As a Therapist, Have I Ever Been Tempted to Seek Understanding, Validation or Support From A Client? Vol. 522 – July 15 ,2021

“As a therapist, have you ever been struggling yourself and been tempted to seek understanding, validation, or support from a client you had a good rapport with, yet knew this was inappropriate. What did you learn about yourself?”

 

This is a great question and I respect those who are licensed practitioners and answering it honestly because as one of the folks below mentioned – they have licensing requirements to uphold to keep their licenses. Of course, they were unable to speak to this at all because to do so would have put their licenses at risk – given all the other licensed folks who are on Quora answering questions and maybe many more reading them. To stay out of one another’s business isn’t a boundary that they uphold based on what I witnessed while answering questions from licensed practitioners on how to better help their patients heal from various forms of trauma. I received all sorts of kickback from the licensed folks back then (2005-2006) and later so did others for merely trying to give best practices as requested to truly help a colleague help a patient. This is why I stopped interacting on there. Now it Linkedin is just a bunch of ads for people to sell whatever their greatest new offering of the week is – so no more best practices are exchanged which is sad, really.

 

The answers that the questioner received from the licensed folks were:

 

“There have been times in my life when I’ve been struggling myself but no, I have never been tempted to seek understanding, validation, or support from a client – apart from it being inappropriate, unfair to the client, unethical, and potentially outright harmful to the client, it doesn’t make sense to me (as a course of action) and it would make me feel utterly despicable for mis-using their time and abusing their trust they have placed in me…”

 

There was another brave soal who spoke to when he first began practice who actually admitted that almost everything he did was done to feel validated and affirmed as a competent therapist, but it wasn’t conscious on his side as he recollected those moments early in his career.

 

I am a hypnotist so I don’t have a license to lose as a result of the sometimes restrictive manner in which those who are licensed are practicing.

 

Over the years I have been through some really challenging times – one of them that comes to mind is during the time that I went through treatment for a brain tumor (I no longer have it so no worries on that one.) During the entire time that I was going for treatment, I had clients seeing me in the evening after the treatments for the 6 weeks of 5-day-a-week treatments which took place 1.5 hours from where I was living at the time. I never spoke of the condition at the time, but I certainly did let folks know after the fact of what was going on because clients had asked about the change in their scheduling of our appointments and because I was taking time off to go abroad after the treatment was completed for an undetermined amount of time. The reason for not telling them till after the treatment was because I did not want them worrying about me – because, I was there to treat them and frankly, anything that was going on with my own treatment was not in the way of my taking care of my clients – the brain tumor did not bother me in the least by that time (there was the double vision for a while which is how it was found, but had stopped before the tumor was found a few months later on its own – go figure…). I didn’t even deal with the meaning of the tumor till I left the country for an extended trip abroad to do my healing work on my own which was quite an experience.

 

My clients did help me when I had returned to the East Coast after living in California during my mom’s last 10 days or so of life – 2 in particular who lived very close to the nursing home and the funeral home which took care of her ashes. They allowed me to stay with them as I just did what had to be done – and they were lifesavers to me during this time. I wasn’t particularly upset with the situation with my mom – I was seeing clients during this entire time – going to my client’s homes to do the work seeing mom for an hour around lunchtime right before her passing. It was the only time she was awake during this time stopping eating which was one way I knew she was ready to go…I let her know that all her kids were fine and that she could do whatever she needed when she was ready – all would be quite fine. The next day she quietly passed away with 3 of her 5 daughters and their two husbands, her 2 longtime roommates, and the staff of the nursing home that took care of her for the past several years right there with her.

 

What is the relationship that I have with these two families in particular currently? To tell you the truth they are both stronger than ever. The one family is always speaking to others of how I helped to save their son’s life because the in-patient program he was in at the time came very close to killing him telling him that he would be in jail or dead by the time he was 18. I originally did the work with him back in 2005 right before his 17th birthday. Today he is 30-years- old, has his own business, and is living a ‘normal’ life – just what his adoptive mom wanted for him when we first met all those years ago.

 

The other family has known me from the very beginning of my practice 18 years ago when I first worked with one of their family members that again the conventional mental health world had no idea in how to help. It was because of that success that her brother came to find out what I had done for his sister about a year later. He was just curious. To his surprise, we ended up dealing with some career issues he was going through at the time. After that he had his wife come to see me and that has been an ongoing relationship where she calls for tuneups when she needs them being in a very stressful career. She just referred her daughter to me with whom I worked to help with a 1-time intervention to help her through a sporting event. I just heard that her daughter is now in a much better frame of mind regarding this sporting challenge she has taken on.

 

The notion that people who help others are incapable of having a life separate and apart from their clients is ridiculous. There are times when others are in a place where they can be very helpful and are more than happy to be there because the reality is that not all people are so emotionally a mess that they are unable to make a decision to help out when it makes sense. I believe that if anything the relationships with these two families and myself has been made even stronger because I wasn’t looking for emotional help at all – I was still living my own life – just needed a place to stay for a little while giving the circumstances going on with my mom whose passing was welcome by me given the state that she was in. She was ready to leave this world as she told me that she ‘wanted to go home” which means going back to her Creator. She also let me know that she had 2 wonderful marriages and had fun raising her kids – a great summation for a woman who had a tumultuous life due to a severe mental illness – actually a few of them that made things much more difficult for her than a person without them. It was more her physical condition that was making life a bit too hard in the end, not the emotional as she had great mental health care from the staff at her nursing home where she spent the last 7 years of her life – many of the staff in tears at her passing – which was certainly heartfelt and beautiful to see. She was 84-years-old at her passing so she had a very long life.

 

So, I don’t really know how anyone else will feel about this reality of life and how my very long-term and grateful clients were more than willing to help me during this time. Frankly, it doesn’t matter to me because the reality is that at least as far as I am concerned, I have always treated my clients with the respect to know that they were capable of making their own decisions and allowing them to do so. I don’t infantilize my clients, instead, I allow them to demonstrate to me during the work we do together to show me what they are capable of which allows them to grow to the point where people are capable of overcoming those diagnoses that the conventional practitioners feel are diagnoses to be forever managed, never cleared – which is a complete disservice to the true healing of their patients. Why should a patient have to be seen as a person who is always dependent on another for care – as if they are lesser capable than the person treating them? Frankly, it is a system that continues to keep people ill who do not need to be in at least 95% of the cases that I have had over the 19 years of my being in practice. My own mother would be an example of a person who needed her mental health to be managed throughout her life – but she is in the tiny minority of folks so far as my own experience has proven.

I take the time to write these answers because I want people to realize that there is more than one way to deliver care and interact with clients and patients than the restrictive and I would say dehumanizing manner of which many of the licensed folks do. It is the reason that many in the mental health profession are going into life and business coaching and why others are moving out of the system. Many are sick of the lack of sessions reimbursed by insurance companies and the forcing of medication as the main form of treatment with their restrictions over the form of care that can be covered.

When one works on one’s own, there is a much more elastic manner in which the client may be treated and where the client is seen as an equal in care rather than someone who can’t think for themself – which unfortunately happens more often than many of the credentialed people understand. It is that behavior that makes many of their patients look elsewhere for care. I know because their past clients and my current clients tell me so.

 

To my mind, real healing occurs as people learn how to navigate their own lives. This is the underlying work that I do with my clients without the need to classify them in any way other than to give them the healing work and the ability to learn the interpersonal skills necessary to better navigate their lives. I do what I can to take the diagnoses away by having them no longer demonstrating the symptoms that got them diagnosed in the first place – no symptoms – no diagnosis needed. See how simple that is? It’s a paradigm for holistic healing and true health and wellbeing.

 

To be honest, nothing would make me happier than to see every licensed mental health and physical health professional learn how to work with their patients’ unconscious mind which would predicate a paradigm of true healing instead of fear and over concern for the great majority of their patients – much deeper and better healing could be had and with that many more people could be healed without medication for life (which causes physiological problems over time) and sessions forever. But, that would mean that they would actually have to find new clients to work with and that may not work as well for their business model…just a thought…