I spent thirty years working in IT, mostly designing systems and developing software. And I still dabble in it, although these days I describe myself, rather grandly, as a “Computer Whisperer”.

When I worked in IT, I tended to look at every problem as something that could be solved with logic. There was no space for “don’t know”, or for the idea that anything happened in a non-deterministic way. All I had to do was analyse what was going on, work out why it was happening, and figure out a solution.

Sometimes it took a while. Sometimes it took a very long while. But somewhere, buried in the code or the data or the configuration, there was an explanation.

This approach did not translate quite so well to the world of therapy.

Human behaviour isn’t entirely illogical. Most of the things we do make some kind of sense, at least to us, even if they seem completely baffling to someone else. But people are rather more complicated than even the most convoluted computer system. And coming at human difficulties armed only with logic is rarely particularly helpful.

Computers don’t have feelings, even if sometimes it feels as though they do. But people do. And it’s often our feelings that drive us in particular directions, sometimes in ways that seem to make no sense at all.

And feelings don’t lend themselves particularly well to logical analysis.

We might understand perfectly well why we feel anxious about something. We might know exactly where that anxiety comes from, recognise that it’s disproportionate to the situation, and be able to explain the whole thing with impeccable logic.

But rarely do we then say, “Oh, that’s fine then. I don’t have to feel like that any more.”

If only it were that simple.

It needs something more.

If you shout and swear at your computer (or even if you talk nicely to it), it doesn’t hear you. It doesn’t respond emotionally to your state of mind. It just carries on doing exactly what it was told to do, however unreasonable that might seem at the time.

People, on the other hand, are affected by how we treat them. They respond not just to what we say, but to how we say it, what they think we mean, and what they believe it says about them.

Two people can hear exactly the same words and experience something completely different.

And perhaps that’s one of the biggest things I’ve learned in moving from working with computers to working with people.

In IT, understanding the problem is usually the first step towards fixing it. In counselling, understanding can be valuable, sometimes enormously so, but understanding alone doesn’t necessarily change how we feel.

What can make a difference is being heard, understood and accepted by another person. Having the opportunity to explore something without being judged, corrected or offered an immediate solution. Sometimes discovering that the way we’ve always understood ourselves isn’t the only possible way.

It’s a rather different process from debugging software.

I still enjoy solving technical problems. There’s something immensely satisfying about tracking down an obscure fault and watching everything spring back into life.

But I’ve come to appreciate that people aren’t computers. They don’t necessarily need fixing, and they certainly don’t always benefit from someone trying to fix them.

Sometimes they need something much simpler, and rather more difficult.

Someone who will listen.

And perhaps the most useful thing thirty years in IT taught me about working with people is knowing when to stop trying to solve the problem.