17/02/2026
Feeling everything your client feels NOT helpful!
If you feel everything your client feels but you lose connection with yourself you are NOT helping your client.
In fact you are highly likely to be repeating past trauma patterns.
It is no coincidence that clients come to you because you are so deeply feeling, so empathetic that you can feel exactly what is going on in their body. It feels very safe to them, because it’s a very familiar pattern to lose themselves in someone else.
It’s highly likely as a child they had to put their needs last, they had to make themselves smaller, they had to grow up before their time and so they had to lose their own sense of self in order to survive. That pattern worked very well, in the past, as they have survived.
Nervous systems love predictability. They love a usual pattern with a known expected outcome.
So the client’s nervous system feels very safe, when you merge with them because its a very familiar pattern.
I would guess it’s probably a pattern that’s very familiar to you too as the practitioner.
So off you two go on a dance of merging together without any clear boundaries and delineation of who’s nervous system is leading the session, of who the practitioner is and who the client is.
Many times afterwards you will feel like you the therapist had an extraordinary session, with so much feeling. Likely the client will too. However, when the client leaves you office and goes back into the “real world” they will continue to use their same pattern of making themselves smaller, of putting others first and they will wonder why on earth they can’t make the changes they want in their life.
Meanwhile you, the practitioner, might feel drained, spacey, maybe you think about your client frequently after the sessions and wonder how more you can help them. “Detaching from the outcome” feels very difficult. You just really want to help them.
Resonating without merging is a skill to develop. There are tools to help you achieve this and you and your clients will do much better as a result.
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