The Intervention I Almost Made and Didn’t Do

I want to tell you about a session that taught me something I have not been able to unlearn since.

A client of mine came in carrying something visibly unspoken. I knew what was underneath it because we had been working together long enough that I could read her presentation. There was a piece of trauma she had been circling for months that she had never quite been able to name out loud, and on this particular afternoon, the door to it was sitting open on the floor between us.

Every part of my training was telling me to walk her toward it. The opportunity was right there. I had the technique. Our rapport was strong enough. The session had the time. By any clinical logic, this was the moment where the thing got named, and we did the work that we had both been quietly preparing for.

I did not take her there.

I did something almost the opposite. I let the door stay open and we talked about something else. We talked about the dog she had adopted three weeks earlier, and the way her husband had looked at her differently the night before, and a small, ordinary detail from her childhood that she had never connected to anything significant.

I cannot tell you in clean language why I did that. The honest answer is that something in the room told me she was not ready to walk through the door yet, even though every external sign said she was. There was a quality to her nervous system that afternoon, a kind of brittle alertness, that told me if I took her in, what would come up would not stay metabolizable. It would come up as flooding, not as processing.

She came back the next week and brought it up herself, and we did the work, and it landed cleanly because she was the one who had decided when to walk in.

The reason I am telling you this is that the most important skill a clinician can develop is not the ability to execute interventions correctly.

It is the ability to decide when not to use the intervention you would have used.

The textbook version of that session is the one where I took her in. By any reasonable metric, I should have. The reading I made instead was made on something below the level of training, somewhere in the part of me that has done this work for a long time and has paid attention to what happens in rooms.

That part of you cannot be installed in a weekend training. It can only be earned by hours, by mistakes, by paying attention, and by doing your own work so the part of you that reads the room is not also distorted by what you have not yet looked at in yourself.

If you are early in your career, this might feel like an excuse for breaking protocol. It is not. You earn the right to break the protocol by mastering it first, and then by listening for the moment when the protocol would do harm.

Warmly,

Esther

P.S. If this is something you’re ready to master and understand further, I can help! In the Trauma Mastery Program, we go beyond standard training and seek to build out the advanced skillset needed to read these moments like I shared. Ready to learn more or have questions? Let’s connect.