Many people approach therapy the way they approach work, with a bullet-point list. Issues to fix. There’s often quiet anxiety about not having enough to talk about this week, or pressure for the session to feel productive. And yes, sometimes life demands solutions. But real growth in therapy doesn’t unfold on a timetable. It begins when we stop trying to solve and start learning to feel—when curiosity replaces control.

“Joe” and I have worked together for years. He’s bright, funny, and thrives on structure. One day he smiled and said, “Tom, we’ve had three Seinfeld sessions in a row.” That’s his term: a session about “nothing.” No crisis, no dramatic insight—just ordinary life. For someone who values progress, this felt like drift. We wondered together whether it was time to end. I gently asked whether what felt empty might actually be a doorway—not the conclusion of therapy but the start of a different kind of listening. Could we, I asked, try to move from classical to jazz? He smiled softly.

The next week, he began, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” I talked about the value of long-term work, how a trusted relationship allows two people to sit in quiet, sometimes with a score, without losing purpose. “It’s a bubble,” he said.

“A bubble we blow together,” I replied.

Later, when I asked him for a “random” moment from the week, he described his young son announcing a new “BFF.” His heart swelled, he said, but his face stayed still. I noticed it aloud. The air changed. Curiosity about the incongruence entered. What followed wasn’t analysis but feeling—pride, wistfulness, a touch of loss. His eyes moistened. The room filled with something unplanned, a living chord struck between us. The session shifted from commentary to music, from narrative to emotion.

This kind of “play” can happen with anyone. “Molly,” a patient carrying the weight of childhood abuse and long-COVID exhaustion, didn’t begin to trust me until we worked on a puzzle together, laughing at my lack of skill. She could feel, perhaps for the first time, what it meant to be in charge. The hierarchy of the therapeutic dyad softened, opening space for new relational possibilities.

When we allow emotion its full range, messy, layered, unexpected, we begin to hear the deeper music beneath the words. Each feeling, even the dissonant ones, holds a note of truth. Exploring them with curiosity rather than judgment transforms noise into melody, revealing choices we might never have recognized.

Winnicott wrote that therapy becomes transformative when two people can play together and the unconscious begins to speak. That’s when therapy swings, when the melody opens and something unscripted comes through.

Maybe that’s true outside the therapy room too. When we stop trying to play every note perfectly, life starts to make music of its own.