I can't presume to know how to help anyone.

What I have learned as a therapist, something I didn't know before I began this work, is that each person is a mystery never to be fully understood.

The so-called problems people bring to therapy aren't problems at all; they're mysteries, and the response to a mystery should be entirely different from that to a problem. A mystery is something not to be solved, but only to be honoured, appreciated, contemplated, and revered. I can best do my job by offering a chair, week after week, and a space free of ambitious intentions and heroics. I have to wash my hands, the way a priest ritually washes his or her hands before the holiest part of the rite, as an image representing purity of intention. I have to free myself of any salvational fantasies-any need on my part to save this person from fate or destiny, from the pain that is part of the initiatory progress of life, and from whatever demons he or she may describe in the hours of conversation.

- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life