The Third Point: Why the Therapeutic Relationship Changes Everything

There’s a model I use with almost every client as I help them work through emotional distress. It’s called the triangle of containment. It’s where I direct the client’s attention as they are taking inventory of and organizing their emotional experience. Two of its three points are fairly intuitive: an image that represents a painful moment, and the feeling that image produces in the body. The third point is the one I think can be less intuitive for people to grasp, but I think is of vital importance: the therapeutic relationship itself.

Here’s why that matters. When people come to me in distress, they very often don’t know what they don’t know. They can’t name the emotions they’ve buried. Many of them have had few genuine experiences of being met with real understanding — and even when those experiences happened, they were hard to recognize in the moment. So when I ask a client what they are feeling, I often get a shallow answer, not because they’re withholding, but because they’re not practiced at relationships defined by safety and real connection. What they think they want is usually just relief.

That’s why the third point matters so much. Real change doesn’t come only from examining an old wound. It comes from experiencing something new, right here, in the relationship where the examining is happening.

This is why I regularly bring the relationship into the room explicitly, rather than leaving it implied. When a client has fully described an image and a feeling and there’s nothing more to add, instead of asking them to simply sit with it, I ask: “how does it feel to talk about this with me, right now?” That question moves the work from something being examined to something being lived — and it’s often where the real movement happens.

There’s one insight from this work it took me some time to articulate clearly , and I think it matters beyond the therapy room: healthy grief happens at the intersection of thanksgiving and sadness. It requires a grateful element — an internalized sense of experiencing something different, right now, than what was experienced before. It’s the tension between the two — what’s happening now, and what happened then — that grief actually lives inside of. Not sadness alone. Sadness held next to something genuinely good.

I think this is true well beyond a therapy office. Whatever healing you’re looking for — in a marriage, a friendship, your relationship with God — it rarely comes only from understanding the wound intellectually. It comes from experiencing, here and now, in a real relationship, that things can be different than they were. That’s the third point. And I’ve come to believe it might be the most important one of all.