What I carry into the therapy room

Psychotherapist Julia Berrington reflects on what she brings into the therapy room: an awareness of danger alongside a determination to remain curious about what might still be possible. The challenge, she suggests, is not choosing between them but learning to hold both at once.

I sometimes wonder whether I am becoming increasingly cynical. Perhaps that is what happens when you spend a working life looking closely at what human beings are capable of doing to one another.

Before I became a psychotherapist, I was a police officer. That career taught me things which are difficult to unlearn. To notice what doesn’t fit. To listen carefully to what isn’t being said. To recognise risk. To question apparently straightforward accounts. To understand that people can be frightened, manipulative, deceptive, dangerous, desperate – sometimes all at the same time.

Being a police officer taught me not to be naïve. And then I became a psychotherapist. Which is, in some ways, a rather strange second career for someone with that history. Because psychotherapy asks something different of me. It asks me to remain curious when I think I already know. To listen without immediately deciding. To tolerate uncertainty. To sit alongside another person’s version of reality, even when it is uncomfortable or difficult to understand. And nowhere is that tension more apparent than when I work with profoundly traumatised and suicidal people.

There is a part of me that is acutely alert to the danger. I notice the changes in presentation. I listen for what isn’t being said. I think about risk, intent, protective factors and what might happen after the session. That part of me has been trained, over many years, to anticipate what could go wrong.

But there is another part of me that refuses to give up. Even when someone is exhausted by living. Even when trauma has narrowed their world to the point where they genuinely cannot imagine a future. Even when the risk feels frighteningly real, something in me continues to look for the tiny opening. Not necessarily hope in the grand sense. Sometimes just a crack. A moment of connection. A different way of understanding something. A flicker of curiosity. A sentence that lands differently. A reason to stay until tomorrow.

And I will keep looking for it. That is the exhausting part. Sometimes it feels as though there are two of me sitting in the therapy room.

One is scanning the horizon. The other is sitting beside the person in the darkness saying: I’m not giving up on you yet.

One has learned that people can die. The other continues to believe that people can change.

One is suspicious. The other remains curious.

One wants to know what could go wrong. The other wants to know what might still be possible.

Perhaps my cynicism isn’t the opposite of hope after all. Perhaps it is what I have had to carry alongside hope. Because I don’t think I can be the kind of therapist who offers easy optimism. I have seen too much. I know too much about trauma, about human behaviour, about systems that fail people and about the terrible consequences of getting risk wrong.

I cannot honestly promise a client that everything will be okay. But I can sometimes offer something else. I can say, in effect: I don’t know how this story ends. You don’t know either. But while we are here, I am willing to keep looking.

Maybe that is what keeps the two parts of me working together rather than tearing me apart. The police officer reminds me not to underestimate danger. The psychotherapist reminds me not to underestimate people. And perhaps the real discipline is learning to hold both truths at the same time. Because sometimes being a therapist means sitting with someone who has almost completely lost hope, while quietly carrying a little of it for them until they are able to carry some of it themselves.

And that, I think, is why I keep doing it. Even when it is exhausting. Especially when it is exhausting.

________________
Return to THE NOOK

Click the link if you'd like to visit Julia’s therapy website
All rights reserved © Copyright Julia Berrington 2026. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author of this post is strictly prohibited. Author contact via website Contact page.