This is our “lost episode” from Season 1 – it was so emotionally difficult for us to record that we couldn’t bring ourselves to edit it until we began to talk about recording Season 2 more than two years later! Props to Monica for gearing up to lean back in! Consider this: As beautiful and as life-affirming our work with clients can be, had you known that it could also inflict pain and hurt in the process, would you have still become a therapist? How do we make sense of this duality when we choose to empathically step into the client’s darkness and suffering with them? In The Pain Episode, our co-hosts Ian, Monica, and Bill confront what it means for us as therapists to take risks with our clients. Team PI examines our willingness to feel into the client’s difficult moments, their discomfort and their sadness, to vulnerably respond to their pain. Is there a point where you question whether you’ve gone too far in with your client, or to the contrary, what fears emerge to avoid risk in the work? How much of our own story of pain and suffering affects our decisions in the room? Either way, the clinical relationship with your client is affected. As our discussion progresses, we ask what purpose pain serves us as humans? Why does pain exist? We take a deeper dive into the mucky unknown, and discuss how leaning into the discomfort of our clients’ pain is a natural and unavoidable opportunity to be with our own pain and suffering. Team PI wrestles with the risk we take to embrace the client in their vulnerability, their brokenness, and our sustaining emotional injury in the process. If we routinely protect ourselves in our work, how well do we get to really know our client? The courage it takes to open up to our own wounds, with the intent to effect lasting change for the client comes along with risk. It is often in this moment that we remember how and why we do this work in the first place. We invite you to lean in for a vulnerable share of how sitting in the dark with a client’s pain can make us confront our own, and how therapists need to navigate through their own life experiences in the process. It’s unlikely you’ll need tissues for this episode. Co-host Bill could use a few for his audibly evident head cold though.