perceptual shift

i first started dabbling in therapy nearly a decade ago. i started with an older male therapist i found through betterhelp, to address what felt like outsize anxiety about my new relationship. we did a few brief sessions before he promptly told me i was fine and didn’t need more therapy.

a few years later, when i was working at square and feeling despondent about my life and career, i decided to try therapy again, this time at a practice by and for women in san francisco. it was... fine? i went once a week to talk to my therapist about what had been on my mind lately. she nodded and took notes. therapy is just a dedicated space for me to think through how i’m feeling about my life, i thought. there’s nothing a therapist can tell me about myself that i don’t already know.

after i moved to new york, the pandemic struck. i left square and started to search for what could come next. homebound and questioning my past choices, i picked up therapy once again, with lyra health, a corporate benefit through my partner’s workplace at the time. its focus was, unsurprisingly, productivity—how to deal with burnout and anxiety and depression so that you could return to achieving your goals. my therapist practiced cognitive behavioral therapy, which i came to view as capitalism’s answer to the problem of the self. identify your irrational thoughts so you can stop having them and get back to work! before long, it started to grate against me—it felt like a therapeutic modality designed to convince me that the only problem in my life was the insufficient policing of my own mind, and i already did plenty of that.

i decided to find another therapist outside of these online platforms maximizing for scale, at a real practice. after doing a round of consultations, i landed on a therapist with whom i clicked. she was warm, affirming, and funny, and we got along well. and it was good! we chatted weekly for four years. over that period of time, i was able to speak in more depth about deeper subjects—my family, my relationship, my fears. i cried a few times, even.

still, then, i couldn’t get over this feeling that therapy was just a weekly appointment setting for me to analyze myself and my life, where it wasn’t clear what it added beyond a protected time and a supportive ear. nothing was happening. it wasn’t aggregating toward anything; it wasn’t enabling me to perceive or behave differently. my problems kept recurring.

in fact, they got worse. eventually my therapist diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder. i wondered what we should do about that, but i wasn’t sure what could be done about it. i was the way i was, and i already knew exactly why. what else was there? so we kept doing our usual routine, where i would chat through what happened each week, how i had felt about it, and what the psychological causes and effects were. and everything stayed the same.

looking back, as an analytical person who intellectualized emotions so reflexively that i didn’t know there was any other way to be, i had run into the most obvious failure mode of talk therapy. when all my therapists were impressed by my emotional awareness and praised me for how thoughtfully i acted on my self-knowledge, i just thought i was doing a good job. when nothing shifted after years and years of what i believed was “doing the work,” i just thought that that was the limitation of what therapy could do. i couldn’t expect it to be transformative; the results might be slow and imperceptible, but it was better than nothing.

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turning thirty last year led to a cascade of events that included leaving my therapist and seeking a new one, again. this time, i had a much clearer goal: to find a form of therapy that was less analytical and more embodied, as well as a practitioner intimately familiar with the hyperintellectualizer archetype. i wanted to, well, feel my feelings.

how did i arrive at this conclusion? ironically, perhaps, claude was a big part of it. i would use it to search for blind spots in my own self-perception, countering my automatic interpretations of events with a “neutral” third-party perspective. that was helpful, though limited. but what the process did reveal to me over time was just how often i would spiral into overthinking and how heavily i relied on analytical understanding in every single aspect of life. it turns out that using claude as an adversarial judge to discern the most objectively healthy emotional response to a situation and then diagnose the origins of why you aren’t experiencing it indicates a pretty specific kind of person.

the other part was the rise in popularity of less mainstream therapeutic modalities like internal family systems (ifs), somatic work, and psychedelic therapy in my social circles. i saw the effects play out over time with people i loved and respected, eroding my long-held skepticism of how much these kinds of interventions could really do.

so at this point i believed it was possible for therapy to be more impactful than it had been, but i was also now aware of how difficult by default it was to find the right fit. i decided to cast a wide net, scheduling a series of consultations with different practitioners—psychoanalysts, somatic therapists, ifs coaches. some had been recommended by friends, and others were people i had encountered online.

many of these conversations went the same way as my first several experiences of therapy. i would speak to a practitioner, and they would be surprised at how “articulate” and “self-aware” i was and inquire what i was hoping to get out of the experience given that i already had a handle on it all. earlier in my life, i would have been flattered; now it read as an anti-pattern. i would explain my history with therapy and what i wanted to be different this time, and they would agree readily to all of it without seemingly any real recognition of what i was saying.

only two of the conversations i had had the click where the practitioner instantly understood what i meant and had evidently undergone this experience on a personal level. both were coaches, not therapists, which gave me some pause. i was worried about the degree of rigor and professionalism; all the requirements (licenses and credentials, confidentiality, etc.) of therapy were nonexistent. plus, coaching was much more expensive. both of them charged three times the hourly rate of my previous therapist, which at the time had already felt like an exorbitant expense because it was uninsured. but the clear resonance was the one non-negotiable factor that i had been missing for years, so i decided to give it a try.

i chose the coach who had worked with one of my closest friends for a few years. she was the most perceptive of everyone i had met by far—in our brief consultation, she read me more quickly than perhaps anyone ever had. it was a novel experience. i was used to having to explain myself to be legible even to people who had known me for years. beyond that, she was trained in specific modalities like ifs and somatic experiencing rather than vaguely gesturing to “alignment” and “clarity,” which made the prospect of working with her feel more substantive than the average coaching experience.

our very first session reached a depth of emotional honesty and attunement that i hadn’t experienced in the decade of therapy prior to that. granted, i was in a period of overwhelming grief, and my emotions lurked closer to the surface than they ever had. but my default level of self-control meant that nearly everyone in conversation with me experienced that as factual information rather than my felt experience. she drew out the emotions, not just my accounts of them. one of the prompts she gave me was so psychoactive that, when i mentioned it to my sister and a few friends, two people cried just hearing it.

not every session was like that, of course. there were stops and starts, many iterations, points of friction and challenge. i struggled with the pace. i had imagined the rapid progress i’d make once i really applied myself; in reality, most of the year went to developing the capacities to even start the practices i had wanted to do. i kept waiting impatiently for the “real” work to begin, not noticing it already had. eventually, for the first time, i could see a path to an evolution of who i was, the surprising contingency of what i thought were fixed, load-bearing parts of my identity.

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to do this kind of work well requires a level of perception and attention that most practitioners haven’t cultivated. what can this client receive? what’s the ask under the ask? what’s the feeling under the rationalization? calibrating to that in real time with a stranger is really, really difficult, especially with someone whose mental architecture is wholly foreign to their own.

therapy is a tricky job; the incentives can often be misaligned. both from a financial perspective and from a support perspective, it is hard for a therapist to say that they aren’t the right fit for you. but when you’re early in this work, less emotionally aware and less knowledgeable about the options, it’s difficult to locate yourself in what’s out there. the particular alchemy of what you need might be so hard to find that you conclude it must not exist. then again, maybe there’s no way around that; you blunder through it for a while, and you learn.

when i had offered up individual context to prior therapists—that i feel deeply and want to go there even when i’m less outwardly expressive, that i don’t think in words or images, that it helps me to have a course of action and directionality to the work—they had nodded in understanding and then changed nothing.

my coach, though, took in everything. nothing was dropped. she didn’t disavow my analytical mode, which i had been eager to do but with no idea of how to operate without it. she channeled it where it was productive and guided me toward developing other capacities where it wasn’t. my strength is understanding complex systems, identifying their faults, and addressing them, which means i can be remarkably clear-eyed about where in my life i’m not acting as the person i want to be and will put in a huge amount of work toward shifting those behaviors. it also means it’s much harder for me to accept the status quo of who i am as exactly how i’m supposed to be and not in need of fixing. but the analytical mode could be directed in service of flow over resistance, moving toward over moving from.

we built a working doc together that continued our work outside of sessions, now approaching probably a thousand pages of experimentation and observation. every tool was fluid and adaptive, rather than prescriptive—we worked to understand what resonated, what didn’t, and why. she tuned the work to be the right gradation, easing into depth, building up skills over time.

this same perception, directed at our relationship, turned it into a focal point of the work. she established our time together as a playground for learning and experimentation—not just saying it, but consistently reinforcing it. we worked through conflicts and misunderstandings, building trust over time that we could be honest with each other. she affirmed over and over again that i could not hurt her feelings with my feedback or reactions, or even if i decided to stop working with her. slowly, i started to believe her.

psychoanalysis has the concept of transference; the therapist-client relationship, then, becomes the site of a lot of the work as long-held relational patterns emerge within it. but, from my experience, few modern therapists know how to skillfully use the working relationship as a foundation for growth. many people aren’t looking for that from therapy in the first place—they’re looking for validation, comfort, understanding. investigating the tension in the working relationship risks disrupting that.

in my final session with my previous therapist, we discussed how we had worked together and why it hadn’t quite clicked. she told me that she had been going to her peer consultation group and asking, why does jackie keep coming back? i told her that i had been wondering to myself, why aren’t we ever going deeper? there was a deep connection in that honesty, after four years of not saying what we really thought. she hadn’t wanted to intrude past my comfort zone; i hadn’t wanted to make her feel bad. but the conflict avoidance on both parts had limited the relationship to a certain shallowness, despite how much we liked each other.

one of my other therapists offered a lot of frameworks. i would come with a problem, and she would hand me a printout with a process for dealing with it. none of the strategies were bad, per se, but we kept hitting walls. i always intellectually understood the first layer or two of what was happening, and i had these reasonable explanations at hand. “i care about having a budget because i need to feel in control.” “all my tasks need to be done before i can write so that my head is clear.” “it’s important to me that every choice i make is intentional and meaningful and not random.” she accepted them, and that was that. they were true enough.

but then what? we never asked the next question. why is that so important? i could supply a litany of surface-level reasons: i’m an oldest immigrant daughter, i had to become mature and responsible from an early age, my parents grew up amid abject poverty and scarcity, chinese culture values security and avoidance of risk, and so on. all of it was true, and none of it was the substance of the feeling. i never seriously questioned why i had these needs and why they felt so fundamental. they were just a feature of who i am.

my coach used her own frameworks, but in our work they became the lens to seeing what came next. they weren’t the terminal point, handed off to check the box of giving the client a tool. they were processes for gathering the information needed to go further or doing the work once you’d gotten somewhere interesting.

so we asked the next question. if most of my needs circle a deep fear of not having total control, of not having the ability to perfectly predict outcomes and have certainty, then what? perhaps the issue was not how i was following a framework, or how my life was organized. perhaps i needed to go upstream.

much of this past year i spent searching for the perfect answer, a beautifully wrapped reason tied with a bow. what i kept finding was that there was none—or, rather, there were a million, but they all came back to: “i don’t feel safe.” it was a frustratingly simple truth, one that couldn’t be made endlessly fascinating and analyzed into the ground. it just had to be felt.

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if i can explain inner work in one way, it’s as a series of perceptual shifts.

my mind was a little room that i thought i had long since memorized. here’s where everything is. here’s how everything works. i know it all, i’ve lived here my whole life.

but over time, i looked around the room, and i noticed, oh, i thought that was a wall. but there’s a doorway. suddenly you see this door, and you open it. you peer inside this new room and realize, wait, i have been hearing this sound my whole life. i thought that was just what the world sounded like, but in fact, in this room, there is something making the sound, and i can just turn it off.

and then you do it again, and again, and again.

inner work is this continual expansion of the frame, where barriers of your mind that appeared immovable are in reality quite fluid if you find the right switch. inner work that’s working is able to gently widen this frame progressively over time, mapping the territory, finding the switches.

learning anything works this way, but it’s especially extreme when you’re learning yourself and your own mind. you’re so accustomed to your particular way of existing in the world that every contingent truth feels like a law of nature. on top of that, your mind is obscuring your field of view purposefully at every level to protect you.

Ellie going to vc@basilYam

Working with oneself, healing, etc, is like trying to get a message to the king that his minister is corrupt but u can only communicate with the king through his minister

9:05 PM · Jan 21, 2026 · 47.9K Views

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12 Replies · 216 Reposts · 2.17K Likes

i think of psychological defense mechanisms like reaching the boundaries of an open-world video game. an open world is supposed to feel infinitely expansive, but of course there are edges to the maps of most open worlds because the game designers didn’t, in reality, create an infinite world. so you will reach the outer bounds, but they don’t want to make it obvious that the world they’ve designed has these limitations. instead, your vision just starts to blur and fade out, or you find your character turning back toward the map without your directing it there.

that’s how it feels to not be ready for a realization. it just slides off you. often there’s this practiced quality to it, where your mind automatically replays some default response: “oh, of course, i know what’s over there,” and without quite noticing it, you’ve covered up the lack of deeper inquiry or engagement with this sleight of hand; you’ve turned back toward safe ground.

but a skillful practitioner can notice when it happens and say, “wait a second, i see you turning back from this direction. what if we look back there for a moment?” and that’s where the work takes place.

or it happens during a period of acute grief. grief turns your mind into a prison. you are trapped, and in your desperation you do everything in your power to find a way out. you start inspecting every nook, every surface, every shadow, with suspicion. and, it turns out, when you do that intently and for long enough, you usually do find a hidden doorway, or even a few.

i’ve often wondered whether it would have been possible for me to arrive at this place earlier. did i need to be wholly unmade to remake myself anew? or is it possible that, with the right practitioner, i could have done it before? it’s hard to say. grief without direction would likely have led me to cope in all the ways i already knew: rumination, achievement-seeking, self-control. and even the perfect practitioner, absent my willingness to question everything, might have found me impenetrable.

my defenses were so strong, so foundational to the person i believed i needed to be to move through the world, that i mistook them for my core self. i couldn’t imagine releasing the competence, the perfectionism, the certainty, these parts of myself i was sure i needed to be safe and, beneath that, to be loved. the perceptual shift was realizing that the walls weren’t protecting that; they were keeping me from feeling it.

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as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.