22/01/2026
If you’ve been reading the room since forever, you get pretty good at it.
The micro expressions, the unspoken tension. You feel it, it isn’t announced. You learn to toe the line that others can’t see.
I had a therapist like this once. Their take on my situation was pretty accurate, but they ran out of road once I tried to talk about how I experienced them and wouldn’t entertain it when I told them they seemed annoyed. They went straight into ‘no you’re wrong’. (Bonus points for the ‘tight smile’).
It happens when the therapist either hasn’t been taught to work with the client’s experience of them in the therapy room or can’t handle the feedback (probably because they feel embarrassed they were annoyed, guilty they did something ‘wrong’ or struggle with you knowing something they don’t).
But if you’ve grown up in an environment where you constantly had to read the room, it only gets unravelled if you’re allowed to talk about it. And that includes talking about your experience of being in therapy and your therapist. Even if it’s awkward for your therapist (their problem not yours).
And yes, my therapist came back the next week and said they had been annoyed. I mean ‘no s**t Sherlock’ 😂
