Does suspecting your therapist has their own issues affect your therapy?

And if so, how?

Just thought this would be an interesting topic to explore after reading the thread about the possibility of therapist's family/friends being jealous of their clients where it was suggested a t was getting their needs met by their relationships with their clients.

For me, I find it a worry if a therapist doesn't appear to have their "house in order". I think if they can't solve their own issues, how can they possibly help me? I realise that this is a rather simplistic way of looking at things but it is my default response, like a knee jerk reaction to catching a glimpse of t not being all they might seem.

I’ve had a long journey with a couple of visits to a year of visits with different therapists. Several of them disclosed to me certain personal issues of theirs on the first meeting or after. I’m not sure why. Yes, their issues colored how I thought of them. I suppose that’s why they told me. Maybe ethically they are supposed to disclose certain things.

One told me a shocking story that led to his divorce. Since we were seeing him for marriage counseling, that led me to see him in a light surrounding what his views must be regarding our issues. He was a good therapist, nevertheless though- the best one I’d seen. Still, he didn’t help us much and ultimately told us to go elsewhere, lol.

It depends whether the issues spill over into the room and create a situation where I feel it's not about me but the T. This has happened with former T but never happened with current T. Ironically I know more about current T than any T I've had, so I know she has issues in her life. She's genuine and honest about certain things so I feel I'm sitting with a real, imperfect person, but her issues never take anything away from me. She knows how to bracket her stuff so that it doesn't, and that's the key thing for me.

Her having issues actually makes her more real and perfectly imperfect. It has much to do with where I'm at because I had to see a previous T as perfect and having the perfect life. I couldn't bear to think she could make any mistakes or contradictions. She was Godlike to me. Current T is much more like me and that's why I like her so much - there's a connection that is real, but the focus is always on me.

All of this depends completely on the nature of the relationship and the willingness of the T to be self-aware and really own their stuff and the affect on the client.

Sometimes I suspect anxiety is an issue for her and it leaches into our sessions - but only with one topic I can think of. That topic is when my mental health interferes with school. She compounds my anxiety by catastrophizing. She starts doing these rapid fire questions that cause me a lot of stress and make me feel kind of overwhelmed. Then when I can't answer, she makes dire predictions about how I'm going to fail all my classes and have to move back in with family. This part is even worse because I don't think I have the option to move back in with family, and I have told her this several times. So of course this makes my anxiety, which is already present and intense, even more extreme. It's just not helpful.

She kind of acts like a worried parent when it comes to me and school, to be honest.

I feel like I can tell when my T is in a bad mood. He doesn't say it but overall he doesn't appear as happy and is more pessimistic and blatant during the session. To me, it can be pretty obvious. I honestly think he does like meeting with me, because a big portion of his clients are young kids and he can discuss things with me that he can't with them. So when he's really not even in a good mood around me, I can conclude that he's had a rough day. I don't think he even realizes the difference himself. It really does kind of ruin the session for me. When he's in a worse mood, he's a lot more straightforward and can say things in a way that I find hurtful. I'm guessing it's just his home life getting to him since he has a family.

Depends on the therapist.
T1 didn’t have any huge issues (and we ended up being friends after she totally sucked as my T). She was active and respected in her church and community, lived in a modest home with her (2nd) husband. Her children were adults but were still in regular contact. In hind sight, looking at her life, it isn’t what I want my life to be. She is happy and healthy but I don’t envy her life.
T2 and T3 didn’t really have issues, life experience, or therapy experience and both ran away from me/my issues because it was too much for them. So their lack of having issues was a problem.
T4 was really good the first time I worked with her. I moved away for a couple years and came back and went back to her. Unknown to me at the time she was going through an ugly divorce and it totally impacted her work. I found out about the divorce years later from another T who helped me understand the disasterous second experience.
T5 and T 6 never worked through their issues and I got hurt badly.

Two T’s disclosed things about their kids that were total deal breakers for me. One left her kids alone some nights while she was working on her counseling degree (many years before). The other was just cold and distant with her very young daughter who was, IMO, appropriately needing and wanting moms attention. Deal breakers!

So... more often than not their issues or lack of issues seeped into therapy and was harmful. Knowing about their issues, even later, helped me learn it wasn’t my fault.

Current T. Current T has shared very vaguely about their childhood not to tell me about their issues but so he could tell me (and show me) how he is practicing the very same things he is asking of me. He shares his personal resistances to what he is asking me to do, he is sharing when they started making a difference, he is sharing when something in his therapy really created a breakthrough for him and what it was like. He also shares his resentment at having to work so hard to be whole/healthy because someone else didn’t clean up their mess.
A while back he had a fight with his spouse and shared that because he knew I would feel something “off” in the room and trigger. He was right and his telling me upfront not only kept me from the trigger rupture cycle but also let me do more of my own work. Because he had put it out there, when I started to feel it I knew it was OK to talk about. We were able to work through my triggering in real time while I was still present. Before he started sharing with me I would trigger but not show it, go home and spiral, and email him back and forth until we got me calm enough to make it to next session. Having already been triggered though I learned slowly. I learned a lot more being able to do it in real time.
I know a lot about T and only about half of it is stuff he has chosen to share, maybe not even half. His stuff comes up in the room, IMO any T’s stuff does no matter how hard they try not to. What is awesome about my T is he owns it! For a year I asked for occasional longer sessions or the occasional second session in a week and he never said no but he also never allowed it to happen. A few weeks ago he offered me a longer session and I looked at him funny. He admitted he was concerned about the financial impact therapy was having on me and that he had been being codependent and trying to take care of me the way he saw fit even though I am an adult. He apologized. We had a very open conversation about how if he was feeling protective of me I wanted him to share so we could discuss it openly just like he want me to bring up my concerns. So we talked about finances and my perspective on therapy. We scheduled a longer appointment and we clarified roles and boundaries in our work in a very open and loving way.

So... for me, it all depends on the T.

My therapists, for all appearances, were incredibly stable, healthy individual which made trusting them very easy for me.

I remember my first talking about truly dealing with depression for the first time when his son was going through cancer and died. Completely normal under the circumstances -- not a life-long problem with depression. My last talked openly about having ADHD and being dyslexic and the challenges that combination had created for him, particularly during his years of education, but otherwise again seemed to just have the very normal bumps in the road everyone does.

The one time I had tried a therapist who openly started telling me her story of abuse and mental health issues like in the first couple of sessions, I left and never went back again. I felt like she was using my issues to vent her own. NO WAY. NO HOW. Therapist who don't have their crap together enough to keep it from bleeding over into their clients' therapy, should not be practicing.

No. I don't believe people without a lot of issues want to become therapists in the first place. Therapists are not better at being human than anyone else. I think therapists are rife with issues and the best a client can hope for is that the therapist doesn't come to the appointment drunk, high or floridly psychotic.

Not necessarily. As human beings, I believe we all have our crap to deal with. No one lives a charmed life.

Besides, sometimes it is easier to help others than to help oneself (e.g. you can be a great marriage counsellor but have been divorced etc). That being said, it depends what kind of messed up: all over the place, no boundaries, no ethics, etc is a no-no.

yes, surely it helps to break the idealisation and see them as normal people, struggling with day to day things and life events like everyone else? That's why it's so important for a therapist to have their own therapy and good supervision. I wouldn't want to see someone who had never struggled with life and couldn't relate to me emotionally. Also, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a therapist who hadn't gone into the profession, at least in part, to fix themselves. Spoiler alert... there is no fix, only acceptance. I often wonder how my therapist's emotional state might impact on my therapy... good days and bad days etc, hopefully he's thinking about that too and speaking to his supervisor or therapist, if he can't work it out.

T was always upfront about the fact that Ts do not have the corner on the perfect life market. The have problems just like everybody else. For the most part knowing about her struggles did not effect what we discussed in therapy. She was very open about while she helped a loy of people with relationship issues. she herself could not maintain a romantic relationship for more than a couple of years.

The one issue that over time did effect things a but not necessarily in a bad way was ver relationship with her mother. Before Ibknew anything about their relationship, I frequently vented about being angry that my mom died so young. I had such a short time with her and do many other people took their moms for granted and much more. T kept telling me how not everyone had a good relationship with their mothers, not everyone had healthy mothers, etc. Her response really bothered me. Fast forward a couple of years I found out her mom was still a live and some of the toxic things her mom put her through even though T was in her 60s. From then it did make me realize that T who was a caring and compassionate person struggled with the very thing that use to make me angry. After that I would remind myself before venting those thoughts.

Knowing she did not have the perfect life helped me to go in there and spill things to her

EMDR T has hinted about issues but never really opened up. Between appointments I worry about what she thinks about me...even though in appointments she just might be the least judgmental person I know

There is a difference between people who have had struggles in life and have an ability to deal with and work through those struggles in a pretty healthy ways and people who have struggles in life and end up with serious mental health issues because they are unable to cope with those struggles in healthy ways.

Everyone has struggles. Not everyone falls into serious mental health issues as a result. Many people have that ability to deal with the crap life deals them and keep moving on as pretty mentally healthy individuals. They have bumps in the road, perhaps very major bumps, but they work through them on their own and often end up stronger on the other side. They usually don't require the help of the therapist to survive those bumps. That's how I would characterize my therapists. They were helpful to me in showing me that it can be done.

My parents were people like that. They dealt with some rather horrible obstacles and events throughout their lives -- truly traumatic really --, but they were incredibly resilient. I wasn't that person growing up, probably because of abuse (not by them) at a very young age that skewed my thinking for a very long time. For me, because of the early trauma, I needed the help of therapists to find that resiliency. But I did, much with the help of my therapists who were rather innately resilient individuals.

I don't think all therapists have had the type of trauma that changed their innate character at a very early age like it did with me, nor do I think they need to have had that kind of experience to render them effective therapists. I do think a therapist who has those kinds of mental health issues that are so severe that they have been left still strongly affected by those issues really need to work through most of their stuff before working with clients or the bleed-over can be really dangerous and damaging.

When my T had cancer, I asked her if she spoke to her own therapist about it and she replied, "Of course!" Knowing that she probably had or has her own T makes me feel better about her, because she knows what's it's like on "our" side.

Pastor T has shared some of the things he has struggled with and so has regular T. I don't think it really affects my therapy as much because our issues are different. Sometimes I get a little frustrated when they are discussing their issues because the time is supposed to be about me, but usually they rein it in. HUGS Kit

It's so weird trying to picture the therapist being the client. Sitting on the couch. Doing most of the talking. Very strange indeed.

My husband is a therapist and i know he has issues, so i am sure my therapist has issues. But shes human. Its not a big deal.

And yet, at least in the uk, that is exactly what they have to do as part of their training.

It's common but not compulsory for personal therapy to be a requirement of training in the UK. It depends on the training provider and subsequent accrediting body. Concerning stuff.

Yes that is very concerning. I was thinking of regulatory bodies like BACP and UKCP where personal therapy as part of training is compulsory and it wouldn't even occur to me to see someone who wasn't appropriately registered as to me that is not a 'therapist' but I can see how many people wouldn't know or understand how this works and may see someone who has done an online course and set themselves up as a therapist.

It's even worse than that. BACP and UKCP are not regulatory bodies and provide no governance. They are two of several accrediting organisations, including COSCA, NCS, etc. Therapy is currently unregulated in the UK and there is no single register which therapists are required to join in order to practice. It is entirely possible to train at a reputable institution (Masters level at a uni, for example) on a course which does not require personal therapy and begin private practice without joining an accrediting body. It's an issue which affects more than dodgy online courses and people appropriating the title "therapist".

After this weeks session I sent my T my usual feedback on the session and our work together. What I was most thankful for was his recognizing what I needed and making it available to me. His reply wasn’t this direct but it basically said he knew because that was what he had needed (when he went through something similar). For me it is helpful beyond words... BUT only because T has done his work on this. He was not filling his need or heal himself by using me. If he had not done his work last session would have been a complete disaster.