Many people end up in therapy not because they needed it, but because someone in their life refused it.
“I’m not telling a stranger my problems.”
I hear this often, and I think the fear is rarely about the stranger.
Sometimes the fear is about what might surface if someone listened closely. What might come into focus if empathy replaced defensiveness. What might become harder to dismiss if compassion was offered instead of minimization.
Avoidance can feel protective. It can look like independence or strength. But what goes unexamined does not disappear. It shows up sideways in relationships, in reactions that feel bigger than the moment, in patterns that keep repeating without explanation.
So the stranger becomes the villain. Reduced to a caricature. Someone intrusive. Someone unnecessary. Someone dangerous. But therapy is not a spectacle.
There are no secrets shouted into the world. No lives put on display. What happens instead is quiet. Steady. Intentional. A space where questions are asked not to accuse, but to understand.
And sometimes understanding asks us to stay with things we would rather move past. To reconsider stories we have relied on. To sit with truths that complicate what we thought we knew.
Maybe the fear is not about telling a stranger your problems.
Maybe it is about what becomes visible when you stop looking away.
Between sessions, this is what lingers. Therapy is not about blame or exposure. It is about allowing your inner world to exist without being dismissed, defended against, or rewritten.
And the stranger you worry about is simply someone trained to notice what has been there all along.
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