Therapy is often described as insight, healing, or self-discovery.
From an ecological perspective — drawing on James J. Gibson’s concept of affordances — therapy can be understood more simply and more precisely:
therapy is the creation and restoration of viable affordances.
In other words, therapy is not only about what happens inside a person.
It is about what becomes possible between a nervous system and its world.
Traditional psychological models tend to locate difficulty inside the individual: distorted beliefs, dysregulated emotions, maladaptive traits. An affordance-based view shifts the focus outward — without denying inner experience.
It asks not first what is wrong, but:
• What actions are currently possible for this person?
• Which possibilities have collapsed, narrowed, or become dangerous?
• What once-available affordances are no longer accessible?
From this perspective, suffering appears as a breakdown in the fit between a nervous system and its environment.
Many forms of distress can be understood as consequences of affordance loss:
• when expression no longer affords safety → silence or dissociation
• when closeness no longer affords care → withdrawal or hypervigilance
• when agency no longer affords impact → despair or rage
• when sensitivity no longer affords meaning → overwhelm
The world still exists — but it no longer meets the person in ways that allow action without harm.
Seen this way, therapy is not primarily a space for explanation.
It is a relational environment that affords new possibilities.
A well-held therapeutic relationship can afford:
• speaking without punishment
• feeling without collapse
• curiosity without danger
• difference without expulsion
• slowness without loss of value
These are not techniques.
They are environmental conditions.
When such affordances are reliably present, new forms of action emerge spontaneously.
Insight follows.