One of the questions that matters most to me in my work is this:
How do my clients actually experience me?
Not in theory.
Not in my own imagination.
In reality.
As a psychotherapist, executive coach, clinical supervisor, and researcher, I routinely ask clients to rate their experience of me after our first 60-minute session.
I recently looked again at the aggregated data from 479 clients using the ECR-RS attachment measure.
What struck me is that, after one session, clients rated their experience of me in the secure range — more secure, in aggregated terms, than how they rated their mother in childhood, father in childhood, romantic partner, and close relationships in general.
I do not share that as a boast.
I share it because it highlights something clinically vital:
People do their best work when they feel safe enough not to defend against the work.
Many clients arrive with understandable fears of rejection, misattunement, abandonment, engulfment, exposure, or shame.
If those fears are activated in the room, therapy, coaching, or supervision will only go so far.
This is why I place so much emphasis on emotional safety, attunement, body and emotion regulation, and healthy self-worth as foundations.
These are not peripheral issues.
They are often the conditions that make transformation possible.
It also leaves me with a question for all of us who work relationally:
How do your clients experience you?
And how do you know?