a therapist’s right

There’s been an absolute vile and crude response to Black woman therapist setting boundaries on Twitter last week and I keep thinking about it.

As many people know, therapists are given space as they train to consider which groups of people they want to work with. This includes not only personal preferences of the therapist, or based on specialized training, but also about populations that are sustainable for us to see. This shifted in a real way when the pandemic started and therapists all over the world were seeing clients or patients with the same lived experience that we were also going through. There have been massive levels of burnout across therapists of clients of all age ranges because of this.

In most cases, if you are going through a divorce for example, you would likely not take clients who are also starting the divorce process or recently became divorced because it can be hard, when something is close to you, to keep your own ‘stuff’ out of the therapy session. No one wants a therapist to use your therapy session for their own shit.

So, this well-established, brilliant, and therapist caring for herself decided she was no longer accepting any male clients because she noticed how dysregulated it made her. No therapist should ethically be seeing clients that they know they cannot be present with because it takes too much out of them to care for themselves to provide care to their client. Therapists themselves are the vessels for the work, the relationships we build with the people we work with are the catalysts for change.

It is not helpful for anyone to have a therapist where they are unfocused, dysregulated, or needing to focus on themselves more than you. And y’all, people chose VIOLENCE. Like tangible death threats, threats to S.A. her, reporting her to her licensing board. It is unequivocally our right, as therapists, to not work with people who are not sustainable clients for us to continue working.

Let’s celebrate that she’s choosing not only her wellbeing, but the care she is able to provide for her other clients (who might have less quality care if she was preoccupied).