The Gifts Clients Offer Their Therapists
Most people recognize that when therapy is at its best, clients take something positive away from the therapy encounter. Through the mysterious synergy of the therapy relationship clients can find relief from symptoms, reductions in distress, or new insights about themselves and the word around them. What’s less often acknowledged is that clients offer precious gifts to their therapists, as well. While income is the most obvious, I think there are other offerings that are subtler while—paradoxically—feeling almost sacred. Some of these include:
Meaning. Therapy work is often described by therapists as fulfilling or rewarding, even while acknowledging the challenges that come with the work. Beyond the help offered to clients, the work itself can feel intensely significant and offer a deep source of purpose to therapists, alongside whatever is offered to the client.
Inspiration. Therapists hear many stories of pain, loss, and harm. Yet parallel to these stories are stories of the extraordinary resilience of clients who find a way forward, often with their capacities for love, kindness, and compassion intact (or even enhanced). Related, clients often show remarkable courage in their sessions as they sit with a stranger and share their most vulnerable truths. Bearing witness to this bravery, perseverance, and capacity for growth can be very moving to witness, and inspire a kind of reverence for the beauty of human spirit.
Self-awareness. Just as clients often deepen their self-understanding in the therapeutic encounter, therapists can learn about themselves too. The client-therapist relationship often brings forward the therapist’s own vulnerabilities and unfinished business in response to whatever is unfolding in the room—or whatever characteristics the client embodies. The open therapist can use these countertransferences as fertile grounds for growing one’s self-knowledge and healing their latent wounds. In some cases, these opportunities for growth and healing might never have come to light were it not for the intersection of the client-therapist encounter.
New perspectives and skills. Oftentimes while struggling through a problem clients identify a solution—novel to both client and therapist alike. They might also stumble across a new, more adaptive framing of their problem or some facet of reality. Usually this shift in perspective becomes a container for holding more of life’s complexity, and it brings some relief to the client. But a therapist can take up these new skills and perspectives, as well. More than once I’ve found myself reflecting on such novel perspectives outside the therapy encounter, or using a coping strategy a client identified independent of any of my direct input.
Humility. Related to the new perspectives piece above, therapists are often blessed and challenged by opportunities to sit with difference, including differences of worldview, culture, or other kinds of lived experience. Sitting with these differences is an ongoing lesson in humility: Regardless of how much training or confidence I might amass over the years, clients continually remind me of other valid ways of experiencing the world. Clients also offer the opportunity to be wrong over and over again when a hypothesis or formulation doesn’t land or resonate, which can also breed humility (and more opportunities for growth).
While I think it’s good to acknowledge the non-exhaustive list of offerings above, I also think it’s good for therapists to have a variety of places in life from which to receive these offerings. It places an unfair burden on the client if the therapy relationship becomes the therapist’s only source of self-awareness or purpose, for example. Instead, therapists should—I think—nurture their friendships, supervisory relationships, their senses of spirituality, etc. outside of their work with clients. Therapy works best when any benefit to the therapist arises naturally, as a byproduct of focusing on the client’s needs.