therapist neutrality: the blank slate?

A client recently said they noticed I do not hold the same blank slate/neutral positioning of other therapists they had seen. I had at different points shared something from my life that linked with their experience and expressed personal resonance with something they had said. I thought we (as a collective) could try and clarify some views on this.

The ideas about how the therapist should be come from different theoretical models and discourses about what is considered “professional”. For example, the ideas of therapist anonymity and neutrality have roots in Freud’s theory about the therapist being like a mirror, in which the unconscious can be seen. These ideas remain influential and shape discourses about how to be professional as a therapist. These ideas also exist alongside lively debate about the value and practicality of such an approach.

In the modern tongue we might talk about professional or therapeutic boundaries. Such boundaries or positioning determine what information a therapist can share about themselves, what a client can ask a therapist, therapist showing resonance or emotion in response to a client, contact outside of a session to name a few examples. “Boundaries” can be helpful. They can help people seeking therapy step closer to positions of safety and trust, they can offer clarity on roles within relationships, and they can function to minimise misuse of power. So… what is there to question?

The origin of the word “boundary” is a good analogy for our caution around firm boundary holding as therapists. The word boundary comes from how land was divided and marked out. It relates to the fixing of borders and comes with territory marking, privileging those who are included and marking out those who are excluded. Psychiatry and psychology have a history of pathologizing and exclusion.

Psychology and psychiatry have been responsible for marking out the benchmarks of what constitutes “normality” and what constitutes “abnormality”. Creating markers and criteria for who gets included in the normal and functioning range in society; and clear markers for who gets excluded. These ideas are based on a particular set of knowledges and ideas, they serve a particular group of people and support particular systems (capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy to name a few). Excluding who? Those who have routinely been oppressed, marginalised and othered by much of western mainstream society.

We are not attempting to discredit the psychodynamic or similar approaches, but we do want to make visible that these are ideas from a particular set of theories and not universally assumed truths. We also want to make visible the set of ideas we use to help position us as therapists in relationship with the people we are in conversation with.

Whilst we very much subscribe to the idea that people seeking therapy should be held at the center of therapy and not the therapists’ own beliefs/ideas/lives, we acknowledge we are not neutral and we are not blank slates. We make choices about which question (of hundreds) we ask, and those choices are informed by personal experience, professional experience and training, the conversations we have had with other clients etc. Every question we ask reveals something of our politics and we come into every conversation as a human with our own experiences, knowledges, beliefs and politics. We hold a belief that to subscribe to neutrality is a participation in the systems that have oppressed so many groups of people over so many years.

We think differently about knowledges and power and the boundaries between who and who doesn’t hold these. We aim not to privilege professional knowledge or draw a distinction between professionals and those seeking support. We see people and their communities as the experts in their own lives, with many skills, knowledges, abilities to respond to their challenges. When we share our ideas, or our “expertise”, we share where ideas have come from; we might draw upon ideas from others we have been in conversations with, we invite people to position themselves in relation to ideas (“is this a good idea for you? Or a terrible one!”), we invite in and honour the knowledges from peoples’ own communities, cultures and preferred ways of making meaning. 

One of the most powerful positions as a human is to know you have touched the lives of others and moved them in some way. Who does it serve if we don’t allow people to see the ways conversations move, influence and connect with us and our lives. For us what matters is to show up in the therapy space as a human, privileged with the witnessing of peoples’ stories, and allowing ourselves to be connected with these stories as a human. This does not mean huge emotional outpourings from the therapist which may have unhelpful effects on the hopes of the conversation; but it does mean showing up as a human who experiences resonance, movement and human connection. And of course- always being mindful and checking in on the effects.

We don’t want to abandon boundaries. We prefer the idea of edges. They are spaces that can be co-constructed and negotiated within the relationship, as opposed to hard lines set by the one with “power”. They can be fluid, move, shift, they can be renegotiated when things shift. 

There are many things we try to hold in mind when considering edges. To keep it simple, three main considerations are: 

• Who or what are we hoping to keep at the center of the therapy space?

• What are the effects of sharing resonance, emotional response etc 

• How can we co-research with clients what brings us closer to positions of safety and what takes us further away

We’d love to hear your thoughts, responses or questions.