I remember a teacher in graduate school telling us something that’s stayed with me ever since: people’s problems are their solutions.

This may seem counterintuitive. After all, people come to therapy with “symptoms”, with patterns that make them suffer, with things they desperately want to get rid of. Anxiety. Avoidance. Perfectionism. Emotional numbing. Control. Depression. You name it.

These are the problems, right?

And yet, so often, when we look more closely, we begin to see that these “problems” are actually the best solutions a person once had to a deeper pain. They are defense mechanisms. Ways of surviving. Ways of coping the best they could with what was available at the time.

In that sense, our symptoms are not signs of failure. They are signs of ingenuity, of adaptation in the face of internal or external adversity.

And yet here’s the paradox I see in my therapy room every day: Our solutions eventually become our problems even though we feel we need them.

The very strategies that once kept us safe begin, over time, to cost us. When we avoid taking risks to protect ourselves from being hurt, we also avoid being known. When we play it safe, we also play it lonely. When we appear confident and self-sufficient while feeling vulnerable underneath, we keep others at a distance. When we mask our anxiety or insecurity, when we act as if everything’s fine when it’s not, we may look strong on the outside—but inside, something starts to feel empty or off. And what often emerges is a profound relational loneliness or disconnection from self.

Tragically, the strategies we’ve used to manage pain can end up recreating the very experiences we were trying to escape: rejection, invisibility, not being met, not being understood. The need to adapt all over again.

So people come to therapy saying they want to change. And they do. But there’s almost always another part of them that’s afraid to change. Afraid that giving up their symptoms—giving up the familiar ways they’ve learned to cope—will be more painful, more dangerous, than holding on to them. Because as much as these patterns hurt, they also feel like home.

And yet, alongside fear, there is something else: a longing to grow, to transform, to finally solve what’s underneath.

So here’s the thing. When we listen deeply enough, the underlying problem is rarely the symptom itself. It’s something more basic, more human:

Loneliness. A hunger for connection. Not feeling accepted as one’s true self. Trying to be who other people want you to be, even when it doesn’t resonate inside.

At the core of so many of us is a primitive, primal need: to be recognized by another mind.

We need to feel that someone holds us in their thoughts. That we are represented in someone else’s inner world. That they’re trying to understand us, to make sense of our experience, even when it’s messy or hard to put into words. This is not about being merged, it’s about being accessed.

We want to be known.

Everyone is trying to connect in their own way. Even when those ways look or are problematic. Even when they present as the symptoms.

And here’s the paradox: our problems are our solutions—and our solutions are now our problems.

Healing isn’t about ripping defenses away. It’s about helping people see them, honor them, and slowly discover that they may no longer be the only way. It’s about helping someone take healthy risks, to acknowledge their needs, to let themselves be a little more real with another person. To experiment with showing up differently and seeing what happens.

Therapy, at its heart, is an invitation into this paradox: to see how what hurts also helped, to respect the ways we survived, and to slowly discover new ways of being that allow for more aliveness, more closeness, more truth.

Not by forcing change. But by understanding the benefits and costs of staying the same.

And when people feel seen in their struggle, when even their “problems” make sense but are also challenged, something begins to transform. And in that space, growth and expansion become possible.