How A Therapist Can Re-Wound A Client Without Ever Meaning To

I want to use a phrase that I don't think most therapists have language for, even though they have all probably been on the wrong side of it once or twice without realizing.

The phrase is implicitly gaslit.

It describes what happens when a therapist normalizes something that is not normal, because they did not have the cultural, social, or relational frame to see it for what it was.

A few years ago, a woman came to me who had spent a year in couples counseling with her husband and a previous therapist. She came in to my office on her own. What she told me on the first session was that she felt worse after that year of therapy than she had felt going in. She was not sure why. The thing she knew was that she had felt crazier the longer it went on.

The therapist had not been a bad therapist. She had been competent, well-trained, and probably extremely well-meaning. The problem was that this therapist had no felt grasp of the marriage dynamic she was sitting in front of, no read on the cultural context the wife had grown up inside, and no instinct for the power difference that had been operating in that room for fifty-some sessions.

So when the wife described, as carefully as she could, the things that had been happening at home, the therapist heard them as ordinary marital complaints. She redirected the wife toward "owning her part." The husband's behavior got framed as a communication style, not a pattern.

The couple was given skills to use during conflict, when the issue was not that they did not have skills. The issue was that one of them was systematically using the room to confirm a version of reality the other had been trapped inside for two decades.

The wife came out of every session feeling like she was the one who could not see straight. Which makes sense, because the person whose job it was to see clearly with her had been seeing through a lens that erased her experience.

That is implicit gaslighting. The harm is not malicious or even conscious, just the slow accumulation of a hundred small misreadings stacking up into a verdict the client cannot articulate but absolutely feels.

The thing about this kind of harm is, it does not show up in case notes.

It shows up in the shape of who the client is when she finally stops going.

I tell every therapist I supervise the same thing. Before you reach for any intervention, ask yourself what cultural, social, or relational context you might be missing about the person in front of you. The intervention you would have used is rarely the danger. The danger lives in what you cannot see, and what you cannot see is what the client will end up paying for.

Warmly,

Esther

P.S. Are you resonating with the therapist in this scenario? Our Trauma Mastery Cohort is a strong community of clinicians honing their skillset and mastering the skills to dive deeper into understanding stuck points and character strategies. If you’re curious, let’s connect.