Lately, I’ve been seeing more therapy memes and more therapists making funny reels about their work. They share ridiculous moments from our working lives, speak without arranging their faces into expressions of profound concern, and occasionally admit that they, too, can be petty, mistaken, tired, or absurd. More therapists are beginning to sound like people you might actually know. It caught my attention because for a long time, the public image of my profession gave the impression that becoming a therapist required acquiring a new personality, complete with a superbly soft voice, an inexhaustible supply of sympathy, and a face permanently prepared for a difficult disclosure.
The professional face
You probably know the performance I mean. The therapist tilts their head, lowers their voice, and receives an ordinary sentence as if it has arrived from a remote and tragic civilization. Every feeling gets a solemn acknowledgment; every account of a disagreement seems to require a grave expression and a lesson about boundaries. Of course, people need to be heard, and some experiences deserve great care. What makes this particular manner questionable is its constancy. A person cannot be equally moved by everything. When concern becomes the default facial setting, it stops telling you what the therapist actually thinks or feels. You begin to wonder who’s behind it and at what point in their working day they switch on the professional mode.
I encountered this manner as a client and later, during my training, among clinicians. And I tell you, the backstage version could be even worse. In discussions with colleagues, the voice of compassionate authority sometimes to often gets dialed even higher as the competition is tougher. People speak as though their professional knowledge has carried them beyond the ordinary human tendencies to judge, compete, get irritated, or talk nonsense. That implied elevation is hard to bear when you only want to learn how people work and discover that you’re apparently also expected to join a priesthood. It leaves you wondering how much the pose gets between the clinician and what they’re supposed to be examining.
The client gets a part, too
The etiquette can recruit the client, too. If the expected therapist is an endlessly sympathetic witness, the expected client may become someone who arrives with an inventory of injuries, armed with the correct vocabulary for naming every slight. Others may feel pressure to display enough distress to justify the attention they receive. Someone can have been badly hurt and still find this script embarrassing; someone can genuinely lose control without performing anything at all. The point is that a room has its customs, and people learn them. When every account of being wronged receives the same reverent response, it becomes harder to ask a less comfortable question: what else was happening there, including in me?
Where did we get these customs? I suspect part of the answer lies in psychotherapy’s inheritance of medical authority and the expectation that a professional should possess a special composure. The profession also developed a language of attentive concern that can be useful in one conversation and stifling when applied to every conversation. Then there’s the older cultural habit of looking to an expert in human troubles for something like moral guidance. Few therapists, I imagine, set out to imitate priests, but the posture is recognizable: one person speaks as though they occupy higher ground while the other offers a confession. In a culture where psychological difficulties can also become conspicuous parts of an identity, both people have a remarkably elaborate set of roles available to them.
The people who never book
Some of the cost remains invisible because the people paying it never enter the consulting room. They take one look at the charades and imagine having to discuss their lives with someone who will call them brave for making a phone call, search their childhood for the meaning of a joke, or nod earnestly through an account of a perfectly ordinary bad day. They may have something serious they want to understand, perhaps a difficulty that keeps returning despite their efforts to change it. But that kind of gaze is simply to cringe to be a part of it. Others do book, spend the hour sitting in uncomfortable pomposity, and never return. They leave having been listened to, perhaps even kindly, while much of what they received had a funny aftertaste.
I understand that recoil. I’ve felt it as a client and as a clinician. I am one of those who need a conversation in which we can examine something painful without adopting a reverent tone. Concern can be expressed without every movement of the face being recruited to demonstrate exceptional compassion. The conversation itself should be the object of attention. Psychoanalysis gives us ways to listen for what a person doesn’t yet know about themselves and to question what initially appears obvious. That work asks us to acknowledge our participation in the human mess. If you ask me, pretending to float serenely above it makes the conversation rather difficult, as does expecting you to deliver your life in the approved vocabulary of wounds.
We can dispense with the priestly face
This is why the silly voices make me hopeful. A meme won’t reform psychotherapy, and a television character tells us little about what happens in actual consulting rooms. Still, when clinicians speak plainly and laugh at their professional habits, people can more easily imagine what talking to them might be like. As more of us work and speak across borders, those who find the old atmosphere intolerable have a better chance of finding someone with whom they can think out loud. I hope this irreverent corner of the profession keeps growing. Serious work requires skill and close attention, including the willingness to notice when you’re wrong. The priestly face contributes remarkably little to any of it.
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