The Myth of the Expert: How Therapy Learned to Speak Over the People It Claims to Help
An exploration of how therapeutic expertise can slip into quiet control. On power, not-knowing, and why staying with a client's uncertainty may be more respectful than explaining them to themselves.
There is a moment in therapy that often feels like success. The client pauses. You offer a formulation - gentle, thoughtful, clinically sound. They nod. Sometimes they look relieved. Yes, they say. That's it. That's exactly what's happening.
We're trained to read this as progress. Understanding has landed. Meaning has been made. Something has clicked into place. But it's worth asking what else might be happening in that moment.
Because relief doesn't only come from being understood. It also comes from handing something over. From letting someone else hold the uncertainty, name the thing, tidy the edges. From the quiet comfort of believing that another person - trained, accredited, confident - sees more clearly than you do.
Therapy, as a profession, has grown very good at offering this comfort. We reassure people that their pain makes sense. That it fits a pattern. That it has a name. And often this genuinely helps. Language can be containing. Recognition can be regulating. Being met matters.
Matt Hussey
But alongside this sits a quieter assumption - rarely spoken, rarely questioned:
that the therapist understands the client's life more deeply than the client themselves.
That we can see what they can't. That our distance gives us clarity. That expertise equals insight. This belief is rarely malicious. It's woven into the fabric of how therapy is taught, regulated, and sold. It flatters the profession and steadies the work. It makes the room feel safe - especially when things are messy, ambiguous, or politically charged.
But comfort is not a neutral force. Sometimes what feels like being understood is also the moment a person's own knowing starts to recede. Sometimes relief is the sound of agency quietly leaving the room.
And if that's true, then the question isn't whether expertise is useful - it often is - but whether the way we've learned to inhabit it has come at a cost we don't like to name.
Where the Expert Came From
The idea of the therapist as expert didn't emerge from nowhere. It has a lineage. And like most things in Western psychotherapy, that lineage runs straight through Enlightenment thinking.
The Enlightenment promised that if we could name, categorise, and measure the world accurately enough, we could control it. Knowledge became safety. Mastery became virtue. To understand something was to stand above it.
Modern psychotherapy inherited this logic almost wholesale. As the field sought legitimacy - especially in dialogue with medicine - it learned to speak the language of diagnosis, classification, and treatment. Distress became something to be assessed. Experience became data. The therapist became the trained observer: objective, neutral, qualified to interpret what the client could not yet see.
This wasn't cynical. It was survival. To be taken seriously by institutions, insurers, and states, therapy had to look reliable. Predictable. Replicable. Expertise wasn't just cultural - it was economic and political. The professional knew. The client received.
And in many contexts, this structure works. If someone is bleeding, we don't crowdsource the solution. If someone is psychotic, overwhelmed, or in acute danger, containment and authority can be lifesaving.
Matt Hussey
But the problem begins when a model designed for stabilisation quietly becomes a philosophy of human meaning. Because the inner life is not a machine. And suffering is not a technical fault.
When therapeutic knowledge is treated as superior to lived experience, something subtle happens. The client's story starts to be filtered through frameworks that were never neutral to begin with - frameworks shaped by Western individualism, medical reductionism, and a deep suspicion of ambiguity.
We begin to privilege what can be named over what can only be felt. What can be formulated over what resists coherence. What fits the model over what exceeds it. The therapist's expertise, once a tool, becomes a position. A vantage point. A quiet hierarchy.
And from there, it's a short step to believing - often unconsciously - that distance equals clarity, and that the person inside the experience must, by definition, know less about it than the person observing from the outside.
This is the myth at the centre of modern therapy: that meaning is something extracted by the trained, rather than lived and discovered by the one who suffers.
When Understanding Becomes Appropriation
There is a point at which understanding stops being generous and starts being extractive.
It rarely looks dramatic. No boundary is crossed. No ethical code is breached. In fact, it often happens under the banner of care. The therapist listens. They translate the client's words into professional language. They offer meaning back - cleaner, clearer, more coherent than the original account. The client recognises themselves in it, at least partly. Something settles.
But something else has shifted too. The client's raw, uncertain, half-formed sense of their experience has now been reorganised into a framework that didn't come from them. Their pain has been made legible - but also portable. It can now be written, explained, referenced. It belongs, in some sense, to the therapist's world.
This is the moment lived experience becomes material. The client's knowing - embodied, contradictory, unfinished - risks being replaced by a more polished version that travels better in notes, formulations, and supervision rooms. What they felt gets substituted with what it means.
And while this often feels containing, it can quietly displace agency. Because when someone else becomes the authority on your inner life, your relationship to your own experience changes. You start to check it against the expert's interpretation. You learn to doubt the parts that don't fit. You look for confirmation rather than discovery.
Matt Hussey
Over time, the centre of gravity shifts. The client begins to speak in borrowed language. The therapist becomes the one who "gets it." And the messy, personal work of meaning-making is subtly outsourced.
This is not done with ill intent. It's done in the name of clarity, insight, and progress. But clarity has a politics. It privileges some forms of knowing over others.
When therapy moves too quickly to understanding, it risks performing a kind of epistemic takeover - not by force, but by refinement. The client's experience is not denied. It is improved.
And improvement, when it comes too fast, can erase the very thing therapy is meant to protect: a person's right to be the primary knower of their own life.
What the Expert Fantasy Gives Us
It's easy to talk about the cost of expertise for clients. Harder to talk about what it gives therapists. The belief that we understand our clients better than they understand themselves doesn't just organise the room - it soothes the practitioner.
Because not-knowing is unsettling. Sitting with another person's pain without a clear frame, without a sense of direction, without the comfort of "this makes sense," exposes us to our own limits. It asks us to tolerate confusion, contradiction, and the possibility that there is no clean narrative waiting to be found.
Expertise offers relief from that exposure. If I know what's going on, I don't have to feel as lost. If I can explain this, I don't have to stay with its rawness. If I understand you, I can protect myself from being undone by you.
In a profession shaped by risk management, supervision requirements, and outcome measures, this fantasy is actively rewarded. Knowing looks competent. Uncertainty looks dangerous. Mastery looks ethical.
And so we learn - often implicitly - that our value lies in seeing more clearly than the person in front of us. But this clarity often comes at a cost to presence. When we occupy the position of the knower, we subtly step out of the encounter. We move from with to over. From relationship to interpretation. From mutual risk to professional distance.
The expert stance doesn't just shape how we listen - it shapes how much of ourselves we allow to be touched. Believing we understand can become a defence against being affected.
And this is where the myth becomes self-reinforcing: the more we rely on expertise to manage our own anxiety, the harder it becomes to relinquish it - even when it no longer serves the person sitting across from us.
The question, then, isn't whether therapists should have knowledge. Of course we should. It's whether we've confused knowledge with authority - and authority with care.
From Expertise to Shared Inquiry
If the therapist is not the primary knower of the client's life, then what exactly are we doing in the room?
The answer isn't that we abandon knowledge, theory, or training. It's that we change how they function. They stop being conclusions and start becoming supports - scaffolding rather than structures. In this posture, therapy becomes a shared inquiry rather than an interpretive act.
The therapist brings curiosity instead of certainty. The client brings lived experience instead of evidence. Meaning emerges between them, not from one to the other. This changes the texture of the work.
Language is no longer something delivered back to the client fully formed. It's tested, shaped, rejected, revised. The therapist offers words tentatively, as invitations rather than verdicts. The client is free to say, no, that's not it - and to be taken seriously when they do.
Not-knowing here isn't abdication. It's respect. It recognises that experience is always richer than explanation, and that understanding reached too quickly often closes down what needs time to speak. The therapist's task is not to extract meaning, but to stay present long enough for the client's own knowing to take form.
This kind of work privileges process over insight. It allows contradiction to stand. It treats confusion not as resistance, but as information. Crucially, it keeps agency where it belongs.
The client remains the author of their experience, even when that experience is fragmented or unclear. The therapist becomes a witness and companion - someone who helps hold the space where meaning can be discovered, rather than someone who decides what that meaning is.
This is slower work. Less impressive. Harder to summarise. But it honours a simple ethical truth: no amount of training grants us privileged access to another person's inner life.
What Becomes Possible When Agency Is Returned
When therapy stops positioning the therapist as the primary knower, something subtle but profound changes. Clients begin to relate differently to their own experience.
Instead of looking to the therapist for confirmation - Is this right? Does this make sense? - they start listening inward. Their uncertainty is no longer something to be corrected, but something to be explored. Confusion becomes a legitimate state, not a failure of insight.
This is where agency is rebuilt. Not through reassurance or explanation, but through being taken seriously in the act of not knowing. When a client's half-formed sense is met with patience rather than interpretation, they learn that their experience doesn't need to perform coherence to be valid.
They don't have to get it "right" to be met. Over time, this fosters a different kind of confidence - not the brittle confidence of having answers, but the steadier confidence of trusting one's own capacity to make meaning. Clients leave therapy not with a story they've been given, but with a strengthened relationship to their own inner life.
This matters beyond the consulting room. People who trust their own knowing are less easily overridden - by partners, institutions, systems, or ideologies that claim superior insight into who they are and what they need. Agency in therapy has social consequences.
In this sense, returning agency is not just clinically sound. It's quietly political. Therapy becomes a place where a person practices being the authority on their own experience - with another human present, attentive, and not in a hurry to take over.
Staying With What We Can't Know
The temptation, at this point, is to replace one ideal with another - to trade the expert therapist for the perfectly humble one. But that would miss the point.
This isn't an argument against knowledge, training, or theory. It's an argument against confusing them with authority over another person's life.
Therapists will always bring frameworks into the room. We can't not. What matters is whether those frameworks are held lightly enough to be moved by what they encounter - or whether they quietly dictate what is allowed to count as meaning.
There will be moments when clients ask us directly to explain them to themselves. When they want answers. When uncertainty feels unbearable. Sometimes offering language is part of care.
The question is not whether we speak, but how. Do our words open space, or close it? Do they return the experience to the client, or relocate it with us? Do they invite further discovery, or signal that the work is done?
Perhaps the most ethical stance in therapy is not understanding, but restraint. The willingness to stay present without resolving. To resist the small, seductive power of being the one who knows.
Because no matter how carefully we listen, another person's inner life will always exceed our grasp. And treating that excess as a problem to solve rather than a reality to respect is where therapy quietly loses its way.
If there is a discipline worth reclaiming here, it is this:
to remain with the person, rather than stand over their meaning.
Not to know for them.
Not to tidy what is unfinished.
But to stay - long enough for their own knowing to find its voice.
