When does a therapist get to say no? Candice and Ari start with the old idea that a helper who charges fairly, takes a day off or holds a boundary is being selfish (if only good vibes kept us fed), and follow it through values that clash in the room, the surprising drain of letting clients book themselves into your calendar, and the guilt that comes along with all of it. Then they turn to humour: why Candice helps young clients make their fears ridiculous, and why it worries Ari when a client can't find anything funny at all. They finish on where each of them is rooted as a therapist, why therapy should be a lifeline and not a life sentence, and how a group of Milton therapists got through the pandemic rush by handing each other the work they loved. A conversation about how much of ourselves this work asks for, and what we get to keep. Content Advisory: Includes brief discussion of abusive relationships and homophobia. 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
The helper’s bind. Candice opens with something she keeps running into: the moment the business side of practice meets the professional side, taking care of yourself starts to look like selfishness. Charge what you charge, take a day off, hold a boundary, and someone will call it selfish. Ari knows the feeling from music, where a musician trying to break in is expected to be grateful for the chance to play and never mind the pay. The helping professions carry the same unspoken rule: you love the work, so that should be enough. As Candice puts it, if only good vibes kept her stomach full.
When your values and a client’s collide. From there they ask when a therapist gets to say no to a client. Candice walks through the examples that come up again and again on professional discussion boards: a religious therapist whose client has had an abortion, therapists on opposite sides of the vaccine divide during COVID, and a queer therapist whose long-standing client began spending sessions condemning a family member who had come out, without knowing the therapist's own identity. Do you disclose, challenge, let it go, or refer on? Ari shares how he once named a concern gently ("some relationship experts might consider some of what's going on to be toxic") rather than telling a client what to do. Candice describes an intern who was angry and frustrated with a client who kept choosing to stay with an abusive partner, and the supervisory work of separating our own wishes for a client from the client's right to choose. Ari offers a friend's line that lands well: therapists are not people without judgements; we have simply learned when sharing one will be useful and when it won't.
Managing energy by managing the calendar. Ari talks openly about structuring his days and weeks around a brain injury: more space between sessions than any therapist he knows, and the occasional week where he has to cancel everyone and stop. He finds it hard to watch clients insist they cannot slow down when he knows how necessary it can be. Candice describes the opposite pace, eight to ten sessions back to back three days a week with two days fully off, and how she needs a mix of case types through the day to stay sharp. The clinic's new practice management system lets clients book themselves in, and she has been surprised by the sigh that comes with each "someone booked in" notification. She realised she had been managing her energy by managing her calendar. Ari compares it to being on call: exhausting even if nobody rings. He moved his online booking cut-off from twelve to twenty-four hours so nobody can slide into home plate without him knowing. Candice's single session clinic runs on a four-hour window, which regular clients have discovered too. Her workaround is simple: if she doesn't want the late slot, she blocks it in the morning. Then comes the guilt of open slots nobody is using, which she suspects is worse than parent guilt (blanket on, blanket off, blanket on again).
Humour as a way of stepping back. Ari notices that clients who can find something funny in their situation tend to be in a healthier place, and that he worries more about the ones who can't find any humour at all. Candice connects this to naming anxiety and telling it to be quiet, and to an activity she uses with young children, borrowed from the boggart lesson in Harry Potter: take the thing they fear and make it ridiculous. The burglar they worry about is now wearing pink spandex. In her experience, humour and fear are hard to hold at the same time. Both of them talk about analogy and naming as ways of stepping away from a problem far enough to see it, and Ari mentions two podcasts that do this with their titles alone: The Hilarious World of Depression and You Made It Weird.
Where each of us is rooted. Candice spots Ari as a narrative therapist at heart, and he agrees that narrative therapy found him: a musician, storyteller and improviser who always thinks in storylines. He compares it to his music: he plays many styles, but everything runs through punk rock. Candice calls herself intentionally eclectic, choosing a narrative move for distance, a Gestalt empty chair, or somatic work depending on what a client needs in the moment. They land on the idea that most of us have a base way of understanding the world, and the other models we learn fill the gaps it leaves.
Therapy, coaching, and the strangest business model. Ari has been asked the difference between a coach and a therapist and tries out an answer about who holds the expertise: if therapy is done well, the client leaves feeling like the expert in their own life. Candice, who also does some coaching work, describes coaching as following a process towards a goal and therapy as helping someone understand themselves, with counselling somewhere in between. Her favourite line: therapy should be a lifeline, not a life sentence. If she is doing her job well, she is putting herself out of business. That brings them full circle to where they started, and to referrals. Candice tells the story of how, in the flood of work after the first months of COVID, a group of Milton therapists began passing referrals to whoever actually wanted that kind of work. They went from overwhelmed to steady, because everyone was doing work they enjoyed.