Can a Therapist be Authentic with Clients?

Описание: Can a Therapist be Authentic with Clients?

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Many of you have asked me about how to properly balance being authentic while placing highest priority on your clients’ needs. This has become particularly relevant with the rise of therapists on social media (myself included!).

In this video, I offer a few tools to help you hold your clients’ interests in the highest priority while still feeling like you can bring your full self to your work.

This video is geared for therapists of all kinds, including psychologists, MFTs, LPCCs, social workers, and others in the clinical counseling field.

Welcome to Private Practice Skills! I’m Dr. Marie Fang, psychologist in private practice. I post videos offering tools I learned the hard way about starting and growing private practice so that you don’t have to.

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This video is not intended as professional or legal advice. Be sure to seek the services of a professional if you are in need of them.

Every decision we make as therapists needs to come from the lens of what we believe will best serve our clients. And if we think about it, this is the driving force behind the argument for being the “tabula rasa” therapist. I would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater!

Here are a few questions to ask to help you determine how “open” to be both publicly and in-session with clients:

1. How comfortable are you with sharing about yourself?
This is an important question to start with! If you’re not comfortable sharing, then don’t! I would hate for you to feel like you somehow need to share more with the world than you prefer. So before approaching the next questions, spend a moment reflecting on your own comfort level.

2. What are the needs of those in your niche?
Some clients may find your authenticity humanizing and trust-building, while others might react to your openness with distaste, or in ways that reinforce unhealthy patterns.

Here are some examples where therapist’s sharing can benefit the client:

-Clients feel validated knowing that a therapist has a similar experience or background as them.
-Clients feel released to let their guard down because they believe you’re presenting your true self to therapy (and therefore, genuinely care about them)
-Clients find your experience educational and apply learnings to their life.

3. What potential downsides exist with being vulnerable with your niche?
Even if generally speaking, your target niche finds it helpful for you to share bits of yourself with them, there will inevitably still be times when clients have negative or unhealthy responses to your sharing.
Some examples of when therapists’ sharing can be unhelpful:

-Clients react by feeling invalidated because their experience is different than yours
-Clients react by feeling pressure to align with you as a means to overly fuse their identity with yours
-Clients react by feeling an urge to take care of you.
It’s important to weigh these downsides with the benefits of sharing before doing so.

4. How might you navigate negative outcomes when they arise? Even with the best of planning, all sharing has some level of risk. It’s inevitable that at some point, there will be a challenging outcome in response. It’s helpful know in advance how you might navigate these challenges. And if you’re not sure how you might navigate them in a helpful way, it could be worth consulting with other therapists first, or reconsidering whether it’s truly worth sharing to begin with.

By answering these questions, hopefully you develop a sense of what is worth sharing and what isn’t. I do encourage you to be thoughtful about any decision to share about yourself, whether publicly or in-session with clients, and make sure you’re truly doing so for the benefit of the client.

And I strongly encourage you to have a community of therapists you consult with on these items. They may be able to see potential risks that you hadn’t thought of on your own.

If you answer these questions and you’re feeling like you need to have the freedom to be a bit more vulnerable than is beneficial for your niche, you might want to reflect on whether you’re better suited for a different demographic - one that would benefit more from you showing more of yourself.

I hope you found this video helpful as you consider how open to be with your clients and the world.

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