Your Therapist Should Have Feelings About You. If They Don't, Find a New One.

I spent seven years in psychoanalysis. My analyst never once told me what he thought of me. Never said he admired anything about me. Never told me how I came across. He just sat there, behind me, making interpretations.

It was a complete waste of time.

I don’t say that lightly. The man was well-trained. He followed the rules. He maintained his neutrality. And in seven years, I never once felt like he actually saw me. I learned a great deal about psychoanalytic theory. I learned almost nothing about myself.

That experience shaped everything I do differently.

The Myth of the Blank Screen

There’s a model of therapy that’s been handed down for over a century. The therapist is a blank screen. A mirror. They don’t react. They don’t share. They don’t let you know what they’re thinking. The idea is that by withholding themselves, they create a space for the patient to project, and through those projections, insight emerges.

It sounds elegant. In practice, it’s often deadening.

I never had an analyst who said, “John, this is my impression of you.” They never got personal. They just made interpretations. And it was a complete waste of time.

Because here’s the thing about human beings: we don’t grow in a vacuum. We grow in relationship. We need someone across from us who is present, not performing objectivity, but actually in the room. Someone whose face changes when we say something moving. Someone who pushes back when we’re evading. Someone who, occasionally, tears up.

What I Actually Do

I tell my patients how I experience them. Not all of it, and never on impulse.

I tell them the part I believe they can use, at a moment when they can use it, in words I’ve chosen with some care.

“You know what I notice about you? You’re much warmer than you think you are.”

“I’m going to tell you something: you come across as hostile, and I don’t think you intend to.”

“I’m tearing up right now. Because what you just described is genuinely beautiful, and I want you to know that someone heard it.”

Look closely at those sentences. Every one of them is built.

The first leads with what she doesn’t believe about herself, because a compliment she could wave away would have been worth nothing. The second tells a man he comes across as hostile and, in the same breath, tells him I don’t think he means to, because without that second half he’d have heard an accusation and spent the rest of the hour defending himself. The third names my own tears and then hands the moment straight back to him.

None of that is spontaneous. It’s fifty-five years of learning how a true thing has to be put before a particular person can take it in.

Is this unprofessional? Some of my colleagues would say so. They’d say I’m violating boundaries, contaminating the transference, making it about me.

I’d say honesty, delivered with judgment, is the most professional thing a therapist can offer. Honesty without judgment is just noise with a diploma behind it.

Countertransference Is Not a Problem. It’s the Point.

Every therapist has feelings about their patients. Every single one. The question isn’t whether those feelings exist. The question is what you do with them.

The old model treated countertransference as contamination, something to be analyzed away in your own therapy so it wouldn’t interfere with the work. Glen Gabbard, one of the finest psychoanalytic thinkers of the last fifty years, reframed it entirely. Countertransference isn’t a bug. It’s the feature. It’s clinical data of the highest order.

When I want to strangle a patient, the first thing I do is find out whose feeling that is. If it’s mine, it belongs in my own work and nowhere near him. If it’s his, it’s the most useful thing in the room, because it’s what his wife feels and can’t say. Then comes the real question, which is whether he can hear it this year, and in whose words.

The therapist’s emotional response is a tuning fork. It picks up what the patient is broadcasting, often without their knowing it.

That response is only data until I decide what to do with it. When I’m satisfied the patient can hold it, and I’ve found the right words, and the moment is right, something remarkable happens. They get to see themselves through someone else’s eyes. Not through interpretation. Through experience.

The Mirror Question

One of my favorite moves, and I do it often, is to ask: “How do you think you’re coming across to me right now?”

Most people freeze. They’ve never been asked that by a therapist. They’ve never been invited to consider the other person’s experience in the room. And that freeze? That’s data too.

Because if you can’t imagine how you’re being perceived by someone who’s sitting three feet from you and paying full attention, how are you going to navigate the infinitely more complex social world outside this office?

The blank-screen therapist would never ask this question. They’d consider it a violation of the frame. I consider it the whole point of the frame.

When I Tear Up

It happens more than you’d think. A patient describes a moment of genuine courage: leaving a relationship that was destroying them, standing up to a parent for the first time at age fifty, telling their child something they’d been holding for years. And I feel it. Physically. My eyes well up.

I don’t hide it. When I think it will mean something to the patient, I name it.

“I’m tearing up because I’m so moved by what you just did. Do you know how brave that was?”

The effect is immediate. The patient, who has likely spent their whole life wondering whether their emotions are too much, too little, or too strange, sees that their experience moved another human being. Not in theory. Not in interpretation. In real time.

That’s not a violation of boundaries. That’s a human moment. And human moments are where healing lives.

What a Feeling-Less Therapist Costs You

If your therapist never reacts, never shares, never lets you see what’s happening on their side of the room, you’re missing the most powerful feedback loop in therapy.

You’re left guessing. Performing. Trying to figure out what they think without any data. And that guessing game? It usually reproduces the exact dynamic that brought you to therapy in the first place, trying to read someone who won’t tell you where you stand.

There’s a difference between a therapist who’s holding something back on purpose and one who simply isn’t there. Patients can always tell which is which. The second kind isn’t being careful. He’s absent, and absence is not therapeutic. It’s lonely.

The Difference It Makes

I had a patient. A successful man, respected in his field, utterly convinced that nobody really liked him. He’d been in therapy for years. Good therapy, by the conventional standard. Lots of insight. Zero movement.

In our third session, I told him: “I want you to know something. I genuinely enjoy talking to you. You’re funny, you’re sharp, and you have a kindness about you that I don’t think you see.”

He stared at me. Then he said: “No therapist has ever said anything like that to me.”

That’s the problem. Not that his previous therapists didn’t feel it. I’m sure some of them did. But they kept it behind the screen. And so this man spent years in rooms with people who saw good things in him and never said so.

I use restraint every day. Restraint is waiting until a man can hear a good word about himself without deciding you’re working him. That’s a clinical decision, and it takes real skill.

What his previous therapists were doing wasn’t that. They weren’t timing it. They were withholding it on principle, forever, because the rulebook told them to.

There’s a large difference between choosing your moment and having no moment at all.

Finding the Right Fit

I’m not saying every therapist needs to operate the way I do. Different patients need different things. Some people need more structure. Some need more silence. Therapy is not one-size-fits-all, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a method, not serving a person.

But I will say this: if you’ve been in therapy for months or years and you have no idea how your therapist experiences you, if you’ve never seen them react, never heard them laugh at something you said, never felt them push back on something that wasn’t true, ask yourself whether that’s really working.

You deserve a therapist who is in the room with you. Not behind a screen, literal or metaphorical. Not performing neutrality while feelings pile up unspoken.

You deserve someone who will tell you the truth about how you come across. Who will tear up when something beautiful happens. Who will notice his own exasperation when you’re dodging the hard stuff, work out what it means, and then find a way to say it that you can actually take in.

That’s not unprofessional. That’s what therapy is supposed to be.