I am, in Fact, Just a Girl Practicing Client-Centered Therapy.
The elephant in the room when I started practicing as a therapist was that, well, I didn’t know all that much. In most professions, counseling included, a lack of experience in the field can translate to a lack of expertise. Lucky for me and my clients, however, it wasn’t my job to be the expert.
Client or patient-centered therapy operates from the understanding that you are the leading expert on yourself, your thoughts, feelings and healing. The job of the therapist is to act as a facilitator for you to exercise that expertise in new and supportive ways, whether by offering psychoeducation or simply a new perspective.
The difficulty with this, however, is that many of us have been undermined and devalued as experts on ourselves. The world around us profits from telling us who we are, what we want and what we need, so it has no incentive to support or validate our own thoughts and feelings on the matter of ourselves. We also aren’t given the language or education to express and communicate our knowledge of ourselves, which is where a therapist can come in and offer support. Culturally, many of us are also taught to defer to authority and the current model of mental healthcare sets up a power dynamic that puts the therapist in this position.
Client-centered therapy also isn’t for everyone, so you may find yourself in a therapeutic relationship where your therapist’s expertise is much more necessary to reach your goals. In these situations, your therapist’s expertise works in tandem to your own, but does not negate your own authority over your experience and healing journey.
Ultimately, however, your therapist is merely another person, who is only an expert on their own self and understanding. This is why shared identity can be important to many people in the search for a therapist and why their own transparency is necessary to counteract any biases of theirs. But different perspectives can be powerful tools to help us better understand our own, whether they are aligned or opposed. When your therapist offers you an insight, your reaction and response are often more valuable sources of information than their thoughts or feelings. After all, you are the expert in the room.
Comments