Therapists shouldn’t talk about themselves.
Yesterday was a tricky one.
The second anniversary of my dad’s death.
And for a variety of reasons it got me thinking about self-disclosure.
It’s a weird, unconventional thing for a therapist to do. It can interfere with the ‘work’. Most therapists take the approach of being a ‘blank canvas’ with clients. It keeps the focus on the clients’ ‘stuff’. It avoids contamination, and over-intimacy between therapist and client, the therapist taking up too much space in the room.
And yet.
My style is relational, and interactive.
Not every client will want to come and see a therapist like me. But the ones who do, often come because they’ve seen my stuff on here and they feel they have a sense of who I am. My stories on Linked In seem to work much better as an indirect marketing ‘tool’ than those website profiles where you can never seem to quite capture the essence of who you are.
People respond to the ‘messiness’. My willingness to be honest about how I’m not perfect. The things that I struggle with.
This also chimes with my training work. They are infused with real stories about life and, in particular, life in legal practice. People tell me that this is vastly more engaging than invented case studies. I tend to agree.
In therapy, where I feel it would be helpful for the client, I disclose situations I’ve had (mainly at work) that have been difficult. As a former lawyer working with lawyers, I actually think it would be unhelpful if I took a pure blank canvas approach. It would mean holding back from showing a deep understanding of the difficulties they face.
Don’t get me wrong. My relationships with clients are not two mates engaged in a mutual sharing conversation. But my experience is that many clients are looking for this more relational style than you might think. The clients I work with are busy people. They want to talk to someone they feel like they know a little bit and who they can have a bit of a laugh with as well as going deep and talking about the difficult stuff.
Part of my reason for working in a relational way is to build rapport and trust. As I say, I only mention things that I think would be useful for the client. I don’t mention things about myself that I don’t feel I’ve processed to a large degree and assimilated emotionally.
We are living in a world now where many people coming into the therapeutic profession are of the ‘Instagram generation’. They have social media profiles. There’s a greater openness about who they are. I believe the therapeutic profession needs to embrace this and evolve accordingly. Not least because there are so many counsellors and psychotherapists who struggle to make ends meet from this work. Bizarre isn’t it, given there is a mental health crisis? But I think this means we need to think deeply about what clients are seeking.
So let’s embrace different styles. Provided clients are kept safe.
And I’ll keep mentioning my dad!