The Subjective Side of Objectivity: The Person Behind the Therapist

If you ask a surgeon why they became a doctor, you will probably hear a story about a grandmother having heart surgery, a brother fighting cancer, or a childhood spent in and out of hospital waiting rooms. No one asks the surgeon whether their grandmother’s bypass will make them feel shaky in the operating room. In fact, we tend to respect doctors who go into medicine because of a personal experience (Knishkowy & Guggenheim, 2022), since it speaks to their commitment, empathy, and investment in their patients, which can feel reassuring.

When therapists are asked about their motivation for entering the field, their responses are often similar: they may reference a family member’s mental illness, a personal trauma, or a life-changing event. The underlying question, however, shifts from “What led you to this career?” to “Can you be trusted to competently do this work?” A therapist’s difficult history is often treated as something that needs scrutiny. People wonder whether the therapist is still affected by their past struggles, whether they will get too emotionally involved, relapse, or have poor boundaries.

This article explores a double standard: in many professions, a personal experience that inspired someone’s career is admired as evidence of commitment and insight, but a therapist’s personal history that motivated their career path may be seen as a liability to be managed rather than a resource.

Therapists Are Not Blank Slates

As therapists, we are trained to be acutely aware of our reactions with clients. We learn to recognize when we are engaging in countertransference, rescue fantasies, or overidentification, and when we might get too involved with our clients or not be involved enough. While this training is beneficial, a less explicit message often runs alongside it: The ideal therapist is detached from their personal history of hardship and suffering and presents more as a mirror than as a person with a past.

The field has long debated whether therapists should be seen as people or as neutral professionals. One side emphasizes anonymity and the therapist as a “blank screen.” Curtis (1982) described this traditional approach as an effort to limit the therapist’s personal presence without appearing distant or cold. Psychodynamic theory goes further, describing therapist traits within the blank screen model and advocating that therapists keep their personal experiences, characteristics, and reactions outside the treatment relationship (Welton, 2018). In addition, discussions about self-disclosure tend to encourage therapists to use caution and disclose only when it clearly serves the client’s interest. But somewhere along the way, “Be thoughtful about disclosure” became “Your history is a problem,” and those are not the same claim.

When a therapist has lived through trauma, addiction, loss, or mental health struggles, the biography can get labeled as “professional impairment” even before anyone looks at how it shows up in sessions with clients, if at all (King et al., 2020). This becomes less about self-disclosure than about the therapist’s experiences. A therapist’s history will inevitably show up in sessions, whether they choose to disclose it or not, because therapists are not blank slates. We lived as people before becoming therapists, but the focus of our training and many client expectations ask us to separate ourselves from our therapist role, as if one could clock out for 50 minutes.

Marsha Linehan’s story is a well-known example that disputes the idea that the two must remain separate. She developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a treatment that has helped countless clients survive some of their most desperate moments. For years, however, she was reluctant to publicly disclose that she had lived through the kind of suffering DBT was designed to treat (Carey, 2011). When she eventually did, she described her experiences as foundational to DBT’s development (Linehan, 2020). If someone of her stature was afraid of the repercussions of disclosure, where does that leave the rest of us? Our histories will enter our work with clients regardless, so is the question truly whether or how the therapist and the person can be separated?

Right Instinct, Wrong Question

The question is not whether a therapist’s history shows up in sessions with clients, because of course it does. The important question is what we do when it happens.

It is common for therapists to have difficult histories or to be dealing with mental health issues (Victor et al., 2022). Having been through trauma or having a mental health diagnosis does not automatically impair clinical work, nor does it guarantee greater attunement or clinical effectiveness. It comes down to how the therapist responds when those experiences show up in session.

A therapist who has been betrayed may hear an affair disclosure differently than someone who has not. Similarly, a therapist in recovery may feel frustrated by a client who continues drinking despite the consequences. A therapist who has experienced a sudden loss may struggle to sit with a client who is not ready to accept one. And a trauma survivor may hover a little too closely when a client takes risks. Countertransference does not make a therapist unfit to practice; the difference is whether they recognize it and what they do with that recognition. Managing countertransference is an active clinical skill and is not the same as resolving our own issues so they do not negatively impact treatment with clients. Discussions of therapist histories and mental health conditions commonly blur that distinction.

Turning the Bias into an Asset

A common focus in discussions of therapists’ histories, trauma, and mental health is whether the therapist’s “stuff” is going to harm the client, lead to boundary violations, or otherwise render the therapist incompetent. But how much do we focus on whether these experiences can actually be helpful (Taylor, 2025)?

Bias is not optional; every therapist has biases. The goal is to understand our own biases well enough to use them deliberately. Therapists who reflect on their histories, rather than trying to deny or distance themselves from them, often find those experiences sharpen their clinical skills and improve their work, including attunement, timing, and clinical judgment (Cvetovac & Adame, 2017). A therapist can recognize that a client’s story touches them personally and allow it to inform how they listen, what they notice, and how they choose to respond, all without ever self-disclosing.

Clients do not need to know our histories to feel connected, just as they can know quite a lot about us and still feel “not gotten” and alone. Self-disclosure is not necessary for building connection or strengthening the therapeutic alliance. More important is how we have worked with our difficult experiences long before the client sits across from us, and how we use them in the moment. Some of our personal experiences that end up being most clinically useful are details that our clients will never hear about, and that is precisely the point. The value is not in the self-disclosure, but in how we use our experiences to better understand and respond to our clients.

The Standard, By Design

Self-disclosure, like personal history, is neither inherently helpful nor harmful. It depends on why, when, how, and with whom it is used, and the same is true of a therapist’s mental health. The mere existence of a therapist’s trauma history or mental health conditions is not relevant; the issue is what the therapist does with those experiences. If a therapist uses their experiences to increase awareness, responsiveness, and nuanced attention, then what happened to them or what they are currently dealing with becomes an asset.

We do not leave our histories at the door, nor should we try to. If we do this work long enough, the countertransference we were trained to look out for will inevitably show up. Using countertransference to guide our timing, judgment, instincts, and what we notice in our clients’ stories can strengthen our clinical work.

In practice, this means being present as a person while staying aware of what we bring into the room and its clinical impact. When we know ourselves well, countertransference does not take over the session. It increases our capacity for empathy, perception, and connection with our clients. Having a difficult past or mental health challenge is not a clinical failure; failing to recognize its influence is.

Countertransference: From Reaction to Clinical Action

Countertransference is not inherently bad; in fact, it can give us valuable information to aid our clinical work. When something a client says or does hits a nerve, we need to notice our reaction and reflect on what it is telling us to help distinguish our unresolved needs from clinically useful information about the client. With that goal in mind, rather than trying to eliminate countertransference reactions, therapists can deliberately take some of the following steps:

• Pause and reflect when we feel a strong emotional response to a client, and ask, “What is being stirred up?” and “Is this about the client or me?”
• Use supervision or consultation to explore recurring patterns or reactions, especially ones that feel intense.
• Jot down brief notes after sessions to track themes, feelings, or urges. Over time, these notes can offer insight.
• Ask ourselves clarifying questions such as, “Am I assuming something that has not been explicitly stated?” or “How might another therapist interpret this?”
• Notice when it is our agenda versus the client’s. If we feel an urge to rescue, persuade, or protect, consider what is driving it before acting.
• Remember, countertransference is information. Instead of seeing our reactions as problems, see them as insight into the client’s experience or needs.

Countertransference does not need to disappear; we need to become aware of it well enough to use it deliberately instead of enacting it unconsciously. What clients evoke in us can help us understand them, because the person behind the therapist never leaves the session.