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There's a session most of us have had. The thing underneath the thing finally gets said, the client stays with it, you stay with them, and the hour ends in that particular quiet neither of you wants to close. You write your note half thinking, this is why I do this. And then they cancel the next appointment.
Our training supplies a reading for that: too much, too fast. Sometimes that's exactly right. Sometimes the breakthrough was a performance you built together without noticing. But there's a third possibility our field rarely names. Sometimes the session went well, and that's the problem.
This week's essay is about the two mirrors. Every client walks in holding one they didn't choose, issued by the family, the marriage, the congregation, the workplace. It has a small vocabulary and it repeats: you're too sensitive; that's not what happened; after everything we've done for you. Then therapy starts working and the room becomes a second mirror, one where their needs are not too much and their perceptions count as real. The mirrors don't agree. And your client spends one hour a week in front of the second one, and the other 167 in front of the first. The new learning isn't fragile because the work has been shallow. It's outnumbered.
This is the part after the slide deck ends: the client who carries a newly named need home and hears "isn't what we have enough?"; the client who gets worse because it's going well; the client who leaves, and why that isn't a failure. Along the way: what secondary gains gets right and what the word "resistant" hides; the silent contracts our clients unilaterally amend when the work works; and how a despair-shaped question, addressed to no one, can become a grief-shaped one, addressed to someone. Plus three practices for the middle of the work, starting with telling your client about the contrast before it arrives.
A note: a short passage in the middle of this essay touches on suicidality. Take it at your own pace.
Read the essay and subscribe (free, one essay a week):
https://www.relationalthread.com/podcast?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=TRT_EssayNN_Therapists_Summer_2026
The Relational Thread grows from the forthcoming book EMDR and the Therapeutic Relationship: Reclaiming the Relational Thread (2027) by Bridger Falkenstien & Jen Savage:
https://connectbeyondhealing.com/the-relational-thread/?utm_source=nt&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=relational_thread
Notice That is an EMDR podcast for therapists, counselors, and social workers, hosted by Bridger Falkenstien and Jen Savage.
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