When do you call a client on their nonsense, and when do you let the story run? Candice and Ari trade stories about challenging clients and choosing not to, then follow the question into hallucinations (including Ari's own, in hospital after a brain injury), the annoyance some clients stir up and what it might be telling you, and whether showing different sides of yourself in different rooms makes you a fake. Ari brings a mixing board, Candice brings a diamond, and they finish on why a relational job is harder to hand to AI than people think. Content Advisory: Includes discussion of hallucinations and psychosis, including a host's own hallucinations in hospital after a brain injury and a client's frightening hallucinations of being attacked (no graphic detail), a brief reference to past substance use, and strong language. Like the way we think? The Circle is where we keep the conversation going with clinicians like you. Come find your people: https://tinyurl.com/th3c1rcl3
Calling it out. Candice opens with a client who came back after six years away and told her she was the only therapist who called them out, where everyone else had been polite. Compliment or warning? It leads to the question of the episode: when do you challenge a client, and when do you let the story run? Candice sees the other side of it with kids and teens who say they never get angry with their friends or at school, and then lose it completely at home.
Good enough rapport. Ari owns up to the one client he answered with two blunt words, knowing the relationship could take it and that it would make them both laugh. It worked, and he still second-guessed it afterwards. Candice describes the different parts of herself she draws on depending on the client: some stories she knows are hogwash and accepts anyway, because in that moment the client needs to be believed, and some get a plain "I call bullshit on that." Neither of them chooses consciously; it comes from years of reading people.
Saying nothing, cleverly. Ari remembers a young man who answered every direct question with an abstraction, and the rare feeling of getting annoyed in session. Candice's move with clients who intellectualize is to get out of the clouds and ask for an actual example. With teenagers who feel wronged, she often agrees, because what they describe is true for them, and contradicting it only adds one more person who doesn't believe them.
Other people's realities. Ari recalls an early practicum client who described hallucinations, and the worry at the time that asking about them would feed them. Candice talks about perspective: two people standing in different corners of the same room describe the same things, and they are different. Ari describes his own auditory and visual hallucinations in hospital after a brain injury: a crowd in the hallway that earplugs could not shut out, then strange, anime-like figures in the corners of the ceiling, and the oddness of knowing they weren't real and finding that knowing wasn't enough to make them stop. Candice wonders aloud about the number of young people identifying with dissociative identity disorder after seeing it online, and how that differs from the ordinary experience of having different sides. She describes reality testing with a client who saw people with knives coming out of crowds, and then exploring where else in their life that client felt attacked.
The DJ and the diamond. Clients ask both of them whether they are like this all the time. Ari answers with a mixing board: different faders for different parts of himself, pushed up or pulled down depending on the room. Candice is a diamond, with different facets catching the light. Neither feels like a facade. They talk about leaving the non-judgmental stance at the office door, and Ari passes on a line from psychotherapist Daniel Farb: it isn't that therapists have no judgment, it's that they know when sharing it will help.
Annoyance as information. Candice offers a supervision idea: when a client gets under your skin, you may be feeling what everyone in their life feels around them, which gives you the chance to respond differently. Ari calls his old session a missed opportunity, and Candice reminds him that what isn't dealt with tends to come back.
What AI can't do in the room. Please and thank you, an imagined AI tribunal, and Candice's kid on how much water a polite thank-you uses. Candice's theory on why AI won't replace therapists: so much of the work means leaning away from the predictable. Ari tells the story of a child who turned his anxiety into a dragon that slept in a box during the day, and shares a line from one of his favourite therapists: a good therapist has the eye of a detective and the mouth of a poet. Candice explains tips and tools as the Advil for the headache, and therapy as the search for the cause. They finish on what "reasonable" privacy means now that AI is in the picture, and on why we can't have nice things.
A note on the science: Candice mentions a recent study on why some people hear voices. It is Whitford and colleagues (UNSW Sydney, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2025): in people who had recently heard voices, the brain responded to their own silent inner speech as though it were a sound arriving from outside. It is one study, and the researchers describe it cautiously. It does not on its own explain why therapy helps, though psychological therapy for distressing voices (cognitive behavioural therapy for psychosis) is recommended in clinical guidelines and helps some people, usually alongside other care. And many AI tools now work with voice, images and video as well as written words.