Hello, today we are going to talk about judgment in the therapy room coming from the therapist. I teach and train graduate students, and this was a hot topic this week. When a client is confusing, or they’re living a different lifestyle than we do, or they aren’t making progress in the way that we expect them to, or we get frustrated with what’s happening, it’s common for therapists to feel tempted to move into judgment and blame. We all get tempted to judge others, and it shows up in a specific way in the psychotherapy room.
So think about a time when you’ve been with a client, or you’ve been trying to help a friend, and your help isn’t landing for them. They are either pushing it away, or they keep saying they tried that, or we just don’t know what is actually going to help this person. The mind hates open questions and the unknown, and so when there’s an unknown, as in the stall of progress, it’s common for the mind to fill in that gap of the unknown instead of allowing it to remain open.
You start to feel this pressure when you don’t know what’s wrong. You don’t know how to help. It seems like we’ve tried everything and nothing’s working.
That pressure gets taken by the system as discomfort, all the way from discomfort to threat.
So when a therapist is feeling threatened in a session because they don’t know what’s going on, that’s a real flag for your attention.
Because what can happen, instead of sitting with that threat or that discomfort, is we start labeling the client: resistant, poor insight, not ready for therapy. We start making it about them. And it’s not that resistance, poor insight, or lack of readiness isn’t present, but that is where a mind in discomfort will stop, and it will not inquire further.
We start to hide behind our authority, our degrees, our pedigrees, our years of experience, our own personal growth work. We compare what we’re capable of compared to what the client is able to do. Our judgment relocates the problem into the client alone, so I take that discomfort that I am feeling out of myself and I make my idea of the client hold it entirely. So what does that do? Then I don’t have to feel the discomfort of being stuck with this person’s process. My client is stuck, and so I feel stuck because none of my usual things are working.
So I can just take care of that discomfort by making it all their problem. Easy peasy.
So the therapist may not realize this, but when we get frustrated and when we feel stuck, our identity itself actually starts to feel a little threatened. We can feel a little bit like I’m going crazy. So the judgment just nips that in the bud. I don’t have to tolerate the unknown.
Human limitation. Human fragility.
So then I judge, and it restores my coherent sense of self. It ends the discomfort of not knowing. And so even though I’m ending the discomfort of not knowing, I did not remain in the openness that would have allowed me to potentially arrive at a different perspective, which would have in turn enabled me to guide the client into a new perspective. The whole process just gets cut.
So here’s where this shows up for me, and it actually showed up for me recently, to be honest.
Turning towards my own shame-inducing material has always been relatively easy for me. Even in elementary school, I would get into a conflict with a friend and I wanted to know what my part of the problem was. Part of this was driven by attachment anxiety, wanting to preserve the relationship by falling on the sword.
But that ability turned into a real boon, because I can fairly easily examine my own psychological content, tolerate shame, and become the person that I want to be. So it’s actually something that I really value about myself, and it’s a big part of my identity. What that prevents me from doing is fully understanding the struggles of people who are psychically threatened by taking ownership. They are not willfully feeling threatened about taking ownership. It’s a psyche preservation method. There’s something about taking ownership of their part of a conflict that is too overwhelming for them, or taking ownership about the ways in which they have contributed to their suffering that is too overwhelming for them, and there are tons and tons of reasons why that makes a hundred percent sense.
However, when I encounter this kind of mentality, or what we call a victim narrative, which is different from being a victim or being victimized, the victim narrative is this mental orientation around: everything is bad for me, all these people and all these things have abused me, and there are no choices for me.
The fundamental piece of the victim narrative is: there are no choices for me. There are plenty of people who have been victimized who can see choices even after victimization. So when I encounter a psyche that says this can’t be me and I have no choices, I get triggered, because to me, staying in that mindset is threatening to my attachment relationships.
That’s my stuff. So it can make it challenging for me, with clients who are stuck in helplessness, to not move into that hair-trigger judgment space. That judgment space provides me reliable, but really cheap and overly easy, relief from being in the helpless unknown with this person.
And so when that happens, and when I get triggered, my mind will start to yap at me and it will start saying unflattering things: they like being a burden, they just want a bunch of attention, they want everyone to do everything for them, they don’t want to work hard. I can label them with clinical language, all these things.
And so what I’ve noticed is that even though I can track that judgmental voice and also stay in the unknown with the client’s process, recognizing that I’m not being effective, or maybe I am but I don’t see how I am, I don’t know how to be effective. That is an unusual and uncomfortable feeling for me.
And it’s important for me, for hours, days, weeks, or months, to just sit there and feel my own limitation in this situation, instead of jumping to these judgmental conclusions. I really want to stay in openness and curiosity even though that’s a challenge. So the effort that I have to do here is be with the unknown, invite my curiosity, and just let that judgmental voice yap on in the background. Not shut it down, but also not buy into it, lean into it, condone it, or act like that voice is right.
So the reason why this is important for us clinically is because judgment relieves the therapist’s distress, tension, discomfort, or even feelings of threat in the moment, but you’re missing out on all the information that this system has for you, because you are landing in these labels that decrease your anxiety and your shame, but they don’t actually leave you open to the evolution of information that comes through sitting in these really hard periods of time.
Furthermore, as a therapist, you’re probably acting against your values, because you have left your compassion, objectified and othered a person, if you follow along with what the judgment wants to do.
And so when you reflect on that later, that can be a really tough moment of guilt and moral injury.
So in the end, doing our best to notice the judgment, allow the judgment, don’t judge the judgment, but just notice it without aligning with it and acting on it.
So here, for those of us that are doing helping work and clinical work, here’s what I want you to sit with: what would you have to tolerate, and what would you have to give up, if you gave up your fast labels and your alignment with the very human tendency to judge?
Because that’s the real question. Not whether judgment is good or bad, but what it’s protecting you from having to feel and face.
