Anyone could invent psychotherapy if he had the courage or desperation to attend to his feelings and realize they are his life while his thoughts are merely attempts to explain them. The person would notice the vague or sharp negative feeling in his body. He would then sense the obvious rightness of pulling the pin that keeps his head fixed in his present explanations and would sink down and realize that he is a body that has accumulated time. In that time he would find injuries so painful – life-twisting, -darkening, -ending – that he had had to run from them. The worse his childhood loss and pain, the more the running. It may turn into flying into the sky over the cliff. This is why the most horrendously damaged sexual, satanic abuse and complex-ptsd victims are the happiest New Age dreamers and purveyors of magic, from forgiveness to tapping to astral dimensions.
The new psychotherapist would feel instinctively that that pain must come out – mouth, eyes, body. Some anger is hard to retrieve. Some sounds of torture may feel too strange to expel. Many tears are so deeply buried they are unknown. But that answer would be as absolutely clear as the need to cease holding your breath after a minute-and-a-half, to urinate after suppressing it for hours, to say “I love you” to a loved one on your death bed. Pain must be expressed out of the person, whether it’s five minutes or fifty years past.
That is therapeutic healing. Everything else is just a running commentary.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.