Hello. Today we are going to talk about the eight signs of emotional maturity in therapists. Our field has a tendency to focus more on tool acquisition than the emotional maturity of the people providing those tools. Often people having the discussion show up with the attitude of, I would never do that, or, here are the ways that I am mature.
Maturity is a lifelong process. We are never done becoming mature. There are some of these that I am better at than others, but let’s be honest. All of them are a work in progress for all of us. And the second we lose sight of that is the second some of the most important assets we have start to slip.
There is no tool more powerful than the self of the therapist, and these eight points are going to make it easier to access and utilize that tool.
Point number one, tolerance of the unknown. This isn’t just an important concept for therapists. This is also an important. Philosophical concept that the philosophers have toyed with since the beginning of philosophy, because it’s one of the things that humans hate the most.
Mental health counseling comes from philosophy science and spirituality. So mature therapists can sit with a client or a client issue that they don’t know very well and stay in that not knowing as long as they need to without rushing to fill the gap. Even when a client thinks they know something about themselves, we the therapist, take that information seriously. But we also hold out that it may be that the client doesn’t actually know that thing about themselves.
What immaturity wants to do is rush to find a name, a label, a theory, an approach before we actually have all of the information that we need to. Reliably apply that label or approach.
The example that I see most often, and it’s very understandable, is the therapist is struggling with the client for some reason, or the client is struggling and the therapist instead of sitting with the discomfort of the struggle, plus not knowing will. Rush to assign a label like, oh, this client’s resistant, or they’re dissociating, or They’re not ready for therapy,
we start to characterize clients in an unflattering way. Number two, a non-defensive response to rupture.
When a client gets angry, withdraws starts showing up late, starts doing things that are off putting. The mature therapist gets curious.
The less mature therapist becomes blamey or they collapse into over apologizing, which is another form of self-protection that isn’t really helpful here.
So what I watch for in myself and also in the therapist I train, is when a client gives us feedback like that, does the person get curious for the information? That’s actually helpful in a statement like, I don’t think therapy is working.
Or does that therapist collapse into defensiveness and shame?
Number three, knowing when your interstate is really about your own stuff versus something that the client might be inducing in you.
This is the core of what we call countertransference. Counter transference and transference are often characterized as negative. They’re not negative. They’re always happening. It’s just the nature of the therapeutic relationship is we’re not in each other’s lives.
So we don’t actually know what the other is really like outside of this context.
So when you feel irritated, bored, anxious, or pulled to rush in and rescue the client you need to know is this. Something about you and your own wounding, or is this something about how the client’s relational style actually tends to function with other people? It’s a really important distinction.
So the mature version of this is you get some kind of pull or push in your system, and you ask yourself immediately, is this mine? It might be mine. While at the same time, asking yourself what is happening in the client and what is it about the client that might be inducing this in others?
The underdeveloped version of this, or the immature version of this is feeling something like that in immediately making it about the client.
Number four, the ability to grieve. There are a lot of things that therapists have to grieve, not just once, but over and over again in our careers. Sometimes we watch somebody really go down the tubes, and that’s really sad. Sometimes clients leave us and we maybe we know why, or we don’t know why, but we don’t get to see the rest of the story.
Sometimes the therapist makes a mistake and the therapeutic relationship can’t recover from that.
All of these are instances where the therapist needs to have their own grief process, not only for the health of the therapist.
But also as a way to model healthy grief states to clients.
Emotional maturity means actually going through all the stages of the grief process. When something like this happens, not just slotting it away in your head as something unfortunate, compartmentalizing and moving on. That’s a recipe for burnout. We have to be able to get in touch with difficult, challenging, uncomfortable, crunchy emotions, let them move through our system, have procedures and processes around what works for us so that the emotional container of a therapist isn’t always full up to here.
Because at the end of the day. Grief is really about letting go.
Imagine if you just never went to the bathroom again. That is similar to not grieving.
Number five, a low need for client approval of the therapist and also client progress. While also still being able to care about that person.
This one’s a little subtle. You can care deeply about a client’s wellbeing, progress. You can really like them as a person, but also not need them to get better for your own sense of wellbeing.
And this is a paradox because when you’re overly invested in the outcome of your client’s progress, you are more likely to get into enactments, to have unhelpful countertransference, and to actually interfere with that progress by doing subtle, unconscious things on your end, and also putting pressure on the client, and the therapeutic relationship.
When a therapist needs a client to get better needs it, you start making decisions based on your own anxiety instead of the actual client process unfolding in front of you.
So the thing I look for in my students and supervisees is.
Are they actually tracking the client process with a long range view in mind? Not getting too caught up in what is happening in the present moment, because often what’s happening in the present moment can look like regression when that is the very pain the client needs to feel in order to move forward properly.
All right. Number six. This is another big one, kind of like grief, but integrated aggression. The psychoanalysts have written extensively about aggression, and it’s interesting because we’re in a cultural moment and maybe have been for the last 20 years. Where the word aggression is kind of a dirty word in therapy,
but aggression is really important. We don’t, for example, think that the Roman God Mars is bad. The Roman God Mars embodies a certain energy that exists. We need aggression to be athletic, to make decisions, to stand up for ourselves, to stand up for others, to endure conflict in a healthy way. Aggression is really important.
It’s how I know where I end and you begin. It’s that difference. Aggression is inherent in difference. So we need to have a healthy, useful narrative and relationship with aggression.
So that means the therapist needs to be able to acknowledge their own anger, competitiveness.
Frustration and irritation while also not acting on them as though they are facts.
But in the clinical context, it goes even further. Because this is where I embody my authority, which yes, you have authority as a therapist. You cannot get around that. It’s where I can be directive with clients when they need me to be. And people with trauma need you to be directive.
It’s how I can confront the client when the client needs confronting. Of course, always warmly, respectfully, and within the therapeutic ethos.
And it also enables us to interrupt clients, which we need to do. One of the things I see Supervisees struggle with all the time is they’ll come in and they’ll complain about clients that just hold you hostage, verbally. And we have to be able to interrupt that ’cause that’s not working for the client.
And it’s not compassionate to allow them to continue to do that.
Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about it, but you gotta try.
So therapists who have not integrated their aggression will avoid confronting the client. They’ll avoid interrupting the client.
They’ll default to unhelpful, continuous, perpetual space holding even when that is no longer needed and they will call it respecting the client’s process when it’s actually people pleasing.
Number seven, authentic equanimity. That’s just means being actually regulated as a therapist. Sometimes therapists will have a mask that sounds calm, or they’ll be using a soothing voice, or they’ll be speaking in a slow manner and they think that they are regulated. But actually there is a great deal of anxiety and performativeness occurring in that therapist’s demeanor.
They’re not actually regulated. They’re performing regulation by mimicking what they think a therapist is supposed to sound like.
Authentic equanimity is a felt. Embodied sense of flexibility that can tolerate the ups and downs of the emotions that come through the therapist throughout the therapy day, all day, every day, we are feeling emotions. I’m feeling so many emotions all day every day, and it’s important that I don’t get too hung up on one so that I can flow into the next one.
And even though things can be rather mercurial and move around, there is a grounded, centered through line that the therapist is holding, and that in and of itself is the most implicit tool in all of therapy. Can I show my client through modeling with my own body what it’s like to go through these ups and these downs of emotions and hear all of these different types of stories while staying grounded and centered?
It’s the constant underlying modeling that is the hallmark of a true, mature therapeutic relationship.
The professional performed version actually disregulates clients because the therapist is not being congruent, and clients can tell. Not consciously, but unconsciously. I have even seen this with incongruent teachers of counseling where I’ve been in the room as an assistant type person.
By the end of the day. Several students in the room are dysregulated, not because the teacher was doing anything wrong, but because the teacher was fundamentally incongruent, they were actually going through a lot internally and kind of pretending to be calm and sounding calm and performing calm on the outside.
So this is a really important thing. We need to get this one right. And that might mean doing a lot of your own work. You may need to invest heavily into this part of your tool because even if nobody can come up and tell you that that’s what’s happening, you will not have the effect that you want to have with your clients.
Number eight, the willingness to be impacted. This one kind of dovetails off of seven because you need seven in order to do eight. If you have enough authentic equanimity. You will be able to be impacted and not take it home with you, not feel so sloshed around that you’re burning out all the time,
and then it actually becomes quite joyful to be impacted by your clients in this way, and your clients feel it. This is something that my clients comment on. They can tell that I love my job. They can tell that I’m really in the ring with them, that I’m really feeling them. And sometimes they ask me if it’s exhausting, and the answer is no, it’s not.
It’s life giving. And the reason for that is because I enjoy watching my system move in and out of these emotions. I enjoy feeling connected with my clients. I enjoy being. In process with them. I enjoy how their process impacts my process. So it’s not even just the willingness to be impacted it, it may even go as far as like finding what is joyful in life-giving about being impacted by people.
The defensive version of this, or the immature version of this is therapists who are hiding behind their tools, whether that’s CBT worksheets or somatic breathing exercises, whatever it is.
Counselors do this when they feel fragile inside, when they feel like they can’t handle the impact of that kind of relationship. It’s not something they’re saying to themselves consciously. It’s something that they’re feeling in their own system. So when they give the CBT worksheet and the client says, this isn’t working for me, the therapist can get tight and rigid.
Say the client is being resistant, label the client. Maybe even declare that the therapy failed and all of this is happening because the therapist can’t tolerate receiving the impact of the client, the feedback, the client’s emotions, the stories, the journey, the energy in the room,
and when a therapist is behaving in a defensive manner, even implicitly unspoken, the client feels it. I’m certain I have done this to clients too. There’s something that they’re doing in their life that I don’t agree with or I would never do, and I get a little tight.
And again, the client may never really be able to say, oh, I know Liz doesn’t approve of that because she got tight in her pecs. But they will say, yeah, every time I talked about my participation in extreme sports or whatever, I could tell my therapist was like, put off by that. Even if they can’t say why they know that.
Deep mature clinical work requires contact. Contact means that we are meeting at our boundaries and we’re flowing with each other. And so that means I’m not gonna let the client cross any boundaries, but I am gonna let them. Push into my system a little bit so that I can connect to the client, but also receive really valuable information that comes through doing that.
