Going to Therapy is not the same as doing Therapy
There’s a moment many clients have in therapy (sometimes early on, sometimes much later) when they realise that showing up to the room is only one part of the work. It’s an important part, yes. But doing therapy asks something a little deeper, a little braver, and often a little slower than we expect.
Going to therapy is the act of arriving. Booking the appointment. Sitting in the chair. Allowing yourself to be seen and heard. For many, that alone is a huge step. It signals readiness, or at least a willingness, to look at your life with more honesty.
Doing therapy is something very different. It’s what happens when you begin turning toward the parts of yourself you’ve avoided. When you start to listen to what hurts, instead of rushing past it. When you’re willing to let your guard soften, even slightly.
Doing therapy means allowing yourself to be impacted. It’s noticing the things that stay with you after a session: a question, a feeling in your chest, a memory that suddenly makes more sense. It’s the quiet work between sessions: the small shifts in how you speak to yourself, the moment you pause instead of reacting, the way you try, even once, to meet yourself with more patience.
It doesn’t look impressive from the outside. Often, it looks like sitting in silence while emotions rise and fall. Or naming something out loud for the first time. Or realising that a pattern you’ve lived in for years is ready to change. Sometimes doing therapy is simply staying in the room when every part of you wants to leave.
And it’s important to say: doing therapy isn’t about performing growth or forcing breakthroughs. It’s about being honest with yourself, even when the truth is tender or difficult. It’s about allowing your therapist to walk alongside you, not for them to fix you, but to help you make sense of what you carry.
There will be sessions where you feel like nothing happened. There will be weeks when you feel stuck. And there will be times when you wonder if you’re doing it right. These moments are all part of the work. Therapy is not a straight line; it’s a relationship, a rhythm, an ebb and flow, a gradual unfolding. And when these feelings show up, sharing them with your therapist matters. Naming your uncertainty, your frustration, or your sense of “not getting anywhere” opens the door to understanding what’s happening beneath the surface. It’s often in those honest, slightly uncomfortable conversations that something starts to ease or shift.
Going to therapy is the doorway. Doing therapy is stepping inside. One is attendance; the other is engagement. Both matter. Both take courage.
If you’re somewhere between the two, showing up but unsure how to lean in, that’s a real and valid part of the process. Stay with it. You can take your time. Together, you and your therapist will find your own way into the work, at a pace that feels safe enough to sustain.
Doing therapy isn’t about getting it right. It’s about letting yourself be human, fully, honestly, and with as much compassion as you can manage on any given day. And that, in itself, is how real change begins.
