Thanks for sharing this, it’s important and meaningful.

Your observation that your therapist “was playing a role that felt dishonest, in which she disowned or denied her own subjectivity” is important. The issue isn’t just not having a theoretical orientation, but what fills the void in its place: subjectivity and bias.

“The best supervisors and therapists, like my new voice teacher, have ‘done their own work.’”

Strongly agreed. In the same sense that we would feel skeptical of a personal trainer who’s out of shape or has never worked out, it’s similarly off-putting when mental health professionals haven’t done their own work. This is not to say that a heart surgeon must have experienced heart surgery to be any “good,” but certainly if someone is working within the realm of conditions that afflict many humans, e.g., childhood wounds, pain, loss, anxiety, stress, it serves both them and their clients to have navigated that terrain themselves. Very much like many massage therapists also still get massages.