Therapy for Outsiders: Opening Up When You Feel Unrelatable

Most people feel some uncertainty when starting therapy. It’s normal to wonder if it will be helpful or if you'll feel comfortable with your therapist. Vulnerability is part of the process, and there are things about getting started that are just plain uncomfortable. But if you’ve spent your life feeling like an outsider, it’s different. Being vulnerable—being fully yourself—with a therapist can feel almost impossible if part of you believes you’re fundamentally unrelatable.

Maybe you've looked through dozens of therapist bios, and none of them sound like they’re speaking to you. You've read profiles about soul work and transformational healing with the requisite stacked stones or sandy beach and wondered how the therapists offering these cliché expressions could begin to make space for your messy, confusing, contradictory experiences. Maybe you’ve tried therapy before and walked away feeling misunderstood, judged, or flattened into someone you didn’t recognize. Maybe you’re someone who’s used to adapting, translating, or hiding parts of yourself just to get by.

If that sounds familiar, I want to say this clearly: It makes sense for you to feel unseen. Your experience is real and understandable. And you’re not alone in it.

As a therapist who works primarily with queer, neurodivergent, and spiritually-injured clients—and shares those lived experiences—I am intimately familiar with that outsider feeling. It’s more than just anxiety or self-doubt. It sometimes feels like an invisible, impassable barrier between the world and you. Sometimes it's a product of traumatic experiences. You ask yourself, Who could even begin to understand this? Sometimes that outsider feeling comes from important parts of who you are that have not been accepted, embraced, or supported. You recognize that there's value in being unique and that being different can be profoundly painful. 

So let’s talk about what it’s like to open up to a therapist when you’re carrying a story about being unrelatable—and what it means to question whether that story is actually true.

Why Therapy Might Not Feel Meant for You

Growing up, I didn’t see myself reflected in the wellness messaging around me. Mental health brochures, guidance counselors, and college pamphlets—all felt like they were written for someone else. Someone less complicated. Someone who didn’t grow up queer in a rural environment, navigating family disruption, masking neurodivergence before they had the language for it, or quietly questioning the faith traditions that those around me deemed absolute.

When you’ve spent years adapting—noticing that how you speak and experience the world around you isn't welcome, when the core of who you are balks against systems that haven’t served you—it makes sense to wonder whether therapy is just one more place where you’ll get lost in translation.

For people from niche or marginalized communities, therapy can feel like walking into a space where you're expected to follow unspoken rules that simply don't account for your experience.

Bad therapy experiences do happen. If you've ever had a therapist try to "fix"—or invalidate by putting themselves in the "expert" position—your identity, your coping skills, or your boundaries without understanding the context shaping them, that feeling of being too unrelatable in the therapy room doesn't come out of nowhere. It’s learned.

Rethinking Who Therapy Is For

There’s an unhelpful myth that therapy is most effective for people who are already pretty good at talking about their feelings, have a solid support system, and trust authority figures. But many people come to therapy because they’ve had to go it alone, because they’ve been hurt by authority figures, or because they’ve never had a space where their inner world felt worth sharing.

So if you’re someone who thinks, “I’m not the kind of person therapy works for,” I want to suggest something: Maybe you’re exactly the kind of person therapy is for—but the way it’s usually marketed, which I'll suggest usually has less to do with the actual therapist and more to do with therapists being bad at marketing—hasn’t told you that yet. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Wonderfully weird, human therapists sometimes get caught up in creating generic, stereotypical marketing because they want to do it "right," and that's what they often see. Even really good therapists are sometimes masking. 

How to Tell If a Therapist Is a Good Fit

A lot of advice about finding the right therapist focuses on logistics—specialties, cost, insurance, and availability. Those things matter. But when you’re carrying the story that you’re unrelatable, emotional safety matters just as much.

One way to assess fit early on is to name that story and watch how the therapist responds.

You don’t need to overshare or dive into your trauma in the first session. A simple statement like:

“I often feel like I don’t fit into spaces like this.”
or
“I’ve had the experience of not being understood in the past.”

…can be enough.

If the therapist rushes to reassure you, gets defensive, or starts listing their credentials to prove they “get it,” that may not be a great sign. But if they slow down, acknowledge the weight of what you’re saying, and respond with curiosity rather than correction—that’s a therapist paying attention to more than just your words.

Good therapy doesn’t require your therapist to be the same as you. But it does require that they can hold your complexity without pathologizing it or making it about them.

Can Shared Identity Help You Feel Understood?

For many people, it feels safer to work with a therapist who shares aspects of their identity or life experience. That might mean choosing someone who is also queer, neurodivergent, BIPOC, disabled, or who openly names their stance on social justice, trauma-informed care, or affirming therapy practices.

There’s real value in not having to explain what microaggressions are, or why you flinch at certain religious language, or why “just take a deep breath” isn’t a reasonable suggestion for your nervous system.

But there’s another side to that, too. Sometimes people with a shared identity can still miss the mark. And sometimes people without that shared identity can show up in deeply affirming ways.

Here’s an example from my own life: At a particularly difficult point, I was assigned a therapist through an Employee Assistance Program (EAP). In our work together, she was genuine, accepting, and able to balance compassion when challenging me to be more honest with myself (not totally welcome feedback, but observant). After we'd worked together for some time, I looked her up. I hadn't seen her website profile before because she'd been assigned to me by the EAP program. I discovered she markets herself as a Christian counselor—and if I’d started with her website, I never would have met her. My outsider story is deeply tied to religion, and if I'd been intentional in seeking a therapist with shared life experiences, I would have simply said, "That's not for me."

She was my therapist, and though her cultural identity is on her website, it never negatively impacted our work together. She never projected her beliefs onto me or assumed we had the same worldview. She showed up with curiosity and respected my boundaries. She listened well. And, quietly, she helped me build trust again—not in faith, but in the possibility that I could be understood without having to over-explain.

Sometimes, we’re helped by people we didn’t expect. And that’s okay.

Noticing the Stories That Make It Hard to Start

Here’s something I say to a lot of clients:

“The story you carry about yourself might not be wrong—but it might not be the whole truth.”

If the story is “no one will get me,” or “I’m too complicated,” or “I don’t belong in therapy,” then that story deserves your compassion, not your judgment. That belief probably kept you safe for a long time.

But it also might be standing between you and the kind of support you deserve—it just might be keeping you from connecting with people who just might relate.

Therapy isn’t about pretending those stories don’t exist. It’s about giving them space to be examined, understood, and—eventually—updated.

It’s about finding someone who doesn’t try to rewrite your narrative for you, but sits beside you as you begin to wonder what exists beyond your story.

It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Even when you do all the right things—read the bios, ask the right questions, show up bravely—it might not work out. Sometimes the therapist you hoped would be a great fit isn’t. Sometimes the relationship runs its course. Sometimes your needs change.

You are allowed to change therapists.

This isn’t failure. It’s feedback. Part of the healing process is learning to notice when something doesn’t feel right and trusting yourself enough to pivot. When you begin putting supports in place, each step—even the ones that are shaky—is progress. It doesn’t have to be flawless. It doesn’t even have to start smoothly to be meaningful—maybe, just maybe, it has the potential to change things entirely. As annoying as it might be, that's what those therapy websites are talking about when they say their work is "transformational". It's still okay if the cheesiness of it makes your brain itch. 

Maybe you'll try out the transformational therapist and see how it goes. If it works out, great. If it doesn't, you've got more information to work with. It doesn't mean something is wrong with you if you end up needing a better fit. You’re not flaky or difficult for wanting more, or different. You’re advocating for your well-being. That matters.

You’re Not Too Much. You’re Not Alone.

If you’ve read this far and are still wondering whether therapy is “for someone like you,” I want to say this again:

Your life experiences are not too much. You are not unrelatable. You don’t have to shrink yourself or pretend to be anything other than who you are to receive care. It might not be comfortable in the first—or even the fourth—session. It might take some time to see how it goes and build trust. If you’re generally skeptical—like me—and slow to warm up, I’d suggest committing to a certain number of sessions (unless something goes wildly poorly). Sticking with it—even when it’s uncomfortable at first—might be one of the most generous choices you can make for yourself. 

The world may not have made it easy to ask for help, but that doesn’t mean help isn’t possible. And the right therapist won’t try to make you more normal. They’ll help you feel more you.