This is the last part of a four part series grappling with the stages of therapy. Many people come to therapy with very little idea of what meaningful work actually consists of, even when they’ve had therapy before.
The Threshold Series is my attempt to explore this process, from recognising that something must change, to the difficulty of crossing, to the experience of the psychological desert, and finally, what begins to return, and how therapy changes you.
Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground–
Oscar Wilde
The Advent of Spring
I was recently taking a walk. The air was crisp, but all around me were the first signs of spring. The vibrant Mahonia circling the birches, the green buds appearing as if from nowhere. I knew this marked the end of winter, something was shifting, but still I felt my limbs were heavy, sluggish and that familiar feeling of a cold coming on.
Spring is like that. The world begins to open, but the body does not immediately follow. After months of darkness, the return of light can feel less like pure relief, and more like exposure. There is always a period of adjustment, as something internal catches up with what has already changed outside.
What People Think They Want
When most patients arrive in my office, they are already struggling. They know something cannot continue as it has been, and often they have tried therapy before. Many people say a version of the same thing: “How do I get rid of that part of me?” There is often a quiet hope that something painful can be removed, softened, or left behind. That there might be a way to move forward without having to fully encounter what is there. At times, this is not just a wish for relief, but a wish to no longer feel in the same way at all. And I find myself thinking, this is where the work begins.
The Psychological Desert
In my essay about entering into the psychological desert, I tried to explain why therapy is not a straightforward process. Our coping feels rational, helpful, necessary even, and it may indeed be. I’ve heard many times patients tell me, “Oh I got over that years ago”, “Oh I dealt with that”, “Oh I can’t even remember.” It seems as if our own natural defences kick in and shut down the possibility of allowing experiences to matter or feelings to register. Something gets organised in order to continue.
But when someone stays long enough in what I have called the psychological desert, long enough to tolerate not knowing, something else begins to emerge. It may not always be clarity, or neat resolution, but rather space for something new.
The Real Work: Grief not Optimisation
Freud, in Mourning and Melancholia, made a distinction between losses that can be felt and those that cannot. In mourning, something painful is gradually recognised and released. In melancholia, the loss remains, but in a more obscured form, turned inward, often without clear awareness. Much of the work of therapy moves quietly between these states.
Psychotherapy can resemble the work of a moirologist, someone who gives voice to grief. Not publicly, but in the privacy and intimacy of a consulting room. Grief, as psychotherapist Francis Weller writes, is not exceptional but inherent to the human experience throughout one’s life. And yet we have lost many of the rituals that once allowed it to be expressed and recognised. Up until recently spouses who were widowed wore black as a strong visual symbol to the community that they were in mourning. Now you’re lucky if you get two weeks off work.
Contexts change and nowadays psychotherapy has become one of the few places where this acknowledgement of grief can still happen, a place where what was pushed aside in order to function can be felt, named, and slowly integrated. We thaw ourselves from the need to perform, if only for an hour each week, not to produce or achieve, but to feel.
In this, therapy is not about making you a different person, but rather it is about changing your relationship to what you feel, primarily through the capacity to grieve. When that happens, something in life begins to move again, but not always in the way people expect.
What Begins to Change in the Therapy Room
People often ask what actually happens in therapy when something begins to change. They might be expecting a resurrection, when in reality, it might be a lot less dramatic.
At first it may appear in subtle forms. There may be less pressure within each session. Time feels different, less urgency to figure it out or get better. Emotional states become more tolerable, even when they are not pleasant. The therapeutic relationship shifts. It can be thought about, even aspects that once felt impossible to name, such as need or disappointment. The work feels less like something to survive, and more like something that can be inhabited. More room starts to develop, internally and between the therapist and patient.
Over time, the therapist may no longer be needed in the same way. The intensity of the relationship shifts. What once felt urgent or overwhelming can be thought about. The work moves from rescue towards recognition. There can be mutual contemplation of what an ending may look like without panic or avoidance, an ending that is no longer only experienced as loss or abandonment, but as a beginning.
Emergence Outside of the Room
Emergence is not the end of the work. It’s the beginning of living without the previous illusions. These shifts have been described in different ways. Jung wrote of integration, Freud of the capacity to work and love, Rogers of a more fully functioning way of being. Frankl spoke of meaning.
What they share is not the elimination of difficulty, but a different relationship to it. What returns is not a new self, but a shift in one’s relationship to oneself. Paradoxically there may be less symptomatic anxiety, but also a greater tolerance for uncertainty. There may be more aliveness, but also more vulnerability. There may be more agency, with less reliance on external validation.
There is often grief here too, for the self that was organised around survival, for the fantasies that can no longer be sustained, for the simplicity of earlier ways of being. As Francis Weller describes in his “Five Gates of Grief”, loss is not singular. It includes what we have loved and lost, what we never received, what continues to change around us, and what we carry from those who came before us.
In lived experience, this may look like the loss of old relationships as patterns shift. A recognition of decisions made, without defensiveness. An acceptance of limits, of what can and cannot be changed. It may involve the loss of certain fantasies, about love, the body, success, being seen. And a different relationship to our parents, where anger and disappointment can be felt alongside understanding, and sometimes, a deeper form of love.
What emerges is less optimised than expected. A more sober, less glamorous, less performative identity. Something has come back into circulation — feeling, curiosity, the capacity for play, the possibility of love. Even humour. Desire, but less compulsive. More meaning, more room, more coherence. Lightness alongside darkness.
Therapy becomes a holding ground where these capacities can live without needing to resolve the tension. Like spring, it does not arrive all at once. It comes unevenly, in moments. A sense of movement where there was once stasis. A feeling that something, however incrementally, is beginning to return. And even then, the work is not complete. As my therapist once said, there are different seasons in therapy. I only understood this when I entered one of those seasons myself, and the work continued, not from scratch, but as a continuation.
The threshold is not something we cross once, but something we learn, slowly, to recognise, and to cross again.
Sophie Frost is a depth-oriented psychotherapist working with individuals and couples in Berlin and online. She writes cultural and clinical essays in response to an increasingly simplified psychological culture.