A good therapist can also be a mirror, reflecting your own unconscious reactions to things back at you so you can see yourself in a new light. When I sought therapy I wasn't experiencing difficulty maintaining rational thought. Everything I was thinking about myself and others was perfectly reasonable given what I knew. What my therapist did was expose the fact that what I knew was a very limited slice of the facts of the situation. She never halted my thought process or exposed every little thing. She asked interesting questions and challenged me to consider a different perspective in some situations. That was enough to get me on a path to self-leadership. And once I had that, she helped me change how I thought about myself and others so that I could trust instead of fear. I learned to have courage and it saved me.