A client asked me once, mid-session, “Why are you crying?”
I wasn’t expecting it. But I wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t happening.
“Because someone has to.”
She had been telling me about something that happened to her as a child. Something that would have shaken anyone listening. And she told it the way you’d describe the weather. Flat. Detached. No feeling anywhere in the story.
But I felt it. So I let myself feel it.
And I didn’t hide it.
That moment mattered.
Because I had been taught, like most therapists, that you don’t show emotion. That self-disclosure is risky. That you stay neutral and keep the focus on the client. I remember an advanced CBT training where the instructor said that if a client asks about the painting on your wall, you don’t answer. You redirect. Everything goes back to them.
That approach misses something fundamental.
Clients are not just responding to what you say. They are responding to you. Your timing. Your tension. What you avoid. What you allow yourself to feel.
If you are sitting with someone’s pain and acting as if nothing is happening inside you, that is not neutrality. It is absence.
And clients register that.
The moment she realized I was feeling something she couldn’t access, something shifted. She started crying.
First time in years, she said.
That’s the clinical point.
Not that therapists should express whatever they feel.
Not that emotion belongs in every session.
But that when something real is happening in the room, and you step out of it to maintain a role, you are no longer participating in the work.
You are managing it.
And clients can feel the difference.
