On authenticity & professionalism
It’s a new semester. I love teaching, and this summer I’m lucky enough to be facilitating a Group Supervision class—seven students in their first semester of clinical internship. They're seeing clients and getting to put into practice all the book learning they’ve done in the previous year and a half. It’s a rich and overwhelming time.
Yesterday a student asked, “How much authenticity are we allowed to bring? What’s the balance of authenticity and professionalism we should have as counselors?” There are so many answers to this question, but this was mine.
I grabbed a purple marker and asked them to start describing themselves. They started slow, with “good” things: smart, honest, compassionate. All the “résumé words” went up on the board. Then I asked them how their families or their friends would describe them. The students laughed and less polite words came out—intense, messy, too sensitive. Last came all the labels of the inner critic: rigid, disorganized, cynical. These came the fastest; I had to ask people to repeat themselves so I could scribble them all.
The full board.
Once we had a giant word cloud, I picked a blue marker and asked the group to tell me which of these adjectives were acceptable to be as counselors. I underlined the ones they called out—all the résumé words again. We looked closer. Some words we reframed: judgment can also be wise discernment. Naivety can be a deep belief in people’s inherent goodness.
Some of our words we acknowledged sharing with clients: anxious, overwhelmed, depressed, confused. Others we talked about as products of culture that encourages comparison and insecurity, a not-good-enough-ness in all of us.
Then we stepped back, looking at the whole cloud and the notes we’d added.
I told my students that I didn’t see anything on here that is alien to the human experience. All of these feelings and ways of being are available to us all.
In any relationship, there’s what’s yours, what’s mine, and what is ours to share. This is true in therapy, too: the client works on themself by themselves (hopefully; after all, we’re only together an hour every week or two), the counselor works on their own things, and then there’s what happens in the therapeutic relationship, which is sometimes messy and confusing and beautiful and courageous.
Plenty of the words on our board describe ways of being, that if the therapist brought them into the room, would understandably make the therapeutic relationship more difficult. It’s one thing if your counselor acknowledges they understand how anxiety feels; it’s quite another if they have regular panic attacks in the room. So, what I shared with my students is that our work is to know what is ours to attend to—on our own, with our therapist or supervisor, a friend. It’s not our work to eliminate what makes us human—and it is our responsibility to keep the relational focus on the client’s work.
When I think of myself as a therapist, I’m actively trying to bring MORE into the room and the relationship. I want there to be so much space for the client—I want them to know that nothing in the human experience will be shut out or shot down.
What that often means in my own growth work is making more space for myself—building and maintaining practices that help me welcome all of my parts and experiences. The more room I make for myself, the more space I can hold for others.
My most constant and audacious prayer for the world is that we get to feel at home fully, fully human, fully ourselves, fully connected. Sending you a little more, today.
