by Brianna Cheney, M.A.
Most therapists feel an inherent drive to help their clients overcome emotional pain and suffering. While this drive allows therapists to be successful helping professionals, it can also lead therapists to place irrational demands on themselves when their clients do experience emotional crises and setbacks.
For example, when their clients experience exacerbated symptoms and or require inpatient hospitalization, therapists often ask themselves what they might have done differently to assess symptoms and to intervene in a more effective manner. These thoughts can be helpful when they lead to concern and, ultimately, to more effective clinical practice going forward. However, when therapists perseverate on what they should have done better and globally evaluate their efficacy as a therapist based on their clients’ outcomes (I’m clearly not as good of a therapist as I thought I was, and therefore I’m a failure!), the emotional consequences for the therapist are unhealthy negative emotions, such as guilt, shame, and depression.
These all-consuming demands and the ensuing negative emotions often hinder the therapist’s ability to respond productively to the situation. After all, the therapist who is so preoccupied with condemning herself for what she should have and could have done differently may be less likely to think about how she can use the clinical data gained from the situation to revise her assessment methods and treatment plan.
As therapists, it is both natural and normative to wish that we could help more, but is important to remember that as much as we would have liked things to go differently for our clients, demanding that we should have acted differently and condemning ourselves for failing to do so benefits no one — not us, and certainly not our clients!
