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One of the most valuable therapeutic encounters I’ve ever had was with a psychoanalyst who pissed me off so badly that I never went back.
Instead I went home furious, venting to my partner and anyone else who would listen about what a horrible experience I’d had with her. But years later, I still think about what she said.
Mid-sentence, she cut me off:
“Why are you even here, Tanya? Is there anything you actually even need from me? You seem to have figured it all out, right?”
I was gobsmacked. I froze, totally lost on how to behave next. A therapist had never spoken to me that way.
Our dynamic had gotten off on the wrong foot before I’d even walked through the door. I arrived with a takeaway coffee, and when she opened the door, she looked at me and said, flatly: “You can’t come inside with that.”
I was stunned. It was morning, it was cold outside, and I had to stand on the street glugging down a hot coffee just so she’d let me into the waiting room.
I wasn’t there for individual therapy. She ran an analytical group, and I had sought her out because I knew I had relational issues. I kept running into the exact same walls with people, and it was draining. At the time, I framed the problem like this: I’m always the emotionally available one, and I keep encountering people who don’t have the capacity to meet me. I give, and I don’t get what I give.
Little did I know that what I called “giving” was actually chronic overfunctioning. I was working like a dog in relationships, constantly going out of my way for others, prioritising their needs and what worked for them over what worked for me. I was always harmonising, accommodating, making sure the connection stayed intact. And then I’d feel resentful, confused, and often abandoned or rejected when others didn’t do the same for me.
The few sessions I had with the analyst were half-hour intake assessments to see if I was a fit for her group. I sat on the opposite side of her desk while she opened her MacBook and stared at the screen, asking basic questions while I answered in elaborate ways.
I’d been around the personal development block quite a bit by then. I’d worked in communications and understood human behaviour, and I was already coaching. I knew how to present my problems in ways that were intelligent, articulate, and psychologically informed.
Three sessions in, I was laying out a recurring, frustrating dynamic I was having with someone in my life. I was explaining the whole thing at length—the behaviours involved, what I was doing, what they were doing, probably going off on a few tangents along the way.
That’s when she cut me off.
“… What do you even need me for? You’ve figured it all out, right?”
She went straight for the jugular.
It created a silence in the room I didn’t know how to be with.
I sat there, shocked, trying to find words: “I don’t understand... I haven’t figured it all out, that’s why I’m here.”
“Well, you seem to understand everything already. But who are the people you’re talking about? You haven’t even told me their names.”
I thought it was the most arbitrary, pointless thing I’d ever heard. What the hell did she need their names for?
I began to panic. I hadn’t prepared for this. There was no well-thought-out packaging to hide behind. Confused, I gave her the name, wondering what difference it could possibly make.
And then something shifted.
Was it saying the person’s name? Or was it her question, and the sudden feeling that I’d done something wrong? I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me, or why any of this mattered.
Either way, the rehearsal was gone.
I was no longer explaining the dynamic at arm’s length; I was feeling it. The tension. The insecurity of not knowing where I stood.
Funny how we think we’re doing so much when we’re monologuing, rambling, and overexplaining, when really all we’re doing is keeping reality from touching us. Right there in the room, that same dynamic was playing out with the analyst too. I didn’t know what she wanted from me. I had lost the wheel, and I was incredibly uncomfortable.
Her delivery was cold and shaming, and frankly, I still think so. That’s why I walked out and never went back.
There is an assumption—fuelled heavily by social media influencer culture—that therapeutic spaces are supposed to be soft, soothing, and endlessly validating. That your therapist is supposed to be some kind of pseudo-friend, speaking in a hushed, calming tone, gently holding space while you recount everything that’s happened to you, validating your feelings and perspectives along the way. As though therapy were about finally receiving the unconditional acceptance you missed from your caregivers.
This woman did none of that. She cut through the noise and called out what was happening right there between us.
The confrontation brought real material into the room. With another person right there, everything I was analysing in my head became real in the moment. And honestly, I wasn’t ready for that. Looking back, I may have only been performing therapy, not really participating in it.
I didn’t see this woman as a person; I equated her to a performance, too. Someone who had all the answers. Someone who had figured it all out. We do that with authority figures, don’t we? Therapists are treated as almost non-human in their relational perfection.
But now that I think back, after I chugged down my coffee and finally walked into her office from the waiting room, she was actually apologetic. “This is a rented office,” she said. “I prefer not to take any risks.”
There was a real person in there, with her own set of fears—and there they were, quite possibly clashing with mine. That’s what makes relational work so delicate. There’s a real human on the other side of you. Someone who is receiving what you bring into the space, not simply assessing it. I wonder if we sometimes forget that.
And for me, the possibility of being received was terrifying. Because what if I wasn’t?
I grew up with too much space, and I was left alone in it constantly.
It took me years, and eventually my own trauma-informed training, to recognise this as a form of neglect. Neglect is a strange kind of trauma, because it’s defined by what didn’t happen. The people who weren’t there. The experiences you never had. There’s often no particular event to point to, no story to tell. Just all the things that should have happened but didn’t.
There was all this space, all this time, and no one else there in it with me. And what is a child supposed to do with that much loneliness and isolation but fill the void with their own thoughts?
I learned to rely on myself because there was no one else to rely on. I didn’t really learn how to need another person, because there was never anyone consistently there to need.
And that never quite turned off.
I carried that into my adult relationships, and right into that analyst’s office. While I was desperately seeking someone who could meet me, I was also busy making sure I never had to find out whether anyone would.
Instead, I kept myself busy: figure it all out, do it all yourself, get it right, be insightful, look like you’re really self-aware—even about the very problem you’re presenting.
And the bizarre paradox is that I was taking up all the space in the room, cognitively and acoustically.
We think we’re being vulnerable by sharing everything we’ve been through, but those stories and narratives we’ve regurgitated time and time again from therapist to therapist are also something we hide behind. I can talk about what I’ve been through endlessly without ever actually feeling it.
Taking up space with your voice doesn’t necessarily mean taking up space in vulnerability. You can rehearse your stories, prepare what you’re going to say, even run through the entire conversation in your head beforehand. And if I’m being totally honest, I’ve done plenty of that in therapy myself. I doubt I’m alone.
You can present your experiences perfectly to another person without ever really feeling what’s happening between you and the person you’re sharing them with.
Taking up space with the experience underneath the story means risking something real. And I still wonder, even now, working with people relationally: is it even possible to be genuinely vulnerable with a stranger you’re meeting for the first time?
Or are we just performing the intake, the introductory call, the first session, based on what we think is expected of us and what we’ve experienced in every other therapeutic encounter?
And if that’s how we start, at what point do we release the performance? Are we even aware that we’re performing? And whose responsibility is it to notice?
A relationship requires you to take that risk to find out whether someone can actually meet you or not. But those of us who overfunction can spend so much time holding up both ends of the dynamic that we never really find out.
What happens when we stop? Will the other person show up? Will they meet us in some kind of mutuality? Or will we be left alone, rejected, or disappointed all over again?
And how often does all that self-protective managing inadvertently recreate the very relational setup we’re trying to avoid?
We’re so afraid that no one will show up that we never actually give anyone the opportunity.
I certainly wasn’t giving anyone that opportunity. But it took me a hell of a long time to realise that.
What happens when you stop trying to hold up a relationship without giving up on the relationship itself?
What happens when you stop trying to get it right?
When that analyst cut me off and asked, “Is there anything you actually even need from me?”, she went straight to that uncomfortable silence. Straight to that edge, to the place I had spent my life avoiding—where I had to wait for another person to show up, with zero certainty of whether they would or not.
It was cathartic.
It was like she had said what maybe everybody in my life was never able to say to me, and this stranger said it directly to my face. It broke the spell of “I’m right and they’re wrong.” It broke the spell of my own victimhood, because I was forced to look at my part in the setup of what kept happening.
What I thought I needed was someone to think with me and join me in the analysis. What I got was someone who burst the analysis, who popped the bubble, and I fell right to the ground with a thud. In that moment, I came out of my own head—despite not really wanting to, nor expecting to. I was forced to meet another human being in real time and feel the tension between the two of us.
And by the way, it took years of integrating what happened in that half-hour session to realise that depth-based work—work that actually moves you—doesn’t necessarily need to be the things we expect it to be.
I had assumed meaningful therapeutic work required an ongoing relationship, a practitioner I liked, and an approach I agreed with. Yet that encounter affected me profoundly, even though I left furious and never returned.
I still don’t agree with her approach. But I can recognise the value of what happened without needing to decide whether she was right or wrong. Nor does it mean that I was wrong for not returning.
Neither of us could have known what would happen in that room. Meeting another person like that takes a kind of intimacy I wasn’t prepared for. I wasn’t yet able to risk getting vulnerable with her.
Because you can’t perform relational work. It happens between people, and neither person can completely control what eventually emerges.
I could have stayed with that analyst. I could have carried on, explored what happened between us, and maybe discovered something different.
But I wasn’t ready to take that risk in that relationship.
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About Tanya Master
Tanya is a psychosomatic consultant and somatic coach, currently training in Somatic Experiencing® (SEP) and Family Constellations facilitation. She runs an independent, international private practice, working with people to bridge the gap between cognitive self-awareness and embodied relational experience.
To learn more about her 1:1 consultations or reflective practitioner containers, visit tanyamaster.com.