Have You Been the Client? Why Counsellors Should Have Their Own Personal Therapy
What therapists learn about vulnerability, power and practice from the other chair
One of the things that continues to surprise me in teaching and supervision is how many counsellors have undertaken very little counselling of their own. Some have never been to therapy at all!
I find this really difficult to understand.
As counsellors, we ask people to sit with a stranger and disclose experiences they may barely have admitted to themselves. We ask them to trust our intentions, tolerate uncertainty, risk being misunderstood and return after sessions that may leave them feeling emotionally exposed. We believe that counselling can help people understand themselves and change how they live and relate.
I think we should be willing to discover what that invitation feels like when it is addressed to us.
I regard substantial personal therapy as an ethical responsibility for counsellors, even though Australian professional standards do not prescribe a universal number of therapy hours. This does not mean every counsellor needs to remain in weekly therapy throughout their career but instead, that our understanding of counselling should include serious experience from the client’s chair.
Therapy feels different from the receiving end
Counselling theory can teach us about therapeutic relationships, boundaries, rupture and repair. Role-plays can help us practise. Supervision can draw our attention to relational dynamics we have missed. None of these experiences fully reproduces the vulnerability of being a client.
As a client, we learn how difficult it can be to begin. We may spend several sessions circling something before we can say it directly, then rehearsing what we want to disclose and then talking about something safer. We may worry that the therapist will think less of us, misunderstand us or decide that our distress is disproportionate.
Therapists can be particularly skilled at presenting well in therapy. We know the language. We can formulate our own difficulties, explain our attachment history and offer a respectable account of our defences. All of this can keep us safely in the position of expert. Good personal therapy eventually invites us to give up some of that protection.
From the client’s chair, we also learn how much apparently little therapist behaviours can affect us. We feel the difference between a therapist who is listening closely and one who appears to be waiting for an opportunity to introduce a technique. We notice when a reflection is accurate, when an interpretation arrives too early and when a therapist’s need to be helpful begins to crowd us. We learn how exposed a silence can feel and how difficult it may be to tell a therapist that something they said was unhelpful.
We also experience the material realities of therapy. Fees, cancellation policies, scheduling, breaks and endings feel different when we are the person depending on the relationship. So does a rupture. So does the exquisite relief of feeling deeply seen and understood.
These experiences can cultivate humility. Once we have felt the power held by the person in the therapist’s chair, we are likely to exercise that power with greater care.
Mindfulness does valuable work, but different work
I have heard therapists explain that they do not need personal therapy because they have a serious mindfulness practice. Mindfulness may strengthen attention, emotional regulation and the ability to observe internal experience. It can be an important part of a counsellor’s personal and professional development.
A solitary practice does not reproduce the relational experience of therapy. It does not show us what happens when we disclose something shameful to another person and wait for their response. It does not place us inside the dependence, ambivalence, misunderstanding, rupture and repair that can develop in a therapeutic relationship.
Journalling, meditation, reflective practice, professional supervision and personal therapy each offer something valuable. They are not interchangeable!
Clients meet the person as well as the practitioner
Our clients encounter more than our qualifications and preferred modalities. They also encounter our attachment patterns, sensitivities, defences, unmet needs and familiar ways of managing discomfort.
A counsellor may become overly protective of a specific client, struggle to tolerate their anger, feel rejected when they cancel or become desperate to produce change. We may rescue clients because their helplessness is difficult for us to bear or avoid asking a necessary question because the answer could activate something painful in our own history. We can over-identify with a client, become rigid around boundaries or feel compelled to prove that we are useful.
Personal therapy does not remove these reactions. It can help us recognise them, understand where they come from and take responsibility for what we do with them.
This is closely connected to ethical practice. The Australian Counselling Association’s current Code of Ethics and Practice requires counsellors to pursue ongoing personal and professional development, undertake regular supervision, monitor their functioning and address personal biases that may affect the counselling relationship (Australian Counselling Association [ACA], 2025). The Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia’s Code of Ethics explicitly includes seeking personal therapy and other opportunities for personal development within its principle of practitioner self-respect (Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia [PACFA], 2017).
Neither code establishes a universal minimum number of personal therapy hours for all counsellors. My view that substantial personal therapy is an ethical responsibility therefore goes further than the formal minimum required of every practitioner. I think the position is justified by the vulnerability of clients, the power held by therapists and the inevitable influence of our personal histories on clinical work.
When personal material enters supervision
Supervision is often where the need for personal therapy first becomes visible. Personal material rarely arrives with a convenient label attached. It appears through what is happening with a client.
A supervisee may become unusually frightened, protective, irritated, compliant or controlling. They may work much harder than the client, struggle to maintain a boundary or feel disproportionately wounded when a client withdraws. A particular client may activate a rescuing part, a frightened part, a part that needs to be liked or a part that cannot bear getting something wrong.
These responses belong in supervision when they are affecting the client. A supervisor needs enough freedom to ask what the supervisee is feeling, what the client may be evoking and how the supervisee’s response is shaping the therapeutic relationship. Avoiding the personal dimension would leave an important part of the clinical process unexplored.
There is also a boundary to this exploration.
As a supervisor, I may ask what happens internally when a client becomes angry, refuses help or describes an experience resembling something from the counsellor’s own life. We might identify what the reaction makes the counsellor want to do, what they are tempted to avoid and what the client may need from them instead.
Sometimes I can see that there is much more underneath the reaction. Part of me may want to continue exploring it, particularly when the supervisee is distressed and the connection seems clinically important. My responsibility includes remembering that I am their supervisor. The work has reached the boundary of supervision when our focus shifts from understanding the effect on practice towards processing the supervisee’s own history.
I might say:
“I think we need to understand enough of this here to see how it is affecting your work with the client. I am also wondering whether there is a part of this that deserves more time and care than supervision can properly give it.”
Supervision can help the counsellor recognise the pattern, understand its clinical consequences and make safer choices with the client. Personal therapy offers a confidential relationship organised around the counsellor’s own needs, where they can explore how the pattern developed, what it has protected them from and how it operates across their life.
The distinction protects the client, the supervisee and the supervisory relationship.
A recommendation for personal therapy requires care. Supervisees can hear it as criticism, rejection or a judgement about their fitness to practise. Supervisors should explain the clinical reasoning and convey that personal therapy is a legitimate form of support and professional development. The supervisee has encountered something human that deserves proper attention, rather than evidence that they have failed as a counsellor.
Recent Australian qualitative research supports this distinction. Psychologists who had undertaken personal therapy described it as reaching areas of personal and professional development that supervision could not appropriately address. They also saw therapy as contributing to self-awareness, compassion and sustainable practice, although their views about making it compulsory during training varied (Raga et al., 2025).
Personal therapy as professional development
I also value personal therapy as a way of learning about therapeutic modalities. When I want to understand an approach more deeply, I often seek a therapist who practises it well and experience the work as a client.
Training can explain the theory and demonstrate interventions but personal experience reveals how the modality feels. We learn whether its language comes naturally, how its structure affects the relationship, when its interventions create movement and when they feel awkward or intrusive. We also learn from therapy that does not go well! An intervention that once appeared elegant in a textbook can feel very different when it lands on the wrong part of our experience.
This kind of learning requires us to become genuine clients. Remaining in therapist mode and covertly evaluating the practitioner keeps us protected from much of what there is to learn.
A qualitative meta-analysis of 21 studies found that therapists commonly described personal therapy as increasing self-awareness, providing experiential knowledge of the therapeutic process, strengthening professional identity and helping them understand the effects of interventions. Some participants also described harmful or complicated experiences, including inadequate therapy and the activation of personal difficulties that temporarily interfered with clinical work (Willemsen et al., 2024).
Personal therapy deserves the same discernment we would encourage in any client. The quality of the therapist, the timing, the relationship and the practitioner’s readiness to engage all influence what becomes possible.
Does personal therapy make therapists more effective?
The research requires some honesty here.
Personal therapy is extremely common among psychotherapists. In a study of 3,995 practitioners across six English-speaking countries, 87% had attended personal therapy at least once. Rates ranged from 94% among analytic and psychodynamic therapists to 73% among cognitive-behavioural therapists (Orlinsky et al., 2011). This establishes a strong professional norm. It does not establish that therapists who attend therapy produce better client outcomes.
Reviews find consistent self-reported benefits, including greater empathy, genuineness, self-awareness and understanding of therapeutic processes. Direct evidence of improved client outcomes remains limited (Moe & Thimm, 2021).
Gold and Hilsenroth (2009) found no significant difference in client-rated therapeutic alliance between graduate clinicians who had attended personal therapy and those who had not. Their small study did find an association between the quality of the clinicians’ own therapeutic alliance and their clients’ reported outcomes.
A larger 2024 study examined two datasets involving counselling trainees in China. In one dataset, neither having attended personal therapy nor the number of hours predicted client symptom improvement. In the second, the apparent effect depended on how trainees experienced the therapy. More hours of highly satisfactory therapy were associated with greater client improvement, while more hours of unsatisfactory therapy were associated with poorer improvement (Li et al., 2024). The study was observational, so it cannot establish causation, but it adds weight to the view that quality matters more than accumulating hours.
The available evidence supports personal therapy as a valuable form of personal and professional development. It gives us far less certainty about a direct causal pathway to client outcomes. But we do not need to inflate the research to make a serious ethical and experiential case.
A responsibility, rather than a purity test
There are legitimate barriers to personal therapy. Cost can be prohibitive, particularly for students and early career counsellors who are already paying for training and supervision. Some practitioners struggle to find culturally safe or affirming therapists. Counsellors in small communities may have limited options that do not create multiple relationships. Others have previously experienced harmful therapy and understandably approach the prospect with caution.
These barriers call for better access and thoughtful support. They should not become grounds for shaming practitioners.
I remain concerned when a counsellor rejects personal therapy categorically because they believe professional knowledge, mindfulness or self-reflection makes it unnecessary. Attendance alone proves very little, but a belief that therapy is valuable for clients and irrelevant to the therapist deserves scrutiny.
There is no evidence-based number of hours that permanently completes the task. Significant therapy early in a career can be formative, and later experiences may reveal new areas requiring attention. Grief, illness, parenthood, relationship changes, professional conflict and sustained exposure to traumatic material can all bring different parts of us into the consulting room.
Mature practice sometimes involves returning to therapy when our life or clinical work exposes something that supervision can identify but cannot properly hold.
Counsellors do not need perfect histories or permanently regulated nervous systems. That requirement would empty the profession fairly efficiently. We do need humility about what we bring into the room, respect for the vulnerability we ask of clients and somewhere appropriate to take our own unfinished material.
At some point, every counsellor should know what therapy feels like.
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References
Australian Counselling Association. (2025). Code of ethics and practice (Version 16).
Gold, S. H., & Hilsenroth, M. J. (2009). Effects of graduate clinicians’ personal therapy on therapeutic alliance. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 16(3), 159–171. https://doi.org/10.1002/cpp.612
Li, X., Wang, Y., & Li, F. (2024). Does personal therapy predict better trainee effectiveness? Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 24(4), 1539–1548. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12797
Moe, F. D., & Thimm, J. (2021). Personal therapy and the personal therapist. Nordic Psychology, 73(1), 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/19012276.2020.1762713
Orlinsky, D. E., Schofield, M. J., Schroder, T., & Kazantzis, N. (2011). Utilization of personal therapy by psychotherapists: A practice-friendly review and a new study. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 67(8), 828–842. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20821
Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia. (2017). Code of ethics.
Raga, M. F., Jayant, N., Mohi, S. R., Quinlan, E., Ward, J. R., Britz, M. S. E., & Ivey, G. (2025). Should personal therapy be mandatory for psychologist trainees? Perspectives from Australian practicing psychologists. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 56(5), 426–434. https://doi.org/10.1037/pro0000625
Willemsen, J., de Condé, H., Kaluzeviciute-Moreton, G., Guogaite, G., Fiorentino Polipo, N., & Zech, E. (2024). A qualitative meta-analysis examining the impact of personal therapy on clinical work and personal and professional development. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 24(3), 853–869. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12733