Therapy isnt about fixing, its about making sense (to you)

People often come to therapy with the belief that something about them is wrong.

This isn’t always conscious but can manifest as apologizing for their feelings, minimizing what they’ve been through, bracing for judgment, or asking some version of, “Is this normal?” Many people arrive hoping that if they can just identify the right problem and apply the right solution, things will finally feel better.

The idea that therapy is about fixing can be comforting in its simplicity. It suggests there’s a clear cause and a clear cure. But in my experience, this often misses something essential about how people actually suffer and how change really happens.

More often than not, distress isn’t rooted in pathology. It’s rooted in confusion. Confusion about what happened. Confusion about what one feels. Confusion about what’s allowed, reasonable, or real. Over time, chronic confusion can begin to look like anxiety, depression, dissociation, or shame. Not because something is inherently wrong with a person, but because they’ve been trying to move through life without a clear and coherent way of understanding their own experience.

Confusion Is Not a Personal Failure

Humans are meaning-making beings. We are constantly organizing our inner and outer experiences into some kind of story about who we are, how relationships work, and what we can expect from the world around us. When those stories are disrupted, distorted, or never given the chance to fully form, distress emerges naturally.

Importantly, we don’t make meaning in isolation. Our understanding of ourselves develops in relationship, through attuned responses from others. Someone listens. Someone reflects back what they hear with care and clarity. Someone stays present without trying to rush, fix, or explain it away. Through this process, thoughts that once felt tangled can begin to organize and feelings that felt overwhelming can become more precise. Experience becomes something that can be held and integrated, rather than endured.

Why This Disproportionately Affects Queer and Trans People

For queer and trans people, this kind of internal static rarely develops in a vacuum. It forms in the context of chronic invalidation—of having one’s lived experience questioned, minimized, misunderstood, or ignored over and over again. This invalidation can be subtle or overt, relational or systemic, but the impact adds up.

Many queer people grow up without clear models for understanding themselves; family members don’t reflect back what they see with curiosity or care, language for identity, desire, and self-understanding may be missing, distorted, or actively discouraged. Broader systems: schools, healthcare, religion, and media often fail to offer affirming or coherent narratives about queer lives. As a result, meaning-making becomes something that must be done in isolation.

For trans and nonbinary people in particular, reality itself is often treated as negotiable. Access to language may arrive late, if at all. Bodily experience can be medicalized or debated rather than understood. Identity is treated as something to be proven instead of something to be known. In these conditions, confusion is not a symptom, it’s a reasonable response to being denied the tools needed to make sense of one’s own life.

When queer clients arrive in therapy, they don’t come in with only the concern listed on an intake form. Alongside anxiety, relationship struggles, addiction, or depression, they carry a long history of having had to translate themselves; of having learned, often unconsciously, that they must overexplain in order to be believed, or minimize in order to stay safe. Without attention to this broader context, therapy risks addressing only the visible tip of the iceberg, while the deeper layers that give the problem meaning remain unseen.

When the Language Finally Arrives

I entered graduate school as a queer person carrying significant anxiety and relational trauma that I didn’t yet know how to name. I understood that I was struggling, but much of my distress felt vague and hard to conceptualize. It wasn’t that nothing had happened—it was that I didn’t yet have a framework that could hold my experience with enough accuracy to make it make sense.

Being in an academic environment that was explicitly social-justice-oriented was a turning point. I was introduced to language that helped clarify what I had lived through, not by reducing it to a diagnosis, but by placing it in a broader relational and cultural context.For the first time, my experiences felt understandable, and my admittedly maladaptive responses made sense given the reasons they developed.

A professor presented an idea during a lecture one day that really stuck with me: hermeneutic injustice. At its core, it describes the harm that occurs when people are denied access to the language or shared understanding needed to make sense of their own experiences. When the dominant culture doesn’t offer words for what you’re living or actively dismisses them, confusion and self-doubt take hold.

For example, imagine growing up feeling constantly overwhelmed by noise, lights, or social situations. But, everyone around you treats it like you’re “too sensitive,” “dramatic,” or “difficult.” You know something is happening to you, but you don’t have language for it. There’s no concept of sensory overload, the only explanation is that you are the problem.

Years later, you learn the term sensory processing differences or autistic sensory overload.

Suddenly, your past makes sense.

What Therapy Can Become

This is part of how I’ve witnessed healing take place in the therapy room, and also why therapy can be a source of perpetuated harm. When therapy offers accurate language, historical awareness, and genuine attunement, it can be deeply reparative. When it doesn’t, clients may once again feel unseen or misunderstood, even in a space meant to support them.

As a therapist, this understanding shapes how I practice. I don’t believe therapy should be rigid or imposed. The approaches I draw from: relational, narrative, systemic, and emotion-focused, are always shaped in collaboration with the person sitting across from me, co-created, with care, based on who you are and what you need.

For queer and trans people especially, support needs to allow space for agency and authorship. Dominant systems and narratives were not built with queer lives in mind, and therapy should not replicate that dynamic. Instead, it can become a place where your experience is taken seriously, where your story is honored, and where meaning is allowed to emerge at your own pace.

Therapy, at its best, isn’t about correction or self-improvement in the way we’re often taught to imagine it. It’s about creating a relational space where confusion is allowed to exist without being rushed, where experience is met with curiosity rather than judgment, and where meaning can slowly take shape in the presence of someone who is paying close attention.

For many queer and trans people, this kind of space can be profoundly reparative. Not because it offers answers right away, but because it makes room for questions that may never have been safe to ask before. You don’t need to come in with the right language and road map. Making sense is not a prerequisite for therapy; it’s the work itself.