Too Much Information: Therapist Transparency and Oversharing

Why it's sometimes better not to know too much about your therapist

The first time I ventured through the door of a psychotherapist’s office, I was 22. My therapist was a middle-aged woman with glasses and fine, straight hair. She wore bulky sweaters and sensible shoes. I knew she was married because she wore a wedding ring, but that was all I knew. She said very little, revealing almost nothing about her thoughts as I prattled on, but I experienced her as a steady presence companioning me while I navigated the confusion of young adult angst.

The Blank Screen

Freud taught that the therapist should be a “blank screen” upon which the patient could project whatever she needed. Throughout the profession’s history, most therapists have avoided displaying family photos in their office, refrained from casually sharing personal information, and declined to answer questions straightforwardly about where they were going on vacation. The matter of therapist self-disclosure in therapy is not a simple one, and much ink has been spilled theorizing about when, whether, and why it might sense to share. However, in general, therapists have been trained to be thoughtful, sparing, and intentional when revealing personal information.

In recent years – with the advent of social media – new norms have taken hold in the business of therapy. On Instagram and other social media sites, therapists now routinely reveal their own histories of substance abuse, trauma, and mental health struggles. They may divulge details about their sexual preferences and political beliefs. They make “relatable” content that features videos of themselves dancing, enjoying a glass of wine, or talking about their life from their car.

In some ways, this trend is refreshing. The injunction against self-disclosure sometimes meant that therapists held themselves too aloof and inaccessible. When a vulnerable patient worked up the courage to ask his therapist a personal question and was met with an evasion or a flat refusal to respond, the result could be hurt and humiliation. However, even if Freud’s blank screen analogy could sometimes be misapplied, there is often a benefit to knowing less about one’s therapist, and I can’t help but wonder whether the social media self-disclosure trend doesn’t represent a diminishment of our profession’s technique.

When Less Is More

The reasons for therapist abstinence are complex and multi-faceted, and in this essay, I’ll explore just two. First, when we know a lot about our therapist, their life can take up too much room in the process. Even intentional sharing can crowd out the patient’s experience. If your therapist has shared on Instagram about their Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, are you going to feel inhibited talking about the great night out you had at the bar with your friends? If you know your therapist also has a history of sexual trauma, are you going to find yourself worried about her as you tell your difficult story? The less you know about your therapist’s personal life, the more space there is for the relationship to be whatever you need it to be.

Early in my career, I had a chance to do an unintentional experiment that showed me quite clearly how important it can be to leave questions unanswered. As a new therapist, I split my time between two different locations of the same clinic. After working there for a few years, I got engaged and made plans to move to another city. My supervisor at one location instructed me to let my patients know as soon as possible that I would be leaving in a few months, but without telling them why. My supervisor at the other location encouraged me to be forthright and share the reason for my upcoming departure right away.

Whose Needs Are Being Served?

In the first location, my patients expressed anger, disappointment, grief, and even anguish. When they asked me why I was leaving, I invited their theories and imaginings, but I didn’t share my happy news. One patient with whom I had developed a strong rapport spent months working through my leaving. He spent several sessions sobbing, reliving older losses and experiences of abandonment. He spent some sessions raging at me. He finally found the courage to tell me what our connection had meant to him. Our process was painful and intense but took both of us places we likely would not have gone otherwise.

When my departure was just a week or two away, he asked me again. “So, why are you leaving?” This time, I answered. “I’m getting married,” I told him. “Oh!” he said. “I’d love it if that happened to me some day.” His matter-of-fact acceptance of my announcement was hard won at that point, and his ability to imagine himself experiencing a similar happy life event was a tribute to the difficult relational dance we had engaged in over many months.

On the other hand, at the second clinic where I divulged my reason for leaving right away, my patients all congratulated me and expressed their delight at this new development. Once they knew why I was leaving, there was no room for them to be angry at me. They couldn’t express their sense of betrayal, sadness, or resentment. There was no space for them to have a process. Their reactions didn’t change or complexify as the months went on. My departure was simply about me, and not about my patients and their needs and experiences.

The Illusion of Sameness

A second issue with therapist self-disclosure – especially on social media or as part of group or individual practice websites – is that it may feed an illusion about what it takes to be known intimately. Announcements about the therapist’s identity, political beliefs, sexual orientation, and psychiatric diagnoses are presumably being offered so that prospective patients can feel assured that this therapist is capable of understanding them because they share key traits in common. While it might seem that someone more like you will be better able to understand you, this may not always be the case.

Shared life experiences and convictions may mislead both parties into believing that deep empathy and understanding can be assumed, when in fact it cannot. When my children were small, I was working with an analyst whom I was pretty sure did not have children. Parenting was an all-encompassing part of my life at that time, and it did sometimes feel that this was a barrier between us. Mothering stirs such deep feelings – both positive and negative. I assumed that parts of my emotional landscape would remain impenetrable to someone who had not been through it.

And yet, I have learned to be very cautious when working with someone whose life looks much like mine on the surface – the patient who is also a therapist, also has kids, and perhaps even grew up in the same town I did. The danger in these situations is that I assume I already understand what she is feeling, when in fact her experience of being a therapist, mothering, or our mutual hometown might be completely different from mine. I can get lazy. I can rest into the cozy assumption that we are alike. In reality, the outward facts of her life may be familiar to me, but her inner experience is wholly her own. It is sometimes easier to be a better therapist to someone whose outer life is very different from mine, because then the discipline of radical curiosity comes more naturally.

Confrontation with Alterity

The desire to have a therapist who is like us is understandable. Revealing your most vulnerable self to a stranger can be terrifying and knowing that the person on the other side of the consulting room has been through something similar may offer the reassurance some of us need to open up. However, to paraphrase Adam Phillips, the point of therapy is to be liberated from our self-knowledge. To do so, we need to be able to confront difference and otherness – especially in ourselves. Seeking frictionless mirroring from a therapist who (apparently) shares our worldview and experiences may serve as a defense against deep self-exploration. When we choose a therapist based upon identitarian branding because they seem to be like us, we may be unconsciously creating a “closed circuit of projection and idealized reflection.”¹ Such therapy will likely feel safe and affirming, but we reduce the possibility that we will be surprised by ourselves.

It can sometimes be helpful for a patient to know something personal about their therapist. The question is always whether such revelations are in service to the patient and the process or in service to the narcissistic needs of the therapist or the defensive needs of the patient. It isn’t always a straightforward matter to determine whose needs are being centered and whether self-disclosure might be in the interest of growth or stasis, but as clinicians, we need to do our best to parse these questions. Knowing a lot about your therapist’s personal life may help you feel comfortable reaching out to them when you otherwise might not have had the courage. Doing so can normalize struggles for those who may feel alone with their difficulties. But there are also advantages to knowing less.

References

1. Alessandra Lemma, Psychotechnical Becomings: Psychoanalysis, Identity, Desire, and Mourning in the Age of AI and Digital Mediation, Routledge, 2026. p. 82

A previous version of this essay was published at Psychology Today.