A while back, during a check-in on therapy progress, a client expressed how while they’ve gotten useful insights from our sessions, their life didn’t seem to change in any significant manner.
As a therapist, if you’re inexperienced, as I was back then, you tend to absorb such comments immediately and solely as a sign of your incompetence.
But experience taught we otherwise; there are so many factors influencing client change aside from therapist competency.
I had to ask more questions to get a better sense of how the client is presently living life.
I shared how many clients share similar experiences due to a variety of factors, two of which are 1) sessions mainly focus on uncovering intellectual insights without experiential work, and 2) clients do not practice the insights outside of the therapy room.
My client nodded, as if a sign of agreement and understanding. But their nodding seemed more like a pleasantry hiding their skepticism. My sharing didn’t register with them.
As I was sharing, I recalled a recurring observation I’ve made: my client ran on an extremely packed schedule. Despite the insights gained, they stuck to their usual routines; they weren’t actually exploring different ways of being, living, and relating.
In our preceding sessions, they admitted that doing so was their attempt to fill the void within, to keep themselves so busy that they’re too exhausted to look inside.
Therapist’s Temptation to Play God
As I sensed my client’s resistance, I felt an urge to share what I was thinking. On the one hand, underlying the urge was my genuine desire help them achieve as soon as possible the change they sought.
But on the other, the urge partially stems from my ego being defensive about my sharing being doubted. My ego wanted to convince my client that I was “right”.
A lot is going on during the therapy hour. As a therapist, you have to manage your own projections. It is one thing to use your emotions as a gauge for how people in the client’s life might feel about them.
It is another when your emotions stem from your personal unresolved problems.
The rule is this: don’t make your problem the client’s problem. If you don’t resolve your own problems, you become controlled by your emotions, not the other way round.
In these moments, your mind and body become instinctively possessed by your own values system of “right” and “wrong”, mistaking your way of living as one that everyone else should follow.
Consequently, you might unknowingly direct and advice the client based on your own values system, which is dangerous and unethical.
A therapist is neither a god nor a sage. A therapist isn’t omnipotent—they do not know how life would or should turn out for anyone. To believe that you know how someone else should live reflects arrogance and ignorance. Your personal truths do not necessarily apply to others.
Why Therapists Let Clients Suffer
There’s a perspective in the therapy field that a therapist has no right to take away a client’s suffering. How could that be? Isn’t the point of therapy to reduce suffering? Well, it depends on what type of suffering and how we go about doing that.
If the therapist is fixated on reducing a client’s suffering for them, the therapist isn’t being truthful an existential fact, which is suffering is an inevitable part of life.
The therapist can’t bear for the client to report suffering, for the therapist interprets that as a sign of their own incompetence. They made their own problem the client’s problem.
Such a therapist invokes the imagery of an overprotective parent shielding their child from life’s suffering. Yet, first and foremost, a therapist isn’t a parent of the client. The therapist is neither lawfully nor morally responsible for the client’s life like a parent, though the therapist is bound to the ethical code on confidentiality.
Second, the role of the therapist isn’t to remove suffering as such, but to journey with the client through the inevitable sufferings of life in a less sufferable way.
Hopefully, together, they unearth lessons and wisdoms clients can apply in the future to transcend future sufferings on their own.
A therapist isn’t like a dictatorial basketball coach drawing out the plays, directing where every player must go.
On an existential level, no one knows how a person’s life would turn out. This is a radically different stance from our usual social relations—family relationships, friendships, romantic relationships, professional relationship—in which people often overtly direct and dictate how others should think, feel, and live.
However, the therapeutic process is like a basketball game, both of which reflects the nature of life. The coach might’ve drawn the play, but the players—the clients—are the actual ones playing the game. On the ground, no one can truly predict how the game would turn out, just as how life is filled with uncertainties.
The therapist who merely spends a few hours every month with the client only has a microscopic peek into how the client actually experiences life. The therapist barely knows anything about the client.
The job of the therapist is to awaken the coach with the client and to co-create with the client a series of potential plays.
Beyond that, in their life outside the therapy room, the client becomes both the coach and the player—they have to draw their own play, adjust on-the-go, and play the game of life.
Sometimes, plays emerge not from the dialogue during the therapeutic hour, but from the client themselves while they live life outside the therapy room.
In other words, the therapist is willing to let clients live life on their own and suffer—not for suffering’s sake, but for the opportunity to experience the transformational process suffering always offers.
To fixate on completely removing the client’s suffering for them is to deny them of a potentially life-changing experience, one that might finally allow them to become who they want to be and to live the life they dreamed of living.
Furthermore, if a therapist acts like an overprotective parent, the client remains infantile. They don’t gain the strength and mastery to play the game of life that only they can play themselves.
Who is the therapist to play God and dictate another human being’s destiny? Is the therapist responsible if the client’s life falls apart because of the play the therapist drew and compelled the client to follow?
Sometimes, the wisest thing a therapist could do in the moment, is to let clients live and suffer.
When Truths Don’t “Land”
Seeing how my words went “in and out” of their ears, I sensed intuitively there was no point if I shared what I was thinking. After all, those were the spontaneous musings of a therapist.
When insights don’t land, sometimes it isn’t that the insight is “false” or “inaccurate”, but that the way it was delivered and the way you reach an insight is more important than the information of the insight itself.
Sharing a barrage of insights, even if gained from reputable therapy research, isn’t necessarily helpful, and most certainly not if done in a rapid-fire way. It would be like a session of sharing motivational quotes, likely condescending and patronizing.
A classic example is how when we’re younger—and perhaps even now—our parents would offer advice and insight about what not to do. And being a willful adolescent, you wouldn’t listen to their advice, and had to experience for yourself the actual acting on of our mistakes before their advice and insight finally made sense, before they “land”.
Truth is a lived experience, not simply uttered words and information.
Before you actually lived through an experience, though, I’m sure your parents’ insights went “in and out” of your ears, simply registering as vibrations—devoid of any meaning—on your ear drums. Or an annoying fly buzzing around your ears.
In this case, I was certainly not a parent. And because of that, any hint of parenting or “I know it all” could be profoundly damaging to the therapeutic trust.
Given the tone of their resistance that day, I intuitively suspected no matter what I shared and how I shared, they won’t hear me—that’s just how they are in that moment.
Maybe some other time, when the client and I are in a different mood, a different delivery and different message might land. But not that day.
I took a mental note of what I sensed and left it as that.
The Mystery of Timing
Just recently, that client shared the same insight they’ve uncovered months ago. But this time, I could sense they really believed it.
They’ve also decided to lighten their schedule for proper alone time.
There was a fundamental shift in their presence: they felt a lot more grounded and genuinely more self-accepting.
Being an intellectual type who avoids their emotions, our conversations tend to be quicker in tempo, with them reporting analysis they’ve already completed and delivering it to me with a ribbon.
Usually, their presence exudes a detached quality despite their upbeat energy, a mood similar to the typical superficial socializing with friends and colleagues. But on that day, the mood of the room was more contemplative and introspective than usual.
I decided to point out how that was the same insight they uncovered months ago, which they didn’t realize. I also repeated the two factors inhibiting change, and shared my thought process back then.
Delivery is important here, I reminded myself. By bringing up the past, you might come across as taunting, “See, I told you so.” Don’t ruin the contemplative mood, I reminded myself. A lot of good therapeutic work can be accomplished in such a mood.
I ended my sharing with the following therapist “wisdom”:
Right message, wrong timing = wrong message
My client pondered for a moment and agreed: “You’re right. If you had repeated the insight before today, I honestly wouldn’t have believed you or myself. I wouldn’t have listened to you and would’ve just forgotten about it.”
My words finally landed.
Now, the insight isn’t simply words or information but a vivid lived experience and truth.
Back then, the timing was wrong. My client wasn’t ready to truly hear their own insight. They were neither the right person to hear it, nor was I the right person to deliver it.
Thinking Differently Isn’t Enough
And often times, it’s down to coincidence and luck. Regardless of what I do, it was totally possible that this change wouldn’t have occurred for another few months, weeks, or years.
My client didn’t intentionally set out to do something different, but on a whim participated in an event—which she wouldn’t have typically done so—because their friend pestered them to tag along.
My client observed it was after participating in this event that triggered a fundamental shift in their worldview.
Regardless of intention, conscious or not, the larger point is this: for change to happen, life has to continue happening outside the therapy room, and happen differently.
Uncovering intellectual insights from thinking about life is like reading book summaries; they’re abstract and detached.
Deriving experiential truths from living life is like the actual reading of the book; it is experiential and immersive.
Sometimes, the book summary and insights seem unrelated to the book and your current life, just as with my client.
But after reading the book, after living life, and actually experiencing a different pattern of thoughts and emotions, of being and relating, intellectual insights derived by the mind transform into experiential truths your whole being truly believes.
So don’t just think about life, live it, too. While you’re at it, try something different.
Hopefully, when you combine both thinking and living differently, one day without realizing, you’re right on time for the change you longed for.
About the Author
Hello, I’m Gary: A recent Anthropology graduate from Yale-NUS College, and an incoming student pursuing a Masters in Counselling. If I were to describe myself in a sentence — which is impossible, but I’ll try nonetheless — I’m currently someone who’s in a perpetual existential mood!
I invite you to join me on my journey of writing to make sense of that mood, myself, and this crazy, complex world. I’m not following a fixed structure, so I don’t know what I would come out of this conviction — I guess we can only find out as I write!
