Working Harder Than Your Client? When You Should, When You Shouldn’t, and Why
What this piece of counselling advice gets right, and when it gets more complicated
“Don’t work harder than your client” is something I say to counselling students all the time, particularly when I am teaching person-centred therapy and foundational counselling skills.
Usually, I say it because I can see them working very hard.
The client pauses, so the counsellor asks another question. The client seems unsure about what they are feeling, so the counsellor offers possibilities. The conversation slows down and the counsellor finds another direction to take it. Before long, the counsellor is questioning, reflecting, reframing, interpreting, problem-solving and searching for the next useful intervention.
Meanwhile, the client has barely had time to think.
Learning how to do counselling can create a strange pressure to demonstrate that you are counselling. Sitting attentively with another person, reflecting what you have heard and then waiting might feel like doing nothing. It’s important to remember that it very much isn't.
Sometimes the most useful thing we can do is stop working quite so hard.
The client needs to work
Therapy is collaborative, but the therapist and client have different jobs.
We can bring our knowledge, attention, curiosity, clinical judgement and therapeutic skills, helping clients recognise patterns, experience difficult emotions, consider different perspectives and develop new skills. What we can’t do is make change happen on someone else's behalf.
Bohart and Tallman (1996) described the client as an active agent in psychotherapy rather than a passive recipient of treatment. From this perspective, therapeutic interventions provide opportunities and experiences that clients themselves use in creating change. This fits comfortably with the person-centred tradition, where the therapist aims to provide conditions that support the client's own process rather than assuming responsibility for directing it (Rogers, 1957).
This also requires clients to have enough room to think.
Imagine a client says:
“I don't know. I suppose I've always been the one who looks after everyone.”
We could immediately ask why. We could ask who looked after them. We could enquire about childhood, relationships or boundaries. We might already have three hypotheses about what is happening.
Or we might reflect:
“You've always been the one looking after everyone.”
And wait.
What comes next belongs to the client.
They may realise that they are angry about it. They could suddenly remember something. They might correct us. They might sit with the statement for ten seconds and then say something much more important than the question we were about to ask.
A good reflection doesn't always need a clever question attached to it.
When the therapist starts carrying the session
One of the things I encourage counsellors to notice is how they feel at the end of sessions.
If you routinely finish sessions feeling as though you have run a marathon, it is worth becoming curious about what you are doing in the room.
Exhaustion doesn't necessarily mean that you are working too hard. Some therapeutic work is genuinely demanding. Sitting with acute distress, trauma, suicidality, complex relational dynamics or significant risk can require enormous concentration and emotional regulation.
But exhaustion can also be useful clinical information.
Ask yourself:
Am I generating most of the direction in the session?
Am I asking question after question?
Do I rush to fill silences?
Am I explaining thanings the client could discover themselves?
Am I trying to persuade the client to make a change?
Am I searching for solutions while the client rejects each one?
Am I becoming more active as the client becomes less active?
Do I feel responsible for making sure something useful happens before the session ends?
There is an important difference between being therapeutically active and carrying the therapeutic process.
Research into therapist effects supports the importance of what therapists actually do relationally. Therapists' facilitative interpersonal skills, including their capacity to respond effectively to challenging interpersonal moments, have been associated with stronger alliances and better outcomes (Anderson et al., 2009, 2016). Good therapy therefore does not require us to become passive; it requires us to become responsive.
Sometimes the responsive thing to do is something but sometimes it is to leave enough room for the client to do something.
Why do we start working so hard?
This is where “don't work harder than your client” becomes particularly interesting in supervision.
Sometimes we overfunction because we are inexperienced. Maybe silence feels uncomfortable. We worry that the client is wondering why they are paying us. We think competent therapists should know what to say next.
Sometimes, though, the urge comes from somewhere more personal.
Perhaps we desperately want this client to leave an abusive relationship. We want them to stop drinking, apply for the job, eat regularly, set the boundary, attend the appointment or finally change the pattern that we can see has made their life smaller.
Our care for the client can gradually become investment in a particular outcome.
Then we start pulling.
This is often a useful point to ask in supervision:
What am I afraid will happen if I stop working so hard?
The answer may tell us something important about the client. It may also tell us something important about ourselves.
The therapeutic alliance is consistently associated with psychotherapy outcomes across different therapeutic approaches (Flückiger et al., 2018). Collaboration is part of that alliance. When we become overly responsible for moving therapy forward, we can unintentionally reduce the client's opportunity to exercise agency within that collaboration.
Bringing it to supervision
Supervision is a particularly useful place to notice when you have started working harder than a client, because it allows you to look at the pattern without having to solve it while you are still sitting in the therapy room.
You might start with the practical details of the session. What did the client bring? What did you do in response? At what point did you start feeling responsible for moving things along? What happened when you became more active? Did the client become more engaged, or did they become less active while you became busier?
It can also be useful to pay attention to the language you use when talking about the client. Statements such as “I just can't get them to…”, “I've tried everything…”, or “They know what they need to do, but…” can be clues that you have become invested in producing a particular outcome.
A supervisor can help slow this down and look at what is happening from several directions. Greater therapist direction may be warranted when depression, dissociation or crisis affects a client’s capacity to engage, or when the therapeutic approach calls for more structure at a particular stage of the work, or if it fits the client’s needs.
But there may also be something happening in the relationship.
A client’s hopelessness or apparent passivity can lead you to assume greater responsibility for sustaining hope and moving therapy forward, sometimes creating pressure to demonstrate that the work is helping. As you become more invested in achieving progress, it may become difficult to distinguish your own expectations from the client’s urgency or frustration. Attending to this process can help you recognise how the relationship is shaping your responses and whether you are taking on responsibility that needs to remain shared.
These responses are not necessarily mistakes; they are information.
Supervision gives us somewhere to ask what the impulse to work harder might be telling us about the client, the therapeutic relationship and our own responses to both. It also allows us to consider whether our increased effort is actually helping.
Useful supervision questions might include:
When did you first notice yourself starting to work harder?
What happens in you when the client becomes silent, stuck or uncertain?
What outcome are you hoping to produce?
How important has that outcome become to you?
What happens between you when you become more active?
What might happen if you did slightly less?
Does this client need more from you at the moment? If so, what exactly do they need?
Are you doing something with the client, or increasingly doing it for them?
The aim is not to police how hard we work. It is to understand why we are working in the way that we are, and whether that is serving the client.
But sometimes you should work harder than your client
“Don't work harder than your client” can become a fairly terrible clinical principle if we interpret it literally.
Clients do not arrive in therapy with equal capacities, and their capacity can change enormously from one session to another. The level of therapist support needed will vary with the client’s circumstances and capacity in the moment. Severe depression can make initiation difficult, while dissociation may require active support with orientation and engagement. During acute crisis or intense emotional arousal, a client’s capacity for reflection may be temporarily reduced. Developmental and communication needs also matter: a young person may need help to express their experience, and some neurodivergent clients may benefit from greater structure or more explicit communication.
Clients who are new to counselling may also have absolutely no idea what we mean when we sit back and ask, “What would you like to talk about today?”
There are also therapeutic approaches and clinical situations in which the therapist appropriately takes responsibility for structure. We might provide psychoeducation, conduct an assessment, teach a regulation skill, undertake risk assessment, develop a safety plan or guide a client through a structured intervention.
None of this violates the principle.
The better question is whether our level of activity is responsive to what this particular client needs at this particular moment.
Anderson (et al., 2020) describes effective therapist responsiveness as finding a response that fits the client's needs within the therapeutic moment. That is much more clinically useful than a rule about who should be doing more work.
Sometimes we provide considerable scaffolding because the client cannot yet do something independently. Good scaffolding should, where possible, help the client develop greater capacity to do that work themselves.
Giving the work back
When I tell students not to work harder than their clients, I am usually not asking them to become less engaged.
I am asking them to trust the therapeutic process a little more.
Listen closely. Reflect accurately. Notice emotion. Ask the question when a question is needed. Offer structure when structure is useful. Intervene when the client needs something from you.
And then notice whether you can stop.
Let the client respond. Let them disagree with you. Let them think. Let the silence last long enough for something to emerge. Let them make an association you didn't anticipate. Let them discover something rather than having every piece of therapeutic meaning delivered to them.
There is also something protective for therapists in learning this. We can care deeply about our clients without assuming responsibility for every decision they make or every outcome they experience.
So perhaps “don't work harder than your client” is best understood as a prompt rather than a rule.
When you notice yourself working particularly hard in a session, ask:
What am I doing that the client could be doing?
What happens if I stop filling this silence?
Am I supporting the client's thinking, or supplying it?
Am I trying to create motivation that the client does not currently have?
What am I feeling responsible for?
And then the important qualification:
Does this client need me to carry more of the therapeutic load right now?
Sometimes the answer will be yes.
Knowing when to step forward and when to leave room for the client is part of the skill of therapy.
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References
Anderson, T., Finkelstein J., & Horvath S. (2020). The facilitative interpersonal skills method: Difficult psychotherapy moments and appropriate therapist responsiveness. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 20(3), 463–469. https://doi.org/10.1002/capr.12302
Anderson, T., Crowley, M. E. J., Himawan, L., Holmberg, J. K., & Uhlin, B. D. (2016). Therapist facilitative interpersonal skills and training status: A randomized clinical trial on alliance and outcome. Psychotherapy Research, 26(5), 511–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2015.1049671
Anderson, T., Ogles, B. M., Patterson, C. L., Lambert, M. J., & Vermeersch, D. A. (2009). Therapist effects: Facilitative interpersonal skills as a predictor of therapist success. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 65(7), 755–768. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.20583
Bohart, A. C., & Tallman, K. (1996). The active client: Therapy as self-help. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 36(3), 7–30. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678960363002
Flückiger, C., Del Re, A. C., Wampold, B. E., & Horvath, A. O. (2018). The alliance in adult psychotherapy: A meta-analytic synthesis. Psychotherapy, 55(4), 316–340. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000172
Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357