Hello. Today we’re going to talk about cutoff processes in a therapy session, especially when they’re caused by the therapist. Sometimes sessions are going somewhere deep, complicated, unknown, or painful, and suddenly something shifts — and it wasn’t the client.
Therapists are people, and we’re not comfortable with absolutely everything.
Sometimes material emerges in our clients that brings up marked anxiety for us.
When that happens, the therapist can do something that looks like good clinical work or a proper intervention, but it is actually the therapist heading off their own anxiety at the pass.
They may use things like psychoeducation, which is something in the intellect, not in the emotions. Reframing, which looks like kindness and care — helping someone out of a limiting belief into one that is more helpful. Summarizing at the wrong time, which — usually — summarization is a fantastic way to show the client that you’ve been paying attention and synthesizing their information. It’s a real demonstration of attention and care. But when any of these are done at the wrong moment, it can actually be driven by the anxiety of the counselor with the material that is coming up in the room.
These moments can appear to pass quietly, but what happens is something either conscious or, more often, unconscious in the client: they are getting the message that these topics are off-limits with this particular counselor.
So for counselors who are watching this and who care, how can you avoid situations such as these? First, you need to discover what sensations happen inside that let you know that you’re uncomfortable with something. One of the ways I find out that I am anxious is when I lose my typical faculty of language. Normally, I know what to say next — that’s just who I am. When I lose access to that ability, it’s often because I’m anxious.
I’ll give you an example. One of my clients kept using the word “sexy” to describe things that they like. I don’t have a problem with sexuality in general, but sometimes when it comes through in the therapy room suddenly, I can feel a little caught off guard. Not everybody has this problem — this is something that’s unique to me. So as soon as they said that word, I felt a little hiccup in my ability to access speech.
When things like this happen, that is an invitation for me to sit with what is uncomfortable about a client characterizing things they like as “sexy.” Part of it, I discovered, has to do with the role. Therapists are rightly pressured to keep all sexuality outside of the therapeutic relationship. But the therapy room should still be a safe place for people to explore their sexuality and what turns them on — that is a normal part of therapy. As long as it’s not crossing any therapeutic boundaries, there’s really no issue.
As far as I can tell in my examination, that was the thing that was throwing me off. Now that I know that this person likes to characterize things this way, I can be more open when they do it. I won’t be so surprised, because I know that this is a common pattern for them.
Other topics that I see throw therapists off are big emotions, clients feeling really lost, clients in a really helpless situation that are hard to find resolution or direction around, and when the client knows something better than the therapist does — when the therapist’s competence is on the line.
All of these can induce these tide-turning behaviors in therapists, where they just want to take the session in another direction.
Staying in uncertainty is a really high-level skill that you have to spend a lot of time cultivating. It’s one of the skills that I focus on the most for myself, because I still fail at it all the time.
When we can allow ourselves to slow down, sit back, and just let a little bit of spaciousness be in the room when we feel thrown off, surprised, concerned, confused, lost, or uncertain ourselves, we’re less likely to jump in with impulsive actions that look like clinical interventions but are really just us assuaging our own discomfort.
Get to know your discomfort better. Start to learn how your discomfort shows up in your body consistently. That way, when that familiar feeling comes up, you can take your discomfort as data — not as an emergency to fix.
