Can A Therapist Break A Client’s Heart?

Is it possible to have your heart broken by a therapist?

You might think not - given that it’s a professional relationship with someone that you pay.

I’m here to tell you that it is possible, and here is why.

Because forming a relationship with a therapist is the most vulnerable thing you will ever do because the power imbalance is huge. In most other relationships we trade vulnerability to stay safe:

“I know stuff about you. You know stuff about me”.

In therapy though, depending on the therapists modality and courage, there is little or no trade. It’s all you.

There are a lot of things we therapists do to mitigate the power imbalance. A long training, supervision, and some skill at sharing our process in the interests of client add to the fact that most of us are kind people with big hearts who have experienced our own suffering.

Many therapists are kind in a bone-deep-suffering kind of a way. They have honed their humanity into a gentle chair that they invite you to sit on, so that when the challenge comes, they have quietly slipped a safe seat underneath you. They understand that they must be emotionally mature enough to allow themselves to be impacted by your life. Sometimes it keeps us awake, and it should. We grow with the clients, if we are wise. A colleague of mine says, “Once you have been in therapy with me you will always be in my basket”.

The therapist’s ability to maintain the good frame boundaries and soften the emotional ones appropriately enables a client to be met and held from across the room. A tutor of mine says; “Clients will put up with an awful lot of your nonsense if they know that you care about them and are on their side”. They know we care not because we tell them but because they can feel it.

In the therapist’s consulting room is a world full of longing, lost dreams, and an awful lot of fear. Fear of getting it wrong: That we might not be met. Fear of being returned to the corner we were made to stand in as a child, with a sign around our neck, because we hadn’t learned our two times table.

Like a mother cat bringing her kittens in from the cold, all our violations are dropped one by one at the therapists’ feet. We don’t know what will emerge and neither does the therapist. But we must trust that the training is there - and the love. We have to trust that the space is Holy Ground. Sacred Space. And – therapist - you should know - that we invite clients into that space on our knees. Rumi said there are, “A hundred different ways to kneel and kiss the ground”: But kiss the ground we must before we start. Before we dare to make the offer of therapy we must first kiss our own ground and be afraid. Because the client is already hurt. Their heart is open to the breeze. They are bringing that heart to us. Our own heart needs to be ready for that.

I’m afraid that if you have not done enough of your own work you will break a client’s heart with your own fear and shame. By throwing the story they told you back at them. By using its sharp edges to reopen the wound they came in with. By pretending you have kissed the ground of your own suffering when you have not. You will react to their attachment to you, not by stepping forward, but by recoiling in disgust back behind your own mask. Instead of sweeping the boundaries with a gentle, curious gaze you will patrol them with a shotgun, hovering above the trigger at every tentative, painful and misguided request for a bit more connection. And finally, you will have to pretend that it was the client’s fault that you were not able to show up when they needed you. That they were just too damaged and would have to see someone else

Making a colleague unpick your knitting.

So, yes, a therapist can break your heart. It’s a serious thing.

I’m afraid it is.