top of page

Being Open in your Clinical Practice

Recently I read an interview between Arabella Kurtz and Irvin Yalom. Adding some very interesting snippets that provided some insight!


Give it a read!


"How have you developed over the course of your career, particularly from the point of view of patients?"


"Our field is different from a lot of fields in that we get better as we get older because of a couple of things. One of them is the greater knowledge and awareness of yourself, provided you keep working on yourself or getting back into therapy when you go through the anxiety of various life stages. But secondly I believe that you grow wise and I feel I’m wiser when I work with patients, in addition to having accumulated much more experience. I tend to be less uptight about revealing myself, I don’t have strong rules about what you can say and what you can’t. Younger people need to have a set of rules just to dampen their anxiety a little bit. I tend to be more open, I reveal more of myself to patients. I’ll talk about dilemmas, I’ll work with the patient more out loud."


Maybe we are "too hidden" with our clients?

14 views

Recent Posts

See All

"[Psychotherapists] hold no brief for the greatness of their hearts—they are among the least of those who work beyond themselves—but to some extent they lessen the man-made misery of man. They stand b

Irvin Yalom (2002) in “an open letter to a new generation of therapists and their patients” summarizes: Therapists must be familiar with their own dark side and be able to empathize with all human wis

The two kinds of depressive affect are not talked about enough: 1. introjective: self-criticism, self-punitiveness and guilt. They ascribe their suffering to their own 'badness' (something they can tr

bottom of page