Thoughts from the Couch: Why You Don’t Need to Know Your Therapist’s Business

People are often curious about whether their therapist has lived through the same things they have. Have you ever been depressed? Are you married? Do you have children? Have you struggled with your body image? Sometimes the question underneath the question is: Can you really help me if you have never experienced this yourself?

But therapy is not, “I went through this too. Here is what worked for me.”

My job is not to use my life as the blueprint for yours. And I’ll even take this a step further and say, if there is no mystery about your therapist (because they’ve told you everything about themselves), I might suggest you get another therapist.

That approach is much more aligned to coaching. Ideally, you hire a coach because they have accomplished something, developed expertise in a particular area, and you believe they can transfer that knowledge or skill to you so that you can achieve a similar result. That makes perfect sense when you are learning to manage your finances, run a business, reach a fitness goal, or even play an instrument.

But there is no person who has mastered “life” and can teach you to master it the way they did. Honestly, that is why the concept of a “life coach” pisses me off so bad. What does that even mean? You mastered all of life, and now you are going to coach somebody else on how to master it too???

I could go on, in great detail, about the amount of things wrong with that statement, but I digress…

My job is to become deeply curious about you. Who are you? What have you lived through? What patterns keep showing up? What hurts you? Who hurt you? Who are you trying to become? How do you love? What is your purpose? How do you want to change, and how do you not want to change? Are you who you are meant to be?

And it gets deeper and deeper…

Then I bring what I know (from years of training) about people, culture, relationships, systems, and psychological research into the mix with what we have just laid out about your life. And thats when the magic starts happening.

But the answers are not inside my story. The answers are inside you! My job is to walk alongside you as we make sense of it together.

Did you know I spent the entire first year of my clinical training learning how to listen, center somebody else’s story, and remove myself from the conversation? It truly is that serious of a skill.

Every now and then, a client will ask me a personal question in the middle of a session, and I swear it’s almost a little jarring. I literally glitch and have to shift my brain for a second because I genuinely forgot about myself. Me? Who is me??

You may think you want to know a ton about your therapist, but you really don’t!

Finding out too much about your therapist gives your mind somewhere else to go. Before you know it, you’ve gone down the rabbit hole: Who is this woman in her free time? Is she on the dating apps? What does she look like on the weekends when she’s outside? Does she get along with her parents? Does she have a daddy? Is she a strict parent? Has she ever had a whoopin? And why do I feel like she orders the same thing every time she goes to brunch?

Now you’ve created an entire side plot about your therapist.

Your mind is going to do this because that is what minds do. But the consequence is that part of your attention is now on your therapist when the entire purpose of therapy is to focus on you.

Of course, there are times when a therapist might share something personal, but it should be because hearing it may be useful to you in that particular moment. For example:

• Maybe it helps establish trust early in our relationship. You might need to know I am not a robot to feel comfortable, and I might need to model vulnerability.

• Maybe a small example from my life helps move your story forward.

• Maybe sharing something personal normalizes what you are experiencing and eases your fear that what you are telling me sounds completely alien.

This is different from an ordinary conversation with a friend. In friendship, something you say reminds me of my own life, so I jump in with a story. Then my story reminds you of something else, and we go back and forth. That reciprocity is part of the relationship.

But that is not the job of your therapist. I repeat, that is not the job of your therapist.

Furthermore, I know my clients. They are genuinely kind people who care deeply about those in their orbit. If they knew I was hurting, their natural instinct would be to support me.

I love that about them (truly).

But that is not their role in our relationship.

This feels especially important in my work with Black women who show up to therapy completely burned out, exhausted, and tiiiired of taking care of everyone in their lives. You are paying attention to what other people need, reading the room, anticipating problems, and carrying responsibility in every direction. Therapy may be the one and only space where you don’t have to carry the responsibility of wondering what someone needs from you.

That is extremely beautiful. It is sacred. You deserve that space. You paid for that space. And it is my job to protect it for you, even if it means making you a little uncomfortable because of the mystery.

Discomfort does not mean something bad is happening. Sometimes, it simply means something different is happening. And something different is happening in the therapy room. Your world is stopping for just a moment so you can focus on you.

Isn’t that why you come to therapy?

To break patterns? To experience something different? To focus on you?

Trusting and leaning into the mystery,

(Founder & CEO, The Black Girl Doctor)