My Luteal Phase Rant

It is annoying to be a therapist sometimes.

There is this expectation that therapists must constantly embody empathy as a virtue. But empathy, in our work, is not just a virtue. It is also a skill. And those two things are different.

Being empathetic about the state of the world is, in many ways, a normal response for those of us who spend so much time immersed in conversations around human suffering, trauma, and social justice. Over time, that environment shapes us. Fair enough.

But measuring the virtue of a therapist based on how visibly they perform empathy outside the therapy room is unreasonable.

It is like saying that if someone is a good cook, the only way to prove it is by cooking free meals for everyone, everywhere, at all times, regardless of their circumstances. And if they don’t do that, it must mean they are a bad cook.

It sounds strange when you put it that way, right?

The same logic often gets applied to therapists.

Interestingly, this level of moral expectation is rarely placed on us by non-therapists. My clients, for instance, understand this much better than many people imagine. They know that empathy is something I practise intentionally within the space we share. They understand that I have a life outside our sessions, and that I am not obliged to exercise therapeutic empathy beyond the one hour a week that we meet.

Sometimes, in personal spaces, I do hear the occasional grating comment.“You’re a therapist, so you should understand.”

It usually comes up when someone suddenly launches into a story about something upsetting at a wedding, a family gathering, or some social setting where I arrived assuming I was there to simply exist as a person.

How exactly am I meant to fix it?

I don’t have context. I don’t have my tools. All I have is the nice outfit I wore to enjoy the evening.

It’s a bit like asking a plumber at a wedding to fix a pipe in a house 100 kilometres away.

But honestly, even that is manageable. I can brush it off with a quiet “not my circus, not my monkey.”

What is harder to sit with is when this policing comes from within the profession itself.

There is a strange culture emerging where therapists evaluate the moral worth of other therapists based on what they publicly perform online.

“You engage in a lot of political conversations, so you must be a good therapist.”

“You don’t explicitly label yourself as queer affirmative, so you must be homophobic.”

The irony is that a field built on curiosity and the suspension of assumptions sometimes becomes quick to sort people into good and bad categories based purely on the politics visible on their Instagram pages.

My clients, interestingly, could not care less. They send referrals. They continue the work. None of this seems to determine whether they feel helped.

For the record, I do share political reflections on my page. I am one of those therapists. I write about things that move me, things that feel personal, things that feel close to home.

But naturally, some topics will resonate more deeply than others. Some issues will feel more personal. And that means other topics may appear less often on my page.

That does not mean I do not care about them.

If a therapist chooses to use their platform politically, that is their choice. But it should not mean they must comment on every single atrocity happening everywhere in the world in order to maintain their moral credibility.

Someone might speak more about politics in their own country. Another might speak more about global issues. Neither of these things determines how morally upright or competent they are as therapists.

Because at the end of the day, the work of therapy is still the work of healing.

For those of us who hold a social justice lens, healing does not mean asking people to meditate away injustice or breathe through oppression as if the world is not broken.

Social justice helps us understand why someone stopped breathing deeply in the first place.

But understanding the cause of breathlessness is not the same as helping someone breathe again.

Our work has always been simpler, and harder, than that.

We help people remember how to breathe when threat has made breathing feel impossible.

We help them unlearn the fear that has frozen them.

The truth is that most people already know how to breathe. They always did. Therapy is not about teaching the breath. It is about removing what has been constricting it.

Social justice gives us language for the larger systems that created the constriction. But language alone does not restore the breath.

On my page, social justice is often a way of finding people in alignment. It helps me find community.

It is not activism inside the therapy room.

Activism is powerful and necessary, but it does not automatically teach someone how to unlearn fear.

As therapists who are increasingly visible on social media, we may need to become more intentional about recognising when we are doing activism and when we are doing therapy.

I appreciate how much language has evolved to help people articulate their experiences of harm and oppression.

But sometimes I worry that the language can also make breathlessness feel permanent.

“The world is terrible right now, so it is normal that I cannot breathe.”

Yes, it explains why breathing has become difficult.

But where do we go from there?

How do we help people access moments of safety even when the world feels unsafe, so that their bodies remember how to breathe again?

Because if we want people to take action in the world, they will eventually need access to regulation.

We cannot only focus on regulation.But we also cannot only focus on why we are dysregulated to the point where dysregulation becomes the only normal.

Somewhere in between those two spaces is where healing begins.