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In her essay " Why Therapy Feels Worse Before It Gets Better: The Psychological Desert" , Berlin-based psychotherapist Sophie Frost explains how therapy can feel worse when meaningful change begins. "One of the most common things I hear from my patients is: “I thought therapy was supposed to make me feel better.” As a therapist, I cannot offer timelines or guarantees. I can only say that sometimes therapy feels worse before it gets better, and that this is not a failure, but

In her article "Why People Are Losing Trust in Psychotherapy" (03/2025), psychotherapist Selda Koydemir proposes that misconceptions and misguided practices risk undermining the core purpose of psychotherapy: fostering genuine self-understanding and lasting personal growth. Below are selected excerpts; the full article is linked at the end: “Many people enter therapy expecting comfort, validation, and emotional soothing. Some hope to be uplifted and reassured, while some ther

"Words are powerful containers of emotion. The act of putting thoughts and feelings into words transforms them, making them more manageable. When we put experience into words and share it with another, we bring it into the light of day. Putting words to experience allows it to be processed differently—integrated with other memories, and with the whole of who we are. Words also bring our responses increasingly under conscious and voluntary control. This expands freedom and ch

Nina Pyykkönen, a Specialist Clinical Psychologist and Individual and Group Psychotherapist, wrote a beautifully succinct article on neuroscience and psychotherapy, recently published in HS.fi and translated below. In her article, Nina captures the essence of neuroscience in human development and why it matters in long-term, intensive psychotherapeutic treatment. The article is particularly pertinent in these days of very brief interventions and lifestyle hacks, many of whic

"Whether it’s infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, midlife, early old age or your final chapter, every new life stage brings the opportunity to mourn the loss of what has gone before, to grow through and around it, and develop into the person you are right now. It is a chance to work through something and change. So buying into the “age is just a number” philosophy – consciously or unconsciously – robs us of the valuable experience of feeling rooted

" Meaningful therapy has helped me to understand that what I wanted was not what I needed. That my search for the right answer, born out of my conviction that there is a right way to do life, could only ever keep me stuck. I see now that this powerful treatment can offer something far more valuable than strategies: a fertile environment in which a mind can grow, so that a new space can open up between sensing an emotional experience inside you and having to get rid of it imme