Therapy Isn’t About Becoming Someone Else

There’s a quiet belief many people bring into therapy that they often don’t realise.

I need fixing.I need improving.I need to become someone better than I am.

It often arrives dressed up as motivation, self-awareness, or personal growth. On the surface, it can sound hopeful. But underneath, there’s usually something heavier: pressure, judgement, and the sense that who you are right now isn’t enough.

At Liberty Talking Therapy, we see this all the time. And gently, steadily, therapy offers something different.

There is a loud self-improvement culture out there on Tik-Tok, on Insta, on all the social media platforms that systematically and constantly tell us that we need to be better, we need to be different, we need to be “more” or “less”

Self-improvement is a culture with enormous influence on our sense of self, after all culture has the biggest impact on who we “need to be” and how we “perform in the world”. It promises confidence, productivity, happiness if you just work harder, think differently, optimise yourself more.

But therapy isn’t a productivity project.

Letting go of the self-improvement story

It’s not about becoming calmer, stronger, more positive, or more “together” so you can cope better with life’s demands. It’s about understanding why those demands feel so heavy in the first place.

In the therapy room, we often slow things right down and ask a different kind of question:

What if nothing about you needs correcting?

That question can feel unsettling. Sometimes even disappointing. Because if you’re not a problem to solve, what do you do with all that striving?

Accepting rather than correcting

Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation.It doesn’t mean “this is just how it is, so I’ll put up with it.”

In therapy, acceptance is about turning towards your experience rather than away from it.

Your anxiety isn’t a flaw, it may be a response to pressure, loss, or uncertainty. It may even have become a perverse security blanket, after all you are still functioning right? So clearly, it’s doing its job.

Your self-criticism isn’t a personal failure, it is a habit you have learned to tell yourself that you are not enough, that you need to be different. Your exhaustion isn’t weakness, maybe it is the cost of carrying too much for too long.

When we stop trying to correct ourselves, we create space to understand ourselves. And understanding tends to soften things in ways force never can. Understanding ourselves is the first step to acceptance, but it is the necessary step to changing not who we are, but how we are in the world.

Softening the internal pressure

Many clients arrive in therapy with an inner voice that sounds relentless:

• You should be further along.

• You shouldn’t feel like this by now.

• Other people cope better than you.

• Your weak for worrying

• Other people are always happier than you

Therapy doesn’t argue with that voice or try to silence it. Instead, we get curious about where it came from and what it’s trying (often clumsily) to protect.

As that curiosity grows, the pressure often eases. Not because life suddenly becomes easy, but because you’re no longer fighting yourself on top of everything and everyone else.

There’s relief in discovering you don’t need to push yourself into being different in order to be worthy of love, of respect, of connection.

Becoming more you, not a better you

One of the quieter truths of therapy is this: people don’t usually leave therapy transformed into someone new.

They leave more themselves.

More able to notice their limits.More able to trust their feelings.More able to choose how they respond rather than automatically performing, pleasing, or coping.

That isn’t flashy. It won’t fit neatly into a before-and-after post. But it’s deeply human and often life-changing.

Therapy isn’t about erasing parts of you.It’s about making room for them.

A gentler way forward

If you’re considering therapy and find yourself thinking, I need to be better, it might be worth pausing there.

What if therapy isn’t a route to improvement? What if it is a space to come home to yourself?

At Liberty Talking Therapy, we work relationally and at your pace. There’s no agenda to turn you into someone else. Just a steady, respectful invitation to understand yourself more fully, and to soften the pressure to be anything other than who you already are.

Sometimes, that’s where real change begins.