Therapists Doing Their Own Work: The Ethics of the Wounded Healer

What responsibility do we hold as therapists? Can a trained professional still do harm in this profession?

The title therapist does not automatically mean someone has deeply examined themselves.

Depth psychology has long held a different standard. Carl Jung believed that a therapist can only accompany a client as far as they have been willing to go themselves. In other words, our own unresolved material matters. It can shape what we notice, what we avoid, how we react to clients, and what we unconsciously bring into the therapeutic relationship.

This is part of why I valued my training at Pacifica Graduate Institute. In Pacifica’s M.A. Counseling Psychology program, students are required to participate in their own psychotherapy while enrolled.

Many of us had already spent years in therapy and nurturing our own version of self exploration before entering the program.

I think that matters.

There is an archetype in depth psychology called the wounded healer: the idea that our own wounds can become part of what allows us to recognize suffering in another person. But being wounded alone does not make someone capable of accompanying another person through healing - or, as I often prefer to think of it, a return to wholeness.

The wound has to be worked with.

Otherwise, what has not been examined can enter the room through projection, countertransference, rescuing, judgment, blurred boundaries, or even an unconscious need for the client to validate something in the therapist.

Perhaps the goal, then, is not simply to become the wounded healer, but something closer to the healing healer, meaning someone who remains in relationship with their own wounds and continues doing the work.

I also think there is something valuable about life experience before becoming a therapist. In the United States, it is not unusual for psychotherapy to be a second or even third career. People arrive after careers in business, education, healthcare, the arts, technology, or other fields and perhaps after experiences of parenting, grief, relationships, relocation, failure, reinvention, and change.

There can be something useful in having lived enough life to know that human beings rarely fit neatly into theories.

This has felt somewhat different from some of what I have encountered in parts of Europe, where pathways into psychology may begin earlier and where therapy itself can hold a very different cultural position. In some communities, therapy is still viewed with suspicion, sometimes shaped by experiences or stories of clinicians who felt distant, overly diagnostic (patient vs client), or unable to understand the cultural world of the person sitting across from them.

Trust has to be earned.

As registered and licensed professionals, we are not automatically entitled to a client’s trust simply because we hold a credential.

Earlier in my work with some clients, I encouraged a degree of healthy skepticism in general but even toward me. Depending, of course, on a person’s particular growing edges, it can be valuable to practice not automatically believing or accepting what someone says simply because they hold authority or have a shiny title.

Therapy should not replace a person’s internal wisdom with the therapist’s authority.

Ideally, it helps someone develop a stronger relationship with their own discernment.

For that reason, when people are shopping around for a private pay therapist, I often encourage them to ask prospective therapists about their own relationship to personal work. Not necessarily for private details, but a question such as: Do you have your own therapeutic practice?

A therapist does not have to disclose their personal history to answer these questions meaningfully. But I think it is reasonable for clients to be curious about whether the person asking them to examine themselves is also committed to examining themselves. It is like taking money guidance from someone who is bad with finances —why would we do this?

Professional training matters enormously. Ethics matter. Supervision matters.

But the person behind the credential matters too.

The areas I work with are informed not only by professional training, but by my own willingness to encounter those terrains in my own personal life. This means that insight or intellectual knowledge moves to into practical change.

Therapists do not need to have lived every experience their clients have lived. That would be neither possible nor necessary.

But I do believe we have an ethical responsibility to continually examine the person we are bringing into the room.

Because the deeper we are willing to actually change ourselves, the more honestly we can accompany someone else in knowing themselves.