There is an increasing trend among consumers of therapy…

…and I am here for it: Asking for/seeking out providers who share aspects of one’s lived experience and/or have identities in common. Self-disclosure has always been a debated topic among therapists (probably anyone who does emotional labor that relies on making some degree of authentic connection), and there are pros and cons and ethical considerations to both privacy as well as revelation. It is a valid choice for providers not to answer personal questions, and ask you to reflect on why you’re asking. (I may also encourage your reflection on what the assumed and actual impact is of me answering.)

My self-assessment is that I am more self-disclosing than the average therapist, and my alignment with DBT, narrative therapy, and Adlerian therapy (the power of shared story-telling) supports this. I am not, however, indiscriminate or unexamined in my use of self-disclosure; primarily, I use it to 1) reduce collective taboos and shame, 2) increase clients’ hopefulness for recovery and change, and 3) deepen clients’ feeling of being understood. At the same time, I don’t believe that sharing an identity or lived experience with any client means that I know what that experience or identity is like for them, or am an “expert” about what choices they should make.

Ethically, I do my best to stay mindful of and limit how therapist self-disclosure can shift focus from the client, create concern on the client’s part, and/or compromise my own comfort or safety. With that in mind, the following is some of my lived experience that has most often related to clients’ identities and backgrounds. In addition to the reasons above, I hope that this exercise prompts you to think very broadly about what aspects of your own lived experience may be significant. If you are or become a client, I also hope that this information enriches our therapeutic relationship (while saving us the time of me sharing any of this in session).

• I am cisgender, assigned female at birth, queer, and nonmonogamous. This combination creates invisibility that, in some spaces, begets privilege and, in others, results in erasure.

• I am white (another source of significant privilege), of Eastern European descent (German and Russian/Ukrainian [bio dad’s family is largely unknown to me]), and I grew up in the Cleveland area of Ohio before moving to upstate New York for college, then moving to Washington, DC the summer before 9/11. I’m part of that micro-generation known as Xennials.

• My family was poor/working class and I was the first in my family to go to a 4-year college/university. Because it was an elite school, I experienced a particularly high degree of classism. Up until 6th grade, I attended school in a desegregated school system where I was bussed across town to schools where most of the staff and other students were Black.

• My family of origin has significant multi-generational history of domestic abuse, addiction, and serious physical and mental illness, much of which continues to be unaddressed/untreated. Because of this, I do not have relationships with several family members.

• A family member, a friend in college, and two former romantic partners have completed suicide.

• I have experienced medical trauma (health care system failures, cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy treatment) and workplace trauma (severance, mistreatment by management/employer, wrongful termination, sexual harassment), and have pursued legal rectification in some of those situations.

• I’ve been married and divorced, been through pregnancy and childbirth, and now successfully co-parent a daughter who’s in elementary school.

• I was clueless for several years after college about what to “do for a living” and made a failed attempt to apply to MFA programs in creative writing shortly after I moved to Oregon in 2003. I still write and get a lot of satisfaction from it.

• I have experienced clinical depression and anxiety, am on the ADHD spectrum, and have a history of disordered eating and childhood/adolescent trauma. I have received effective treatment for all of this.