18 November 2013

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Should I Be Concerned If My Therapist Sees A Therapist?

Short answer: no.

Long answer… If you don’t feel that seeing a therapist yourself (or therapy itself) is bad, then why should it be concerning if your therapist chooses to see someone? Many therapists see their own therapist, and it shouldn’t be surprising. After all, therapists are tasked with working with a wide array of potential concerns from an even wider array of individuals and couples. That’s a lot of emotion and anger, and anxiety to contend with; depending upon what’s going on in that therapist’s life sometimes the therapist-as-therapist and the therapist-as-private-individual divide can become difficult to delineate.

A rough metaphor would be working with a fitness trainer and then one day coming into the gym and seeing your trainer privately working out, perhaps even struggling with her regimen in a way that is proportionate to your own.

This concern speaks to an expectation in some quarters that therapists should be detached experts who should have no need for personal therapy. After all, what kind of therapist would you turn to if they needed help? Well, the answer is that we all need help from time to time. And I’m skeptical of the “detached expert” expectation – you cannot after all be interpersonally detached and interpersonally present at the same time. One only needs to read this article about a detached expert and his experience with PTSD as a result of his own practice to understand that it’s (for lack of a better word) crazy to assume that even the most accomplished mental health professional doesn’t require intermittent self care from time to time.