Thanks for that River. Nice explanation. Yeah, it's true...we don't know until we get there.

I appreciate the concept of therapists not disclosing too much of their lives in order to avoid having the focus be on them. I understand that there's sometimes a fine line there...giving enough of their own experience so the client feels understood but not too much that the client can't feel the transference or ends up taking on the therapist's own stuff (Frankly, I'm not altogether of the mind that it's necessary to encourage transference to happen...there might be other ways for healing to occur, but I also know in some cases it just pops right up there. I'm certainly not an expert on this subject either but I like exploring the ideas around it.)

But I also wonder to what degree therapists are emotionally available to clients. When I've read some of the comments in the articles, and feel the torment some people go through, I get the feeling that they aren't getting enough of the therapists' feelings about what's going on between the two of them. I get the sense that the therapist is not really "showing up". It's pretty hard to learn about connection when the therapist is invisible!

Being emotionally available to my clients is definitely not something that I learned about in my early training. (Heavens that just sounds barbaric when I think of it now.) Yet, we now know (from neuroscience) it's where it's at for creating therapeutic change. Thankfully, I learned how important it is through my own therapy and being in my study group. And, what's really interesting is that, I really "get" how it is that I can only take my clients as far as I am able to go myself.

Shrinklady