Wisdom in Your Mirror
by Lisa Baron, PhD, LCSW
The first client referred to me in a Boston internship while I was earning my master’s degree was a 26-year-old man who was a voyeur. He described in dark detail how he would watch other family members in his home through peepholes in the splintered, wooden floor. I was 24, new to the field, and wildly uncomfortable.
My supervisor was a stern, “by the book” woman who never smiled. She was focused on therapeutic content, not the richness of how the process of psychotherapy unfolds. She boomeranged away from conversations about my discomfort with this client and what it was triggering in me and discouraged me from talking about our supervisory relationship. Her unwillingness to process feelings with me cast a shadow on my depth of learning in those early years.
Thankfully, in my second-year internship in rural Massachusetts, I was trained by a wonderful social worker who was all about process. She led discussions about every client with the question, “How do you feel about this client?” She also asked, “How can I continue to help you grow as a social worker?” As a result of this supervisor’s approach, I grew as a clinician by leaps and bounds that year.
One essential thing that I want you to know is that processing your emotions and experiences is a key feature of becoming a strong clinician. Not doing so will limit your learning curve.
Social work graduate programs often focus on tracking clients’ stories and content. What is the story that your client brings to you? What is the history, prior relationships, your diagnostic assessment, diagnosis? How do your clients interact with you and welcome you (or not) into their introspective worlds? Looking at your client’s process, as well as your own, will always help you to grow.
A social worker I supervise recently observed that she was having a hard time “slowing down” a verbal client. Her verbose client filled sessions with descriptions of her life stories, sometimes for 45 minutes at a time, and appeared avoidant of sitting with her emotional state, which was fraught with anger and sadness. My supervisee described her own frustration with her client’s verbosity. When we talked more about this, she realized that she had some hesitancy as a clinician sitting with “silence” and allowing this client to feel her feelings. Therefore, letting the client talk and talk was in some ways a safer, familiar route. She also realized that slowing down and processing her own emotions was an issue in her own life that she was working on, as well. These realizations led to taking a deeper, more process-oriented route that held more clinical depth and wisdom. By looking in her own “mirror” at her own discomfort, and discussing it with me, she was able to take a deeper approach, helping this client to develop new relationship patterns with others in her life.
Think about your current practice. Is there a client you find yourself thinking about more than other clients? Are there things about them that trigger you? Where are the places you feel stuck? Travel into those thoughts and feelings and allow yourself to stay there for a while.
And then be sure to talk about these experiences with your supervisor. Some key nuggets of knowledge are waiting for you. Those nuggets will help you in your clinical work, both in terms of new avenues for your clients and new insights into yourself.
Lisa Baron, PhD, LCSW, has been a social worker, academic, and writer for more than 20 years. Two of her previous publications, Waking Up – Telehealth, the Pandemic, and a New Normal (2021) and Living with Uncertainty (2015), have been published in The New Social Worker.