What happens to our boundaries when the instinct to help follows us home? This one starts with the therapist reflex to fix (in friendships, in parenting, in our own relationships) and the honest question of whether the deeper look we do is us being the expert or us happily admitting we don't know. Then the brain starts zinging: the head-tilt theory that runs away with the conversation (lean left for thought, lean right for feeling), whether we could tilt on purpose to shift a session, the way clients walk away remembering a version of what we said that we never actually said, and the birthday Ari went to work only to have one of five booked clients show up. Underneath all of it sits one freeing idea: we are not a crisis service, we are at best a speed bump, and people mostly survive the session we miss. A conversation about holding the work a little more lightly.

A note on the science: the head-tilt idea we get excited about in this one (lean left to think, lean right to feel, a little extra blood to one side of the brain) is a great story that doesn't hold up. Head position doesn't route blood to one hemisphere, so that part isn't real. There is a smaller, more defensible idea underneath, that a deliberate gesture can cue a shift in your own attention, and we dig into the whole thing in the members' resource inside The Circle.

Content note: strong language throughout, and a brief, non-graphic mention of suicide and clinical risk in the context of crisis-service limits.

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

Like the way we think? The Circle is where we keep the conversation going with clinicians like you. Come find your people: The Therapist Circle

Fascinated with Humans

Two therapists sit down without a plan and follow a good question wherever it goes. What starts as "how close is too close to a client?" turns into an honest conversation about talking about suicide without flinching, why the mandate to keep people safe depends on going deeper rather than backing away, and what happens to the work when we stop trying to be the expert. Along the way: curiosity versus judgment, the difference between fixing and understanding, why nobody grows from being comfortable, and the idea that we, not the office or the toolbox, are the space the work happens in.

Content note: this episode includes open discussion of suicide and MAID (medical assistance in dying).

What we get into:

- How close is too close to a client: transference, countertransference, and the "friend zone"

- "Who are we to say suicide is wrong?" A colleague's question, MAID, and the gray areas mental health still occupies

- Why the safety mandate needs the deep conversation, not less of it, and how documentation protects you

- From understanding to fascination: curiosity and judgment can't share a room

- Letting go of the expert seat

- Fixing versus understanding, and the idea that maybe nothing is wrong

- Nobody grows from being comfortable

- "We are the space": the real room is the conversation between two people

- Aging, burnout, and getting the magic back

Links:

- Join The Circle (free two-week trial): https://tinyurl.com/th3c1rcl3

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

Like the way we think? The Circle is where we keep the conversation going with clinicians like you. Come find your people: The Therapist Circle