The story goes like this: something happened, it left a mark, and if you can work out what it was and how it connects, the mark fades. Understand the root and the symptom resolves. It’s a satisfying shape, it’s how therapy is usually portrayed, and it’s roughly how we’d fix a problem at work.

It’s also not quite how people work.

If insight alone did the job, the self-help section would have emptied out years ago. Most of us can already explain more about ourselves than our grandparents could have managed, and we are not noticeably freer. Something else is required, and the fact that you haven’t found it by reading harder isn’t a failure of effort.

Most people who email me apologise somewhere in the first paragraph.

Not for anything they’ve done. For being there at all. I’m not sure I should be taking up your time. I know other people have it much worse. It’s probably nothing. Then a list of things that are plainly not nothing, delivered in the tone you’d use to report a slightly wobbly shelf.

If you’ve been circling the idea of therapy for a while and keep stopping at the same place — is this bad enough? — I’d like to take that question seriously, because it deserves better than reassurance.