the client-practitioner relationship
“A healing relationship is special. When you are in one, you feel it. There is an incredible delicacy that you do not dare to disturb. There is a connection with yourself that allows you to relax, be curious and wait. There are intuitions that pop up easily and make powerful contributions to the work. There is a basic warmth and friendliness. There’s a basic wakefulness that informs both practitioner and client. There is no question of healer and healed. Both are parts of something greater taking place. Both feel this. Each is healed.”
– Ron Kurtz
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The potency and possibility of the work we do together relies on the wellbeing of our practitioner-client relationship. While we can think of our practitioner-client relationship as a laboratory for relational learning, it’s also a living, breathing relationship that requires attention and care.
By virtue of my role as the practitioner, I am responsible for holding and maintaining the integrity of the container necessary for us to do our work successfully. I will always initiate and facilitate check-ins around our dynamic, and I enthusiastically invite your feedback at absolutely any time. It’s never too late to bring up an interaction that felt really good or one that didn’t feel quite right to you.
It’s also important for us to acknowledge from the outset the inherent power differential in this relationship. First, naming what is rarely spoken but often felt within the practitioner-client relationship allows us to be with it and get curious about it.
Second, the work of self study and becoming necessitates exploration of our relationship with and to power and privilege. Power differentials often evoke felt experiences of power / lack of power that have yet to be unpacked – awareness gives us a leg up.
Third, as an anti-oppressive practitioner, it’s my job to hold and enforce the boundaries that protect your wellbeing in our dynamic while I simultaneously interrogate, interrupt, and diverge from oppressive practices, beliefs, and standards that dehumanize practitioner and client alike, and keep you disconnected from your power. Reimagining what practices of social and emotional care look like is a sacred commitment of mine within this work and one that I hold with great care, discernment, and integrity.