My clients know some of my secrets…

Why I advocate for therapist Self Disclosure.

Hi I am Elliot. I am a human. I often use this as my opening line when I meet a client for the first time. Acknowledging my humanness and humanity in the room lets a prospective client know that they are sitting in the company of someone human who understands what it means to be a part of the human experience.

Remembering the therapists I have had, some were what is called a ‘blank slate’… quite literally they do not disclose anything, you know they are human, but you occasionally imagine they might be an AI bot since they let nothing through. I’ve also worked with those who are incredibly relational where they share from time to time something about themselves like their dog barking outside, a particular experience they went through or talking about a shared interest after I spoke about it first. At each moment of my personal therapy journey, I can say I needed and valued the Freudian clinical stance and the more Relational approach.

I would say I have been fortunate to have had some positive experiences of counsellors self-disclosing things to me as a client. However, there was a particular therapist who self-disclosed too much of their opinion which felt judgmental and non-empathetic. This resulted in withholding parts of my experiences for fear of being judged and harshly criticised. The disclosures they made were not beneficial and made me feel incredibly uncomfortable and uneasy.

My journey to advocating for therapist self-disclosure began when I attended my first-ever counselling training. One of the first things we were taught was about Carl Rogers, an American Psychologist who was one of the founders of Humanistic Psychology and the person-centred approach to therapy. A person-centred approach asks the counsellors to approach clients with three conditions: a posture of Empathetic Understanding, Unconditional Positive Regard or Acceptance and Congruence. Congruence was a word I had never come across- it simply means to be genuine and authentic- to be you.

So, some old American psychologist says you can be you and now you share your secrets with clients? Yeesh, that sounds unethical and a little needy frankly. I hear It too, but self-disclosure is more than a moment in the therapy room where I say ‘Oh that happened to me too!’ Here’s the distinction. As a therapeutic counsellor my job, my role is to support you. To help you get from A to B. My role is to help you think through things, process experiences, and understand how they play out in your life and the meaning you assign to them. I am not and cannot be your friend. Sure, there are clients whom I have worked with whom I think we would have gotten along fantastically if we had not met in the therapeutic space, however, my role is to support you on your journey, I am friendly, but I am not your friend. When you are with a friend you may share a story and they will reciprocate with a similar experience, they empathise with you and you share how you experienced things and what you took from it. In the therapy room when I share a similar experience there is a different intention, and often I have sat on the disclosure for a while before speaking about it.

In the therapy world, Irvin Yalom in his book The Gift of Therapy shares that there are perhaps three areas of self-disclosure.

1)    The Mechanism of Therapy (How therapy works and what a client is signing up for)

2)    2) The Therapist’s Here-and-Now feelings in Session (A practitioner’s feelings, thoughts, and immediate responses in the session)

3)    3) The Therapist’s Personal Life (experiences shared with the client that support them in their journey)

I echo Irvin’s question ‘How can one have a genuine encounter with another person while remaining so opaque?’

Just as I welcome a client fully, their whole experience and humanity, I also welcome myself into the room. If I cannot welcome myself in, I cannot ask a client to show up too. I wear what feels most me, I let them see my humanity by drinking water in a session, coughing, or sneezing and being willing to make mistakes. Once again, a session is not for me to draw attention to myself and focus on myself, however, there are moments when I join the client in their experience and share my personal story.

So, what does this look like? I share things that are relevant to the conversation. If I sense an individual struggling and in a place of hopelessness, I might share how I felt similarly in that experience to empathise and say ‘I see you and I can appreciate what it is like for you…’ even ‘I have not experienced that before, but I am here with you at this moment…’ brings about a sense of being held.

I share things that feel less present for me and draw from past experiences that have been worked through and processed in my therapy. For me, I have not gotten it right all the time, and sometimes my timing is off and I process that in the moment with clients. For me though, I have found that self-disclosure does bring about positive change in individuals and pushes the therapeutic connection even deeper. I also must caveat what I have written with the power of permission. Asking clients sometimes is more welcomed than an unsolicited experience shared out of the blue with no context. I will always ask permission with ‘How would you feel if I shared something about myself?’ never forcing you to hear my experiences.

At the end of my initial training, I submitted a research piece titled:

Revealing our Humanity: Examining Experiences of Self-Disclosure, The Pros, Cons, Cautions and Best Practices, Towards a Framework for Self-Disclosure in Counselling and Psychotherapy.

This 56-page document took the experiences of self-disclosure and explored where other practitioners stood, how they arrived at self-disclosure and what some of the nuances are in using this as a therapeutic intervention.

From the research and the literature, I noticed a framework emerge. Self-Disclosure might be beneficial if there is a Strong and Established Therapeutic Relationship, there are Intentions to Alleviate Shame and Isolation, Instilling Hope, and Disclosing Processed and Healed Past Experiences, that hold Relevance to the Therapeutic Context.

If you are reading this and are a current client, how was it for you to perhaps have experienced self-disclosures from me? What came up for you? Would you feel comfortable talking about this in our next session?

For those who are curious about sessions with me, maybe you have had a negative and unhelpful experience with self-disclosure, and for that, I am sorry. What comes up for you if you were to learn more about me and my personal experiences? Maybe that feels like it is too much. That is okay.

For those fellow therapists who are reading, what do you think of Self Disclosures in therapy? For me, I guess the whole idea is to show up as my most authentic self, and as I do that, provide the space for other humans to do that too. To echo how I sign off on my emails: From one human to another, take care of yourself.