A personal account of what personal therapy makes possible in the consulting room

Eight years ago, my daughter died by suicide. That fact sits in the room with me every time I work with a client. Most of my long-term clients know it. It’s not something I hide, and it’s not something I’ve resolved. It’s something I carry, and part of my job is to know, at any given moment, how I’m carrying it.

This article is about one session where that carrying became difficult, what happened next, and why I believe the answer to the question “Do I really need personal therapy?” is, for most therapists, yes.

Something in the room

A client I have worked with for some time was talking about the circumstances around her partner’s suicide. She knows about my daughter. That’s part of how we work; I use disclosure as a relational tool, and she had found it useful to know that I had some personal proximity to the kind of loss she was carrying.

As the session progressed, I became aware of growing anxiety in my body. Not thought-level anxiety, the kind you can reason with, but something lower and more physical. I realised she was building towards telling me the specific details of how her partner was found.

I asked her to stop, just for a moment. I needed to regulate. I sat with what was happening in my nervous system, and then I was honest with her: I asked whether we could skirt around those particular details, at least for now. She understood immediately. She was not distressed by the request. Because we had a relational contract, because she knew something of my history, and because I had named what was happening rather than trying to manage it covertly, we could make a joint decision about how to proceed. That’s how I work.

But the session left something unfinished in me.

The next morning

I had a fortnightly appointment with my personal therapist the following morning. I’ve been seeing her for five years. I didn’t know what I was going to bring; I rarely do. What was most alive when I woke was a dream.

In the dream I was in a war zone. There was chaos around me. I was carrying a large assault rifle and being pursued. I took shelter in a cafe. A few minutes later one of my pursuers came in and sat down, ordered coffee, appeared to settle. I was standing in the corner, my rifle propped beside me, and I had to remain still and upright in order to keep it concealed.

My therapist asked me how I had felt on waking from the dream. I told her: calm. Not relieved, not shaken, calm. In the dream I had known what I needed to do and I had been doing it. She asked whether there was any present-day connection. I went straight back to the session the day before.

What the body was holding

We began to look at my nervous system response in that session: the anxiety, the physical signal, the decision to stop. The obvious thread led to my daughter’s death. And as we followed it, I realised something I had not consciously registered before: I had never told anyone the specific details of how she was found. Not my own therapist, not my supervisor, not anyone.

I’m not going to tell you those details here. But I want to tell you what happened when I told her.

I asked my therapist if it was all right to go through it. She held the space. With a great deal of shaking and trembling, I told her everything. As the account came out of me, something began to shift in my body. By the time I had finished, it was as though something in my nervous system had dissolved, or at least loosened its grip. The weight of those specific images, held silently for eight years, had been witnessed.

My supervisor cannot do that work with me. Supervision holds the work; it is where I bring clinical material, ethical questions, and relational dynamics I cannot see clearly. But when something is lodged not in my thinking but in my body, supervision is not the right container. My supervisor has said to me on more than one occasion: “You should take that to personal therapy.” She is right to say it.

What this makes possible

After that session with my therapist, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be able to offer my client the quality of listening I had withheld. Not because I had been wrong to stop, I had been right to stop, but because I now had more capacity than I had before. Something had been processed that had been blocking me. Next time we meet, I’ll share something of that process with her. We will decide together, as we always do, how to proceed.

This is what personal therapy makes possible. Not the absence of response, therapists are human beings, and we respond, but the ability to stay present with what is difficult rather than being pulled under by it. The difference between a nervous system that can be with a client’s account and one that cannot is not intelligence or training. It is the degree to which our own unprocessed material has been worked with.

If you’re carrying something and you haven’t given it a proper place to land, it will find one in the room. It will show up in what you cannot hear, what you deflect, what you subtly redirect. Your clients will feel it even when they cannot name it.

A professional necessity, not a personal indulgence

There are therapists who treat personal therapy as a requirement to be fulfilled during training and then quietly set aside. I understand the logic: time is limited, fees accumulate, and once you’re qualified the external pressure disappears. But the argument for continuing is not about compliance. It’s about what you’re actually offering in the room.

I have been in practice for a number of years. I still carry material that surfaces unexpectedly. I still dream things that turn out to be directly connected to my clinical work. I still need a space where I’m the client and someone else is holding the frame. That’s not a sign of inadequacy; it’s a sign of ongoing engagement with the work.

I don’t go to therapy purely for my own benefit. I go to be in a position to serve my clients better.

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