Season 1 Ep 07: The Poison and The Cure: Expanding Our Understanding of the Wounded Healer
Therapists are tasked with being secret keepers.
The first layer of secrecy seems easy and simple. Maintaining client confidentiality. You can probably recite the limits of confidentiality off the top of your head, and you probably do it regularly during intake sessions.
Everything else goes in the vault. But the vault isn’t a what, it’s a who. The vault is us.
We mostly talk about confidentiality from the client’s perspective. The absolutely crucial nature of it, the ethical dilemmas that come up when we have to breach it, how the client’s understanding of confidentiality impacts the therapeutic process… All very important things.
But we rarely talk about what confidentiality means for therapists beyond a set of rules or ethical puzzles to navigate.
What does it really mean for us as therapists to be the bearers of all of this confidential information about other human beings?
Content note: References to interpersonal traumas
Listen to the full episode to hear:
How bearing witness to the capacity for human beings to cause harm challenges our illusions and contributes to moral injury
Why the disruption of our expectations of human beings as moral agents has the possibility of being generative, for ourselves and for our clients
Why our institutions need to support the passage of intergenerational knowledge among therapists
How therapists experience traumas intrinsic the work and as a result of the systems we work in
Learn more about Riva Stoudt:
Resources:
A Therapist Can’t Say That Ep. 6: Carrying the Weight of Moral Injury with Dr. K Hixson
A Therapist Can’t Say That Ep. 4: Doing Our Own Work: Mental Health and Workplace Culture with Rebecca Ching, LMFT, PCC, Certified IFS Therapist
About Riva
Riva Stoudt is a therapist based in Portland, Oregon. When she's not working with patients, she likes to talk about all the things a therapist isn't "supposed" to talk about.
