The Self of the Therapist

“In the family you grew up in, how was conflict expressed and resolved?” I asked Tamika, my supervisee and an experienced clinician at a residential youth facility for girls.

Her response was quick, stark, and unexpected. She sat motionless and seemingly stunned as her eyes began to quickly fill with tears. “I feel really triggered by that question,” she noted after a few seconds. “I want to leave because I really don’t want to answer that. But I’ll feel like a loser and a hypocrite if I walk out.”

My question is rooted in a Self of the Therapist framework, which is at the heart of my clinical, supervisory, and consultative work and involves encouraging practitioners to engage in an intensive personal process of self-exploration, self-interrogation, and self-reflection. Self-exploration asks what we carry, self-interrogation asks why we carry it, and self-reflection asks how it moves through us into our work.

After a pause, Tamika blurted out: “Okay, you want to know how anger was expressed and resolved in my family? Violently! That’s how!”

This was a breakthrough moment in our work, and it illustrates why the Self of the Therapist approach is both essential and challenging. This framework is designed to encourage people to see their own complexity and become acquainted with all the sociocultural dimensions of their identities: the parts of themselves that have been shaped by family-of-origin experiences, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and so forth. It recognizes that each of us has an infinite number of selves that shape us and that can be extraordinarily beneficial to our clients if we do our personal work, and harmful therapeutically, if we do not.

The work also encourages practitioners to explore their relationship with past and present trauma, conflict, and other life-defining experiences. Thus, the work that a Self of the Therapist approach entails is by definition and design, personal. It explores and uncovers the person within that existed before the therapist did, as well as during and after one has become a clinician. In other words, it’s a process that encourages us to consider who we are and how the totality of all our experiences—good, bad, joyful, painful, past and present—provide a prism through which we see the world, including and especially the process of therapy.

The framework holds that these valuable and enduring life experiences are not to be discarded, ignored, or dismissed as unrelated, worthless, personal residue. Instead, with proper attention and personal interrogation, they can be dissected, processed, understood and accessed to create pathways to connect with those we serve, even when there seems to be an abyss between “us and them.”

Contrary to the traditional way in which I was trained, the Self of the Therapist worldview refutes the popular training notion that you must “get over your stuff,” or eradicate whatever adversities you’ve experienced in your life, in order to be an effective therapist. Instead, it embraces the idea that you must be in relationship with your stuff. You may never truly get over it, but as long as you understand yourself through the three tenets of self-exploration, self-interrogation, and self-reflection, your use of Self can be a valuable therapeutic tool.

Ultimately, the therapist’s use of Self determines whether therapeutic relational arteries are clear, open, and flowing—or blocked. The work must be personal because it is personal, and that’s why it often feels too personal for some therapists, like it initially did for Tamika.

Getting Personal

Tamika, who was 44 years old, worked at a residential youth facility for girls. She’d come in to see me because she’d been having issues with her coworkers, who described her as abrasive and difficult to work with. Although she was deeply committed to the girls she served, her effectiveness in sessions frequently broke down as well. Often, this happened at the moments when one of the girls expressed frustration or anger toward her, as young people in pain sometimes do toward trusted adults.

To help guide our supervision process, I relied on my usual Self of the Therapist framework. Initially, she responded to the process with skepticism, lamenting that it seemed too much like therapy, too personally intrusive, and not appropriate or relevant to her work. Although we continued to work together, she routinely questioned what her family-of-origin experiences or wide range of sociocultural identities had to do with her work as a therapist.

In her view, the approach didn’t pay proper homage to the appropriate boundaries that must exist between the personal and the professional. In my view, her critique was astute, because an aspect of the approach is in fact designed to blur those boundaries, albeit in an ethical way.

Tamika was raised by a single mother who’d physically abused her until the age of 30. She’d never been able to find relief or release because no one, including therapists, believed that someone at such an advanced age could be the victim of parental abuse. Prior to the session when she’d answered my question about how conflict was expressed in her family, she’d been adamant that her work with the girls in her care was unaffected by her life-altering experiences with an abusive mother or a rejecting, absent father.

After that pivotal session, our work focused on helping her envision and embrace how the gravity of her pain and suffering could equip her to work even more compassionately and effectively with her clients. Not only did she have a window through which she could intuitively “see” the girls’ invisible trauma wounds, but she also likely had some good ideas about what they needed in their relationship with her.

I assisted her in exploring how her family-of-origin experiences, as well as those rooted in the sociocultural trauma she grappled with on a daily basis as a dark-complexioned black woman, could empower her to deeply and viscerally understand the emotional-psychological needs her young clients struggled to identify and express. Within her was an unrecognized power—one that could be accessed to unlock therapeutic and healing possibilities for the girls she supported.

Through our Self of the Therapist work, she also developed a keen sense about how the experiences with her mom had hardened her heart. And still, she felt tremendous pain and frustration because her insights about these matters didn’t easily translate into changed behavior. In other words, she couldn’t seem to get over her stuff, which seemed to hang around her life like an albatross!

Once she embraced that the painful experiences with her mom were a conduit to her potential as a therapist/healer, she began to show up differently in all her relationships. She found herself sitting with others’ frustration and anger rather than growing defensive—and in that groundedness, many of the girls she treated were better able to move through difficult feelings and trust her support.

At one point, a new girl she’d begun working with yelled at her, “You’re paid to sit there and listen to me. You’re just like everyone else!” In the past, Tamika would’ve grown defensive, saying something like, “Believe me, I didn’t become a therapist to get rich.” But this time, she said, “A lot of people have let you down. You’re right to be skeptical.” Hearing that, the girl’s face softened.

Because her own story became one of survival, hope, and transformation—not just suffering—Tamika also discovered ways to hold hope for the survival and transformation of the girls she supported. We devoted time to assisting her in developing new strategies rooted in this approach that she could employ in her clinical work and beyond.

Soul Work

The Self of the Therapist framework is multifaceted. Yes, it’s a supervisory and training tool, as it was in Tamika’s case, but it’s also a worldview as well as a clinical stance that helps shape the contours of interventions. It positions the Self of the Therapist as a therapeutic tool that has the potential to unlock clinical impasses and birth new possibilities. And it can unclog relational arteries, softening the blockages that impede meaningful connection between clinician and client.

A core tenet of this approach invites us to question the robustness of a universal, objective reality. It asserts that each of us is a prisoner of our prism and context. What we see, who we see, and how we see, are all, to some extent, dictated by where we stand and the angle from where we gaze. The notion that there is only room for one reality and that the therapist or supervisor or consultant is the holder of that reality is antithetical to a major premise of Self of the Therapist work: that clinicians, no matter how much we try, can’t weed out or divorce ourselves from ourselves.

The value of this work is that it retrains our eyes to see that which we ordinarily can’t see. In so doing, it repudiates the manufacturing of other and promotes the imagining of other. To manufacture other is to construct difference as distance; to imagine other is to search for commonalities among differences. The manufacturing of other virtually always culminates in creating an “us” and a “them.” Our daily rhetoric about “those immigrants” who are stealing “our” jobs is a powerful example of manufacturing other. While the manufacturing process may be convenient and expedient, when we fail to imagine that there are parts of you that are also in me and vice versa, it’s destructive and poses a threat to all of us.

Having the capacity to hold multiple, often seemingly contradictory, perspectives is crucial to this work and rooted in the tenet that the Self is multidimensional. The goal is to help trainees, supervisees, and therapists become intimately familiar with as many of their selves as possible—all the identities and life circumstances that converge to shape us into who and what we are, not only as therapists, but as human beings. In the spirit of true Self of the Therapist inquiry, this is essentially work with a definable beginning and no discernible end—a type of soul work that’s essential to life and living well beyond the walls of therapy and supervision. When therapists actively engage in the process, they often discover that dimensions of the Self are endless, as are the possibilities for change and deeper human connections—even when and while we’re skeptical of them.