Thinking about psychotherapy is like thinking about movement. It happens in many different ways. Everybody who practises or receives it does a similar thing differently (I hope), and there are ways of doing it which are better than others depending on the context.
Have you ever seen those safety notices at work showing you how to lift a heavy box? Psychotherapy has rules to keep it safe, too: codes of ethics, and so on.
Psychotherapists try to understand how you are living life in ways that are usually inadvertently — but sometimes knowingly — piling up problems. Those problems may take some time to seem like problems. It can take ages for someone to feel left on their own, ashamed of what they are doing to themselves, confused by how life is turning out, or alarmed at how little it seems to be working out as they had expected.
Depending on the kind of psychotherapist you see, that person will approach this in a way they believe is best for you — perhaps through conversation, maybe by encouraging you to move or breathe differently, sometimes through approaches like EMDR, which I often use. While the conversation, movements, breathing, or EMDR are going on, your psychotherapist will be noticing things they have been trained to see or feel: signs, for example, of ways in which your life has become too dependent on how you coped with difficulties in the past.
They will have up their sleeve more or less understandable ways of proceeding, always with the help of a supervisor (a senior psychotherapist — check that your psychotherapist is seeing one. Without a supervisor, the process can stop being psychotherapy.)
Speak to a number of different psychotherapists before you decide to work with one. They should be able to describe what they do openly and understandably, and to suggest to you whether their form of psychotherapy might be something you'd benefit from. No form of psychotherapy works well for everybody.
Sometimes psychotherapy can be brief and focused. Sometimes it lasts for a couple of years or much longer. Many people see their psychotherapist once a week. A good few see their psychotherapist more than once a week — even four or five times a week if they are having psychoanalysis or EMDR.
© TOMASZEWSKI PRACTICE 2025