There’s something I often find myself saying to clients: “The answers are not outside you, they are within.”
This may sound skeptical, you’ve likely sought therapy because you don’t know what to do, how to feel better or which choice to make. You’re hoping I’ll have the answers and wisdom to guide you.
But here’s what I’ve learned from counselling people in their hardest moments: the answers you’re seeking are almost always already there, buried under layers of other people’s voices, societal expectations, and the constant noise telling them to look everywhere except inward.
The Outward Search
We’re conditioned from birth to look outside ourselves for validation and direction. As children, we learn whether we’re good or bad, worthy or not, capable or lacking based on how adults respond to us. That makes sense—we needed those adults to survive.
But then it continues. We chase good grades to prove we’re smart. We pursue certain careers to show we’re successful. We buy particular brands, curate social media feeds that demonstrate we’re living successfully. We scroll through endless content from people who claim to have figured it out, hoping their formula has the answers.
Johann Hari calls these “junk values”—the extrinsic measures we use to assess our worth. Like junk food, they might offer a brief hit of satisfaction, but they leave us emptier than before. The promotion, the likes, the admiration, none of it fills the gap for long because it’s all coming from outside.
And when we’re struggling, when life feels overwhelming or meaningless or just wrong somehow, we keep searching externally. More podcasts. Another self-help book. A different mentor. Surely someone out there has the answer we need.
The Journey Inward
Person-centred counselling rests on a radical premise: you are the expert on your own life. Not me. Not the influencer with a million followers, that podcaster who has a thousand inspirational one liners. Not your parents or your partner or the guru promising transformation in seven steps.
Just you.
This doesn’t mean you have all the answers neatly packaged and ready to access. It means that underneath the conditioning, the fear, the voices of everyone who’s ever told you who to be, there’s a part of you that knows. Knows what feels right and what doesn’t. Knows what you actually need versus what you think you should want. Knows, often, what needs to change even when that knowing is terrifying.
The work we do together isn’t about me dispensing wisdom. It’s about creating enough safety and quiet that you can hear yourself again. About gently questioning the external voices that have become so loud they’ve drowned out your own. About building trust in your inner compass.
This is harder than it sounds. The journey inward isn’t comfortable. You encounter things you’ve been avoiding: grief you haven’t processed, anger you weren’t allowed to feel, needs you learned to suppress, parts of yourself you’ve been taught are unacceptable.
It takes courage to stop seeking permission from the outside world and start trusting what you find within yourself. Especially when intrinsic values—authenticity, connection, growth, meaning—don’t come with the same external applause as extrinsic ones.
What Gets In The Way
Several things make this inward journey difficult:
Lack of self-worth: When you’ve internalised that you’re not enough, trusting your own judgment feels impossible. Surely everyone else knows better than you.
Fear of what you’ll find: What if you look inside and discover needs that seem selfish? Anger that feels dangerous? A truth about your life that demands difficult change?
Conditioning to comply: From childhood, many of us learned that our job is to figure out what others want and become that. Turning attention inward feels unnatural or wrong.
The comfort of external validation: It’s genuinely easier to follow someone else’s formula, to seek approval, to measure yourself by visible metrics. The alternative is trusting something inside that can’t be quantified or displayed, which can be hard if you’re feeling stuck or lost.
But the cost of staying outward-focused is high. You end up living a life that looks good from the outside while feeling hollow within. You achieve things that were never really yours to want. You lose track of who you are beneath who you think you should be.
What Therapy Actually Does
My role isn’t to tell you what to do. It’s to sit with you while you figure that out for yourself. This doesn’t mean I’m a passive presence in counselling, my goal is to understand the world from your perspective, to see your questions through your lens and connect to the underlying emotions that accompany them. To offer a relationship where you’re genuinely accepted, not for what you achieve or how you appear, but for who you are in this moment. To reflect back what I expereince and understand, to ask questions that open rather than close, to challenge you and to trust your capacity to find your own way.
Sometimes this frustrates people. They want me to just tell them whether to leave the relationship, take the job, confront the parent. And I understand that, decision-making under uncertainty is agonising. But that takes away your responsibility, only you truly know the consequences of making tough decisions that will likely impact your life. If I gave you my answer, you’d be adding one more external voice to the chorus. You’d still be looking outside yourself for permission to trust what you already know.
Instead, we explore. What does this choice feel like in your body? What does the quiet voice underneath the anxious one say? What would you do if you trusted yourself completely? What are you afraid will happen if you listen to your own wisdom. And slowly, often to people’s surprise, clarity emerges. Not because I provided it, but because it was there all along, waiting to be heard.
The Answers Are Already Inside You
The answers you’re seeking aren’t in another podcast, book, or Instagram post. They’re not in achieving the next goal or finally getting that person’s approval. They’re inside you, beneath the noise.
That doesn’t mean the journey’s easy or that you should do it alone. Sometimes we need support, a steady presence, someone who believes in our capacity to know ourselves when we’ve forgotten how.
But the destination is always the same: coming home to yourself. Learning to trust your own experience. Valuing your intrinsic worth over external measures. Building a life that feels true from the inside, regardless of how it appears from outside.
You already carry what you need. Sometimes, we just need to help you discover it.
