what your therapist
does not tell you
A dozen counselors on what it’s really like to sit in the other chair.
Certain things just can’t
tell your face
“I definitely have to suppress my instincts and get out of ‘me mode’ sometimes. …
…Maybe from my own point of view, I’m like: ‘Yeah! Break up with that person! Run as fast as you can!’ But from a therapy perspective, I have to empower them to make that decision. I only see one person for an hour a week and they may not get the full picture, so they shouldn’t be making decisions for someone else. It comes with practice. Honestly, sometimes you really just want to jump in and say ‘Don’t do this’.”
—T. Rochelle Tice, LCSW
“ ‘I really want to pee.’ Clients don’t realize we have five minutes between sessions and sometimes it’s not possible to get to the bathroom.”
—Jessa White, LMHCA
“A client once asked me to write an emotional support animal letter for her pet hedgehog. This is out of my wheelhouse, and I refused to do it. She was so upset that she stopped coming to therapy.”
— Han Ren, Ph.D.
“’What is your husband’s name again?’ I’m terrible at remembering names no matter how hard I try.”
— Jenn Hardy, Ph.D.
“’I suck as a therapist right now.’ ”
—Shani Tran, LPCC, LPC
He is staff
“I work with many Asian Americans who are looking for an Asian American therapist. I feel, and other therapists of color I know feel this too, like we share more of ourselves in the room. When a client says that he struggles with the shame or guilt of a parent who constantly pushes him, I share that I can relate to that, because my mom was tough too. I only share things that seem a bit practical to me, not emotional stuff that could hijack the shoot.”
—Thien Pham, LMFT
Your wildest confessions are
its 9 to 5
“I work with couples, and I’ve seen a lot of truth bombs go off. Once you create the safe space with clients, you get a lot of super intense moments: people slapped their partners, decided to break the session, or blew up and stormed off, and you just have to stay calm. There have been quite a few times where someone had an unexpected outburst and I’m just sitting there, internally like, ‘What? Did they just say that? OK, we can’t react, we can’t react. … ”’
—T. Rochelle Tice, LCSW
Therapy-talk is out of control
“Over the last five years, I have noticed vocabulary coming into the therapy session, which people seem to be learning online. …
… We have normalized going to therapy and consuming mental health content: pop psychology has entered the chat! – but there are cons. Young people are hearing a lot of messages about all things ‘trauma’. I think that’s really risky. I am not in favor of expanding the clinical definition of trauma, because of the potential to look for trauma in places where it may not exist. And I feel like people are also becoming more limited, switching to this kind of cancel culture. Sometimes people think that isolating yourself from other people is taking care of yourself, and they may be right. But sometimes you can have a conversation with someone and let them know that they bothered you, and work it out for a stronger relationship as a result. I think people are losing those social skills involved in breaking up and mending.”
—Jacquelyn Tenaglia, LMHC
“A large group of adolescents have arrived who are familiar with the topics of therapy, but with a very new, broader and more nebulous definition of them. The fluency of the terminology really took me by surprise. What’s been really hard to deal with is when a parent leaves their child saying, ‘Here’s my child, fix it for me,’ and the child says, ‘I’ve been tricked by narcissists!'”
— Kyle Standiford, Psy.D.
“I think most people are upset about the ‘therapy language’ that is coming, but I want to humble him. I think the fact that people come here wanting to talk about their ‘insecure attachment’ or their ‘avoidant personality disorder’ is wonderful. I appreciate that it helps us to be less hierarchical in our profession. So I say, let’s be curious with them about it, instead of feeling like they don’t know what they’re talking about, because I’m the expert.”
—Elizabeth Cohen, Ph.D.
The intensity is inescapable.
“Twenty years ago, when I was practicing in Argentina, I saw middle-class clients that came with jobs and health insurance. Then I came to the United States and started working in community mental health. Many of my clients were underserved Latinos; they had language barriers, were in constant migration or fleeing violence. Psychotherapy cannot be done if a person does not feel safe; there is no way for that to happen. Sometimes you lean towards being a social worker or a case manager. You’re doing things like getting in your car and meeting someone who just ran away from an abusive relationship and is waiting for you in a parking lot with a bag full of clothes and nowhere to go, or you’re in heartbreaking situations with unaccompanied people . minors who have just passed the US Border Patrol from rural Guatemala or El Salvador. It’s deeply meaningful and satisfying at times. But it’s also frustrating, because as a therapist, you feel like you can’t really deliver what you signed up for.”
— Gabriela Sehinkman, Ph.D., LISW-S.
Everyone sees customers differently.
“The therapy itself is a bit like a dance: you want to see what the other person is bringing and you dance with them. If they’re waltzing, you can’t start with hip-hop, and there are times when people just don’t want to dance.”
— Peter Chan, PhD in Psychology.
“Most therapists are trained and taught to sit back and not show too much of themselves in the room. But I want to share snippets here and there so people feel like they’re not alone and they’re not crazy. For me, therapy is a lot like dating, except obviously you don’t want to date the person.”
—Thien Pham, LMFT
“I spend time in spaces like TikTok and Twitter and the gaming sphere; Knowing what’s going on in gaming culture is very important to my young male clients, and this helps me connect with them.”
— Kyle Standiford, Psy.D.
covid changed everything
“During Covid, I had this weird experience where different people were almost saying the same things in sessions, sometimes verbatim, about their emotions, week after week. People would come in with the same tone and tenor, so it was almost like an emotional forecast, and I could tell people, ‘Listen, this week, don’t be surprised if you feel angry. I’ve heard this three times today. It was amazing to see this broader collective grief response. This very intense depression, anger, numbness. He captured a way we are all connected. It’s hard for an individual to put himself in context, but there was no denying, to me, these trends that he would see. My belief is that therapy, at its core, is a way of understanding our emotional worlds and the ways we struggle as individuals, but while I used to focus more on diagnosing symptoms and putting them into a constellation of a personality structure or disorder, I now take a much more existential and detached perspective, and I believe that many of our problems stem from trying to find meaning and purpose in our lives. Now I can see how so much goes unprocessed in our emotions and seems unrecognizable to us. Since Covid, I have devoted much more of my time and resources to psychoeducation for a broader audience.”
—Lakeasha Sullivan, Ph.D.
Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Amy X. Wang is deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine. She has written about the voyeuristic pleasures and pains of dog-sitting for New York City’s wealthy and the widespread desire for expensive designer handbags that prompted a profusion of cheap and phenomenally accurate fakes.
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