if our tantrums are met with anger and frustration we may learn that we are fundamentally bad. What was learned in a relational context can only be modified in a relational context. Thus, what genuine psychotherapy provides initially is a contained and secure relational context where you can: 1) understand your current self-composition and 2) endeavour to modify the elements of it that are wreaking havoc in your life.

The methodology by which this process takes place in the therapy room is extraordinary and yet so intuitive. There are a number of diverse therapeutic approaches that can inform psychotherapy as it occurs in the room, however, any approach implemented effectively by the therapist will share the principal aim of cultivating an increased capacity to acknowledge what is not conscious in the client - that is, to acknowledge and admit what is difficult or painful to see in ourselves. The overarching goal is truth. After all, it is the lies we’re told & internalise or the lies we tell ourselves that form the obstacles that prevent our growth. The psychotherapist Carl Rogers firmly held the core belief that every human being has deeply embedded within the depths of their psyche a self-actualising force that compels them towards goodness and self-development. This is a view on human nature I share. I believe we all have an innate desire to perfect ourselves (detailed in: The Greatest Adventure of All Time: The Journey to Perfection). Therefore, it is not my job as a psychotherapist to inspirit the client with the ingredients for change (with gratitude, or compassion, or curiosity, or any of the myriad of characteristics that initiate growth). The ingredients are already there. The job of a therapist is to simply to identify and remove the obstacles in the client’s way and the rest will follow automatically. Psychotherapy is fundamentally a pursuit of truth.

It is a privilege to practice psychotherapy because of that. I often explain good psychotherapy as ‘self-reflection with help’. In both the East and West, the practice of self-reflection is a pillar of faith and a form of worship for many. Self-reflection is ultimately an antidote to delusion. Our delusions are what hold us hostage to our misery; the delusion that I must please everyone around me or I am of no value, the delusion that every conflict holds with it the threat of separation and isolation, the delusion that ‘they’ are the problem and that I am the victim, the delusion that relying on and needing others is a weakness. I often hear people describe how their experiences ‘changed them’ but that is not an accurate statement. It is not our experiences themselves, but our reflection on those experiences, that change us. Without reflection you simply wander and pass through those experiences learning nothing, changing nothing, understanding nothing.

However, it is not easy to peer into oneself alone. It is even harder to face what you find with honest clarity. In some sense our judgements and assessments are a product of the contents of our psyche. Thus, it is incredibly difficult to accurately evaluate your own thoughts, feelings, behaviour, and temperament without bias. As Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham clarified in their formulation of the Johari Window model, there are three main levels to self-knowledge: 1) the things we know, 2) the things we know that we don’t know, and 3) the things we don’t know that we don’t know (blind spots) [1]. The third category cannot be accessed through self-reflection in isolation, it is exclusive to the relational domain. A good therapist will guide you through the process of uncovering your blind spots and confronting them rationally. It is utterly fascinating to witness a person’s understanding of themselves broaden and deepen simultaneously. We all have a much greater capacity to bear painful truths about ourselves than we realise.

Every client is completely unique in their experiences, belief system, narrative style, trust in others, and general approach to the relationship. Every therapeutic dynamic is, therefore, distinct from others and those individual differences are what makes psychotherapy complex, dynamic and incompatible with typical standardised medical technique. In other words, a new and unique therapeutic approach must be formulated with every single client. I could elaborate on the therapeutic process and all of its intricacies for pages and pages drawing from many wonderfully transformative examples. However, I feel compelled to highlight what is, from my experience, the primary healing component of every therapeutic relationship. 90% of good therapy is listening. It’s a particular kind of listening that friends, family, and colleagues rarely, if ever, offer to us. It involves all the senses. I listen not only to what is said, but also what is not said, what is inferred, what is hidden, how it is hidden, and what it is hiding under. I listen to the storyline and for themes. As the client speaks and unravels I develop a sense of the associative networks behind the client’s interpretations of their experiences. Being on the receiving end this kind of listening is truly one of the most cathartic experiences possible.

So many people go their entire lives without ever experiencing what is like to tell someone their thoughts, feelings, opinions, and have that person truly listen. It is a tragedy. There is unbelievable value in attempting to formulate a thought into words, hear yourself say it, and then hear it repeated back to you. Clients relay to me thoughts that have occupied the corners of their minds for years without surfacing. I listen, without judgement of my own, and open up the space for those thoughts to be expanded, explored, and challenged. I see the level of solace from simply being listened to in their faces. It is a beautiful process. This is another failure of modern therapy. Modern therapists, often overly concerned with maintaining a superficial positivity in the room, do not truly listen to what is said and so they miss what isn’t or perhaps what cannot be said.

I acknowledge that the claim in the title of this piece is bold. However, if you are religious and have decided to embark on The Journey to Perfection, I believe three characteristics of psychotherapy qualify it as act of worship: 1) you are engaging in a pursuit of truth, 2) you are in a state of self-reflection with the goal of self-development, and 3) these things are happening in the context of a relationship with another soul in God’s kingdom.