I got to thinking today - I wonder what people would say are the qualities they like in their therapist. Clearly there are so many different personality types out there in potential clients - but there area also many different personality types in therapists. I find it interesting how people connect.
The other thing is there are so many styles of therapy, theoretical orientations and philosophies about what motivates behavior. For me, in my previous years of my own therapy, one therapist stands out in my mind as having influenced me a lot with not only what she presented to me intellectually and psychologically - but what she put out in the room. She was very nurturing - gave me hugs at the end of every session. I really liked this and it felt very appropriate. But this is an ethical concern for many therapist-types who don't want to get tangled in putting out messages that are misunderstood, don't want to have legal issues down the line, etc. Again, for me - this was very therapeutic and fit well with what I lacked in my own family of origin experiences.
I'm curious to know if anyone would like to share any thoughts of their previous therapy experiences - things they liked, qualities of the therapist they found helpful, etc. I posted earlier inquiring about the "negative" experiences but this time I'm looking for positive.
What Therapist Qualities or Experiences Have Been Helpful?
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I am somewhat new to counseling, just 6 months in to working through childhood sexual abuse, and the one thing I really love about my therapist are her reactions. I wrote a letter to myself and read it to her and when I looked up she was crying. It definitely was not my intention, but that reaction gave me so many feelings I have not had in a while.. acceptance, validation, just seeing that someone else cares as much as I do.
Thank you for everything you do on this site. I check it often and have found a lot of very helpful information.
-L
I'm so happy to hear that this site has been helpful to you. I enjoy doing it! In regards to your experience when your therapist shows emotion - I totally get that. There are some schools of thought in my world that say "A therapist shouldn't show emotion" in session." I disagree. I can't tell you how many times my eyes have filled with tears over the stories that people share with me. I'm human and I'm reacting to something really sad and am connected with what it must have felt like for them. Now this isn't to say I believe it's helpful to start crying to such a degree that the attention is shifted away from the client. Trust me, I've had to swallow hard to keep my emotion at at that middle ground between what might be helpful for the client (to as you said, "validate" their experience) and not helpful - where I'm weeping and the client feels he/she needs to take care of me. Thank you for sharing your experience!
Hello,Ms Lisa Brookes Kift, your post is about both boundaries and effectiveness in therapy- two of my favorite topics. In fact, I have just co-authored a book, In A Cradle of Words: Intimate Encounters in Relational Therapy. I am commenting as both a therapist and a client. I personally believe the best therapists must be able to be hardworking clients as well. There is a situation I describe in my book where I am in therapy and my therapist makes a mistake. Here it is:
“With my own therapist I had a session where I got to some important feelings, and I felt really touched by how he had helped me, but when I told him how touched I felt, he just looked away. He didn’t seem to hear or see how much gratitude I was feeling or see the significance of it, because he was already going on to the next thing…I was really angry....He started to talk about something else, but I stopped him, and I told him that I had been feeling all this appreciation for him, but that he had ignored me…First, there was a look of shock on his face. He said something like, ‘Oh, I can see you have feelings about this. I didn’t realize that I did that. Tell me, what are you feeling?’
It was really important to me that he didn’t get defensive and discount the anger—that made me feel safe. He showed caring and concern when he asked me to express my anger to him….I said something like, ‘I’m angry that you didn’t see how appreciative I was, and I felt really sad and hurt that you were ignoring my feelings….once I expressed the sadness and the hurt to him, I realized that I was feeling the same painful feelings that I had felt with my dad—anything I felt was unimportant to him. I would either be criticized or ignored. And the two feelings, the one with my therapist, and the one for my father, were identical. My therapist acknowledged the painful feelings I had in response to his mistake. If he had not made that mistake, I would not, at least in that session, have worked through those feelings connected to my
father.”
Our book is a memoir and this Relational Emotive Therapy. Hopefully it will be released in early July.
http://www.relationalcounselingseattle.com/blog/
Best
Christopher Diggins, M.A.
Yes, I think it's so important to admit mistakes in session then explore and validate the client's feelings. It happens to all of us. Again, another opportunity for us to show our "human" side. Thank you for sharing your story and good luck with your memoir - it sounds really interesting!
Here are some crucial qualities of a therapist from a client's point of view.
a. That the therapist pays attention to the client's plan for therapy, as opposed to what the therapist decides the plan should be. Most people come into private practice therapy already motivated. They have at least an unconscious idea, and usually a conscious one, of what they want to work on with us. I certainly did when I was in therapy! I wanted the therapist to stay focused on my plan.
b. Know the difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is feeling the client's world. Sympathy is expressing your feelings about it. I think clients in general want big doses of empathy and small doses of sympathy.
c. Understanding is much more important than "caring." Many merely neurotic (as opposed to e.g. pathological) people coming into therapy -- I was one of these, too -- have a social world of people who care. What they don't have is a worldful of people who are trained to understand. If one needs to err on this balance, this former client would take understanding over "caring" any day. Understanding makes the therapist a valued professional. Caring makes him or her a paid friend. My therapist struggled a little with this distinction before he got it. When he got it, the therapy got hugely more valuable for me.
d. Understand first. Then, seek to be understood. My therapist used to always says, "Let me make sure I understand what you're saying before I even think about responding. You're saying that...." This was the BEST phrasing in the universe, because often he was 85% or 90% there, and I could clarify the last ten or fifteen percent. It meant we were walking the same turf. I was grateful for this. It shortened the process and made it more valuable.
I love this post. This is one of the most succinct and well stated list of important therapist qualities I've ever seen. The best part is that it comes from a client - and not a textbook, conference or journal article. Thank you.
P.S. I think it's really important for therapists to see this. I'm considering posting this as it's own thread and/or using it in an article - I see you're "anonymous" so I'll assume it's ok that I do that. Please let me know if it's not.
Yes, yes, yes! I'd be thrilled to see them an article. But I think I might be able to come up with one more, to make it a nice round number for you. Give me a day or so? I'm leaning to noting that there should be the same speaking/listening relationship with a client that a lawywer has in the courtroom. That is, when the judge -- the client! -- speaks, it is incumbent on the therapist to shut up and listen, even if the therapist feels a burning need to interpret, or if the therapist has been interrupted. Clients' words are therapists' "evidence," and should be encouraged at all costs. Now, it is certainly possible that interruption can be a power play, and needs to be interpreted and discussed. But don't interrupt a client to do that.
Let me think more on this, k? But the broadest answer is yes, yes, yes.
Okay. I've got it! Here's the fifth.
e. A therapist who remembers that "the client is not their problem, and the problem is not the client" is doing the client a real service.
I always had the nagging sense in therapy that the therapist was lacking a sense of who I really was, apart from whatever my presenting problem happened to be. Yes, it's true that in therapy we're there to talk about big issues and big concerns. But our lives outside the room are so much more than that, and the therapist who explores and understands the whole range of our lives -- our work, our play, our love, our being part of a larger community, our literary tastes, our good experiences as well as our painful ones -- will be a more effective therapist for us. We clients have problems, just as therapists have problems. But neither the therapist nor the client "is" their problem.
Similarly, the problem is not the client. Yes, a client may have some pathogenic belief(s) or maladaptive patterns. But they're far more than that, too. They might be essentially good people with those beliefs or even because of those beliefs. It might even be that those beliefs contribute or underscore their being good people in the world, even though the beliefs might not be so comfortable for the client.
The more the therapist was able to grasp me as a whole person, the better the therapy was. And the more the therapist was able to underscore and strengthen the good, as well as try to repair the pathogenic, the better the therapy was. Sounds simple, no? If it was that simple, and more therapists coule execute it effectively, a lot fewer people would be abandoning therapy.
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