Perhaps a therapist makes a personal revelation when moved by a client's display of intimacy or in a seeming effort to bond or show empathy. A woman whose therapist had a need to unburden herself in self-dramatizing accounts of her own worst childhood memories soon found herself more haunted by her therapist's childhood traumas than by her own. A disclosure should not be so captivating, so seductive, so dramatic that the client feels that the therapist is asking for something from her, even though she may not be sure exactly what.
Then there are those therapists who position themselves as role models--"If I could get through this, so can you. Just just do what I did." When a therapist repeatedly holds herself up as an icon of togetherness, alarm bells should go off. Good therapists don't think of themselves as gurus or superior beings, and do not put their clients in the role of devotees.
Personal anecdotes should be shared only occasionally and judiciously. A therapist who takes her work seriously will look to see what impact her self-disclosures have on the client, and will invite the client to talk about it. She will continually question whether spilling about herself is in the client's best interest. When a therapist's disclosures are too intimate, too frequent, too drawn out or driven, or seem particularly self-indulgent, the client needs to ask herself, "Just why is my therapist telling me this?"--and then to turn around and pose the question to the therapist.
Sometimes a client needs a piece of information the therapist refuses to give up. This may be especially true when a client is trying to verify that the anger or sorrow or frustration she saw flash across the therapist's face was really what the therapist was feeling. When faced with this situation, many good therapists say that they would acknowledge the feeling without dwelling on it.
Good therapists neither withhold nor disclose information about themselves capriciously. And they never lose sight of the fact that the therapy is not about them, it's about the client.
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