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A couple of weeks ago, I cried in a therapy session.
Not the quiet, contained tear that gathers in the corner of your eye and can still plausibly be folded into a professional nod.
I mean cried.
My client was reading something to me, and whatever she had written struck me in a way I did not anticipate. I am not usually a heavy crier, particularly in session, but suddenly I was.
And somewhere underneath the emotion was another reaction entirely:
What is happening right now?
This is so unprofessional.
I’m not supposed to be doing this.
Pull it together.
What is she going to think of me?
What would a supervisor say if they saw this?
It was startling how quickly those old voices returned.
Most of the time, I no longer organize my work around those rules. I have spent years developing a much more expansive understanding of therapist self-expression, subjectivity, and the responsible use of our humanity in the room. I believe deeply that our reactions are not automatically intrusions simply because they are visible.
And still, in that moment, the ghosts of professors, supervisors, consultants, trainings, and old versions of professionalism surfaced almost intact.
They had been quiet for a long time.
They were not gone.
Even after years of sitting with people in some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives, there was still a small internal alarm sounding the moment the therapist became too visible.
Too affected.
Too human.
The rules come first
Recently, in a consultation group, one of the therapists described completing an ethics training on self-disclosure.
Instead of leaving with greater clarity, she left feeling ashamed.
She began mentally cataloguing all the ways she had disclosed something about herself to clients over the years and wondering whether she had been doing therapy wrong.
As she kept listening, though, something shifted.
She realized she did not actually agree with much of what she was hearing.
Of course self-disclosure can become inappropriate. It can pull attention toward the therapist, ask a client to caretake us, blur roles, satisfy our needs rather than theirs, or expose something we later wish we had protected.
Those possibilities matter.
But there is an enormous difference between teaching clinicians how to discern those differences and giving them a list of things good therapists do not do.
That distinction feels increasingly important to me.
Because when ethics is taught primarily through prohibition, we may not actually be teaching therapists how to operate ethically.
We may be teaching them how to follow rules.
And then how to feel shame when they find themselves outside of them.
I remember versions of this from graduate school.
Sit this way because this posture communicates openness.
Do not reveal too much about yourself.
Be careful what is visible in your office.
Keep the focus on the client.
Maintain the frame.
There is wisdom inside many of those teachings.
Boundaries matter.
Power matters.
The therapist’s needs should not quietly become the work of the client.
Restraint can be an act of care.
But somewhere along the way, restraint can become confused with disappearance.
We can begin to believe the safest therapist is the least visible one.
The least affected.
The least knowable.
A person with no photographs, no reactions, no history, no preferences, no body that ever betrays what is happening inside it.
We may call this professionalism.
The client may experience something else entirely.
A person is already in the room
The problem is that the therapist does not stop being human because the session begins.
Our body does not disappear when we sit in the chair.
We still have a nervous system.
We still have histories.
We still get moved.
We become protective.
We feel anger.
We feel tenderness.
We sometimes become confused.
We sometimes feel inadequate.
There are moments when a client says something and our chest tightens before we know why.
Moments when we feel an unexpected urge to defend them.
Moments when their grief lands somewhere familiar in us.
Moments when our eyes fill with tears before the part of us responsible for professionalism has had time to approve the response.
The question, then, cannot really be whether our humanity enters the room.
It already has.
The more useful question is:
What do we do with it once it is here?
That is a much harder thing to teach.
It requires more than rules because context matters.
The same disclosure can be deeply useful with one client and intrusive with another.
A therapist’s tears might communicate recognition in one moment and emotional burden in another.
A personal story might help a client feel less alone, or it might quietly ask them to attend to the therapist.
Silence might communicate steadiness.
Or distance.
Structure might communicate safety.
Or control.
There is no single behavior that tells us which one is happening.
Which means ethical practice requires something more demanding than compliance.
It requires discernment.
From prohibition to discernment
I wish more clinicians were taught to ask questions like these:
What is happening in me right now?
What is my impulse asking me to do?
Whose need would it serve if I expressed this?
What might my client make of it?
What is happening between us?
Would naming my reaction deepen the client’s experience, or pull them away from it?
Am I choosing this, or am I reacting?
Can I remain responsible for myself while allowing myself to be affected?
These questions do not give us the comfort of certainty.
They do something better.
They keep us awake inside the relationship.
They make space for the possibility that our humanity can contain information without automatically becoming instruction.
That we can feel something strongly without immediately acting on it.
That sometimes the most ethical choice is restraint.
And sometimes the most ethical choice is to let the client see that another human being has actually been moved by them.
When my client read to me
That was what I eventually understood about my own tears.
What she was reading had landed deeply.
But the significance was not simply that I was emotional.
My crying did not become clinically meaningful because tears are inherently therapeutic.
It became meaningful because of what those tears encountered in her history.
This was someone who had repeatedly experienced important parts of herself being dismissed.
She had known what it was like to speak from a vulnerable place and have the other person remain untouched.
And now she was sitting across from someone whose body had responded before language did.
I was moved.
Really moved.
There was something almost startling about that recognition.
Not because my reaction was the point.
She was still the point.
But my reaction offered information.
What she had written mattered.
What she was saying could reach another person.
She was not too much.
She was not ridiculous for being affected by her own story.
Her experience could land somewhere and be held there.
There was an opportunity in that moment.
I could have hurried to pull myself together and silently communicated that my reaction was an error.
I could have become embarrassed and made her reassure me.
Neither would have served her.
Instead, the work became figuring out how to let my humanity exist without requiring her to manage it.
That distinction matters.
The fear of getting it wrong
I think therapists carry more shame about these moments than we admit.
A colleague in that consultation described having an unexpectedly intense emotional response with a client and immediately thinking something close to:
If anyone knew this happened, they would think I was a terrible therapist.
Maybe even:
Could I lose my license over this?
That level of fear does not emerge from nowhere.
Many clinicians were trained inside systems where ethical competence was associated with avoiding mistakes rather than learning what to do when complexity inevitably appeared.
This is part of what makes professional conditioning so powerful. We can outgrow a rule intellectually long before our bodies stop bracing around it. We can believe in a more relational, expressive, human way of practicing and still feel the old alarm when we step outside the posture we were first taught was safe.
The rule may no longer live in our philosophy.
It may still live in our nervous system.
And complexity always appears.
A client will remind you of someone.
You will become irritated.
Something they say will hurt.
You will misunderstand them.
You will feel deeply protective.
You will occasionally disclose something and later wonder whether you should have.
You may cry.
You may fail to cry when you wish you could.
You may feel absolutely nothing in a moment when you think a good therapist should feel something.
Human beings do not become predictable simply because one of them has a license.
The fantasy that ethical therapy depends on eliminating these experiences leaves therapists with two bad options.
Either deny what is happening.
Or experience it and believe we have failed.
Neither makes us safer clinicians.
Awareness does.
Reflection does.
Accountability does.
The capacity to notice our impact and repair does.
The difference between being human and making it about us
I want to be careful here, because “therapists are human too” can become its own excuse.
It is true.
But it is not sufficient.
Our humanity does not automatically justify every expression of it.
Clients are not there to receive whatever spills out of us in the name of authenticity.
Being genuine and being uncontained are not the same thing.
Being relational does not mean abandoning boundaries.
If anything, allowing more of ourselves into the room requires more responsibility, not less.
If I choose to tell a client something personal, I need to know why.
If I cry, I need to remain capable of staying with their experience rather than requiring them to shift into caring for mine.
If I feel anger, I need enough awareness to distinguish between useful information and an impulse that belongs somewhere else.
If a client’s story lands somewhere familiar in me, I have to be curious about both truths: what I may be recognizing in them, and what the moment may be awakening in me.
This is not a loosening of ethics.
It is a deepening of them.
The question moves from:
Am I allowed to do this?
to:
What does this moment require of me?
And:
Can I remain fully human without asking the client to carry the cost of my humanity?
Those are harder questions.
They are also much closer to the actual work.
What we were taught to hide
I think many therapists were taught to subtract themselves before they were taught to know themselves.
We learned how not to intrude before we learned how to recognize the difference between intrusion and presence.
We learned the dangers of self-disclosure before we developed a language for responsible subjectivity.
We learned that our reactions could contaminate the work.
Far fewer of us were taught that our reactions could also inform it.
So perhaps part of becoming a seasoned therapist is not becoming better at hiding.
Perhaps it is becoming more trustworthy with what can no longer be hidden.
Our faces.
Our bodies.
Our uncertainty.
Our intuition.
Our histories.
Our tears.
The parts of ourselves that inevitably register the person sitting across from us.
And perhaps professionalism was never supposed to mean becoming less human.
Maybe it means becoming responsible enough with our humanity that another person can safely encounter it.
Not every feeling needs to be spoken.
Not every story needs to be shared.
Not every impulse deserves action.
But neither does every human response need to be erased.
Sometimes a client needs steadiness.
Sometimes they need quiet.
Sometimes they need a boundary.
And sometimes they may need to look across the room and discover that what they have shared has actually reached another person.
That someone heard them.
That someone was affected.
That someone remained.
Maybe the work is not learning how to keep ourselves out of the room.
Maybe the work is learning how to bring ourselves in
carefully,
reflectively,
ethically,
and fully enough
to actually be there.
The Relational Thread publishes one essay each week on the intersubjective space, the person of the therapist, and what seems to happen when two nervous systems meet in the work of healing. If you’d rather listen, each essay is read aloud on the Notice That podcast. Subscribing is free.