There is a difference between knowing how to be a good therapist and developing into someone who is a good therapist. There is a lot we can learn academically that will help us help our clients, but, as in our own lives, therapy is primarily an experience of presence rather than intellection.
Put another way: the client sitting in front of us is not a problem to solve but a person to be with, attune to, and understand. To be a good therapist then means we are becoming someone who can sit with our clients well. Becoming any certain someone requires skills, and skills take practice.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of skills but three that I have personally found helpful to my own practice of being a therapist. We’ll go into more depth about each and how to practice them in upcoming articles.
Attention
One of the most basic elements of being with our clients is paying attention to them. It’s a simple idea but quite a bit more difficult in practice. My thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and physiology can distort and distract me from my client as they truly are. To see and understand my client more clearly, I need to first pay attention to and be aware of myself. I need to notice when my experience is distracting me from my client. And that takes practice.
Dr. Daniel Siegel, an expert in interpersonal neurobiology, visualizes awareness in the form of a wheel, where the hub is our experience of being aware and the spokes are the objects of our awareness. This separation between “being aware” and “having an awareness of” creates space for us to notice that we have thoughts, feelings, and sensations rather than feeling that we are our thoughts, feelings, and sensations. We can then more clearly notice our own experience in the therapy room and disentangle it from our perception and experience of our client.
Once we can see our experience as disentangled from our client, now we can observe, explore, and attune to the true experience of our client. The more we practice becoming aware in our own life, the more natural it will be with our clients. Attention is a core skill and practice of becoming a therapist.
Empathy
Empathy is key to us understanding our clients as well as giving them that “feeling felt” experience which is fundamental to healing. Empathy is not a static trait that someone either does or does not have, it is both a skill and an art that can be practiced and nurtured.
Dr. Siegel helps us again by illuminating further the subtlety and complexity of empathy. He suggests there are five distinct types of empathy:
- Emotional Resonance – feeling another’s feelings
- Perspective Taking – seeing another’s present moment experience
- Empathic Understanding – perceiving how another’s past influences now
- Empathic Concern – feeling another’s pain and wanting to do something about it (compassion)
- Empathic Joy – feeling excited about another’s success, wellbeing, happiness etc.
Considering these five distinctions, you might begin imagining how each one can be practiced further beyond simple feeling. Practicing each of these distinct types of empathy takes focused attention as we perceive both our own feelings and perspectives as well as those we are attuning to.
Communication
While being a therapist is often synonymous with being a good listener, being a good communicator is also a key component of our work. Whether we are providing psychoeducation, reflecting what we are hearing, or verbalizing our attunement with our client it is key that we communicate clearly and effectively.
We need to consider how we communicate verbally as well as non-verbally. Regarding our verbal communication we can ask ourselves: Am I dancing around a subject or being clear and direct? Am I being overly long-winded or concise? A professor of mine once suggested that when we want to make a particular point think of it as a bee sting: in and out quick. Too many words can muddy the water.
Reflecting on our non-verbal communication we might consider our use of gestures, our tone and tempo, our posture and proximity to the client. Each of these conveys a message to our client, even if subtly, and we want to make sure that we are communicating the right message clearly.
This next video goes into further detail the importance of communication in our development as a therapist:
I recently heard that Anna Freud is said to have made a distinction between therapists who are “technicians” and those who are “healers”. Technicians are those who know the “right answers” but have not developed into a person who can properly and effectively embody an aware, clear, and attuned presence. The ones who can do this are the healers, those who understand that they as a person are the instrument. And to forge that instrument into something healing takes refinement. It takes practice.