Help or hinder?

If you know your therapist has struggled with the same issue as you, do you think it can help the therapist in his work with you or it is more likely to hinder his ability to help? This might be because he is too close to the issue at hand.

I know mine does. For me it's helpful. Having someone actually understand and not just say they do. I love knowing this aspect of him too. It humanizes him more

Depends on the issue and the therapist, I am sure. If my T disclosed having struggled with depression, I'd feel that might help him empathize. If a T disclosed certain trauma, I'd run for the hills.

Why do you ask?

Definitely depends on t and the issue!

Long term t struggled with and overcame a weight issue. He was hard on me because of mine and I felt he was too close to it to be helpful.

Current t has been helpful for childhood abuse issues especially coping as an adult.

I went to a mental health nurse who disclosed he suffered fromdepression. Had he left it at that it would have been fine but he kept on telling me his experiences of depression and never really listened to mine.

I know my t has struggled with one of my main issues and has had healing in that area to some extent.

I feel like sharing his past experience of it would help me but he chooses not too share much. Tho ironically he says he shares more with me than most other clients I think.

I wonder at times if hes too close to the issue to really see what I need at times. I'm not sure, maybe I will bring it up.

That's interesting. Maybe it can be both a help and a hindrance to share some struggle with a client. I hope you can bring it up, and that The conversation is productive.

To me it was life saving that he disclosed his struggle with OCD and severe anxiety since a young boy and told me about his experience of being inpatient for 30 days. He told me about his experience with therapy and medications.

Yeah, I guess some therapists think it wouldnt be helpful when at times it would be.

My T has shared her history and it mainly helps although at times I feel bad because I'm sure her abuse was worse than mine. She shared it by saying that our histories were very similar during a time I was talking about having been sexually abused so it was not an explicit retelling of her story...that, I would have found intrusive.

She also suggested a history of depression when talking about the fact that she had been through therapy itself. None of that bothered me at all.

It can go either way. Sometimes when she has shared things, it has been really helpful and I felt like she understood. Other times, it was distracting and I found myself wanting to take care of her. It depends on the situation.

My marriage counselor shared that he also struggles with anxiety (he said "an anxiety disorder" without specifying, but I suspect generalized anxiety, from how he's talked about things). At first, it really helped me trust him more, feeling he truly understood that part of me (and not just from stuff in psychology textbooks). But later on...it felt like he tended to blame my anxiety for many issues in our marriage and acted like I just needed to be less sensitive. So it almost felt like, because he'd learned to deal with his anxiety, then why can't I just learn to deal with mine? So I think it can go either way, really...

And I know, not from him telling me--from ex-T telling me, that my T also has a child on the spectrum. But since he hasn't talked about that experience at all and seems unwilling to, because it could potentially negatively affect me, I don't think it's had much effect. At first, had a bit of a negative effect before I told him I knew that, as it made me feel weird talking about stuff with my D, like about possibly pursuing biomed treatments (because that can be a fairly controversial issue in the community). I felt better once I told him I knew, and he agreed that T shouldn't have told me. I said I wanted to ask more questions about his son, but just asked his age, which he answered. I told him part of me wanted to know if he was higher functioning (like my D) or lower functioning, but that I also realized it could affect how I talked about D to him, so I wasn't going to ask him that. In the back of my mind, I still feel he understands more (compared to a parent who hadn't dealt with that) when I talk about struggles with D, even though he doesn't share that.