How Much Should You Know About Your Therapist’s Life?

By Lori Gottlieb (The New York Times, March 30, 2019)

When I was starting out as a therapist, a colleague told me what was intended to be a cautionary tale. After suffering a series of miscarriages, she was in a Starbucks when her doctor called with the news that her pregnancy wasn’t viable. Standing at the counter, she burst into heaving sobs. A patient happened to walk in, saw her hysterically crying therapist, walked out the door, canceled her next appointment and never went back to her.

“You’re not going to keep writing now that you’re a therapist, right?” she said, more a statement than a question.

 My colleague knew that before going back to school to become a therapist, I had been a writer: I had written in books and magazines and newspapers about personal topics such as my childhood, my romantic life, having a baby on my own and being a parent. Maybe she thought that, say, a single woman in her late 30s who wanted to be a parent but would never do so solo wouldn’t seek me out as a therapist, or wouldn’t tell me the truth about how she felt for fear of offending me.

I understood her concern. The therapeutic relationship exists in a certain context. Patients share their lives with us, not the other way around. But even if I stopped writing, the work I’d done was out there, available at the click of a mouse. Now I worried: If patients re ad about my life, would they be more reluctant to see me? Would they bolt like my colleague’s patient in Starbucks?

Therapists, of course, deal with the daily challenges of living just as everyone else does. In fact, this familiarity is at the root of the connection we forge with strangers who trust us with their most intimate stories and secrets. Our training has taught us theories and tools and techniques, but whirring beneath our expertise is the fact that we know just how hard it is to be a person. Which is to say, we still come to work each day as ourselves — with our own sets of vulnerabilities, our own longings and insecurities and our own experiences and histories. Of all my credentials as a therapist, my most significant is that I’m a card-carrying member of the human race. Without this humanity, I’d be useless to help people.

But revealing this humanity is another matter.

Most therapists nowadays use some form of what’s known as self-disclosure in their work, whether it’s sharing some of their own reactions that come up during the session or acknowledging that they watch the TV show a patient keeps referring to. Better to admit that you watch “The Bachelor” than to feign ignorance and accidentally say Colton Underwood’s name when the patient hasn’t mentioned him yet.

The question of what to share gets tricky. One therapist I know told a patient whose child had Tourette’s syndrome that she, too, had a son with Tourette’s, and it deepened their relationship. Another colleague treated a man whose father had taken his own life, but he never revealed to the patient that his own father had done the same. In each situation, there’s a calculation to make, a subjective litmus test we use to assess the value of the disclosure: Is this information helpful for the patient to have?

Outside the therapy room, though, what are the rules? Here are some things you don’t want to do in public as a therapist: Cry to a friend in a restaurant or say, “I know, Mom!” petulantly into your cellphone while in line at Costco with a patient nearby. If you’re a respected child psychologist, like a colleague of mine, you don’t want to be standing in the bakery when your 4-year-old has a meltdown about not getting another cookie, culminating with the ear-piercing proclamation “You’re the worst mom ever!” while your 6-year-old patient and her mother look on, aghast.

The story of my colleague’s patient’s reaction to her crying in Starbucks haunted me, or at least its moral did: When patients see our humanity, they leave us.

And yet, many patients are also curious — including me. I once Googled my own therapist and discovered that his father had died at a young age of a heart attack. Afterward, I began editing myself in sessions, wondering whether talking about my close relationship with my aging father would be painful for my therapist, being careful not to rub it in with an especially moving anecdote. When I finally fessed up, I learned that my assumptions were wrong. What I read didn’t capture his experience the way hearing it firsthand did.

I know that patients Google me, too, not because they necessarily tell me, but because eventually — inevitably — they slip up. An offhand: “Well, you know what middle school boys are like” — despite my never having mentioned my son or his age; or adding “No offense” after making a negative comment about a sorority I belonged to in college and later wrote about.

This is why therapists don’t Google their patients — we want to know about your lives, but only as narrated by you. We’re interested not just in the information but in the process of sharing that information: what you leave in, what you leave out, at what point you choose to share something that makes it seem as though you buried the lede, as when a patient might appear happily married but one day say, “There’s this guy at work I’ve been flirting with for months.”

Not one person I know — well, maybe the very narcissistic — wants to talk to a therapist without a deep inner life, the human equivalent of a brick wall. When my colleague lost her pregnancy, she had the reaction any of us might have — and that’s a good thing. If I’d been her patient, would I want her to take that call in my session? Of course not. But if I had seen her in Starbucks that day, it would have made me feel even safer with her, trusting her all the more to understand me and my own sources of pain.

I hope that my patients feel this way, too.

Вариант 3

Задание 1. Напишите академическое эссе на русском языке (темы на выбор предложены в приложении 1).

Задание 2. Оформите результаты вашего диссертационного исследования 1) в виде научных тезисов на русском языке (требования представлены в приложении 2) в виде речи на защите диссертации.

Задание 3. Подготовьте на русском и английском языках текстовую часть социальной рекламы, призывающей широкую аудиторию к помощи социально уязвимым слоям населения.

Задание 4. a ) Прочитайте информационное письмо о проведении конференции, данное ниже.