Notes for New Therapists is a regular series published on Sundays.
Perhaps they criticize something you said. They interrupt you repeatedly. They insist you do something you believe would be unhelpful. They remind you of someone.
Or perhaps you cannot explain it very well. You notice that you are unusually impatient with this person. Defensive. Anxious. Bored. Eager for them to approve of you.
This can be surprisingly destabilizing.
You became a therapist partly because you learned how to pay attention to other people. Now another person is affecting you, and you are supposed to be, well, the therapist.
That does not mean something has gone terribly wrong.
Therapists sometimes imagine that enough training, therapy, or self-awareness will eventually eliminate being triggered by clients.
What kind of therapist would that create?
One who was unusually detached from their own emotional responses? One who assumed that whatever happened in the room belonged entirely to the client? Neither sounds particularly useful.
Your emotional responses are part of the information available to you. Countertransference has long been used to describe therapists’ emotional reactions to clients and the therapeutic relationship. Those reactions can sometimes help you understand what is happening.
They can also mislead you.
The goal is not to stop having reactions. It is to become better at noticing them without automatically acting from them.
Imagine an ambitious hiker climbing a mountain with an experienced Sherpa. Someone missteps.
For the next few moments, it may not matter very much who made the mistake. Two people, in very different roles, with very different skills, were relatively safe a moment ago. And they may now be in danger.
The Sherpa’s greater skill does not make the Sherpa immune to the consequences of someone else’s movement. It creates greater responsibility for responding skillfully once the situation changes.
Therapy can be like that.
Sometimes a client triggers the therapist. Sometimes the therapist triggers the client. And each person’s reaction can begin affecting the other.
Your job is not to prove that you did not cause it.
Your job is to notice that the footing has changed.
When you feel yourself becoming activated, your first task may be remarkably ordinary.
Slow down.
Notice your body. Notice the impulse to explain yourself, correct the client, become unusually reassuring, withdraw, or regain control of the session.
You do not necessarily need to say any of this aloud.
Sometimes the most clinically useful thing you can do is create enough internal space that you can become curious again.
What just happened?
What is the client responding to?
What are you responding to?
Those may turn out to be different questions.
Your reaction may contain information the client could benefit from hearing.
It may also contain information that belongs entirely to you.
“I noticed I became defensive when you said that” could sometimes open an important conversation. In another situation, saying it would require the client to take care of something that is yours to manage elsewhere.
Before disclosing your reaction, ask what the disclosure is for.
Will it help the client understand something happening between you? Will it make the relationship safer or clearer?
Or will telling them simply make you feel better?
The distinction matters.
Not every difficult reaction needs the same destination.
If you are uncertain about what happened clinically, consultation or supervision may help you think.
If the client has touched something unresolved in your own life, personal therapy may be the better place for it.
And sometimes you are depleted, hungry, overscheduled, grieving, worried about money, or simply having a difficult week. Self-care will not resolve countertransference, but neither should ordinary human depletion automatically be interpreted as a profound clinical phenomenon.
There can be overlap. The important thing is to give your reaction somewhere appropriate to go.
Competence does not mean clients can no longer affect you.
It means you become increasingly able to notice when they do.
You learn to pause before defending yourself. You become more willing to examine whether the client has seen something you missed. You get better at recognizing when your own history has entered the room.
And when the footing shifts, you work to find it again.
You do not need to be unaffected to help another person.
You need enough awareness, support, and humility to recognize when you have been affected—and enough skill to decide what to do next.
Anne Lindyberg, LMHC (Iowa), LCPC (Illinois), integrates the experiential therapy of Virginia Satir with Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR) and the Alexander Technique. She specializes in helping adults with complex and developmental trauma create lasting emotional change through therapy.
This article is intended to support professional reflection and learning. It does not constitute clinical supervision, formal training, or individualized professional guidance. Clinicians remain responsible for practicing within their competence, scope of practice, and applicable professional and licensing requirements.
This article and other informational content on this website are provided for educational purposes only. They are not a substitute for individualized professional care, do not constitute advice specific to your circumstances, and do not establish a therapist-client relationship.
This work is created on the traditional and unceded lands of Indigenous peoples; a fuller acknowledgment of the land, its history, and its peoples is available on this website.
These blog posts are drafted with the support of ChatGPT. All posts are reviewed and edited by the author for accuracy, and consistency with the values of the author and this practice.
American Psychological Association. “Countertransference.” APA Dictionary of Psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/countertransference
American Counseling Association. 2014 ACA Code of Ethics. https://www.counseling.org/resources/ethics
Midwest Center for Transformational Change PLC