How Much Therapist Self-Disclosure is Too Much?

My response to my friend Joe Burgo’s website post about therapist self-disclosure on http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/input/  :

“Unprofessional” seems to me a label many folks use when confusing their personal values and preferences with the a profession’s written code of ethics. There’s a very broad continuum of appropriate and useful self-disclosure, although various sub-schools of psychotherapy define appropriate self-disclosure quite differently.  To model and give appropriate emotional intimacy, therapists who use Interpersonal approaches often disclose Much more about themselves than Psychoanalylitically oriented therapists.

There’s nothing written in stone that forbids therapist’s self-disclosure, and every situation/client calls for different degrees of self-disclosure. As long as the therapist clearly understands the therapeutic reasons for a self-disclosure and doesn’t violates their profession’s written code of ethics , “unprofessional” seems to me a matter of personal taste. Dr Bob

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