Practitioners are trained to notice what their bodies pick up from a client. They are also, without anyone quite saying it, trained that having a reaction is a lapse. So the information arrives and gets thrown away.
Laura Joanknecht, a psychotherapist and supervisor, wrote to me this week about what she teaches her trainees: to tune into their bodies, and to notice what they’re picking up from a client before any words are exchanged.
Then she said the thing I haven’t stopped thinking about.
The hard part of the training isn’t getting them to notice. It’s getting them not to throw it away — because they’re afraid that having a reaction to a client makes them judgemental.
That isn’t a problem about perception.
We train practitioners to attend to their own responses. And at the same time, without ever quite saying it out loud, we train them that having one is a lapse. Countertransference gets taught as contamination. Judgement gets set up as the opposite of acceptance. Professionalism gets modelled, in the room, as the absence of a personal reaction.
So the information arrives — the tightening in the chest, the drop, the wish to be somewhere else, the sudden urge to protect this person — and it gets discarded at the door. Not because they didn’t feel it. Because feeling it seemed like an admission of something.
Here is why telling them it’s fine doesn’t fix it.
Shame arrives as a body state before it’s available as a thought. It isn’t a conclusion anyone reasoned their way to, so it doesn’t come apart under a better argument. Every trainee I’ve worked with agrees, intellectually, that their responses are data. They agree completely. And they still bin them.
What changes it isn’t permission. It’s having brought one, once, to someone who didn’t flinch — who took it as information rather than as something to be corrected, reassured away, or forgiven.
That’s an experience, not a piece of advice. And it’s most of what supervision is actually for.
Then there’s the half of the method that usually goes missing.
Fast is not the same as right. The empathy research has an awkward finding in it: whether a client feels understood predicts outcome better than whether the therapist read them accurately. So a practitioner trained to trust what their body reports, with no step for checking it, has been handed a very fast instrument and no way to tell when it’s wrong.
I put that to Laura, and her answer was better than my question. Slow down. See whether the information keeps returning. Pace when you share it. And take it to supervision — noting, as she did, that not every supervisor works with the body this way.
That’s the checking step. It’s also the part most likely to be skipped by practitioners who have just been liberated into taking their own responses seriously.
So: notice it. Don’t discard it. And don’t trust it either — treat it first as information about you, and only after checking, as information about them.
What did it take, for you, before you first brought one of these to a supervisor?