To be with you in your struggles
If therapeutic analysis is not a scientific or medical discipline, then what is it? The word therapy derives from the Ancient Greek therapeia, meaning to attend to, to care for, or to accompany, rather than to cure or correct. Its root, therapeuein, points to a form of being-with rather than technical intervention. This understanding was taken up most clearly in the work of R.D. Laing, whose critique of modern psychiatry was grounded in an existential–phenomenological tradition that understood distress not as a defect located within an isolated individual, but as something that arises within a field of lived relationships. From this perspective, therapy is not something done to a person, but something that unfolds with them: a shared attention to experience as it is lived, spoken, and shaped in relation to others. The task of the therapist is therefore not to fix or normalise, but to remain present with another in their struggle, helping to restore faith in relationship itself.
Such a relationship cannot be neutral or empty; it must be grounded in a commitment to truth, authentic engagement, belief in freedom and commitment to personal responsibility, to speaking when there is something that needs to be said, and to having the courage to remain silent when nothing can—or should—be spoken.
Therapy as Truth
In the end, the work of therapy is the work of truth—sometimes spoken aloud, in order to be reached internally, but always oriented toward a more honest encounter with oneself. The aim is not to reassure, validate, or help you adapt to things as they are, but to slowly and sometimes painfully find words for what you can honestly live with as true.
In relational work, and particularly in work involving couples, this commitment to truth takes on a sharper edge. Couples therapy, as I understand it, is not primarily aimed at preserving relationships at all costs, but at creating the conditions under which each person can speak truthfully to the other, and where the relationship itself is put to the test of that truth. Whether a relationship survives this process is not something therapy can or should guarantee.
Within this model, love and truth are not opposing forces to be carefully balanced against one another. They are synonymous. Love is not the avoidance of conflict, discomfort, or loss, but the willingness to remain present to what is true, even when that truth destabilises familiar arrangements. Therapy, in this sense, is not a technique for repair, but a practice of truthfulness—individual, relational, and ethical.
For clarity, this commitment to truth does not imply coercion, forced disclosure, or the extraction of confession, but rather a respect for each person’s capacity to speak—or to withhold—what becomes possible to articulate in their own time no matter how long it takes.
A Statement on Therapy, Medical Aid claims and PMBs
I do not accept the premise that medical insurance systems should determine the meaning, limits, or language of psychological treatment. When therapy is subordinated to insurer mandates—diagnostic requirements, session limits, digital identification systems, and cloud-based data collection — the therapeutic space is reshaped in ways that privilege short-term cost saving and administrative convenience over clinical judgment, ethical responsibility, and human complexity.
Medical-aid frameworks increasingly operate on actuarial logic; suffering must be rendered into set language and categories in order for it to be considered legitimate, and some categories of distress and suffering are considered more warranting of the cost of treatment than others. Your concerns, distress and suffering meant to be time-limited, or it is considered your own personal failing or “resistance to treatment”. Your struggles are meant to be as inexpensive as possible.
The assumption that something as complex as “Major Depression” can be adequately addressed within a fixed number of sessions is not a reflection of therapeutic reality, but of the bureaucratic need for procedural efficiency and predictable financial burdens. These limits are imposed not because they are clinically sound, but because they are administratively manageable and cost efficient.
This system also introduces a particular form of illness language into the therapeutic encounter. Psychological suffering is framed as an internal pathology—an illness, a defect, a chemical imbalance—located within the individual, rather than as a meaningful response to lived experience, relational history, family dynamics, biological vulnerability, socio-political and material conditions. Such framing subtly redirects the analytic conversation away from context and meaning, and toward diagnosis, compliance, and premature closure.
My current concern is the requirement that practitioners and clients participate in third-party digital ID and cloud-based platforms as a condition of accessing benefits. These systems centralise sensitive clinical information within corporate infrastructures, where it may be retained, analysed, and repurposed beyond the immediate therapeutic context. Once recorded, diagnostic labels and clinical narratives are no longer transient and hypothetical: they become fixed conclusions that can follow individuals into the future, influencing insurance premiums, exclusions, eligibility for benefits, or access to care in ways that are potentially irreversible and beyond the client’s control.
For these reasons, I am currently refusing participation in PMB applications that require enrolment in insurer-mandated digital systems or data-collection platforms. This is not a rejection of care, but a refusal of a model of care that prioritises cost containment and administrative ease over confidentiality, clinical integrity, and the long-term interests of those seeking help. I will, however, continue to provide invoices with suitable, accurate, yet generic enough codes for you to claim back from your medical aid if you wish to do so.
The therapy that I practice does not consider the client in terms of a diagnosable subject or insurance risk profile. It aims at providing a space for openness, free speech and thinking, for making sense of suffering, and for encountering experience without prematurely medicalising it or translating it into the impoverished languages of industry and commerce. Until a more ethically defensible framework emerges, I choose to place the dignity of the therapeutic relationship above short-term savings and institutional guidelines and convenience.
Credo
Therapy, as I understand and practice it, is not a service to be delivered or a problem to be solved, but a relationship entered into over time. It is a long and patient endeavour, shaped by presence rather than urgency, and by attention rather than technique. Its value lies not in speed, efficiency, or measurable outcomes, but in the space it creates for experience, feeling, thought, speech, and the slow emergence of meaning.
This work is grounded in truth rather than reassurance, in responsibility rather than compliance, and in relationship rather than diagnosis. It resists the reduction of suffering to categories, risk profiles, or cost-managed timelines, and refuses the transformation of intimate human experience into administrative data. Where institutional demands threaten confidentiality, flatten language, or subordinate care to convenience and profit, I choose to step aside.
Therapy, at its best, is a commitment—to remain with what is difficult, to speak when something true can be spoken, to stay silent when it cannot, and to allow relationships, including one’s relationship with oneself, to change in their own time.
I practice therapy as a sustained ethical relationship, devoted to truth, freedom, and responsibility, and resistant to anything that diminishes their place in life.