Discomfort
At a glance
A therapist’s own felt unease during a session — tension, restlessness, a wish to change the subject, a vague sense that something is wrong.
What it might mean
Discomfort can genuinely signal something worth attending to in the relational field — an unspoken tension, a boundary being tested, a client’s own unexpressed distress. It can also simply be the therapist’s own reaction to unfamiliar territory: a topic, a body, or a way of being that doesn’t match their prior experience.
The specific disability version
A non-disabled therapist may feel discomfort around a disabled client’s body, pain, equipment, or way of communicating simply because it’s unfamiliar — not because anything is clinically wrong. Treating that discomfort as information about the client, rather than about the therapist’s own limited exposure, risks pathologising a disabled client for the therapist’s own unexamined reaction.
Working with it
Before assuming discomfort is diagnostic of something in the client, ask honestly: is this genuinely new territory for me, and is my discomfort actually about my own unfamiliarity? Supervision is the right place to work through that distinction, not the therapy room itself.
A question worth carrying
Is this discomfort telling me something about this client, or about how much exposure I’ve actually had to bodies and lives like theirs?