A client tells you something that stays with you.
Perhaps their story reminds you of something from your own life. Perhaps the intensity of their emotion lingers. Perhaps you find yourself thinking about the session later that evening — while making dinner, driving home or trying to fall asleep.
You may not feel distressed. You may not even be consciously aware that you are still thinking about the client - but something of the session has stayed with you.
This is one of the less obvious, but very real, pressures of therapeutic work. If left unaddressed, it can gradually erode resilience and leave you feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.
Therapeutic work requires us to be affected.
We listen closely, we pay attention to emotion, meaning and nuance, and we try to understand another person's experience from their perspective. We may sit with grief, fear, anger, uncertainty or pain.
Our capacity to stay emotionally present is part of what makes therapeutic work possible.
So we can't become less affected. Instead, the question is: after an intense session, can we return to our own psychological space and remain resilient?
Psychological space isn't emotional distance
It's possible to protect ourselves emotionally without becoming more detached.
We can be warm, empathic and deeply engaged while still having the awareness that:
This is my client's experience, not mine.
I can be moved by this without needing to take it with me.
I can care deeply without letting it stay with me beyond the session.
I can think about what happened without continuing to live inside it.
Psychological space is not a wall between you and the client, it's the capacity to remain yourself while being fully present with someone else's experience.
The emotional residue of a demanding session
Not every difficult session leaves a residue. And not every thought about a client is problematic. Sometimes your mind simply continues to process something significant, and that can feel and be productive.
You may be thinking about a formulation, considering something the client said or reflecting on whether you responded as you intended. That's part of professional thinking.
However, the issue is different when the client's emotional world begins to occupy your own. You might notice that you are unusually preoccupied with a particular client, or replay the conversation repeatedly.
Perhaps you find yourself worrying about what happens between sessions, or a client's emotion seems to affect your own mood long after their appointment.
None of these experiences automatically signals a problem, but they can be reminders to ask yourself:
“What am I still holding?”
Perhaps we don't always acknowledge the transition involved in moving between the client's psychological world and our own.
We enter the client's experience with attention and openness. Then the session ends, and the client leaves. But do we always leave the session psychologically as well?
This question connects with wider research on therapeutic boundaries. A 2026 systematic review and meta-synthesis of 25 qualitative studies found that boundaries in psychotherapy are not simply fixed rules but are actively negotiated within the therapeutic relationship. The review identified, among other themes, therapist self-restraint and the distinction between caretaking and bearing witness (Lawson, Schröder and Russell, 2026).
That distinction is interesting - we can bear witness to another person's experience without assuming the responsibility for carrying it.
So - what can you do when a session stays with you?
Simply notice what you're still carrying, distinguish your client's experience from your own, and give yourself a moment to transition back into your own psychological space.
That might mean a few minutes of reflection, a walk between work and home, a conversation with a colleague or simply recognising: 'The session has ended; now this is my life again.'
The aim isn't to stop being affected. It's to recognise what belongs to the therapeutic work, and what belongs to you. A phrase I use often with clients and supervisees is 'Notice what belongs where'.
Perhaps this gives us a different way of thinking about therapists' resilience.
Being a resilient therapist isn't about becoming impermeable, nor about caring less. And it certainly isn't about pretending that difficult material doesn't affect us.
Instead, it's about being able to be deeply present without losing your own psychological space. A resilient therapist can be open and present without absorbing, can care without carrying, and listens deeply without taking the story home.
As resilient therapists we can come to the end of an intense session knowing that something important may have happened for our client - while recognising that the client's experience remains theirs, and we can stay in our own psychological space.
That isn't emotional distance - it's what allows us to keep showing up with genuine presence and resilience.
Do you want to find out more about resilience?
You can discover my FUEL Your Resilience® model in my Calabash talk ‘What Really Builds Resilience? A Practical Overview of the "FUEL Your Resilience" Model’ and explore what sustainable resilience could look like for you and for the people you support.
Reference
Lawson, J., Schröder, T. and Russell, K. (2026) ‘How Do Therapists Negotiate Boundaries: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-synthesis’, Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy. doi: 10.1007/s10879-026-09750-9.
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