Ask a Therapist

Sometimes clients looking for a therapist wonder whether their therapist should be similar to or different from them, and I think this is a question it’s important to think about when choosing a therapist. However, it’s important not to make assumptions about a therapist’s identity. We can’t always tell from looking at a photo of them or from reading their biography. And especially, even if we can, even if we know elements of a therapist’s identity, it’s important not to make assumptions about what that might mean for them, or what that might mean for the therapeutic relationship between you.

So, for example, I’m a woman, a cis woman, so I have a singular subjective experience of what being a woman means, but it might be very different to the next person’s. I think it’s always interesting that some clients choose to work with me because of an element of similarity or sometimes assumed similarity. And likewise, sometimes clients choose to work with me because of an element of difference or assumed difference. And it’s always interesting to me when clients make an assumption about the role of that similarity or difference in my identity. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they get it wrong. It’s been interesting sometimes that clients have emphasised an aspect of my identity that actually isn’t necessarily that important to me, or doesn’t mean the same thing to me that it does to them.

So, I think it’s important to choose a therapist primarily that you feel safe with, that you feel is going to work with you in a constructively challenging way, irrespective of elements of their identity. But broadly speaking, there might be times when it’s important that a therapist shares elements of your identity, because you want to have a sense of, I guess, lived experience, of innate empathy. There are things that I’ve experienced that therefore I understand in a different way to things that I haven’t experienced directly. There are ways of being that I can imaginatively enter into, but that I don’t experience in the same way as things that I’ve lived directly. So, I think it’s important to think about whether you want a therapist perhaps to have an innate, lived, empathetic experience of the things that you’re experiencing, or whether there are times when actually you want them to be outside of the community you’re from, outside of the elements of the identity that you’re from, so that they can perhaps support you to interrogate it or maybe see it in a different way, maybe sort of identify assumptions that you have related to elements of those identities.

So, in short, I don’t think there’s an absolute right answer. I think it’s important to think about ways in which you might want your therapist to be similar to you or different from you, even though you can’t always know. And I think it’s something interesting to talk about and important to talk about with your therapist. What identities do you bring to the room? How do those intersect? How do those impact the therapeutic relationship you have with each other? These are all really important and therapeutically valuable things to talk about.