This is your space

The phrase I often use with clients when we begin working together is “This is your space.” It serves as an invitation for them to consider how they want to use their sessions.

Therapy is not an ordinary relationship. A therapist has professional responsibilities the client does not have and chooses carefully what to disclose. The client, on the other hand, may reveal intimate things about their life and pays to be listened to. In most personal relationships, the listening comes with some expectation of reciprocity. A therapeutic arrangement, however, is intentionally asymmetrical.

As social animals, we frequently monitor other people. Sometimes we do it as part of our job, a social contract, family responsibilities or as an ongoing internal audit. Questions like Is she upset with me? Have I talked too much? Does he need reassurance? Am I being selfish? Should I make this easier for them? may sound familiar.

Some people have become exceptionally skilled at doing this: reading the room, keeping the peace, anticipating other people's needs, making themselves easy to be around. Often they do it so automatically that they hardly realise how much energy it consumes. If they do become aware of growing exhaustion, resentment, unease or anxiety they may be unable to identify where those feelings are coming from. On the surface, life appears to be ‘good’, with nothing obvious to complain about, yet something does not feel quite right.

What makes the therapeutic space different is that the client does not have to look after the therapist. Although the arrangement might appear obvious (I pay – you provide a service), the asymmetry also serves a therapeutic purpose. It makes explicit that the client’s needs and experience are the focus, making it possible for them to step back from taking care of somebody else and turn towards what is happening for them. Sometimes clients apologise for their tears, choose their words carefully or check with the therapist if it is ok to share. If appropriate, this pull to protect the therapist from what they are bringing into the room is gently observed and discussed.

The therapist's role is not to be blank or invulnerable. They are a person too and form an important part of the relationship. However, they enter this asymmetry knowingly and take responsibility for managing their own responses, drawing on training, supervision and other forms of support so that the work can remain focused on the client.

So, if a client starts worrying about whether the therapist is disappointed, bored, offended or overwhelmed, that concern does not get brushed aside with a social reassurance or immediately put right. Instead, noticing what is happening between client and therapist can open up different questions: might something familiar from other relationships be repeating itself in the here and now? What does the client expect might happen if they do not take care of the other person? And what might become possible if, this time, they respond differently?

For fifty minutes you do not have to organise yourself around the therapist. The space is yours but you are not alone in it. Another person is there with you, keeping your experience at the centre and helping to create the conditions in which you can turn more fully towards yourself.

The asymmetry creates a particular kind of freedom. What you do with that freedom, including discovering how difficult it may be for you to claim the space for yourself, becomes part of the work.