Talk to your therapist about your therapist
“I had a weird session with my therapist last week, I just felt like she wasn’t listening, like she was bored or distracted or something. I feel odd about going back.”
“You should tell your therapist about how you’re feeling, about what happened.”
“Is that allowed??”
You bet it’s allowed. In fact, these moments can be pivotal in therapy (they’re some of my favourite moments as a therapist). This is a conversation I’ve had multiple times with my loved ones. They come to me with the stuff they’re worried about taking to therapy, particularly stuff they’re feeling about therapy and towards their therapist, and my response is invariably “you should tell this to your therapist, it could be really useful”. A lot of people don’t realise that this kind of openness and vulnerability is invaluable in the therapeutic relationship.
Many of the people I know who are in therapy (and many of my clients) struggle with conflict and confrontation; they’ve never had a relationship within which they can say to the person “that thing you said/did upset me/ confused me/ unsettled me”, without it ending in the overwhelming feeling of “I wish I’d just kept my mouth shut”. They enter the relationship with their therapist assuming (quite understandably, and often without realising) that this relationship will function as all their others do. Plot twist: it won’t (or it shouldn’t if your therapist is decent). Good therapists will be able to soothe their own defensiveness when confronted with their shortcomings and work with you to understand what went wrong and what needs to be done going forwards to repair the relationship.
One of the most profound moments I’ve had in my time with my own therapist was when I felt dismissed by him on a subject that was very important to me. I raised it with him in the next session, fully prepared to be nursing myself through a potent case of “Should’ve kept my mouth shut”-itis. I told him how I was feeling, how dismissed I’d felt, and braced myself for the impact of his rebuttal. It never came. Instead, he paused for a moment, and said “I’m really sorry. You’re right, I wasn’t taking it seriously enough, and that was wrong of me. I let the difference in my own experience get in the way of fully seeing your experience. Can we talk about it again?”. It was the first time in my life when someone in a position of relative power had acknowledged and apologised for upsetting me. It was probably the first time in my life I’d both been brave enough to stand up for myself, and not been rejected. This rupture-repair cycle ignited within me a spark of permission; I’m allowed to say how I feel about someone else’s behaviour. It also forged a bond of recognition between myself and my therapist; we are both human beings in this room. In that moment I gave him permission to be a human being, not simply my therapist.
The thing to know about therapists is that we are humans, just like you. We make mistakes, we disappoint people, we sometimes say the wrong thing or don’t know what to say at all. When we accept our therapists as humans, we are setting ourselves up to better tolerate the inevitable disappointments that we experience with all the other important humans in our lives including (and especially) ourselves. My seeing my therapist as human and still good after the rupture helped me to see myself as human and still good when I make a mistake. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this small exchange between us was transformational for me. I only knew to bring it to therapy because I’d been told previously by other therapists I knew (before I became one myself) that I could and should talk about the therapeutic relationship itself in therapy. And that’s why I’m writing this; to let everyone who reads this know that you can (and should) talk to your therapist about your therapist, about the things they’ve said or done that have missed the mark for you, and about any worry you’re feeling about broaching certain topics in therapy.
