I had the privilege of attending the EFT Triage Conference in Las Vegas this past weekend, and it was so inspirational that I imagine I will be referencing it for many articles to come, because of how much of an impact it left on me and how many ideas I am still carrying around days later. One of the biggest takeaways that has really stayed with me is this idea that clients do not owe their therapists vulnerability, and that we should not, as clinicians, expect clients to offer it up to us simply because they have entered therapy, because they are paying for the time, or because they want very badly to make progress. Vulnerability is not the price of admission to therapy, and it is not something that should be demanded, assumed, or interpreted as resistance when it does not arrive quickly. It has to be earned over time, and that process can take far longer than many people expect.
It makes a lot of sense that clients come into therapy wanting to hit the ground running. Therapy can feel urgent, especially when someone is in pain, when their relationship is struggling, when they have spent years trying to understand themselves, or when they are exhausted by repeating the same patterns. Many clients want to make progress at a clip, and often there is a part of them that feels like they should be able to walk into the room, tell the entire story, access the deepest emotion, and immediately begin changing. But safety does not always move at the same pace as urgency. Safety with a therapist may take months, if not longer, to develop, because your nervous system is taking in far more information than what is being said out loud. It is observing whether your therapist is consistent, whether they remain present, whether they pathologize you, whether they are able to tolerate your anger, whether they become defensive when they have gotten something wrong, and whether they can repair things when there have been mis attunements or ruptures in the relationship.
There are things I aim to provide as a therapist from the very beginning of treatment that I hope can support or perhaps expedite that process, but no matter what I do, the reality is that vulnerability takes time to naturally unfold. I cannot decide for someone else that I am safe. I cannot tell someoneās nervous system that it should trust me because I have good intentions, because I have training, or because I believe myself to be a caring therapist. Clients get to determine their own experience of safety, and they get to take the time they need to gather evidence about who I am, how I show up, and what happens when the work becomes difficult. I hold myself to certain standards in the room, though of course I do not always meet them perfectly because I am fallible as a human, and part of my own work is continually trying to bring more of these qualities into the therapy relationship.
One of the most important things I try to offer is that I lead from a perspective of not knowing. I do not make assumptions about my clients, and I do not assume that because we share some sort of intersectional identity, I automatically understand their experience. I may be sitting with a client who is also polyamorous, mixed race, half Mexican and Latine, neurodivergent, or a musician, and while those points of connection may matter, they do not mean that the client and I experience those identities in the same way. People are not monoliths, and shared language does not always mean shared meaning. Of course, we all have a tendency to look for links and commonality, and especially as a neurodivergent human, I am prone to hearing something and feeling a sense of excitement because there is recognition there, but I work constantly to show up from a place of cultural curiosity, humility, and an ability to meet my clients where they actually are rather than where I imagine they might be.
I also let my clients know very early that they do not have to be precious with me. I am going to get it wrong for them at times. I may use the wrong adjective or descriptor. I may not capture a reflection in the right way. I may miss an emotional piece, interrupt at the wrong time, or say something that activates a protective part of self. In those moments, I invite clients to let me know that I have gotten it wrong, because so many of my clients have had the experience, both in therapy and outside of it, of not being understood, not being listened to, or being misattuned to and then never having the opportunity for repair. It is incredibly important to me that clients know that a rupture does not have to mean the end of the relationship, even though for many people that is exactly what previous relationships have taught them.
Of course, one of the challenges of this is that many of my clients also have protective strategies of fleeing when there has been activation, which is a whole other post for a whole other time, but I really invite clients to stay with me and give me the opportunity to repair when there have been ruptures, because ruptures are expected. I think that is something clients do not always appreciate when they first enter therapy, that therapeutic ruptures should in some ways be part of the process. A more seasoned or attuned therapist may have fewer of them, but no therapist is going to get it right all the time, and the question is not only whether your therapist missteps. The question is whether they can recognize it, whether they can tolerate your feedback, whether they can remain open instead of defensive, and whether they can meet you in the repair. For many clients, that repair becomes one of the first experiences they have ever had of being misunderstood without being abandoned.
I am also a lifelong learner, and I try to let my clients know what I am doing and why, or at least I try to do this as much as possible. If I interrupt them, I want them to understand the purpose. I might say that I am interrupting because their cycle is online as a couple and what is happening in that moment is pushing them further away from one another. If I ask them to circle back to a certain piece of what they said, I may explain that it feels deeply meaningful, that I have never heard them name it before, and that I do not want us to rush past it. Sometimes the cycle does come online, particularly when I work with couples, and it escalates and I lose control of it. When that happens, I name that too. I might tell them that I really missed both of them, that I want to grab my seat and pull a little closer, and that I want them to feel held and supported by me while we find our way back.
I do my best to name the process just as I do my best to name when I am lost or when I have made a mistake. What I have found as a therapist is that I do not need to know the perfect move every time, and I do not have to get it right constantly, so long as I am operating from a place of curiosity and humility. I am able to name, in a very human moment and sometimes in a moment of vulnerability myself, that I am not sure what to do. And when I am not sure what to do, I am going to make sure that I figure out what it is I need to do, because my clients are in my care, and I take that with an extreme amount of responsibility. I do not need to perform certainty in the room, but I do need to remain accountable for continuing to learn.
That is also a large part of why I am so dedicated to stretching my scope of competence and expertise. When clients come to me, I often hear the same story. They have been referred out by nine therapists before they landed with me. Their first therapist did not know how to walk with them through gender and identity exploration. Their second therapist was not experienced in dissociation. Their third therapist did not feel comfortable working with dating or non-monogamy issues. Their fourth therapist was not trauma focused and was primarily focused on compulsions. By the time many clients reach me, they have already absorbed the message, whether anyone intended to send it or not, that they are too complicated, too layered, too difficult, or too much for the room.
So much of my insistence on ongoing training and the cultivation of excellence has to do with the fact that I do not want my clients, particularly clients who are coming to me for attachment repair, to feel like they are going to be referred out anytime I stumble across something I do not know what to do with. I am willing to pay for consultation. I am willing to go get a training the following weekend. I am willing to stretch myself. That is not to say that I am willing to work outside of my scope of competence, and there are certainly going to be clinical issues that are truly outside of what I can ethically and responsibly support, but for the most part, if something is within reach, I reach for it. I do not want clients to take away the experience of feeling like they are too much or that their issues are too much. That is part of why I specialize in multiplicity and layered, complex cases, because I believe humans are layered and complex, and I owe it to the people in my care to know how to support them across a vast range of issues, presentations, and complexity.
There are also other pieces that I bring into the room as a relational therapist that I believe help with safety. I work with many multicultural clients who come from different countries, ethnicities, cultural backgrounds, and intersectional identities, and many of my clients straddle multiple marginalized identities at once. I am very sensitive to the power differentials in the room. Therapy is not an equal relationship in every sense. I hold a degree, I hold institutional authority, and I am sitting in a role that gives me a tremendous amount of interpretive power. I think it is important to name that and to understand that many clients have very good reasons for needing to know who I am outside of the therapy room before they can decide whether I feel safe enough to trust.
I let clients know that I am the daughter of a survivor. I let them know that I am in remission from my own complex trauma, which I spent approximately fifteen years healing from, beginning in childhood. I let my clients know that I am polyamorous, and I am open with them about questions they may have for me. I do not believe that thoughtful and intentional self-disclosure is inherently harmful to therapeutic goals. In fact, particularly as a relational therapist, I believe it can support those goals. Do I believe self-disclosure is the only tool for safety? Absolutely not. I believe it is possible for me to meet clients deeply without sharing much about who I am, and I also believe there are therapists who disclose very little and do extraordinary work. But for many of my clients, my politics matter. Who I am outside of therapy absolutely matters to them, and I believe they deserve to have a transparent therapist who is willing to be open about those realities.
Clients can, of course, create their own assumptions about those identities and what they might mean about their care, and I invite them to talk to me about that too. That is part of the relational work. It can also help clients understand how to navigate differences, because differences are going to be present in relationships throughout their lives, and safety does not always mean sameness. My self-disclosure is always in service of shoring up the therapeutic alliance and helping clients feel safer with me and more able to access their own vulnerability. It is never about asking them to take care of me, reassure me, or hold my emotional experience. As I continue training to become a supervisor, one of the things I keep returning to is the idea that you have to be willing to offer some vulnerability of your own if you want people to feel safe enough to do so with you. I do not expect or demand vulnerability from the people I supervise, consult with, or treat without being willing to walk the walk as well.
Finally, I feel alongside my clients. I am not a voyeur into their emotional experience, and I am not sitting at a distance watching emotion happen to them while remaining entirely untouched. I am an active feeler in the room with them. If I am moved, I cry. If humor shows up, I laugh with them. I am not going to sever my emotional experience when I am sitting in front of another human being, though I am always contained enough to remain the anchor in the room. My clients should never feel that they need to take care of my feelings, but I also do not believe that emotional absence is the same thing as clinical steadiness. So much of helping people access vulnerability is modeling access to vulnerability and emotional expression, and showing them another way that a nervous system can move when it comes to emotion and connection. Sometimes part of the healing is not only feeling the emotion, but watching another person remain connected while that emotion is present.
I also do not assume that just because I have been able to access relative safety in certain spaces, my clients have had access to the same thing. I am a White-presenting therapist, even as someone who is multiracial and half Mexican and half White, and as a White-presenting person I have had access to a tremendous amount of safety as I have navigated the world. Though I am a woman, and certain spaces have certainly not been safe for me, compared to many people I have had an incredible amount of privilege, and that privilege has shaped my worldview. It shapes how I access and relate to emotion. It is a huge part of why I feel safe enough to go into emotion in front of a vast array of people, because I have not had to face the same amount of shame, danger, persecution, or violence that may be perpetrated against someone else when they access or express certain emotional experiences in the world.
Therefore, it makes a lot of sense that someone with a different identity, particularly a marginalized identity, who has been shamed, persecuted, threatened, or terrorized when they imagined accessing certain emotions or expressing themselves openly, might not be able to do so in therapy. It may take months or years before they feel able to safely access those parts of themselves in front of me. Again, I avoid pathologizing these differences. Of course, those protective strategies can sometimes have an impact on relationships behind closed doors, and that is part of why I am there, to help clients explore how they might have new emotional experiences in certain spaces. But I do not assume safety for my clients, and I always imagine there is a very good reason they are showing up the way they are showing up. My job is not to force the protection away. My job is to understand what it has been protecting, why it became necessary, and whether we can slowly create enough safety for something new to become possible.
You do not owe your therapist vulnerability. You do not owe it because you scheduled a session, because you have been in treatment for a certain amount of time, or because some part of you believes you should be further along. If you become deeply vulnerable with me, I consider that an extraordinary privilege. It is not something I believe I am entitled to receive. It is something that has been entrusted to me, and trust is earned slowly, through consistency, humility, transparency, repair, and time. My responsibility is not to demand that you open. My responsibility is to keep showing up in a way that may eventually allow your nervous system to decide that opening is safe enough to try.
