are therapists "too nice"?

Is a desire to be nice anti-ethical to therapeutic depth? Does the therapy industry risk falling into a trap of being "too nice"?

Early in my training I remember saying to a colleague in a supervision group that I didn't feel the positivity they were offering was genuine. The facilitator gave me short thrift: reflecting that I wasn't able to take in the compassion on offer. At the time I took the supervision as gospel, dismissing the inner sensation that had led me to make the comment.

More recently I’ve been seeing Instagram ads for BetterHelp. Picture a 20-something client talking about how great therapy is, exclaiming that “if I don’t think the therapist is right, I just hit a button and get a new one”. This button sounds to me like the therapeutic equivalent of a block button, which means it has the potential to be used as a narcissistic defence. Hit it, and the projection laden “other” is gone forever.

What unifies these vignettes is the expectation of therapists, to be “nice".  This is an expectation not of outcomes, or of professional robustness. Rather it's an expectation of the style of interpersonal interaction, perhaps an expectation which confuses therapy with ordinary relationships, or conflates compassion with efficacy. And while lots of writing exists on the topic, it seems to me the complexity of this expectation is rarely spoken about. Almost as if in institutions and in our culture, there are a lot of unconscious assumptions about how a therapist “ought” to be.

Now, I am not claiming that BetterHelp's "change therapist" mechanism is all bad: It might help connect clients with the therapist that is right for them at that time. But like all things in life, something being somewhat "good" doesn't rule out that it might also be somewhat "bad". In fact, the good in both of these vignettes is so self evident that it hardly needs emphasis. What I’m exploring is what, in both, might be missing. And that's what got me thinking: when is "nice", not what it seems? And how might an expectation of “nice” actually be anti-ethical to psychotherapy?

When is nice not what it seems?

Let’s return to the example from my training group. I should start by saying that the supervisor of course had a point. Taking in can be difficult for those of us who grew up where goodness might have been untrustworthy.

To learn to discern what is truly good from bad, to move beyond superficially rejecting or naively accepting, is a bit like building a muscle. A very helpful internal praxis toward this goal is to pay close attention to oneself when something is being offered. If we can learn to use the thinking and feeling functions together (that is, when we think about our feelings), we can generate insight and relational intelligence. In the case of the training group, the words the colleague offered conjured thought, and overlaying that across feeling states, allows for a triangulation of sorts. In retrospect, I can see I did detect a discrepancy. And this is key, when a feeling sense doesn’t align with the meaning of the words being said, we may well be detecting something inauthentic.

There’s a but. And its a rather big but. The truly murky area is deciphering what’s going on with our feelings. Over years of self-development I have learned the feeling that something being offered isn’t quite right, might be a projection (an aspect of early environment that lingers in my unconscious) or it might be that I’m detecting through the relational field that the offering is compromised. There is only one way to distinguish these feelings, and that is through self-awareness. If we have a "good enough" grasp on our own "stuff", we can separate ourselves from what might be coming in externally. And this is where it gets really interesting: when we get good at unpacking and analysing the disturbances in attunement we can pickup all manner of insight: from insincerity in the giver, through to collective dynamics that might be at play.

This is why for depth therapists, ongoing personal development work is not optional. We have to get to know the residues of development which live on in our feeling based evaluations, and might even spill over into projection inspired rationalisation. The therapeutic imperative: the more we know ourselves, the more we can be available to others. Then, the more we can rely on feeling as a source of therapeutic insight.

In clinical environments this discernment is very useful. If working with attunement (an umbrella term for when we work closely with the energy of the in-between of the therapeutic dynamic), we can quickly detect a persona or a false self, because that false way of being relates to a way we have had to unlearn in ourselves. Through this contact through presence, we can also detect the authentic being of the client. A being which, although sat in front of us, might have been disowned by the ego of the client. This opens up a very healing potential in depth therapy: to find a way, often through painstaking work, to allow the treasure of that disownedness to come into the room. When we work in this way, we can make room for the clients true self, which can alleviate the terrible pain of parental mirroring which may not have been attuned to that individual uniqueness.

In this sense, I am rather critical of “therapeutic persona” or perspectives which advocate the demonstration of certain qualities, deemed desirable by that paradigm. These I fear, though perhaps giving everyone a superficial sense of niceness, often recreate the false attunement which is at the core of developmental trauma and attachment injury. Indeed, my sense is that in most cases it’s better to be “real” than “nice”. This of course doesn’t mean being rude, flippant or unprofessional, just in case that needed to be said. But it does mean being prepared to engage in relationship in a way which at times, might not be what the client wants to hear. It might not necessarily be what the client might think of as “nice”.

This doesn’t mean that compassion isn’t a key ingredient in therapy. After all, it was Freud who declared that “Analysis is, in essence, a cure through love.” The question we are really asking is, how real is that compassion? And is the compassion being used for healing, or to sublimate something that needs a more nuanced attention, if we are to be relationally real.

So how do we think about "realness" in a consumer-driven therapy marketplace, when therapeutic block buttons are at our clients fingertips?

Being “real” without breaking the mill

The therapy world runs on stories. Many times I’ve been told that the art of our craft is transmitted through oral tradition. As such storytelling in supervision, trainings, and case reviews, are core. Obviously we protect the individual cases (I like to use generalisations, rather than specifics), and sometimes the generalisations are so oft shared they get distilled down into something of a meme.

One of these is the suggestion that messiness (rupture) in therapy is “grist for the mill”. There’s truth in this, that relationships being challenged and stretched is often where the growth is. A colleague recently remarked “yeah it’s all grist to the mill, until the mill breaks”. And I think this is a very important build on the original meme. The relationship can indeed break if we overstep, trigger a potent complex, or worse, violate a boundary. And I think dynamics like BetterHelp’s block button - have lowered the threshold of that mill. To be fair, it’s not just BetterHelp, it’s also a factor of the culture at large. Which, at the same time as becoming more “therapy aware”, has also become more driven toward superficial answers, and a desire to move as rapidly as possible toward “healing”, where healing might mean feeling “better”.

Now what's wrong with that you might ask? Well, let me bring in another meme: “Sometimes we have to get worse before we get better”. This is quite true of depth or psychodynamic approaches which invite us to look at painful wounds. Re-processing such trauma requires that it is re-experienced, this time in a safe and knowable way. Often, in the case of relational traumas, those difficult feelings are actually only able to be revisited in difficult relational situations. And therapists that work deeply with relationship are skilled at bringing such "negative" feelings into relationship.

But what if the client doesn't want to feel those sorts of feels? What if our culture, is becoming less and less tolerant of awkward or difficult moments such as these? And what does it mean if some therapy tribes collude with this cultural trajectory, and consciously or otherwise, avoid necessary awkwardness?

Are those of us being "real" in a little bit of trouble here?

I think we'll be okay. But it does put us on a bit of a tight-rope between two opposites. At one end, we can adopt a persona of constant affirmation and “niceness”.  On the other, brutal honesty which ruffles, ruptures and takes no prisoners.

The answer of course, lies somewhere in between and, importantly, is dynamic. The tension needs to be navigated, based on the strength of the relationship, and an artful appreciation of what is needed in a given moment. And, if we work “from the field”, we are also informed by the inspiration of the healing force which lives inside us.

So how might we think about the strength of relationship? In my experience, many therapists have an implicit sense of what the relationship can take. This might be based in part on the feeling tone in the room and perhaps the duration of the relationship. But we can also be misguided. Perhaps we are caught in a dynamic, protecting an unconscious need of our own. Perhaps we are scared, or conversely, overconfident. Or, perhaps, our training paradigm has blind spots which have led us to think we have to avoid working with the relationship in the broadest of ways. Such paradigm masks can be pervasive, and sometimes worn unknowingly.

The antidote to this is a preparedness to take measured risks and to wisely call upon an unusual honesty. At first this may sound at odds with the pervasive cultural idea of therapy, it might even sound reckless. I’m not advocating for unsafe work. Instead, I am suggesting an ongoing assessment of the clients capacity for reality. It means developing an understanding of the level of tolerance a client might have for the “negative”: which might involve difficult feelings, being challenged, and working with difference. Eventually, in a deep therapy, the client may need to have their dominant world view called into question. Often psychological dysfunction is a result of deeply held belief that doesn’t line up with something even deeper than that: our essence. When the time is right, we have to be prepared to curiously go toward such soul limiting beliefs. To bring such assumptions into the light is a kind of honesty, with a soulful purpose behind it.

Along the way of a developing therapy relationship, moments emerge to understand our clients level of tolerance. I suggest to start relatively early, but in a very gentle way. One might offer a curious sigh, or a simply “I wonder if there are other ways of thinking about that”, as the need arises. Doing so may evoke a catalyzing moment which clarifies if the client is open and able to engage in discourse, or if they might just defensively shut down. More importantly, if we think about the feeling tone in this moment, it may well reveal dynamics which might already be in the room.

As this exploration in relationship continues we might begin to identify and potentially make tense areas conscious with the client, examine them in supervision, or try to understand how they might relate to other complexes and defences. It doesn’t mean arguing, shaming or needing to be right, but it might mean holding onto our differing perspective. Alongside this, always monitoring the capacity of the relationship to be able to think together, even if doing so is outside of what our increasingly factional society might consider “nice”. This is the sort of working which Wallin describes as “maintaining freedom of movement”. And what is pivotal and often misunderstood, is when the relationship grows to allow this realness, it becomes more trustworthy, not less.

Indeed as we become more familiar with our clients personality structure, it might be this way of working becomes pivotal for the healing process itself. For example, narcissistic structures often lead to a thin-skinned reactivity. If we hold such a client too gently for too long, we take away the chance of helping them grow a thicker skin. If we are too nice, some part of their soul remains unable to exist in the world.

Nice moments in the now, or toward a greater good?

The spirit behind this blog is to encourage expansive thinking about culturally-linked dynamics of the moment, and in the case of this section, how those dynamics emerge in the consulting room. A post alone is certainly not going to change the culture, the therapy world, nor a therapy practice. Similarly, as therapists we all work in our own way, based on our individuality, our training, our supervision and the cases we grow through.

My hope is that these words might sew a seed of reflection, and inspire the confidence to think about the true purpose of our craft. The original meaning of the word psychotherapy (literally, to treat the soul), is quite different from the superficial and socially accepted impulses toward feeling “better”. If we loose sight of that original purpose, then maybe we have some of our own soul searching to do.

I have a few years under my belt now, but I feel well short of any sort of mastery. I’m still learning from rupture and the ensuing repair, still wondering why I said certain things. I’ve come to accept these sometimes difficult reflections are a part of the process of our work. What heartens me is when from time to time I hear from a departed client or group participant that something “provocative” I said, or a difficult moment we traversed together, ending up being the pivotal point of reflection they returned too. It seems such grit can fuel the mill well after the therapy ends.

Indeed a “not nice” moment is often the seed for change that without necessarily knowing at the time, was exactly the healing that was needed.