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What is therapy?
As a starting point: therapy is a process of working with a trained professional to explore your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.
However, it is worth breaking this sentence down because each word carries a huge amount of meaning, starting with the word 'therapy.' In a mental health context, therapy (or therapist) is often used as a catchall term to most commonly describe either counselling or psychotherapy. At present, there is no shared agreement on the distinction and no regulated distinction so 'therapy' becomes a sort of shorthand to refer to both.
Then, the idea of it being a process; this is important because being in therapy is about giving yourself time and permission to learn and listen to yourself. Indeed, arguably before even that, it is about practising doing those things, and with the help of your therapist spotting those moments you shut yourself down or don’t take yourself seriously and gently, getting used to challenging that behaviour or inner critic.
Next, the phrase working with a trained professional: the aim here is to describe the variety of people you might have talking therapy with, for example, they could be a counsellor, a counselling psychotherapist or psychotherapist. As noted above the language isn't always straightforward so here, what matters most are the following two things: 1. The quality of the relationship you have with them (see Working Together for what that means to me) and 2. That they are accountable to a governing body, which is part of good and ethical practice and keeping clients safe.
It is also worth picking up on the idea of ‘working with’, therapy should be collaborative. We can work with you to help identify goals, or offer psychoeducation, but it should rarely if ever instruct or advise.
And finally to explore your thoughts, feelings and behaviour… This exploration is about unpicking the details and paying meaningful attention to them. Understanding the layers to each thought, to each feeling, to each behaviour so that we can ultimately see you more clearly.
In some ways, this page offers a working example of 'what is therapy?' On the one hand, the question can be answered by a single, seemingly simple enough sentence. In reality, however, it brushes over a world of meaning and history and messiness which I have made only the first steps towards breaking down when there are of course whole books dedicated to the question. While this is not the space for such a deep dive, your therapy can be.